Walden — Commentary

In brief

Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau’s account of living in a one-room house he built beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. He moved in on 4 July 1845 and left on 6 September 1847, two years, two months and two days. Ticknor and Fields published it on 9 August 1854, seven years after he left.

The book is often taken as a survival manual and then convicted of fraud, since the town was a walk away and the land was a friend’s. That reading misses what it is: an argument about what a life costs, delivered by a character named Thoreau who brags, exaggerates, and rearranges the facts. The thing to ask is whether the performance earns what it asks of the reader, and it does.

The argument

The first chapter, “Economy”, is the longest, and its idea is an accountant’s: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it”. Measured so, a farm is a bad bargain and a house a worse one. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” is not a mood but the bottom line of that sum. A house costing “$28.12½” and food at “twenty-seven cents a week” are the counter-offer: he reports working about six weeks a year to pay for the rest.

What the saving buys is attention. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”, he says in the second chapter, “and see if I could not learn what it had to teach”. The woods are where he ran the test.

The result is reported at the end, with its limits: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment”, that one who advances confidently in the direction of his dreams will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He does not tell you to build a hut. “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account”, he writes, since he may have found another by the time you have learned this one.

The shape of the book

There are eighteen chapters, and the real structure is the year. He admits this: “for convenience, putting the experience of two years into one”. The book moves from summer through winter to thaw.

The account

“Economy”, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, and “Reading”. These are the most quoted chapters and the most scolding.

Summer

“Sounds” lets the Fitchburg Railroad’s locomotive into the idyll, because the line ran beside the pond. “Solitude”, “Visitors” (“I had three chairs in my house”), “The Bean-Field” and “The Village” follow.

The turning

“The Ponds”, “Baker Farm”, with its Irish tenant lectured on economy, “Higher Laws” and “Brute Neighbors”, with its war of the ants. “Higher Laws” holds the book’s best confession: passing a woodchuck he felt “a strange thrill of savage delight”, and wanted to eat it raw.

Winter

“House-Warming”, “Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors”, “Winter Animals” and “The Pond in Winter”. This is the quietest and finest stretch.

The thaw

“Spring” turns on the thawing sand on a railway cutting, “the principle of all the operations of Nature”. It is the book’s great set piece, and it is set on a railway. “Conclusion” follows.

The voice

The epigraph comes from the second chapter, and it sets the terms: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning”. He is a rooster on a perch, and the first person is a declared device: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained”. His reason is a joke at his own expense: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

The prose is built of puns, paradox and sums. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.” Readers who find him humourless are reading him at the wrong speed. He can also be insufferable, and the sneers at the “Baker Farm” labourer are not redeemed by any joke.

The two years

The land. It belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who bought a tract by the pond in autumn 1844 and let Thoreau use it. Emerson’s name is nowhere in the book. Thoreau calls himself “merely a squatter” and claims materials “by squatter’s right”. Emerson also came to the raising in May 1845, with Alcott and Channing, who appear only as “some of my acquaintances”.
The start. The day he moved in, he says, “by accident, was on Independence Day”. He hardly expects you to believe in that accident.
The jail. Thoreau spent a night in Concord’s jail in July 1846 for refusing the poll tax, when Sam Staples, the tax collector, stopped him. Someone, probably his aunt, paid next day against his wishes. “The Village” gives this a paragraph: he refuses to pay a state “which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house”. It sets the arrest “near the end of the first summer”, though it was his second. The compressed year has absorbed the date. The full argument became “Civil Disobedience”, printed in this Gutenberg file after the book.
The fire. On 30 April 1844 Thoreau and Edward Hoar, cooking fish at Fair Haven, set fire to the woods. The Concord Freeman gave about 300 acres and about $2000 in damage and blamed “the thoughtlessness of two of our citizens”, unnamed. Concord knew, and Thoreau was called a woods-burner. The book’s silence is almost total. In “Where I Lived”, of townsmen running to watch a blaze, he adds “we, be it known, did not set it on fire”, and in “House-Warming” he grieves for burned woodland, “though I burned it myself by accident”. Readers in Concord may have caught both.
The leaving. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there”, says the “Conclusion”, and that reason is that he had “several more lives to live”. The plainer one is that Emerson was going to Europe and asked him to help Lidian Emerson with the household.

The laundry question

The favourite charge against Thoreau is that his mother did his washing. The book itself raises the matter, in the ledger in “Economy”, where he totals his outgoings “excepting for washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received”. It is a joke, and a true confession.

How fair is the charge? Less than its repeaters suppose, and more than his defenders admit. Exactly who did the washing is not firmly documented: Rebecca Solnit, who wrote a whole essay on it, finds it unclear even among scholars, while the Thoreau Society allows that he sometimes went home for meals and laundry, as many men did. Solnit also notes that only Thoreau has been tried for his cleaning arrangements. Kathryn Schulz’s attack in the New Yorker in 2015 did not even need the laundry, as Donovan Hohn’s reply observed.

The fair complaint is narrower. A man who records every cent of his beans, and sets a price on living, has left out labour that was free to him and very probably women’s. The defence is that he never claimed to live alone in the wild; the book says “every day or two I strolled to the village”. The ledger remains the point where his sum does not close, and he knew it did not, and he said so in a subordinate clause.

Mapping the pond

People said Walden had no bottom. “The Pond in Winter” records how he dealt with that: “I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line”, cutting holes and lowering a stone on a cod-line. “The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet”, plus five that the water had since risen. The book prints the map.

The figures have held. The US Geological Survey, reporting in 2001, measured 100.1 feet, within two feet of his sounding, while finding a third deep zone he never charted. The rooster, it turns out, could use a chain, and he later earned his living as a surveyor.

He laid a ruler across the map and found “the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth”, and at once: “What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics.” Sound the shape of a man’s shore and you know his depth. It is too neat, and it is the book’s method in small: measure, then jump.

A performance

How much of Walden is performance? Nearly all of it, in the sense that all of it is arranged. Two years become one. The hut, which he calls a place “a mile from any neighbor”, sits near the village and a railway. He lost “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove”, and never explains the sentence.

The performance does not spoil the book, for three reasons. First, it is declared: the rooster, the “I”, the convenience of the year. A liar hides his method. Second, its purpose is rhetorical in the old sense. He says the aim is to “wake my neighbors up”, and a sermon that exaggerates is doing its job. Third, and most important, the performance is itself the experiment’s real product. The two years alone proved little. It was the seven further years of rewriting, in which a man in his thirties worked out what those days had meant, that produced the deliberate life on the page. The critics catch him out on the laundry and the land, which were never what he was selling. He is selling a question about your own week, and it does not depend on who washed his shirts.

The people

Thoreau

Thoreau was a Harvard graduate, sometime schoolmaster, pencil-maker’s son and Emerson’s handyman. He was twenty-seven when he moved in. His brother John had died of tetanus in 1842; at the pond he drafted A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy for him, and that was a main reason to go. Ellery Channing’s advice in March 1845 had been to build a hut and begin devouring himself alive.

Neighbours

The woodchopper Alek Therien, unnamed but drawn with love, is “a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker”. James Collins, who sold him his shanty, and John Field are Irish labourers, viewed from above. “Former Inhabitants” is the book’s most surprising chapter: it remembers Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, Brister Freeman and Fenda, Black residents, some once enslaved, who had lived in these woods on Concord’s margin. Thoreau, a lifelong abolitionist, also says that “One real runaway slave” was helped by him “toward the northstar”.

How it was made

The book began in lectures. In early 1847 Thoreau gave “A History of Myself” at the Concord Lyceum, in answer to the “very particular inquiries” of his townsmen.

The manuscript, now HM 924 at the Huntington Library, reached scholars as a jumble. J. Lyndon Shanley sorted its leaves by paper, ink, handwriting and stationers’ marks, and in The Making of Walden (1957) he identified seven groups, labelled A to G. A dates from 1846–47, B and C from 1848–49, and D to G from 1852 to early 1854. No draft is complete: from the second on, each mixes new matter with old leaves carried forward. The count of eight drafts comes from adding the fair copy Thoreau sent to the printer piecemeal from March 1854, which is lost. Seven survive. Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition lets you read them against each other.

The gap after 1849 matters. Thoreau’s A Week appeared that year at his own expense, in 1,000 copies. In October 1853 the publisher returned 706 unsold, and he joked in his journal about owning a library largely of his own writing. Failure bought time, and the time made the book.

The slow sales are real and easy to overstate. Ticknor and Fields printed 2,000 under a contract paying him 15 per cent. The Library of America gives 1,744 sold by the end of 1854, and the usual account says the whole printing took five years to clear. If both are right, the book sold fast and then stopped. It then stayed out of print until his final months. In March 1862, dying, he agreed a further run of 250 and asked to drop “Or Life in the Woods” from the title.

Readers and critics

The early reception was warmer than legend has it: of 66 reviews traced, 46 were strongly favourable, though many called him quaint or eccentric. George Eliot wrote approvingly in the Westminster Review. After his death James Russell Lowell’s 1865 essay and Robert Louis Stevenson’s of 1880 set the case for the prosecution: poseur, skulker, unmanly.

The modern defence begins with reading him properly. Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden (1972) treats the book as a work of philosophy, serious about its own words. Robert Frost said that in one book Thoreau surpassed everything America had produced. Hohn’s point against Schulz is the one to keep: she takes the “I” for the man.

Afterlives

Gandhi read Walden in South Africa in 1906 and took up “Civil Disobedience”; Martin Luther King read that essay at college. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” comes from an ambition to live in imitation of Thoreau. B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) turned the name towards behaviourism. The pond is now a state reservation with a beach and a replica cabin, and in 1990 the singer Don Henley founded the Walden Woods Project to stop development nearby.

How to read it

Do not stop at “Economy”. It is the steepest chapter. If it drags, begin at “Where I Lived” and come back.
Read for the jokes. Assume every grand sentence has a wink inside it.
Read “Spring” and “The Pond in Winter” whole. They are the book’s proof that the man could look.
In print. Gutenberg eBook 205 is complete, with the pond map, and adds “Civil Disobedience”. For notes, Jeffrey Cramer’s fully annotated edition (Yale, 2004) is the one to get; the Princeton text edited by Shanley (1971) is the scholarly standard.

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849). The night in jail, with the argument at full length.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841). The doctrine from the landlord’s side.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855). A year later, another American brag about the self, equally staged.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851). Also an account of soundings, and with no faith that they settle anything.
Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017). The modern biography, which restores the working town around him.