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21 November 1854, Tuesday; 7:30 p.m.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Spring Garden Institute
"The Wild"
[Back to Calendar of Lectures]
NARRATIVE OF EVENT: In a 21 September 1854
letter to H. G. O. Blake, Thoreau noted his plan to lecture in Philadelphia and elsewhere
during the approaching lecture season. He also indicated his unpreparedness to do so,
"As it is, I have agreed to go a-lecturing to Plymouth, Sunday after next (October 1)
and to Philadelphia in November, and thereafter to the West, if they shall want me;
and, as I have prepared nothing in that shape, I feel as if my hours were spoken for"
(C, p. 339). Philadelphia, then, was to be his first extra-vagant, post-Walden
jump over the cowyard fence of his familiar New England lecturing territory. As it turned
out, however, he would not lecture outside New England again until late in 1856, when he
gave three lectures in New Jersey during his Eagleswood surveying venture. Thoreau’s
uncertainty about his lecture material is reflected in a 6 October 1854 letter from
William B. Thomas, chairman of the committee in charge of the lecture series at
Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Institute. Wrote Thomas:
You will please accept our thanks for
your prompt response to our invitation. We have entered you for the 21st Nov.
Please inform us as early as possible upon
what subject you will speak.1
The Spring Garden Institute, located at the junction of Broad and Spring Garden
Streets, was founded in 1850 to give technical training to young men. One of the earliest
nineteenth-century mechanics’ institutes, it helped fill a need created by the
breakdown of the apprentice system in this country.2
On 19 November, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote
from Concord to his Philadelphia friend William Henry Furness, announcing Thoreau’s
impending visit and asking Furness to show Thoreau the Academy of Natural Sciences. He
added that Thoreau would particularly like to see the Academy’s collection of birds.
Furness, who had attended school with Emerson in Boston, was at this time and for the rest
of his life the minister of the Unitarian Church in Philadelphia.3
The following day Bronson Alcott noted in his journal, "Evening, with Emerson at the
American House till 10 oclock. E. tells me that Thoreau left today for Philadelphia to
lecture there."4
Thoreau’s journal entry for 20
November begins, "To Philadelphia. 7 A. M., to Boston; 9 A. M., Boston to New York,
by express train, land route." Ever the observer, he noted, "Pleasantest part of
the whole route between Springfield and Hartford, along the river; perhaps include the
hilly region this side of Springfield. Reached Canal Street at 5 P. M., or
candle-light." Quickly, he was on another train, where, despite the invisibility of
the nighttime landscape, he yet saw something worth recording:
Started for Philadelphia from foot of
Liberty Street at 6 P. M., via Newark, etc., etc., Bordentown, etc., etc., Camden
Ferry, to Philadelphia, all in the dark. Saw only the glossy panelling of the cars
reflected out into the dark, like the magnificent lit facade of a row of edifices reaching
all the way to Philadelphia, except when we stopped and a lanthorn or two showed us a
ragged boy and the dark buildings of some New Jersey town. Arrive at 10 P. M.; time, four
hours from New York, thirteen from Boston, fifteen from Concord. Put up at Jones’s
Exchange Hotel, 77 Dock Street; lodgings thirty-seven and a half cents per night, meals
separate; not to be named with French’s in New York; next door to the fair of the
Franklin Institute, then open, and over against the Exchange, in the neighborhood of the
printing-offices. (J, 7:72-73)
On the day of his lecture, the twenty-first, the journal notes Thoreau observing
Philadelphia "from the cupola of the State-House, where the Declaration of
Independence was declared. The best view of the city I got." He also remarked the
"Fine view from Fairmount water-works." Emerson’s request to W. H. Furness
did not go ignored, for the journal reports, "Was admitted into the building of the
Academy of Natural Sciences by a Mr. Durand of the botanical department, Mr. Furness
applying to him."5 And, apropos of
Emerson’s mentioning the Academy’s bird collection, Thoreau remarked in the
journal, "It is said to be the largest collection of birds in the world." Other
Academy holdings also are mentioned, including "a male moose not so high as the
female which we shot" in Maine. Tucked between an attempt to identify an ornamental
tree that he supposed "the alianthus, or Tree of Heaven" and a description of
"the neat-looking women marketers with full cheeks" is the intriguing comment,
"The American Philosophical Society is described as a company of old women." The
day’s entry continues with this unintentionally humorous juxtaposition of natural
phenomena, "Furness described a lotus identical with an Egyptian one as found
somewhere down the river below Philadelphia; also spoke of a spotted chrysalis which he
had also seen in Massachusetts. There was a mosquito about my head at night." The
entry concludes, "Lodged at the United States Hotel, opposite the Girard (formerly
United States) Bank." For whatever reason, possibly the undistinguished
accommodations at Jones’s Exchange Hotel, Thoreau had changed addresses for his
second night in Philadelphia (J, 7:73-75).
The next morning, according to the
journal, Thoreau "Left at 7:30 A. M. for New York, by boat to Tacony and rail via
Bristol, Trenton, Princeton (near by), New Brunswick, Rahway, Newark, etc." He noted
a few of the natural features he saw in passing but found the trip "Uninteresting,
except the boat." In New York he played the tourist, going to the Crystal Palace,
where he saw a specimen of coal "fifty feet thick as it was cut from the mine, in the
form of a square column." He also saw "sculptures and paintings innumerable, and
armor from the Tower of London, some of the Eighth Century." At Barnum’s Museum
he examined the camelopard, which he found not so tall as claimed, and a diorama of the
houses of the world, which he found looked much alike. He spent part of the day with his
friend Horace Greeley, who "appeared to know and be known by everybody." Greeley
took him to the opera, where, Thoreau notes in his journal, Greeley "was admitted
free" (J, 7:75-76). Whether Thoreau too got in for nothing is not mentioned.
The journal also does not mention his trip home from New York. By far the most important
of Thoreau’s journal omissions, however, is his lecture itself. Despite the career
significance of his Philadelphia engagement, he said nothing at all of the event that had
brought him so far from Concord.
Some three weeks after the lecture,
Bronson Alcott noted in his diary entry for 11 December 1854, "I pass the morning and
dine with Thoreau, who read me parts of his new Lecture lately read at Philadelphia and
Providence."6 Alcott, however, was referring to
Thoreau’s "What Shall It Profit" lecture, which Thoreau had read only in
Providence before 11 December, the date of Alcott’s entry (see lecture 46 below).
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: The following advertisement appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger
and Daily Transcript on 21 November 1854: "Spring Garden Institute
Lectures—The Second Lecture will be delivered on Tuesday Evening, 21st instant, at 7
1/2 o’clock, at the Institute Building, Broad and Spring Garden Sts., by Henry D.
Thoreau, Esq. of Concord, Mass. Subject ‘The Wild.’" The same
advertisement, minus the location, appeared in the Philadelphia Daily Pennsylvanian
on both 20 and 21 November.
The only known response to Thoreau’s
lecture is that of Miss Caroline Haven, reported by W. H. Furness in a 26 November 1854
letter to Emerson. Caroline was the daughter of Charles E. Haven, one of Furness’s
parishioners.7 Furness wrote:
I was glad to see Mr. Thoreau. He was
full of interesting talk for the little while that we saw him, & it was amusing to
hear his intonations. And then he looked so differently from my idea of him . . . . He had
a glimpse of the Academy [of Natural Sciences] as he will tell you—I could not hear
him lecture for which I was sorry. Miss Caroline Haven heard him, & from her report I
judge the audience was stupid & did not appreciate him.8
This letter is especially noteworthy because it contains a small pencil sketch of
Thoreau made by Furness. Interestingly, the aforementioned 19 November 1854 letter from
Emerson to Furness contains, drawn on the last of its four pages, two pencil sketches of
Thoreau’s head in profile that are very similar to this Furness drawing. Charles
Boewe, who located the Emerson letter at the Academy of Natural Sciences, suggests that
these impressions of Thoreau are also Furness’s work, the prototype from which he
drew the image on his 26 November reply to Emerson.9
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: Aside from
having extracted the passages about moonlit walks (see lecture 44 above), Thoreau seems
not to have done much more with the second part of his two-part, 163-page version of
"Walking, or the Wild"—the part on "The Wild," which he had last
delivered on the afternoon of 23 May 1852 in Plymouth, Massachusetts (see lectures 40-41
in the "Before Walden" calendar). Very likely, then, the text he read
before the Spring Garden Institute was some seventy pages long, which would have taken him
somewhat more than an hour to read. Interestingly, the title page of this draft of the
lecture, acquired a few years ago by the library at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, bears the following sentence, written in pencil, in Thoreau’s hand, in the
upper-right corner: "I regard this as a sort of introduction to all I may write
hereafter." Bradley P. Dean has speculated that Thoreau wrote this highly provocative
sentence sometime in late 1854 or early 1855, when Thoreau apparently began to contemplate
more earnest, purposeful work on the natural history projects he would spend so much of
his time on throughout the remainder of the 1850s and which resulted in such works as
"Autumnal Tints," "The Succession of Forest Trees," "Wild
Apples," "Huckleberries," The Dispersion of Seeds, and the as yet
fully published Wild Fruits.10
Notes
1. Thomas’s letter
is in the Sewall Collection at MCo; we quote from a typescript at the Thoreau Textual
Center, CU-SB. [Back to Text]
2. Charles Boewe,
"Thoreau’s 1854 Lecture in Philadelphia," English Language Notes, 2
(December 1964): 118. [Back to Text]
3. Emerson’s letter
to Furness is summarized and its provenance discussed in Boewe, "Thoreau’s 1854
Lecture," 120-21. [Back to Text]
4. Alcott, "Diary for
1854," entry of 20 November, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text]
5. According to Boewe,
Elias Durand was a Philadelphia pharmacist and noted botanist ("Thoreau’s 1854
Lecture," 119). [Back to Text]
6. Alcott, "Diary for
1854," entry of 11 December, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text]
7. Boewe,
"Thoreau’s 1854 Lecture," 121. [Back to Text]
8. William Henry Furness, Records
of a Lifelong Friendship, ed. Horace Howard Furness, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910),
pp. 101-103. [Back to Text]
9. Boewe,
"Thoreau’s 1854 Lecture," 120-21n14. [Back to Text]
10. For Dean’s
speculations about the sentence Thoreau wrote in the upper-right corner of this lecture
draft’s title-page, see his "‘A Sort of Introduction,’" Thoreau
Research Newsletter, 1 (January 1990): 1-2. Dean published the first portion of
Thoreau’s Wild Fruits manuscript, which is housed in the Henry W. and Albert
A. Berg Collection, NN, in his edition of Thoreau’s Faith in a Seed: The
Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings (Washington: Shearwater
Books, Island Press, 1993), pp. 178-203. Dean is currently editing the remainder of the Wild
Fruits manuscript. [Back to Text] |