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28 December 1854, Thursday; 7:30 p.m.
Nantucket, Massachusetts; Nantucket Lyceum
"What Shall It Profit"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: (See also lecture 47
above.) On 25 November, Thoreau wrote to Andrew Whitney of the Nantucket Atheneum and
offered to lecture there during the second week of December. Whitney responded two days
later by writing, "We cannot have you between the 4 & 15th of Dec. without
bringing two lecturers in one week—which we wish to avoid if possible." He went
on to suggest, "If you cannot come on the 28th of Dec. will the 2d week in January .
. . suit you?—if not, perhaps you can select a day in the 4th week of Jan[uar]y"
(C, pp. 352-53). As Whitney’s response indicates, Thoreau was apparently still
attempting to schedule his local lecture engagements so as not to conflict with his
planned tour of the Midwest and Canada during late December and January. This must have
been a problem for him because even as late as the last week of November his itinerary for
the proposed tour was not fixed. Eventually, he must have concluded that he would not be
able to secure enough lecture engagements in the Midwest and Canada to make a lecture tour
worthwhile because sometime in early December he abandoned his plans and began accepting
the pitifully few offers from lyceums closer to home, including Andrew Whitney’s
invitation to lecture at the Nantucket Atheneum on 28 December.1
Thoreau’s sail from
Hyannis to Nantucket on 27 December must have broken the spell of his previous day’s
woodland idyll at Brooklawn and renewed worries, expressed in his 22 December letter to
Blake, "of being weather-bound at Nantucket" (C, p. 358) His journal
entry for the voyage reports not cold and snow but "misty rain" and a head wind
making for a "rather rough passage of three hours" (J, 7:91). Indeed, as
he later wrote to Daniel Ricketson , "I was obliged to pay the usual tribute to the
sea. . . . [T]hough I went neither before nor behind the mast, since we hadn’t
any—I went with my head hanging over the side all the way." He hastened to
assure Ricketson, though, that his rocky start "was more than made up to me by the
hospitality of the Nantucketers" (C, p. 362).
On the island Thoreau was the guest of
Captain Edward W. Gardiner, who, he noted in his journal entry for 27 December, regaled
him with stories of whaling lore and island culture such as, "you must have been
a-whaling there before you could be married, and must have struck a whale before you could
dance." Thoreau’s apprehension about being weather-bound may underlie his
journal comment: "As for communication with the mainland being interrupted, Gardiner
remembers when thirty-one mails were landed at once, which, taking out Sundays, made five
weeks and one day. The snow ten days ago fell about two inches deep, but melted
instantly" (J, 7:91-92). Thoreau’s journal entry for Thursday, 28
December, says nothing of his lecture but a great deal about Nantucket, which he saw under
the auspices of the obliging Gardiner. In a "misty rain as yesterday," they
drove in Gardiner’s carriage to Siasconset, en route visiting Gardiner’s
extensive pine tree plantations. Thoreau’s usual observations of flora and fauna are
spiced with vignettes of the island’s human life such as the description of a
"singular old hermit and genealogist" who "knows the genealogy of the whole
island" and "at last lives in a very filthy manner, and G. helped clean his
house when he was absent . . . . They took up three barrels of dirt in his room."
Thoreau also "Ascended the lighthouse at Sancoty Head" and "Visited the
museum at the Athenaeum" with its exotic South Seas holdings "brought home by
whalers." The day’s last recorded image must have cast a shadow over his
otherwise pleasant impressions of the island, "The last Indian, not of pure blood,
died this very month, and I saw his picture with a basket of huckleberries in his
hand" (J, 7:92-96).
Thoreau’s 7:30 p.m.
lecture that same day was the third in a projected course of eleven lectures by such noted
speakers as Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Tickets for the entire course cost one
dollar. The Nantucket Inquirer reported on 1 January 1855: "Notwithstanding
the damp, uncomfortable weather of Thursday evening, and the muddy streets, a large
audience assembled to listen to the man who has rendered himself notorious by living, as
his book asserts, in the woods, at an expense of about sixty dollars per year, in order
that he might there hold free communion with Nature, and test for himself the happiness of
a life without manual labor or conventional restraints." According to the Nantucket
Inquirer, after the audience was informed that the next speaker in the course would be
Horace Greeley, Esq., of New York, "Mr. Thoreau began by remarking that he had been
led to ask if he had spent as profitable a year as the farmer."
In his journal entry for 29 December,
Thoreau described his return to the mainland that morning by steamship, a crossing
dramatized by a "fog so thick that we were lost on the water; stopped and sounded
many times." The whistle of a locomotive and the bell of a life boat finally directed
them to the shore (J, 7:96).
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: Thoreau’s lecture was advertised in the Nantucket Inquirer on
13 December, and on 1 January the same newspaper printed an account of the talk, which
declared, "His lecture may have been desultory and marked by simplicity of manner;
but not by paucity of ideas." The reviewer then went on to summarize the lecture in
128 sentences, one of the lengthiest contemporary newspaper summaries of any of
Thoreau’s lectures. "What Shall It Profit" was obviously well received by
the Nantucketers. Thoreau gave his impression of the audience’s reception in his 6
January letter to Ricketson: "In spite of all my experience I persisted in reading to
the Nantucket people the lecture which I read at New Bedford, and I found them to be the
very audience for me" (C, p. 362)
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: See
lecture 46 above.
Notes
1. In late October 1854
Thoreau had corresponded with C. B. Bernard of the Library Association of Akron, Ohio, and
with John D. Milner of the Mechanics’ Institute of Hamilton, Canada West (Ontario),
and had attempted to arrange lecture engagements at those two institutions. He continued
his negotiations as late as 20 November, for on that date he wrote to Milner, "I
shall probably lecture the coming winter as near Hamilton as Akron Ohio—& I shall
be happy to read one or two lectures before your institute. My subjects are ‘The
Wild’ & ‘Moosehunting.’ I will read one lecture for fifty
dollars—or 2 within one week for seventy-five dollars—The nearer together the
better—If my terms are agreeable to you, [s]hall you be at liberty to hear me
[d]uring the first week of January? if not then will you please [state] [w]hat
evenings nearest to that date [are] [u]nengaged" (quoted from manuscript draft
of letter in Collection of Lawrence Willson; the lower-left corner of the leaf has been
torn away, so the material in brackets is conjectural). [Back to Text] |