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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
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including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
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related documents
Walter Harding
(1917-1996)
Letter to the editor, The New York Times (15
October 1972)
Thoreau, Skinny-Dipper
To the Editor:
According to "Thoreau's
Concord Is Willing to Leave Nature's Work Alone" (Travel section,
Sept. 17), Concord is worried as to whether Henry Thoreau went
skinny-dipping in Walden Pond. Can anyone imagine the Henry Thoreau
who boasted he loved to wade the rivers of Concord endwise clad only
in a straw hat, and who wrote so rapturously about the esthetic
appeal of nude bathers that Havelock Ellis cited the passage in his
"Studies in the Psychology of Sex," would have hampered his
enjoyment of swimming with so mundane an appendage as a bathing
suit? Not only did he swim in the raw, but his good friend Ellery
Channing tells us that Henry showed little Victorian constraint in
shedding his clothes to go swimming even if others were around. All
of which reminds me that some years ago Concord police haled [sic] a
young man into municipal court. Old Judge Prescott Keyes (whose
grandfather undoubtedly swam in Walden Pond with Thoreau and whose
great-great-grandfather fought at Concord Bridge) asked what the
charge was. When told it was for swimming nude in Walden pond, he
roared: "Dammit, that's the only way to swim in Walden Pond. Case
dismissed."
Walter Harding,
Secretary, The Thoreau Society Inc.,
State University College, Geneseo, N.Y.
A
Note on the Text:
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