|
21 March 1849, Wednesday; 7:30 p.m.
Portland, Maine; Exchange Hall
"Economy"
[Back to Calendar of Lectures]
NARRATIVE OF EVENT: Thoreau apparently received
the invitation to deliver his first lecture in Portland sometime during the week of 9-16
February 1849. The letter would probably have come from Henry A. Jones or John M. Adams or
both, who together were the "committee of arrangements" for the Portland Lyceum.
On 9 February he wrote a letter to his cousin George Thatcher of Bangor and mentioned
nothing about going to Portland, as he surely would have had he known at the time that he
would be making the trip.1 He began his letter to
Thatcher on the 16th, however, by saying that he was "going as far as Portland to
lecture on the 3d Wednesday in March," adding, "By the way they pay me
$25.00" (C, p. 236). On the 16th of March, he wrote to Thatcher confirming his
Portland lecture and thanking his cousin "for your exertions in my behalf with the
Bangor Lyceum," remarking that "unless I should hear that they want two
lectures to be read in one week or nearer together, I shall have to decline coming
this time" (C, pp. 240-41). Time was precious because he was then reading
proof sheets for A Week; he never did lecture in Bangor.
A number of events may have prompted the
invitation from the Portland Lyceum. For instance, one or more of the favorable newspaper
reviews of his lectures in Salem on 22 November 1849 and in Gloucester on 20 December 1848
may have come to the attention of the managers of the Portland Lyceum. It seems more
likely, though, that Emerson was responsible for the invitation. Emerson lectured before
the Portland Lyceum on 31 January 1849,2 and he
probably mentioned the success of Thoreau’s Salem and Gloucester lectures to the
managers, who would then have convened at their weekly meeting on the evening of 7
February and voted to invite Thoreau to lecture before their Lyceum. They would have
instructed their Corresponding Secretary to write a letter to Thoreau inviting him to
lecture and arranging a date. If the secretary got the letter in the next day’s mail,
Thoreau would probably have received it on or soon after 10 February, the day after he
wrote the first of his two letters to Thatcher.
When the doors of Exchange Hall in
Portland opened at 6:30 p.m. on 21 March to admit patrons to the Lyceum, conditions were
not favorable for a successful lecture. A brisk southerly wind had blown in an equinoctial
storm, and rain was pounding the roof of the hall and making a soup of the already muddy
streets. Nevertheless, "quite a good audience" had assembled in the hall by 7:30
p.m., and Thoreau was introduced to them.3 He
stepped up to the podium, saw a letter lying on it from his cousin George Thatcher, laid
the letter aside or perhaps put it in his coat pocket, placed his lecture manuscript on
the podium, and told the audience that "the lecture he was about to read was the
first of a course entitled ‘Life in the woods,’ delivered before his fellow
townsmen" of Concord, Massachusetts, and that the subject of the lecture "might
be called Economy."4 He then read his lecture
for most of the next two hours, almost twice the length of the customary lyceum offering
and a quantitative bargain, at least, for the twenty-five cents admission fee (or one
dollar for the season). Just before leaving for Boston the day after the lecture, Thoreau
wrote a response to the letter from Thatcher that he had found on the podium the night
before, telling his cousin that he had "had a good audience" at the lecture
"considering the weather, or not considering it."5
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: Advertisements were carried on the day of the lecture in two Portland daily
papers, the Eastern Argus and the Daily Advertiser. Both notices included a
misquoted comment from a review of the same lecture—as delivered in Salem,
Massachusetts, on 28 February—in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller of 14
March 1849. Whereas the Boston paper cited the lecture as a "delectable compound of
oddity, wit, and transcendentalism," both Portland papers quoted the Traveller
as praising its "delectable compound of oddity, wit, and ne-plus ultraism."
Almost certainly, the alteration from transcendentalism to ne-plus ultraism was an
editorial ploy intended to increase attendance by not alarming any potential auditors who
shared the fairly prevalent opinion that transcendentalism was just another name for
moonshine. Whether readers knew what "ne-plus ultraism" meant is questionable,
but, in any case, the Eastern Argus promised them that Thoreau’s lecture
"will be worth hearing," while the Advertiser assured that "A rare
treat may be expected." The Advertiser, oddly enough, identified the provider
of this impending treat as one "Henry D. Shoreac" of Concord, Massachusetts.
Both papers termed Thoreau’s talk the
"18th Lyceum Lecture," presumably of that winter’s season. Thoreau was
clearly a late addition to the roster. An advertisement in the 8 November 1848 Eastern
Argus listed twelve lectures already booked, including one by Charles Sumner and no
less than seven by Henry Giles. Another eight speakers had been "invited" or
"conditionally engaged," including Edward Everett, Horace Mann, and Emerson.
There is no mention of Thoreau, although the ad assures that "all the funds will be
expended."
If what he read was ne-plus-ultraism, his
audience seemed to enjoy it, even one William Willis, who saw the lecture for what it was.
He went home afterwards and wrote in his diary: "Wednesday March 21. Equinoctial
storm, fresh southerly wind & rain[.] lecture at Lyceum by Mr. Thoreau of Concord
Mass. queer, transcendental & witty—quite a good audience notwithstanding the
storm."6 Another personal response apparently
to this particular lecture was recorded by Joel Benton, who remarked in his memoirs,
"Before ‘Walden’ was published I heard [Thoreau] give a lecture before a
small audience, which began: ‘I have been a good deal of a traveler—about my
native village,’ and went on with a very entertaining account of his experiments in
living."7 Although Benton does not specify a
location, he lived in Portland, which argues for a Portland ascription.
Newspaper correspondents too liked what
they had heard. Reviews of the lecture appeared the next day in the Eastern Argus
and on 31 March in another Portland paper, the weekly Transcript: An Independent Family
Journal of Literature, News &c. The Eastern Argus pronounced the lecture
"unique, original, comical, and high-falutin" and likened it to the
"dashing out of a comet that had broken loose from its orbit—hitting here and
there, a gentle rap at this folly, and a severe one at that—but all in good
nature." Noted also was the fact that "It kept the audience wide awake, and most
pleasantly excited for nearly two hours."
Also favorable, and much more significant
because of its detailed summary, is the 127-sentence review in the Transcript, in
which all but the six-sentence first paragraph comprises a closely paraphrased outline of
the lecture. Those prefacing six sentences make it clear that Thoreau’s lecture was
as successful in Portland as it had been in Salem and Gloucester more than three months
before:
A man engaged in the fore-front of a
battle can afterwards give but a poor description of the contest. He who gazes from a safe
eminence may hope to do better, but if his vision be rendered indistinct by distance,
rising exhalations or vapory mists, he may imagine triumphs where none have occurred, or
disasters where victory has been secured. In his lecture Mr. Thoreau took us with him to
his lonely retreat, and pointed out some of the principal features of the great battle of
life, of which the earth is the scene.— But he saw them in the colorings given by his
own mental vision—sometimes clear and lifelike, sometimes picturesque, and anon
grotesque, sometimes humorous and playful, but always genial, and without misanthropy or
malice. It was refreshing to go out of the beaten track, and follow an original mind in
its wanderings among life’s labyrinths, and it was amusing to witness the play of
fancy and strokes of wit which were scattered along its course. The lecture was the
pepper, salt, and mustard of the course [of at least eighteen lectures], and certainly
gave an excellent relish to the whole.
While the summary that follows this appraisal is full enough to reveal the portions of
the "Economy" chapter of Walden that Thoreau was reading as a lecture in
the first months of 1849, the limitations of its accuracy may be suggested by its
reference to "Walcott Pond."
Further on in the same issue of the Transcript,
the editors mentioned that "Much editorial matter [had given] place to the reports of
the Lyceum lectures" in that week’s issue of the newspaper, and they continued
with these observations: "The report of Mr. Thoreau’s lecture, although very
imperfect, conveys a tolerably good idea of the highly unique and amusing character of
that production. Despite the no very slight touches of transcendentalism, there is much in
it to furnish food for thought, as well as mirth." A belated testimonial to the local
success of Thoreau’s lecture is the invitation he received eighteen months later to
lecture there again. On 18 October 1850 Thoreau received an invitation from Josiah Pierce,
Jr., "to lecture before the ‘Portland Lyceum’ on some Wednesday evening
during the next winter" (C, p. 267). Pierce was one of the three members on
the Lyceum’s Managing Committee, and he told Thoreau why they were inviting him to
lecture in Portland again: "Your former animating and interesting discourse is fresh
in the memory of [the Lyceum’s] members, and they are very anxious to have their
minds again invigorated, enlivened, and instructed by you" (C, p. 267). He
accepted the invitation and delivered "An Excursion to Cape Cod" there on 15
January 1851.
Interestingly enough, reviews of
Thoreau’s 21 March 1849 Portland lecture soon traveled well beyond Portland. Horace
Greeley, who lectured before the Portland Lyceum just five days after Thoreau, apparently
had a look at the notes from which the as yet unpublished Transcript review was
being put together. On 2 April, after his return to New York City, Greeley published a
quite similar, though briefer, account of Thoreau’s lecture along with a few of his
own comments in his newspaper, the New-York Daily Tribune. Greeley’s article
reads:
Henry D. Thoreau of Concord, Mass. has
recently been lecturing on ‘Life in the Woods,’ in Portland and elsewhere. There
is not a young man in the land—and very few old ones—who would not profit by an
attentive hearing of that lecture. Mr. Thoreau is a young student, who has imbibed (or
rather refused to stifle) the idea that a man’s soul is better worth living for than
his body. Accordingly, he has built him a house ten by fifteen feet in a piece of
unfrequented woods by the side of a pleasant little lakelet, where he devotes his days to
study and reflection, cultivating a small plat of ground, living frugally on vegetables,
and working for the neighboring farmers whenever he is in need of money or additional
exercise. It thus costs him some six to eight week’s rugged labor per year to earn
his food and clothes, and perhaps an hour or two per day extra to prepare his food and
fuel, keep his house in order, &c.— He has lived in this way four years, and his
total expenses for last year were $41 25, and his surplus earnings at the close were $13
21, which he considers a better result than almost any of the farmers of Concord could
show, though they have worked all the time. By this course, Mr. Thoreau lives free from
pecuniary obligation or dependence on others, except that he borrows some books, which is
an equal pleasure to lender and borrower. The man on whose land he is a squatter is no
wise injured nor inconvenienced thereby. If all our young men would but hear this lecture,
we think some among them would feel less strongly impelled either to come to New-York or
go to California.
Greeley never heard Thoreau’s "Economy" lecture, at least not so far as
we have been able to determine, and the Transcript report was not published until
31 March, four days after Greeley left Portland and just two days before the Tribune
article appeared. Yet Greeley uses specific figures in his account of the Portland
lecture, figures which are not strictly accurate, but which are close enough to the ones
reported in the Transcript to suggest that Greeley took his figures from the Transcript
editor’s hastily scrawled notes.
Greeley’s article on
Thoreau’s first Portland lecture had far-reaching consequences. It was reprinted in
papers ranging from the New Bedford Daily Mercury, on 6 April, to the Philadelphia Saturday
Evening Post, on 14 April. The Tribune itself had a very large readership and a
nationwide circulation, so many thousands of people all over the country must have read
the article. They would also have read the first response to the article, which was
written on the very day the article appeared, 2 April, but which was not published until 7
April, when it appeared in the Tribune under the headline "How to
Live—Mr. Thoreau’s Example." The response was a letter addressed "To
the Editor of the Tribune" and signed "Timothy Thorough"—an assumed
name, no doubt. The writer told Greeley that he "felt a little surprise at seeing
such a performance [as Thoreau’s life in the Walden woods] held up as an example for
the young men of this country," and he supposed that he "must have mistaken the
sense of [Greeley’s] article." So he asked Mrs. Thorough, his wife, what she
could make of it—and she told him exactly what she thought:
She will have it that the young man
[Thoreau] is either a whimsy or else a good-for-nothing, selfish, crab-like sort of chap,
who tries to shirk the duties whose hearty and honest discharge is the only thing that in
her view entitles a man to be regarded as a good example. She declares that nobody has a
right to live for himself alone, away from the interests, the affections, and the
sufferings of his kind. Such a way of going on, she says, is not living, but a cold and
snailish kind of existence, which, as she maintains, is both infernal and infernally
stupid.
Greeley appended his "Reply" to Mr. Thorough’s letter, pointing out, as
so many have since, that "Nobody has proposed or suggested that it becomes everybody
to go off into the woods" and live as Thoreau did at the pond, and Greeley added his
impression "that Mr. Thoreau has set all his brother aspirants to self-culture, a
very wholesome example, and showed them how, by chastening their physical appetites, they
may preserve their proper independence without starving their souls."
This spirited exchange between the
Thoroughs and Greeley was bound to attract attention. One of the people who probably read
it was the editor of Thoreau’s hometown newspaper, the Yeoman’s Gazette.
If he did read it, though, it apparently did not dampen the hometown pride and enthusiasm
he felt after reading Greeley’s article earlier in the week. Under the banner
headline "Our Townsman—Mr. Thoreau," the editor asserted that Thoreau
"is a gentleman of rare attainments" and that "All the good things which
the Tribune says of this gentleman are richly deserved."8
Apparently other editors also agreed with Greeley’s assessment of the lecture Thoreau
read in Portland: the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post reprinted Greeley’s
article without comment in its columns on 14 April, and the Youth’s Companion
reprinted it, also without comment, over three months later, on 19 July.
Of course, not all those who read
Greeley’s article on Thoreau’s Portland lecture thought highly of the ideas in
the lecture or of Greeley’s comments. We have already seen what Mr. and Mrs. Thorough
thought of them, and they were not alone in their views. The Philadelphia North
American and U.S. Gazette, a Democratic, or conservative, newspaper that frequently
feuded with the much more liberal Tribune, also reprinted Greeley’s article on
14 April 1849, but with surprisingly long, relentlessly scathing commentary; and a large
portion of this commentary appeared verbatim, along with Greeley’s article, in the
Washington, D.C., Daily National Intelligencer on 19 April 1849. In both the
original commentary and the reprinted portion, Thoreau is characterized as an "idle
young student . . . laboring no more than barely to maintain his own single, selfish
existence"; and in both stories, the following remarks appear:
At first blush this strange life seems
beautiful in itself and worthy of imitation; but like the scenery of the stage it is
better when regarded at a distance than when closely approached. . . .
The would-be hermit of Concord may or may
not be a worldly-disappointed man: better for him that he were, than that he should
deliberately sit down in the woods, a Timon without a cause, to reject and despise the
common charities and duties, the pleasures and the pains of life, among his fellow men. .
. .
What is such solitary life, after all, but
a voluntary abandonment of civilization and return to barbarism?
Reason this subject as they may, those who
encourage such economic and philosophic perversion of life, encourage idleness and the
most egoistic meanness, and the exemplification is given by the young student himself.
The North American and U.S. Gazette story added, among other indictments:
Such a life affords no example that can
be imitated or ought to be imitated,—that can be or ought to be tolerated, or spoken
of in any terms short of censure. Such a life is, indeed, above all other lives,
A
tale
Told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying
nothing:
It is a tale told by an idiot—it is a life lived by an idiot.
Large portions of this commentary appeared as filler in several other newspapers around
the country—in New York City, Albany, and Newark, for example—but not a word of
it was calculated to enhance Thoreau’s reputation as a lecturer—or as anything
else, for that matter, except perhaps a misanthoropic oddball.9
However, not everyone who read one of the
newspaper summaries of Thoreau’s Portland lecture disagreed with the views he
expressed, as we know from the testimony of a young woman named Mary, who lived on the
western side of Maine and subscribed to the Portland Transcript. Mary read the
three-column review of "Economy" in the Transcript and wrote to the
editors the following week, saying, "I was well pleased with your excellent paper of
the 31st of March, and especially with the account you gave of Mr. Thoreau’s
lecture." After giving her opinion about the way Thoreau lived—the thrust of
which was basically "to each his own" and "more power to
him"—Mary said that Thoreau’s account of the way he lived reminded her of
"a very small woman with a pleasant countenance, and three small children and a
little dog" who had come to her town the preceding summer and who lived in much the
same fashion Thoreau did at the pond. After telling this woman’s story—about how
she set up housekeeping next to a small stream, did her cooking outdoors, and similar
sorts of things—Mary told the editors, "Now Sirs, it is my opinion [that] if
this poor widow’s story and character had such a narrator as Mr Thoreau, it would far
exceed many of the stories with which ‘All Europe rings from side to
side.’"10
Finally, in a 19 August 1854 review of Walden,
the Portland Transcript recalled Thoreau’s 1849 lecture in praising both the
book and his erstwhile lecture from which it grew:
In a lecture which he delivered before our Lyceum, he gave some of the experiences of
this episode in his life—and this book is that lecture revisited and extended. It is
the same quaint production of a crooked genius—only, a good deal more so. Beneath all
its seemingly paradoxical philosophy, however, there is a stream of true thought, in which
some of the illusions of civilization are clearly shown. We only wish some of our good
dames who make themselves such complete slaves to their furniture and their "best
rooms," would read Mr. Thoreau’s chapter on household economy. We think they
might gather a few ideas there that might be of great advantage to them.
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: See
lecture 15 above. The 127-sentence summary of the lecture in the Transcript
establishes conclusively that Thoreau read from the manuscript that J. Lyndon Shanley
refers to as versions II and III, and that is now at CSmH (HM 924).
Notes
1. ALS from Thoreau to
George Thatcher dated 9 February 1849, Collection of Mrs. Raymond Adams; quoted from a
typescript at the Thoreau Textual Center, CU-SB. [Back to Text]
2. William Charvat, Emerson’s
American Lecture Engagements: A Chronological List (New York: New York Public Library,
1961), p. 23. [Back to Text]
3. MS Diary of William
Willis, entry of 21 March 1849, MeP. [Back
to Text]
4. Quoted from the review
of the lecture in the Portland Transcript, 31 March 1849. [Back to Text]
5. ALS from Thoreau to
George Thatcher dated 22 March 1849, MBU; quoted from a typescript at the Thoreau Textual
Center, CU-SB. [Back to Text]
6. MS Diary of William
Willis, entry of 21 March 1849, MeP. [Back
to Text]
7. Joel Benton, Persons
and Places (New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1905), pp. 12-13. [Back to Text]
8. Clipping in the
Collection of Mrs. Raymond Adams. In the clipping the editor also pointed out that
"the Tribune is mistaken in supposing [Thoreau] still continues this course of life,
or that he continued it for four years. Mr. Thoreau lived upon the banks of our beautiful
Walden Pond for two years, where he wrote some of the most interesting and instructive
lectures we have ever heard, and where he became as ‘conversant with beans’ as
any man living, because he cultivated them extensively." [Back to Text]
9. Kenneth Walter Cameron
gathered these articles in "Damning National Publicity for Thoreau in 1849," American
Transcendental Quarterly, no. 2 (2d Quarter 1969): 18-27. [Back to Text]
10. This article is
reprinted in Gary Scharnhorst, "Mary from Maine on ‘Economy’ in Portland,
1849," Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 210 (Fall 1994): 1-2. [Back to Text] |