They needed the money to pay for Henry’s Harvard tuition.Īfter graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau got a job teaching at the Center School in Concord. In 1834, John Thoreau took his son to New York City to sell Thoreau pencils.
They called the firm John Thoreau & Co., and made good pencils. The French and German pencils were better and more expensive.Ī man named Charles Dunbar discovered plumbago deposits in Bristol, N.H., and in 1823 he went into business with his wife’s brother – Henry David Thoreau’s father. In the 1820s, Boston had several pencil makers, but they made an inferior product: greasy, gritty and brittle. It was first used in Cumbria, England, to mark sheep. Visit our Transcendentalism Study Guide for other works and background on the genre that was distinctly American.Pencils are made with a greasy black mineral then called plumbago, now graphite. However the book is written to express that visit over a one year rather than two year period and Thoreau placed careful emphasis on the division of the four seasons. Thoreau stayed at Walden for two years, two months, and two days (a fun personal fact for me because I once worked for a congressman for one year, one month, one week, and one day which was a journey into the wilderness in its own right). He also had frequent guests and visitors. His cabin was not far from the edge of town, his nearest neighbor was about a mile away, and he was only a couple miles removed (that's ~3KM for you European readers) from his family's house. Thoreau was not buried deep in the wilderness, reflecting in solitude, capturing varmints, and skinning them with his teeth in order to survive. There is another popular misconception to dispatch immediately. The final sentence of that paragraph (the second quote) reflects back into the entire paragraph and inflects the early statements with more meaning.
I think it is common to bump up against transcendentalism and conclude that the movement was promoting man of over God or man over religion but I think it is more correct to understand it as a movement that was trying to create a better way to live. The point being that Transcendentalism was not simply a philosophical movement but a philosophical and religious movement. Modern students should keep in mind that though freedom of religion was a founding principal of the United States, religion was pervasive and much more deeply intertwined with the culture than it is today. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
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