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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
Texts and Links
including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
scholarship and
related documents
Francis H. Allen
(1866-1947)
Thoreau's
Editors:
History and Reminiscence
Thoreau, more than most authors, has had to undergo editing, since
of the twenty volumes of his complete writings only two were published in
his lifetime.
Excursions, published in
1863, the first of the posthumous volumes, was composed of papers
collected by Sophia Thoreau from
The
Dial, The Boston Miscellany, The Democratic Review, The New York Tribune,
and
The Atlantic Monthly. All but three of these papers made their first
appearance during Thoreau’s lifetime, and the others, according to
Sanborn, were corrected in proof by their author, at least in part, during
his last illness.
The Maine Woods (1864)
was edited by Sophia Thoreau and William Ellery Channing, the younger. Of
its three parts, “Ktaadn” came out in the
Union
Magazine, and “Chesuncook” in the
Atlantic,
both in Thoreau’s lifetime and so not requiring editing—except
such as the editors of those magazines supplied. The last paper, “The
Allegash and East Branch,” was not completed before Thoreau’s death
and it suffers from careless editing. The most serious piece of
carelessness on the part of the editors, so far as I know, was the
misplacement of two pages and a half of matter belonging to the record for
August 2nd, which was shifted to the end of the entry of July 30th. This
bad break was corrected by Horace E. Scudder in editing the Riverside Edition,
published in 1893. Whether or not Mr. Scudder was the first to discover
the transposition I do not know. It was not till after I compiled my
Bibliography that I discovered the error and its correction. Careful
readers of the book must have been puzzled by the impossible sequence of
events resulting from getting so much matter three days out of the way,
yet it persisted through all of the many impressions of this first
edition. A minor error in this misplaced matter was overlooked by Mr.
Scudder—the misreading of Thoreau’s manuscript that resulted in
printing the word “former” where he had probably written “power.”
Sophia was very jealous of the integrity of her brother’s work,
but she had little equipment by nature or by training for the duties of an
editor, and it is probable that she depended largely on Channing for
guidance, and that friend and familiar of Thoreau’s was a poet and littérateur
without temperament or training, I suspect, for the exactnesses of
scholarship. His treatment of Thoreau’s journals in quoting them in his Thoreau:
the Poet-Naturalist shows how untrustworthy he was in such matters.
These quotations are often a hodge-podge of entries from various dates and
were subjected to much paraphrasing besides containing obvious misreadings
of Thoreau’s handwriting. Sanborn’s revised edition of Channing’s
book, published in 1902, twenty-nine years after the original
appeared, is on the whole an improvement on the 1873 edition, but it
perpetuates most of the faults of the original. Bear in
mind that I am speaking now only of Channing’s treatment of Thoreau’s
text. I recognize the value of his biography of Thoreau.
In Cape Cod (1864) we
have Sophia and Channing collaborating again as editors, though Thoreau
himself saw the first four chapters through their first printing in
Putnam’s Magazine. Channing had accompanied Thoreau on two of his
four visits to the Cape, so he would have been a natural choice for
associate editor even if some one else was equally available. I suppose
Frank Sanborn was available even then. He had been acquainted with Thoreau
since 1855 and had boarded at the Thoreau house, dining with him for two
years almost daily, as he says, and often joining him in his walks and
river voyages, and he was an editor of long experience; but there was no
great cordiality of feeling between him and the Thoreau family, while
Channing was evidently persona grata. It was not till 1894, after Blake had produced his
four volumes from Thoreau’s Journals, that Sanborn appeared as an editor
of any of Thoreau’s writings, though he had published his first life of
Thoreau in 1882 and had established his reputation as an authority on
Thoreau’s life and works.
The fifth Thoreau volume to be published was
Letters
to Various Persons, edited by Emerson, who seems to have aimed at
presenting a rather austere view of Thoreau’s personality and to have
made his selections accordingly. His editing was conscientious, of course, and I have no reason to suppose that
his transcription of the letters was in any way inaccurate. At the end of
the volume he included nine of Thoreau’s poems, which appear to be all
he considered worth preserving. He was, of course, too severe a judge of
Thoreau’s verse.
I have no information as to who made up the volume published in
1866 under the title of A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and
Reform Papers. The first three
chapters of the “Excursion to Canada” were printed in Putnam’s
Magazine, edited by George William Curtis, who like Lowell in the case
of “Chesuncook,” objected to some of Thoreau’s heresies, whereupon
Thoreau withdrew the rest of the manuscript. One of the other papers,
entitled “Prayers,” was ascribed to Thoreau by mistake. It had
appeared as an unsigned article in The Dial, where it contained a poem of
Thoreau’s, but all except the poem was by Emerson. Here, as in some
other cases, Thoreau’s editors slipped.
The next editor of Thoreau to appear was Harrison G. O. Blake, with
his Early Spring in Massachusetts drawn from Thoreau’s Journal.
This was the first considerable draft from that rich source, after
Thoreau’s own drafts. Much of the Journal was written, of course, with a
view to future publication by its author, and its possibilities were by no
means exhausted when he died. James T. Fields and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson at one time formed a plan to publish “the diaries,” but, as
Higginson wrote, “The attempt was defeated by the unwillingness of Miss Sophia Thoreau, the custodian of
the books, who wrote us (September 26, 1866) that while entirely satisfied
with the proposed editorship, she was not yet ready. ‘These papers are
very sacred to me,’ she wrote, ‘and I feel inclined to defer giving
them to the public for the present’.” She kept the manuscript
journals, indeed, as long as she lived but left them on her death on
October 7, 1876, to Thoreau’s devoted and singleminded friend Blake, of
Worcester. Blake, as he tells us, formed the habit of reading every day
the entries in the Journal for that date of all the years covered, and
thus following the progress of the seasons. When, in response to an
evident public demand, he decided to publish the Journal in part, he
followed the plan that had given him so much personal pleasure, and the
result was Early Spring in
Massachusetts (1881) , Summer (1884) , Winter (1887),
and Autumn (1892). For some
reason the first edition of Early
Spring lacked the entries for the first four days of April, but these
had been printed in the Atlantic under
the title of “April Days” in April, 1878, and they were incorporated
into the Riverside Edition of the book when it was published in 1893.
Blake was a faithful editor who did not obtrude himself by
annotations or emendations. The copying of the Journal for publication
in
extenso
many years later brought to light some instances of careless
confusion of dates and more misreadings of Thoreau’s handwriting than one
might have expected from a correspondent of many years, but of course
the greatest fault that one could find with Blake’s work was that he
didn’t use more of the Journal.
We now come to the first regular uniform edition of Thoreau’s
works, the Riverside Edition, published in 1893 but dated as of the
following year, as was the custom in those days when a book was issued in
the autumn. This was edited by Horace E. Scudder, the head of what was
then known as the Literary Department of Houghton, Mifflin & Company,
a careful and scholarly workman, who supplied an introductory note,
biographical and bibliographical in character, for each of the ten volumes
and equipped the set with a general index, besides volume indexes, which had
been
lacking in the earlier editions except
in the case of the four
volumes of the seasons. The Week
was
also furnished with a list of poetical quotations compiled by Mark
Antony DeWolfe Howe.
The year 1894, as I have said, saw the first appearance of Franklin
B. Sanborn as an editor of Thoreau, though his first Life of our author
had appeared in 1882. His Familiar
Letters of Henry David Thoreau was
published in that year of 1894. It included all the letters that
Emerson had collected for the Letters
to Various Persons and many others
besides,
and the connective tissue
of biographical and explanatory matter was a valuable addition. Knowing
the freedom with which Sanborn always
treated
quoted matter, I can’t
be quite confident that the letters he added to the collection are always
verbatim copies of the originals. I dare say that persons having access to
these originals, or such of them as are still extant, have noted
departures from strict accuracy in the printed volume. There is only one
case of conscienceless quoting that has come to my attention in the book,
and that is not of a letter of Thoreau’s but of a passage from
Alcott’s journal describing the call of Alcott and Thoreau on Walt
Whitman in 1856. Odell Shepard in a note to the Journals
of
Bronson Alcott (1938) calls this “a grotesquely false rendering” of these passages.
And such it is. It seems as if in such cases Mr. Sanborn went out of his
way to paraphrase—and to paraphrase inaccurately—what might better
have been quoted as written.
Poems of Nature, edited by Henry S. Salt and Frank B.
Sanborn, was published in 1895. Sanborn’s
coeditor was the English admirer whose Life of Thoreau was published in
1890. Their selection of fifty out of seventy-five or so poems that
Thoreau had preserved was judicious and omitted much verse that adds no
lustre to its author’s reputation. The Introduction says, “In the
present selection a return has been made, wherever possible, from the
emendations introduced by Thoreau’s editors to the original text.”
What emendations were referred to I have not ascertained. Alas, how often
one wishes that Sanborn’s own emendations could be similarly detected
and discarded!
Sanborn also edited several essays and pieces of journal manuscript that came into his hands and that
were published privately or in limited editions. I needn’t name them all
now. The most ambitious, if not the most important, piece of editing that
he did on Thoreau—I had almost said perpetrated on Thoreau—was the
edition of Walden in two volumes printed for the Bibliophile
Society in 1909 but never—perhaps fortunately—regularly published.
This handsome, and astonishing, production purports to be Walden as
its author wanted it, but so far as I have ever been able to see, there is
not the slightest evidence that the Walden that its author saw
through the press was not Thoreau’s own final Walden. Strangely
enough, this Bibliophile Walden itself contains two quite different
stories of its origin and composition. Mr. Henry H. Harper, who seems to
have been the deus ex machina, says in his Introduction that the
manuscript was discovered as a complete entity in Thoreau’s handwriting,
that it contained some 12,000 words of matter that did not appear in the
original edition, and that the inference was that the publishers had cut
Thoreau’s manuscript down in order to bring the book within the desired
physical limits. Sanborn, however, in his Introduction, says frankly that
the material placed in his hands was a miscellaneous collection which he
himself arranged in an order that seemed to him better than that of the
original edition.
I confess that I have never been tempted to read this Sanbornized
Walden,
and so can form no opinion of it as a tour de force. Perhaps I am
prejudiced but I have the impression that there has been little
demand for its substitution for the book that Thoreau himself fathered.
But it was a characteristic performance for Frank Sanborn. What delight he
must have taken in improving on so great an author as Thoreau!
Sanborn’s Life of Henry David Thoreau, published in
1917 after his death, contained many hitherto unpublished essays,
chiefly college themes, and a poem or two. As an editor for Houghton
Mifflin Company I had the not unmixed pleasure of seeing this book
through the press, and, finding that the author had followed his
custom of using great freedom in the treatment of quoted matter, I
asked him if he would not make some statement in his preface which
would explain why his versions of matter already printed differed
from the previous forms. To this he consented, apparently without
reluctance and in writing, but the statement never came, and he died
on the very day when the proof of his preface was mailed to him—the
preface, always the last of a book that the author sees in proof and
now his last chance of keeping his promise. This left us in a hole.
My loyalty to Thoreau and my conscience as an editor wouldn’t allow
me to let things go as they stood, but it was Mr. Sanborn’s book and
it seemed to me that his publishers owed it to him to carry out his
expressed intentions in regard to this statement in such a way as to
present the matter entirely from his point of view. So I added below
the author’s signature to the preface a brief statement of the situation and then the following: “Mr.
Sanborn was not a slavish quoter, and in dealing with Thoreau’s Journals
and those other of his writings which Thoreau himself had not prepared for
publication, he used the privilege of an editor who is thoroughly familiar
with his author’s subjects and habits of thought to rearrange
paragraphs, to omit here, to make slight interpolations there, and
otherwise to treat the rough and unpolished sentences of the Journals,
letters, etc., much as it may be supposed the author himself would have
treated them had he prepared them for the press. If, therefore, the reader
finds occasional discrepancies between the extracts from Thoreau’s
Journals as here given and the forms in which the same passages appear in
the scrupulously exact transcript contained in the published Journal, he
is not to set them down to carelessness, but is rather to thank Mr.
Sanborn for making these passages more orderly and more readable.”
Poppycock, you say, and I quite agree with you. In fact, I consider it my
masterpiece in that field.
I shall have more to say later of my adventures with Mr. Sanborn,
usually very pleasant adventures, by the way, but I must now return to the
chronological account of the editing of Thoreau. We go back to 1906 and
the three or four years that preceded it, when the largest of these
editorial undertakings was under way. Bliss Perry, in his autobiography,
And
Gladly Teach, names two achievements of which in his capacity of
literary adviser to Houghton Mifflin Company he was, as he says, “inordinately
proud.” One of these was that he persuaded the house “to publish the
full text of Thoreau’s Journals in fourteen volumes, edited by
Bradford Torrey and F. H. Allen.” I don’t know how much persuasion it
took, but it was fortunate for American literature that he succeeded. It
was fortunate, too, that Torrey was chosen as editor instead of some one
who might have abused his trust, for Torrey, with his experience as a
student of scientific ornithology and botany, with a profound respect for
facts and no axe to grind, could be trusted to do a scholarly job in an
objective manner without intruding his own personality into the work.
Besides the textual editing, which was deputed to a younger and less
experienced, but I trust no less conscientious workman, there was the
introduction, which discussed Thoreau as a writer and especially as a
journalizer and a naturalist with a competence that perhaps no other
editor could have commanded. I say that the textual editing was deputed to
the junior partner, but that does not mean that Mr. Torrey washed his
hands of it. Far from that: the whole plan of the work was arranged
between him and me in conference, and he read, I think, all the copy
before it went to the printers. I remember that I was for using footnotes
for a little correction of, and commenting upon, natural-history
statements, but he disapproved of that, wisely, I now think. The
editors’ opinions, therefore, were kept at a minimum outside of the
Introduction. My own major project for three and a half years was overseeing the copying
of thirty-nine manuscript volumes of the Journal and verifying the copy by
a personal reading of every word of the original manuscript, two or three
millions of them in all. The published Journal contains errors, of course,
but not many have come to my attention, and so far as any possible
imputation of carelessness on the part of the editors is concerned, my
conscience is reasonably clear.
When the fourteen volumes of the Journal were issued as part of the
twenty-volume set, the hitherto published works exclusive of Blake’s now
superseded volumes were reissued as the first six volumes of the
Manuscript and Walden Editions. Some rearrangement of the contents of the
six volumes was necessitated and some omissions of duplicated matter were
made; poems were added, too, from Poems
of Nature, and new letters were supplied by Mr. Sanborn. Scudder’s
introductions were reprinted from the Riverside Edition. Any details of
editing involved fell to the present speaker.
As an ornithologist I took great delight in Thoreau’s
incomparable descriptions of bird-songs and bird-behavior, and in 1910 I
persuaded Houghton Mifflin Company to publish
Notes
on New England Birds from Thoreau’s Journal. These notes were
arranged in what was then the recognized systematic order and they
included everything that the Journal contained of either scientific or
literary interest about birds. They made a book of 441 pages, which
enjoyed a little succès d’estime among the bird people but never sold as well as I had hoped, either
under its original title or under its later one of
Thoreau’s
Bird-Lore.
My proposal to treat Thoreau’s human acquaintance in a similar
way met with no success for many years, but when I learned of the artist
N. C. Wyeth’s lifelong interest in Thoreau and his ambition to
illustrate a book of selections of his own choosing, I persuaded him and
Houghton Mifflin Company of the possibilities of a joint project, and
Men
of Concord was the result. I am often complimented on this book and
especially on the beautiful illustrations. It is true, of course, that to
a great extent they made the book, and I believe that through them a good
many readers have been led to a better appreciation of Thoreau as a man
among men.
Continuing with my own adventures in editing, I must go back to
1910, when in the same year with Notes
on New England Birds, my school edition of
Walden
was published in the Riverside Literature Series. Of the Introduction,
written for this especial purpose, nothing need be said, but the notes,
afterwards made available for the general reader in the Visitors’
Edition of Walden, afforded me
an opportunity for a great deal of very agreeable research and made this
the most interesting piece of editing that I ever did.
Walden
is so full of quotations and allusions, many of the latter heavily
veiled, that many, many hours were spent in libraries, especially in the
Boston Athenaeum, and in correspondence with individuals in the work of
tracking them down; and many remained untraced after all. For instance, there
was Tom Hyde, the tinker, and his last words, spoken on the gallows,
“Tell the tailors to remember to make a knot in their thread before they
take the first stitch.” Just who was Tom Hyde, and when and where did he
do his tinkering? Does anybody know?
As it was, the book contained fifty-three pages of notes in fine
print, and I enjoyed all the pleasures of the chase in getting them
together. The book was published in response to a demand for an edition of
Walden as a college-entrance
requirement, and, of course, the book being out of copyright, there were
competing editions. One of these competitors deserves special mention. It
was used by our salesmen as a contrast to their own offering, and it
furnished me with copy for an article in the “Contributors’ Club”
that was then a feature of the Atlantic
Monthly. As to the editor I shall say only that the title-page
proclaimed him a Harvard Master of Arts. I must give you a few nuggets dug
out of this rich mine of misinformation—only a few because I can’t
take time for more. Robin Goodfellow, it seemed, was a famous English
outlaw and popular hero. The note to “Old Parr” states that his first
name was Catherine and he was the sixth and last wife of Henry the Eighth,
but this is qualified by the statement that
perhaps
he was Thomas Parr, the noted English centenarian. The editor was
generous here and in other instances in giving his readers a choice! The
most remarkable of all the annotations read: “Mentors, Isaac, 1642–1727. An English philosopher
and mathematician; originator of a theory of light, colors, and
gravity.” This sounds like a note on Newton, and yet the word annotated
is actually “mentors.” I think I see how “Mentors” got changed to
“Newton” and annotated as that and then changed back again without
altering the annotation, but we needn’t go into that now. At any rate,
we had a lot of fun with that particular competing edition.
I shall say nothing of the other school editions of
Walden
nor of the many other editions of this and others of Thoreau’s books
and essays. These latter used the regular texts for the most part and had
little in the way of annotation, an Introduction being usually the only
contribution of the editor. There is one volume of selections, however,
that I must mention because it illustrates how neither Thoreau nor any
other author should be edited for the general reader. That
is
Henry David Thoreau, in the series of American Writers, published in
1936 by the American Book Company. The editor, Bartholow V. Crawford,
furnished his compilation with a scholarly introduction and scholarly
notes, but he made the mistake of reprinting verbatim the first editions
of the several selections, whether they appeared in books, periodicals, or
newspapers. This resulted in the perpetuation of typographical errors for
which Thoreau, if at all responsible, was responsible only in a minor
degree. Little errors in spelling and punctuation distract and often delay
the reader, and it does the author no service to
perpetuate them. First editions, with all their blemishes, have an
interest for collectors and students, and so have photographic facsimiles
of them, but authors have a right to be known by the final authoritative
editions of their works.
Neither shall I say anything of the leaflets and brochures
containing bits of Thoreau’s verse, essays, and letters, edited and
printed by my friend Edwin B. Hill and others, except to voice my
appreciation of what they have done for lovers of Thoreau.
Of the Collected Poems of
Henry Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode, I may say something elsewhere. Now
I will content myself with a general endorsement of what Mr. Adams says of
it in the March New England
Quarterly.
[Allen’s
Note:
I reviewed it in
American
Literature for November,
1945]
Of the editors and biographers of Thoreau I have had some personal
acquaintance with three—Bradford Torrey, Dr. Edward Emerson, and Frank
Sanborn. [Allen’s
Note: This was written before I became acquainted with Edwin Way
Teale, whose edition of Walden
is illustrated with his
beautiful photographs.] Of these I knew Torrey best. I knew him as an
ornithologist and a writer long before I became associated with him on the
Thoreau journals. In 1888 we climbed Mt. Lafayette together and discovered
singing, and doubtless nesting, pine grosbeaks in its upper forests—an
interesting and memorable occasion. It was then, too, that I made my first
acquaintance with Bicknell’s thrush, that bird of the mountain-tops whose song, heard on Mt. Washington,
Thoreau mistook for that of the veery.
[Allen’s
Note: In his journal entry for
July 8, 1858, Thoreau, camping for the night at Hermit Lake in
Tuckerman’s Ravine, wrote, “The wood thrush, which Wentworth called
the nightingale, sang at evening and in the morning . . . also the veery,”
and again, on July 9, “The wood thrush and veery sang regularly,
especially morning and evening.” The olive-backed thrush and
Bicknell’s thrush are the only thrushes at all likely to be found at
this altitude (4000 feet) in the White Mountains. The song of Bicknell’s
somewhat resembles that of the veery, and to Thoreau, who heard many
hermit thrushes in Concord and called them all wood thrushes, the
olive-back, the most abundant thrush of the White Mountain forests, must
have seemed to be just an unusual sounding wood thrush.] Torrey and I
corresponded many years before his death in Santa Barbara in 1912. He was
a delightful companion and correspondent. His treatment of Thoreau as a
man and a diarist in the Introduction to the Journal is, as was natural,
very largely from a natural-history point of view, and it is not
surprising that Frank Sanborn, whose interest in Thoreau was biographical,
when he came to review the Journal in the Chicago Dial, ignored the
Introduction entirely, and of the editing said only, “For the full
understanding of this part [that is, the biographical part] of the copious
work many more notes and explanations are needed than the editors had room
to afford even had they the needful knowledge.” It is no secret, I
think, that Mr. Sanborn would have been very, glad if the job of editing the journal had
been assigned to him.
Of course I saw a good deal of Mr. Sanborn first and last. He was
very helpful to me when I was at work on the Bibliography, and he
introduced me to Herbert Hosmer, of Concord, who inherited his brother
Alfred’s large collection of Thoreauana. I spent many hours in this
collection, and Mr. Hosmer’s hospitality took more forms than one,
because one of his hobbies was home-made wines, which he produced in
almost inconceivable variety and of which I was privileged to enjoy many
more or less delicious samples.
I never knew Mr. Sanborn intimately, but I always enjoyed talking
with him and listening to his caustic comment on men and books. It must
have been when he was revising the Familiar
Letters in 1906 that I corrected his spelling of the name of
Thoreau’s Michigan correspondent Calvin Greene, citing Dr. Samuel A.
Jones as authority for the final e. This elicited from him a parody
of Fitz-Greene Halleck’s familiar lines, which as nearly as I can
remember, went:
“Greene
be the name about him.
Friend of my earlier days.
E final—do without him?
No? and to Jones be praise?”
At another time I queried a hanging participle on some proof I was
sending him, but he was not disposed to let any young whipper-snapper of
forty or so attempt to improve his English and he replied
somewhat tartly that he hung his participles wherever he chose.
I find three letters of Sanborn’s in my files which I think will
interest you. The first two show his helpful side.
[Here the speaker read letters from F. B. Sanborn to F. H. Allen
dated April 10 and July 7, 1916. The first stated that Dr. Kennedy
had written him that Thoreau was appointed to the examining
committee in Natural History at Harvard in 1858, 1859, and 1860, but
that he (Sanborn) doubted if he ever served. The second quoted at
length a letter from Ellery Channing to Emerson, dated May 4, 1853,
proposing to draw on Emerson’s journals for a book to be called
provisionally “Country Walking,” Channing to be paid a certain sum
for the work. The material thus obtained was used with other matter
twenty years later in
Thoreau,
the Poet-Naturalist.]
Probably at either his request or the author’s, I sent Sanborn a
set of the galley proofs of Mark Van Doren’s
Henry
David Thoreau: A Critical Study, which Houghton Mifflin Company
published in 1916. He didn’t like the book very well, and his comments
on the proof showed it.
[Here the speaker read several of these
condemnatory comments, which, though characteristic of Sanborn’s way of
speech and amusing to an outsider, it seems best, out of regard for the
living as well as the dead, to refrain from publishing.]
These reactions
to the book in proof explain why he wrote as he did in answer to a
letter of mine about a hoped-for review of it.
[Letter of January 16,
1917, criticising Van Doren’s book severely in similar unrestrained
language.]
However much one might be irritated by Sanborn’s attitude of
ownership of all that pertained to Thoreau, one had to admit that he
occupied a unique position as the only one of Thoreau’s biographers who
had had an actual personal acquaintance with him, and who was at the same
time an active and energetic seeker for information about his life and
writings, also that he had a keen mind as well as a gift of expression.
Early in 1917, I think it was, our old friend Edwin B. Hill, now of Tempe,
Arizona,
[Allen’s
Note: Mr. Hill died April 6,
1949]
sent me a photograph of a
portrait of Thoreau as a young man that he had picked up somewhere and
that he believed to be authentic and unpublished. It looked genuine to me,
and I submitted it to Mr. Sanborn for his judgment. He promptly pronounced
it a fake, perhaps not using that word, though it would have been like him
to use it. Still, it looked so like what I should have pictured Thoreau in
his youth that I couldn’t help thinking that Sanborn was mistaken. I was
even so rash as to express the opinion more or less privately that it was
only because he himself had not discovered it that Sanborn doubted its
authenticity. I then sent it to Dr. Edward Emerson, and his reaction was
much more favorable. He was in North Carolina at the time, where he could not conveniently consult his
Concord friends, but he wrote me, under date of March 2, 1917, of his
great pleasure at seeing the friend of his childhood as no other portrait
had brought him back to him, and speaking of the picture as “surely
authentic” and as giving confirmation to Walton Ricketson’s bust,
which he considered to be on the whole the best representation of Thoreau,
though idealized. He expressed the opinion that the Ricketson medallion of
Thoreau in later life, on the other hand, ought to have been destroyed,
and that it was “a representation of phthisis, nothing else.”
Shortly after this Dr. Emerson brought us the manuscript of
Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend, and it was arranged
that this portrait should be used for the frontispiece. Fortunately for
all of us, it was discovered before publication of the book that it was
not an original portrait from life, but a drawing by Henry K. Hannah after
a sketch supposed to have been made by Sophia Thoreau supplemented by a
study of the Maxham daguerreotypes and other portraits of Thoreau; also
that it had been printed before—in George Tolman’s “Concord: Some of
the Things to be Seen There,” published in Concord in 1903. Though Dr.
Emerson was as disappointed as I was at this outcome. he insisted that he
still wanted it used in his book, and so it was—with a statement of its
real source. But we had to admit that Mr. Sanborn’s judgment had been
better than ours!
I can’t conclude these random remarks on editing
Thoreau in any better way than by expressing my admiration—I might
almost call it affection—for Dr. Edward Emerson, the son of Thoreau’s
greatest friend and himself a modest, unaffected gentleman with a quiet
sense of humor whom it was a delight to talk with. I can still hear his
gentle voice with something like a lisp in it, and I am glad that I
remember it better than that of his more assertive fellow townsman.
A
Note on the Text:
-
1st
published: The Thoreau Society Booklet Number Seven (Monroe, NC: The
Nocalore Press,
1950).
-
Source:
The Thoreau Society Booklet Number Seven (1950).
-
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