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14 December 1853, Wednesday; 7:00 p.m.
Concord, Massachusetts; Brick or Centre School House, High School Room
"An Excursion to Moosehead Lake"
[Back to Calendar of Lectures]
NARRATIVE OF EVENT: On 2 November 1853 Thoreau
was elected curator of the Concord Lyceum, a position that he promptly declined
"because I did not know where to find good lecturers enough to make a course for the
winter." He continued in the same journal entry, "We commonly think that we
cannot have a good journal in New England, because we have not enough writers of ability;
but we do not suspect likewise that we have not good lecturers enough to make a
Lyceum" (J, 5:506). One place Thoreau might have looked for enough good
lecturers to make a season was in the New-York Daily Tribune, which on 27 September
published a list of more than two dozen lecturers in an article entitled "The Lecture
Season." For several years the Tribune and other papers had run such a list in
the late summer or early autumn to assist lyceums in arranging their lectures.
Emerson’s was the first name on this list in 1853, while Thoreau does not appear.
However, from 1854 (with the publication of Walden) to the end of his career,
Thoreau was a fixture on this annual Who’s Who of lecturers. At least Emerson knew
where to find a good lecturer when he needed one. Elected curator in 1853 after Thoreau
refused the office, Emerson enlisted his younger friend to speak before the Concord Lyceum
that season.
The Concord Lyceum record of the event is
typically brief: "Wednesday eve 14th Dec [1853] Lecture by D. H. Thoreau.
Subject, Journey to Moose Head Lake. J[ohn] B[rown] Jr. Secry" (MassLyc,
p. 167). It was the third lecture in a course of eighteen (MassLyc, pp. 167-68). As
with all of the other lectures he delivered before his hometown Lyceum, he was not paid
for delivering it.
The record of this presentation is sparse,
but at least two of Thoreau’s auditors are known. Edith Emerson, twelve years old,
and Edward, her nine-year-old brother, attended Thoreau’s lecture after Edith had
questioned him at the Emerson family dinner table as to whether his lecture would be
"interesting" or "philosophical." Emerson himself records the
interrogation, which may have taken place the very day of Thoreau’s lecture, and
provides some interesting background:
The other day, Henry Thoreau was
speaking to me about my lecture on the Anglo American [delivered at the Concord Lyceum on
1 December 1853], & regretting that whatever was written for a lecture, or whatever
succeeded with the audience was bad, &c. I said, I am ambitious to write something
which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe. And when I have written a paper or a book, I see
with regret that it is not solid, with a right materialistic treatment, which delights
everybody. Henry objected, of course, & vaunted the better lectures, which only
reached a few persons. Well, yesterday, he came here, &, at supper, Edith,
understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked him, "Whether his
lecture would be a nice interesting story, such as she wanted to hear, or whether it was
one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about?" Henry instantly
turned to her, & bethought himself, & I saw was trying to believe that he had
matter that might fit Edith & Edward, who were to sit up & go to the lecture, if
it was a good one for them.1
Apparently it was good enough for them, as Lidian Emerson would later attest (see
below).
In his journal on 18 December, just four
days after presenting his lecture before his fellow Concordians, Thoreau indicted his
neighbors—and, by implication, his countrymen—for their valuing his talents as a
surveyor above those as a lecturer and writer. It should be noted that prior to his
just-delivered lecture he had not given any lectures for more than a year and a half.
After three successive days of surveying, he complained:
I have offered myself much more
earnestly as a lecturer than a surveyor. Yet I do not get any employment as a lecturer;
was not invited to lecture once last winter, and only once (without pay) this winter. But
I can get surveying enough, which a hundred others in this county can do as well as I,
though it is not boasting much to say that a hundred others in New England cannot lecture
as well as I on my themes. But they who do not make the highest demand on you shall rue
it. It is because they make a low demand on themselves. All the while that they use only
your humbler faculties, your higher unemployed faculties, like an invisible cimetar, are
cutting them in twain. Woe be to the generation that lets any higher faculty in its midst
go unemployed! That is to deny God and know him not, and he, accordingly, will know not of
them. (J, 6:21-22)
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: In a letter of 9 January 1854, Lidian Emerson indicates that Edith and
Edward Emerson found Thoreau’s 14 December lecture "interesting" after all:
"Henry Thoreau has once taken tea with us, & seemed highly to enjoy looking at
the children’s Christmas gifts and hearing their whole story. He seemed much pleased
that they enjoyed his lecture—and also surprised to find that they were present He
did not see them."2
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC:
Thoreau’s lecture manuscript would have taken him about an hour and a half to read.
On 23 January 1858, he wrote a letter to James Russell Lowell, editor of the newly formed Atlantic
Monthly, and said that the lecture "is an account of an excursion into the Maine
woods in ‘53; the subjects of which are the Moose, the Pine Tree & the Indian. .
. . It consists of about one hundred manuscript pages, or a lecture & a half, as I
measure" (C, p. 504). When revising the manuscript for publication as the
essay "Chesuncook" in early 1858, he seems only to have added more material to
fill out the narrative of his excursion.
Notes
1. The Journals and
Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et
al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-82), 13:270. [Back to Text]
2. The Selected Letters
of Lidian Jackson Emerson, p. 194. [Back to Text] |