He recognized, in short, that this book bore the fruits of many years of reading and reflection on Thoreau’s part, and that it expressed the writer’s deepest literary ambitions.

Emerson’s support of Thoreau’s big project—A Week is the longest of any of his published narratives—reflects his personal investment in the younger man’s career. During the 1840s Thoreau was, after all, Emerson’s primary disciple among the Concord Transcendentalists, that group of intellectuals and reformers whose idealism had been kindled by Nature, Emerson’s revolutionary manifesto of 1836. (Another member of Emerson’s circle, Margaret Fuller, had published in 1844 Summer on the Lakes, a work of travel and meditation in the Transcendentalist mode that may have influenced Thoreau’s composition of A Week.) And there is no question that, for all the wide-ranging reading that Thoreau did in the 1840s, the deepest and most profound influence on him during this period was Emerson.

Emersonian themes, including self-reliance, anti-institutional-ism (especially the institution of the Protestant church in New England), the centrality and symbolic significance of nature for human development, the role of the great individual in history—all these Emersonian themes and others are sounded loudly and often in A Week. It is not surprising, therefore, that the epigraph for the first chapter of Thoreau’s book is from Emerson’s poem “Musketaquid.”

It was also Emerson who provided the literal setting in which much of A Week was written. The plot of land known as Wyman’s field on the shores of Walden Pond that Emerson purchased in 1844 became the site of Thoreau’s hut and of the famous experiment in living that he conducted there between 1845 and 1847. One of the primary reasons that Thoreau went to live at the Pond was to write a book, and his reference in Walden to the “private business” he transacted there certainly refers in part to the composition of A Week.

Here at the Pond Thoreau wrote two major drafts of his book, weaving together materials concerning the 1839 voyage that he had worked up in his journal during the intervening years. Depending very little on the actual voyage, he turned instead to gazetteers (popular works that told the stories of local sites in a given region) to fill out, retrospectively, his account of the journey. And he added in a great many materials from his capacious reading of the 1840s, thus creating a composite narrative. In bringing together these diverse materials, Thoreau turned in particular to a journal volume he called “long book,” in which he had since 1842 been drawing together from various sources, including his own writings, materials for his book project—anticipating the moment when he could begin a draft. Thus, when Thoreau arrived at Walden Pond in the summer of 1845, he was fully engaged with his project and was prepared, through years of contemplation, reading, and journal keeping, to write his book.

But there was another book in progress at Walden Pond as well, the one that took its title from the Pond and recorded the experiences of living there. Though Walden ultimately was published five years later than A Week, in 1854, Thoreau was working on the two books side by side at the Pond, and during this period imagined that they might be published contemporaneously. Most readers in our time are unaware of the degree to which A Week and Walden are companion volumes, sharing many of the same themes despite their quite different structures—one built upon a river journey and the other set in place on an idyllic pond. Both books dramatize the process of self-renewal in nature, both are intensely engaged with discovering the spiritual meanings of perception, and both position themselves adamantly against the official culture and politics of the “trivial Nineteenth Century,” as Thoreau called his era in Walden. As Thoreau scholar Linck Johnson has observed, Thoreau’s famous passage in Walden deploring his contemporaries’ “lives of quiet desperation” was originally intended for A Week, and it would have fit there just as well.

But there are significant differences between the two works, and these differences go a long way to establishing what is distinctive and interesting about A Week for modern readers. Walden, as it evolved through an even longer period of composition than that of A Week (scholars have identified eight developing versions, written over almost a decade), was ultimately crafted by Thoreau into one of the most polished and synthetic books in American literature. As much as other highly crafted American works, like The Great Gatsby (1925), Walden has lent itself to intense formal analysis. One literary critic of the 1960s, in fact, believed that Walden was best understood as a long, lyric poem, and systematically studied it in this way. A Week, on the other hand, presents a more uneven and provisional account of experience, as Thoreau himself seemed to recognize when, in an 1851 journal entry, he described A Week as an “open” and “unroofed” book:

 

 

I thought that one peculiarity of my “Week” was its hypaethral character—to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above—under the ether—I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it—but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent—out of doors. It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house, or lead a domestic life. I trust it does not smell of the study & library—even of the Poets attic, as of the fields & woods.—that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book—lying open under the ether—& permeated by it. Open to all weathers—not easy to be kept on a shelf. [June 29, 1851]

 

 

One aspect of A Week’s openness is its adventuring qualities. Rivers, as Thoreau writes in the book’s introductory chapter, “Concord River,” “must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure.” Indeed, Thoreau characterizes himself and his brother as adventurers when he identifies them, in the chapter “Monday,” with Robin Hood and the “old voyageurs.” Many of the heroes of A Week, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ossian, and Goethe, are adventurers in action or thought. Among Goethe’s works, it is his journey book, Italian Travels, that Thoreau discusses.

Furthermore, there is something in the very activity of rivering—the process of continuously renewing perception because of the boat’s ever-changing position—that is inherently open. As Thoreau writes in the chapter “Friday,” “[We two brothers] studied the landscape by degrees, as one unrolls a map ... , assuming new and varying positions as wind and water shifted the scene, and there was variety enough for our entertainment in the metapmorphoses of the simplest objects. Viewed from this [water] side the scenery appeared new to us.”

Yet, for all of A Week’s adventuring and perceptual change-fulness, it is also a deeply retrospective book. Its rivering ultimately becomes part of a process of recovering Thoreau’s own and New England’s lost past. When, late in his book’s development, Thoreau changed its title from An Excursion on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he was, on one level, merely acknowledging that this was no longer simply a travel narrative. But by changing the lead phrase from “An Excursion” to “A Week,” he was also shifting the emphasis from that of travel through space to a voyage in time.

Typically, the book moves back and forth between observation and reflection—observations from the boat of particular scenes on shore (rural villages, agricultural landscapes, and local characters) made in the present moment, which cause Thoreau to “remember” and reflect upon aspects of the region’s past and its legends. One of the finest, and certainly the most skillfully crafted, of such remembrances occurs in the chapter “Thursday”; it begins in this (typical) fashion: “On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty-two years before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there were hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before daybreak.” Thoreau then proceeds to tell one of the most famous of New England captivity narratives, the story of Hannah Duston’s and her companions’ bloody escape from their Indian captors.

In writing this passage, Thoreau depended on historical accounts but brilliantly refigured the story for his own purposes.