Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

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.