1 June 1850 (?)
Worcester, Massachusetts
"Cape Cod" (?)

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        On 28 May 1850, Thoreau wrote as follows in a letter to H. G. O. Blake:

        I shall be glad to read my lecture to a small audience in Worcester, such as you describe, and will only require that my expenses be paid. If only the parlor be large enough for an echo, and the audience will embarrass themselves with hearing as much as the lecturer would otherwise embarrass himself with reading. But I warn you that this is no better calculated for a promiscuous audience than the last two which I read to you. It requires in every sense a concordant audience.
        I will come on Saturday next and spend Sunday with you, if you wish it. Say so if you do. (C, p. 260)

The letter is interesting for its implications: first, that Thoreau apparently still took umbrage at an unfavorable newspaper response to his Walden lectures in Worcester during April and May of 1849 (see lectures 21, 22, and 23 above); and, second, that he found his hometown audiences more in concord with what he had to say. Raymond Borst gives the date of this lecture as 1 June 1850 and suggests that Thoreau may have delivered his "Cape Cod" lecture in Worcester on that occasion, but Borst only cites Thoreau’s letter to Blake as evidence for the attribution (The Thoreau Log: A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862 [New York: G. K. Hall, 1992], p. 166).
        We have found no evidence that Thoreau either gave or did not give the requested lecture, although Walter Harding indicates that he rejected the invitation (Days, p. 273). Joseph J. Moldenhauer, editor of CC, speculates that, if Thoreau did lecture in Worcester that June, he may have read his "one-installment Cape Cod lecture." He cautions, however, that "The comic aspects of the Cape Cod lecture would seem . . . to obviate Thoreau’s concern to have a specifically sympathetic assembly, and the lecture mentioned in Thoreau’s letter may have been on another subject" (CC, pp. 254, 254n6).