Series.
F72.M7T5 1998
974.2’72—dc21 98-7698

 

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INTRODUCTION

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849, was Henry Thoreau’s first book, preceding the more famous Walden (1854) by five years. These were the only works that Thoreau brought to publication as books during his short life. Other works, such as Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, were posthumously made into books by relatives, friends, and editors who organized literary fragments that Thoreau had left behind.

Thus, A Week and Walden share a conspicuous and distinctive place among Thoreau’s works. Of the two Walden has fared much the better. Its reputation as a classic of world literature has been secure for well over half a century. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, on the other hand, has had to wait a long time for recognition. Only now, in the closing years of the twentieth century, are scholars and general readers coming to view this work as one of the most interesting, ambitious, and complex books written in mid-nineteenth-century America, and one of the major literary achievements of that era.

That A Week, like the voyage it describes, has had to work its way upstream undoubtedly owes to its highly discursive form. The book describes a voyage undertaken by Thoreau and his brother John during the late summer of 1839—a voyage that took the brothers from their native village, Concord, Massachusetts, down the Concord River to the point where it flows into the larger Merrimack River. From there, they followed the Merrimack upstream west and north into New Hampshire, and, after a trek into the White Mountains, returned by boat to Concord. (Readers should consult the map on page xxix to gain a more vivid sense of the journey.)

The structure of Thoreau’s book is built by the days of the week, each constituting a chapter, during which the voyage progressed. But interwoven into the travel narrative are extended digressions on a great many things—classical and modern literature and philosophy, the Native American and Puritan histories of New England, friendship, the Bhagvat-Geeta and other Eastern sacred writings, and a critique of traditional Christianity, to name just a few.

Contemporary reviews suggest that mid-nineteenth-century readers, failing to see the digressions’ sometimes quite organic relationship to the voyage, were impatient with the meandering pace of A Week. They apparently were expecting a more straightforward travel book, such as the kind that was much in vogue in the 1840s. The mixed response of that period’s foremost critic, James Russell Lowell, became the representative literary evaluation of A Week in Thoreau’s time, and even well into the twentieth century. Lowell admired the book’s natural history elements, but found the digressions “out of proportion and out of place”: “We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down.”

General readers in Thoreau’s time, on the other hand, were apparently most bothered by his harsh critique, in A Week, of traditional Christianity, a critique he pointedly delivers on “Sunday,” the day of the sabbath. With both professional literary criticism and popular taste working against it, the book sold poorly. The first edition of A Week did so poorly, in fact, that Thoreau was obligated to honor the terms of the contract with his publisher that called for him to purchase unsold copies. When, in 1853, these copies were shipped to Thoreau in Concord, he recorded his response in his journal:

 

For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon,—706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. [October 28, 1853]

 

The wittiness of this journal passage masks the disappointment Thoreau must have felt upon A Week’s, and his own, failure in the literary marketplace. He had been working on this book, alongside other projects, for almost a decade by the time of its publication in 1849, and he had hoped that it would inaugurate his career as a notable American author. Such ambitions for the book were encouraged in Thoreau by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who throughout the 1840s had nurtured Thoreau’s fledgling literary career, and worked hard during the closing years of the decade to help Thoreau place A Week with a publisher.

Emerson’s high regard for the book, up until the point of its publication (when the two men experienced a falling out from which their relationship never fully recovered), is expressed in an 1847 letter to his friend William Henry Furness: “I write because Henry D. Thoreau has a book to print. Henry D. Thoreau is a great man in Concord, a man of original genius & character.... I think it a book of wonderful merit, which is to go far & last long.”

Earlier in the same year, Emerson had praised Thoreau’s project to a publisher, and did so in a way that showed he grasped the book’s large philosophical and literary ambitions. This was no mere travel book, Emerson said; rather, the travel narrative was “a very slender thread for such big beads & ingots as are strung on it.” Emerson fully understood at this early stage that the literal voyage was but the conventional structure on which A Week’s themes and ideas were organized.