Nonfiction · 1854
Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
In July 1845 Henry David Thoreau built a small house beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for two years, two months and two days. Walden (1854) is his account of that experiment: what it cost, what he ate, what he read, what he heard, and why he thought a life could be lived more deliberately.
This volume also contains “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849), the essay on conscience and the state that grew from his night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, and that has been read by every movement of non-violent resistance since.
Bibliomancer presents both texts complete.
Introduction
Editorial matter by Bibliomancer — separate from the author’s text.
Henry David Thoreau went to live in a house he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, on land belonging to Ralph Waldo Emerson, on 4 July 1845, and left it on 6 September 1847. He was a few days short of twenty-eight when he went. The book he made of the experience took him seven more years and at least seven drafts; it was published by Ticknor and Fields in Boston on 9 August 1854 as Walden; or, Life in the Woods, in an edition of two thousand copies that took five years to sell. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in May 1862, aged forty-four, having published only this and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which he paid for himself and which did not sell at all. The posthumous reputation began almost at once and has not stopped.
The book is arranged as a single year, though it compresses two, and it is much more various than its reputation as a manual of simple living suggests. “Economy”, the long first chapter, is a satire and an account book; “Sounds”, “Solitude” and “The Ponds” are among the most exact natural description in American prose; “Higher Laws” is a sermon; “The Pond in Winter” and “Spring” end the year with the ice going out. Thoreau was a surveyor and a reader of Hindu scripture, a pencil-maker’s son and a Harvard graduate who refused to pay for his diploma, and all of it is in the sentences, which are built for the ear and should be read slowly.
The essay printed after Walden in this edition was delivered as a lecture in 1848 and published in 1849 under the title “Resistance to Civil Government”; the title by which it is now known, “Civil Disobedience”, was given it after Thoreau’s death. It grew out of a night he spent in the Concord jail in July 1846 for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that upheld slavery and was fighting a war in Mexico. It is short, and it has had a longer practical life than almost any other essay in English: Gandhi read it in South Africa, and the civil-rights movement in the United States read it again.
Both texts are given complete, from the Gutenberg transcriptions of the first editions, in a new Bibliomancer setting; “Complemental Verses” and the other quoted poems are set as Thoreau placed them.
Contents
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Subjects
- Civil disobedience
- Authors, American — 19th century — Biography
- Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 — Homes and haunts — Massachusetts — Walden Woods
- Wilderness areas — Massachusetts — Walden Woods
- Natural history — Massachusetts — Walden Woods
- Solitude
- Government, Resistance to
- Walden Woods (Mass.) — Social life and customs
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of American Literature, Essential Philosophy, Great Essays.
Source mind
About the author
1817–1862 · Victorian
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born and died in Concord, Massachusetts, and rarely left it. After Harvard he taught school, worked in his family’s pencil business, surveyed land and lived for two years (1845–47) in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on land belonging to his friend Emerson. Only two books appeared in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854); his essay on civil disobedience (1849) and his vast journal were recognised later. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four.
Adjacent records
