|
30 December 1851, Tuesday; 7:00 p.m.
Lincoln, Massachusetts; Centre School House
"An Excursion to Canada"
[Back to Calendar of Lectures]
NARRATIVE OF EVENT: Thomas Blanding has
corrected an earlier misdating of this lecture delivery. Blanding states:
The date of Thoreau’s Canada lecture in Lincoln usually is given as January 6,
1852 . . . on the authority of Thoreau’s Journal entry for January 7, 1852:
"Last evening, walked to Lincoln to lecture in a driving snow-storm" [PEJ4,
p. 240]. The minutes of the Lincoln Lyceum for December 30, 1851, however, read:
"Listened to a lecture by Mr. Thoreau, of Concord. Subject: His travels in
Canada" [MassLyc, p. 223]. Thoreau’s journal entry for January 7 records
the fact that he went to a lecture in Lincoln the evening before. The minutes for
that evening read: "A lecture was delivered by the Rev. Mr. Woodbury, of Acton.
Subject: The character of the Puritans" (MassLyc, p. 223).1
Thoreau may have decided to attend Woodbury’s lecture, probably having heard about
it while at the Centre School House in Lincoln on the night of his own lecture, because he
was at this time still working on his "Cape Cod" manuscript, a portion of which
dealt with the Puritan character.
In any case, Thoreau’s lecture was
the fourth in a course of thirteen that season (MassLyc, pp. 223-24). In his diary
the next day, Bronson Alcott reported, "Pass the forenoon and dine with Thoreau, who
reads me passages from his ‘Canadian Tour,’ which he is now compiling from notes
for Lyceum Readings.— Also at Hillside."2
Alcott’s entry indicates that Thoreau was anticipating further presentations of his
new and probably still evolving manuscript. Specifically, the reference to Hillside
indicates a prospective delivery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as Hillside was the Plymouth
estate of Thoreau’s friend B. Marston Watson, who was soon to begin facilitating
Thoreau’s lecturing in that town. In a letter dated 15 February 1852, however, Watson
asked Thoreau to deliver his "Life in the Woods" lectures in Plymouth, and
Thoreau acceded to the request (see lecture 35 below).3
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: None known.
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: Thoreau
had visited Quebec and Montreal with Channing from 25 September to 3 or 4 October 1850,
but as his journal entry of 22 August 1851 (see lecture 34 below) and Alcott’s diary
entry of 31 December 1851 suggest, he seems to have waited a year or more to begin working
up his journal notes on the excursion into lecture form. The extant lecture manuscript,
which is housed at CSmH (HM 949) and which Thoreau apparently used as two lectures, reads
like a condensed version of the book A Yankee in Canada. Thoreau probably read only
the first half of the almost two-hundred-page manuscript in Lincoln, perhaps because he
may have still been working on the second half of the manuscript.
Notes
1. Blanding,
"Thoreau’s Local Lectures," 26n7. [Back to Text]
2. Alcott, MS "Diary
for 1851," entry of 31 December, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text]
3. MPlPS; typescript at
the Thoreau Textual Center, CU-SB. [Back
to Text] |