THE CONCORD SAUNTERER <£Z^r?%^ 4> j^e ?zz*<^dzz /*Wi^£«^ f New Series Volume 14 2006 PublishedAnnually by The Thoreau Society THE CONCORD SAUNTERER PublishedAnnually by The Thoreau Society Original Series, Volumes 1-20, 1966-1988 New Series Begun Fall 1993 (ISSN 1068-5359) Editor Richard J. Schneider Advisory Editors Michael Berger RonaldA. Bosco Robert Burkholder RonaldWesley Hoag Wesley T. Mott Joel Myerson Patrick F. O'Connell SandraH. Petrulionis William Rossi Nancy Craig Simmons LauraDassowWalls Leslie PerrinWilson ElizabethWitherall Thefront-coverdrawingofThoreau'sWaldenPondcabinaccompaniedthefirstprinting of Walden in 1854. This drawing was based on an original executedby Henry's sister Sophia.ThepassageaboutsaunteringisfromThoreau's"Walking"manuscript,courtesy oftheConcordFreePublicLibrary.ThelikenessofThoreauonthebackcoverisfrom an 1856 Benjamin D. Maxhamdaguerreotype, ownedby theThoreau Society. THECONCORD SAUNTERER, anannualpublicationofTheThoreauSociety,seeks biographical, historical, textual, bibliographical, and interpretive articles relating to Henry Thoreau and his associates, Concord, and Transcendentalism. Submissions of all lengths areinvited; shorterpieces notusedwill alsobeconsideredforthequarterly THOREAU SOCIETY BULLETIN. Contributions shouldconformtothemostrecent MLA documentation style. Sendtwohardcopiesplus SASEanddiskettetotheEditor, THE CONCORD SAUNTERER, Dept. ofEnglish andModern Languages,Wartburg College, Waverly, IA 50677; ore-mail an attachmentto richard.Schneider®wartburg. edu; phone (319) 352-8435. Decisions are reportedwithin threemonths. Subscription toTHECONCORDSAUNTERERisbymembershipintheSociety;seethebackcover foradditional information.THECONCORDSAUNTERERisreferencedinAmerican LiteraryScholarship,AmericanHumanitiesIndex, andtheMLA Bibliography. 1 THE CONCORD SAUNTERER New Series Volume 14 2006 Editor's Pages 1 Shawn Stewart 5 Transcendental Romance Meets the Ministry ofPain: The Thoreau Brothers, Ellen Sewall, andHer Father Phillip Howerton 23 The ShroudedMountaintop: Intertextuality and the Misreading ofThoreau's "Ktaadn" Gayle Smith 37 "My River Leads to the Sea": Sarah Orne Jewett's . . . Country By-Ways as Thoreauvian Travel Narrative Louise E. Wright 6 Jack London's Knowledge ofThoreau Kent P. Ljungquist 75 "A Strange, Wild Land, Permeated by Sea and Wind: Esther Forbes in Thoreau's Tracks on Cape Cod Kathleen Nigro 91 Mr. Emerson Comes to St. Louis: "Inspiration" and Kate Chopin Fredrica B. Gtacksman 105 Concord Comes to ColdMountain: Emersonian Elements in Erazier's Cold Mountain Edmund A. Schofield 121 The Archbishop Visits Walden Pond Notes on Contributors 131 Presidents ofthe Thoreau Society 133 s Editor's Pages After a one-year hiatus because of the double 2004 Walden sesquicentennial issue, we return this year to our regular publication schedule. This year's issue provides a variety of perspectives on Thoreau and Emerson, but with an emphasis on influence. Thoreau and Emerson continue to be two ofthe most widely influential writers in American culture. The essays in this issue find their traces in writers ranging in time from the late nineteenth century writing of Sarah Orne Jewett to the present-day novel of Charles Frazier, and ranging in theme and style from the brutal naturalism of Jack London to the more romantic historical novels of EstherForbes. Before turning to influence studies, however, we first visit Thoreau' own time. Shawn Stewart revisits the romance between the Thoreau brothers and Ellen Sewall and finds it to be more complicated than we had previously thought. While the conventional wisdom among Thoreau scholars has long been that the reason for the failure ofboth John and Henry Thoreau's suits for Ellen's hand was her father's disapproval of their religious radicalism, a closer look at the Reverend Sewall suggests that there were also issues of health and finances that might have affected the decision. Next, Phillip Howerton looks at the popular culture ofThoreau's day to suggest that the readers of Thoreau's own day probably understood a text such as "Ktaadn" less accurately than we do today. He focuses on the illustrations, stories, poems, and other travel essays that accompanied the publication of Thoreau's first Maine Woods essay in The Union Magazine of 1848 to suggest that publications in the magazine exhibit a very genteel popular attitude toward excursions into wilderness which might have led Thoreau's contemporary readers to miss the gist ofThoreau's account. The next three essays explore Thoreau's influence on three very different later writers. Gayle Smith places Sarah Orne Jewett's writing, especially her volume of essays and stories, Country By-Ways, with Thoreau's in the tradition of travel writing that emphasizes both inward exploration through outward travel and the traveler's subjective reaction to the travel experience. Louise Wright finds a specific quote from Thoreau's A Week on the Concord andMerrimack Rivers in Jack London's short story "The Night-Born," which leads her to explore how much London knew about Thoreau. She finds no evidence that London read anything by Thoreau directly (he found the quote from A Week in a newspaper article). However, she argues that it is likely that London at least knew of and might have been influenced by Thoreau second- hand through London's interest in British socialists, who were influenced by Thoreau, and by his admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson, whose unflattering portrait of Thoreau raises the question of Thoreau's sexuality. Esther Forbes, most famous for her historical novel for young adults, Johnny Tremain, refers to Thoreau more directly. Kent Ljungquist examines how Forbes uses both the character of Thoreau himself and his descriptions of Cape Cod to further the theme of her historical romantic novel O Genteel Lady! Thoreau and the Cape strike a note ofindependence which the heroine ofthe novel tragically rejects. Ralph Waldo Emerson's influence on American literature is well- known and pervasive, but the next two essays explore his influence on two writers in whom we might not at first expect to see it. Kathleen Nigro finds Emerson's influence, especially that ofhis essay "Inspiration," in Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening', and Fredrica Glucksman examines the influence of Emerson's thought on Charles Frazier's recent novel, ColdMountain. Although these novels present a rather dark view of humanity, Emerson's philosophy offers more hopeful options to the characters in both. We conclude with a sentimental journey into the not-too-distant past with Ed Schofield's account offamous environmentalist David Brower's visit to Walden Pond to deliver an Earth Day speech in 1983. We include the text of Brower's speech. This issue is something ofa sentimental journey for this editor as well. Having my own other lives to live, I will be passing the editorship of The Concord Saunterer to the capable hands of Laura Dassow Walls at the University ofSouth Carolina beginning with the 2007 issue. As I do so, I would like to say thanks to my predecessor Ronald Wesley Hoag, who set the bar admirably high; to the board of advisors, who gave and continue to give generously of their time to evaluate submissions; and to the board and members of The Thoreau Society, who are committed to the ongoing exploration of Thoreau's impact on both American and world culture. It has been a privilege to work with such wise and dedicatedcolleagues and friends. Digitized by the Internet Archive 2013 in http://archive.org/details/concordsauntere200614unse Ellen Sewall about 1840 A daguerreotype first printed in Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). The image is reprinted here from the 1982 Dover edition of Days with the permission of Ellen Sewall's great-granddaughter, Frances Tower Maroni (Mrs. Yves Maroni). Transcendental Romance Meets the Ministry ofPain: The Thoreau Brothers, Ellen Sewall, and Her Father Shawn Stewart This essay examines the Ellen D. (Sewall) Osgoodpapers held among the manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., and particularly how those documents shed light on one specific episode in Ellen's life, that being the Sewall-Thoreau romance, my primary area of interest. Most ofthe monographs in this collection are original documents-handwritten diaries andletters, scrapbookpagesandephemera. Theyspan manyyears,from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. Ihavefocusedprimarily on those documentsfrom the period of the "Transcendental triangle" that involved Ellen and the Thoreau brothers,from Ellen s arrival in the summerof1839 toJohn's untimely death in January of1842. However, 1 have readalmost all the letters in this collection, as well as other documents outside the collection, and taken them into considerationforthis research. Ellen was a prolific pen pal. Thus, letters make up the bulk of this collection. There are more than 130 letters in the Davenport collection at the Huntington, most of them sent to or from Ellen Devereux Sewell (EDS). Ellen'sfrequentcorrespondents included her would-be suitors John and Henry; Ellen'sfather Edmund Quincy Sewall (EQS); her mother Caroline Ward Sewall (CWS); herAuntPrudence Ward(PW); herlittle brothers Eddie and Georgie; and finally the man who successfully pressed his suitfor Ellen's hand in marriage, the Rev. Joseph Osgood. Formore information on this collection, contact Sue Hodson, Curator ofLiterary Manuscripts, at the Huntington Library. THE CONCORD SAUNTERER, N.S. Volume 14, 2006 The Concord Saunterer Henry David Thoreau fell in love only once, in 1839. This was long before he wrote any of his famous books or essays—Walden, "Civil Disobedience," or"A Plea forCaptain John Brown"; he was just 22 years old, a recent Harvardgraduate, andhad barely begun keeping a journal himself. In fact at this time even the girl he fell in love with, Ellen Devereux Sewell, a 17-year- old minister's daughter, was probably more ofan experienced writerthan he was. Ellen had written hundreds of letters to friends and family, and she was an practiced diarist. Letters were the telephones oftheirday. In theirletters anddiaries, now contained at the Huntington Library, these people reveal an intimate portrait of the young woman from Scituate, Massachusetts, who almost became Mrs. Henry DavidThoreau. She spent fifteen days with the Thoreau family, but apparently that was enough. Henry Thoreau fell head over heels in love with her. "There is no remedy forlove but to love more," Henry pined in his journal, and they might have livedhappily everafter, except for one little bump in the road: Henry had an olderbrothernamed John, andJohn fell in love with hertoo (PJ 1: 81). This was not the first time that either brother had laid eyes on Ellen Sewall. In fact, they had seen her many times before, especially since her aunt and her grandmother had come to Concord almost ten years earlier and become permanent boarders in the Thoreau household. In herdiary, on one ofthose early visits, she recordedthat I went to Concord the 26th ofJune and returned yesterday on the 4th ofJuly; I think that Concord is a very pleasant [place]; I got acquainted with a little girl named Sarah Shattuck, who was 13 years old, and her cousin Elizabeth Shattuck. Edmund and I used to play with Sarah Shattuck every day, and one day we played in her father's little carriage all day long. Elizabeth Shattuck and Sophia Thoreau came to see me one afternoon, and then I went to see Sophia Thoreau the next . . . At Concord, yesterday, was independence day and father and Edmund and I went out in the morning and saw two companies ofsoldiers marching about. In the afternoon, we went out on the common, and coming home we stopped at an Apothecaries and drank some mead. That night, Mr. and Mrs. Simmons, Mr. Chickering, father and mother, and I, all went on the common to hear a band ofmusic, and while we were listening to the music we saw some rockets go up in the sky. The last one that we saw was a very beautiful one. (5 July 1832) Flash forward seven years and the minister's daughter had become, by all accounts, a very striking young woman. Even one of the earliest known photographs taken ofher, a primitive daguerreotype, could not diminish her rare