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6 March 1849, Tuesday; 6:30 p.m.
Lincoln, Massachusetts; Centre School House
"White Beans and Walden Pond"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: Lincoln Lyceum records note
that on 6 March 1849, "The Lyceum met according to Adjournment and was called to
order by the President [Calvin Weston]. They then listened to a lecture from Mr. Henry
Thoreau, of Concord, taken from his journal of a life in the woods. There was no
discussion after the lecture. Adjourned for a week" (MassLyc, p. 220). The
lecture was the seventh of nine that season (MassLyc, pp. 218-20). A series of
journal entries by Lincoln resident James Lorin Chapin delineate the events leading to
this presentation by Thoreau.1 On 11 December 1848,
Chapin wrote, "Another pleasant day. Came home in the morning stopping in town to see
Mr. Henry D. Thoreau and see if he would go and lecture before the Lyceum at Lincoln to
morrow evening. He could not go and gave as a reason ill health. Said he would go at some
future time." On 2 February 1849, he noted, "I came down to Mr. Thoreau’s
to see if H. D. Thoreau would come and lecture before the Lincoln Lyceum next Tuesday
evening. He said if nothing occurred more than he expected he would come." Something
must have occurred because the speaker for that evening was "the Rev. Mr. Hill, of
Waltham" (MassLyc, p. 219). Finally, on 6 March, he entered, "This
evening I have been to the Lyceum here in Lincoln and have listened to a curious lecture
from Henry D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject, his reflections when hoeing beans when he lived
alone in the woods near Waldron Pond in Concord."
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: Chapin’s entry of 6 March says of Thoreau’s lecture:
He had a strange mixture of sense and folly[,] of poetry and halting prose, of science
and fable, of physics and ethics. He touched on the pond[,] the woods, the rail road, the
cars, the church bells, the distant roar of cannons, the sound of martial music, and the
conversation of travellers on the highway, and more fully on the morals of ho[e]ing beans.
I was very much interested with the lecture, perhaps not so much with the logic and beauty
of the subject as the novelty of the style.
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: See
lecture 17 above.
Notes
1. For the relevant
entries from Chapin’s journal, see Blanding, "Thoreau’s Local
Lectures," 21-26. [Back to Text] |