Thoreau’s studied contempt for popular writing
L.D. Burnett · Nov 29, 2020 · Medium.com
Not everyone thinks civilization is a good idea.
Take Henry David Thoreau, the nature lover, the Transcendentalist, the friend of Emerson, the author of Walden. For Thoreau, the term “civilization” was not a marker of cultural achievement, but rather a sign of cultural decay. We see this clearly in the most famous and most often anthologized chapter of Walden, “Why I Lived, and What I Lived for”—the chapter in which Thoreau says, dismally, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
For Thoreau, it was civilization itself that brought such desperation. The opposite of “civilized life” was not “barbarism” nor “savagery” but “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” He identified the idea of civilization with the “mechanical,” with alarm clocks and factory bells and telegraphs and trains and the “hurry and waste” they brought to life.
Thoreau’s view of the meaning of “civilization”—the transformations wrought by a turn to industrialized economy—was shared by many of his compatriots. For 19th-century Americans, “civilization” meant industrialization, bringing the Western “wilderness” under the white man’s control and cultivation, laying tracks, building towns, annihilating space and time with the rapid flow of goods and information thanks to the “internal improvements” of the nation’s growing communication and transportation infrastructure.
But where Thoreau’s compatriots saw real improvement in these changes—industrial civilization as a mark of progress—Thoreau saw a fundamental transformation of the landscape and the material conditions of men’s daily lives that rendered both men and and their milieu “unwieldy and overgrown,” “cluttered with furniture,” and “ruined by luxury and heedless expense.” Thoreau did not deny that civilization as his countrymen understood it was on the march in America, but he did not think civilization was a good idea.
Thoreau criticized many aspects of industrial civilization, from the loss of craft knowledge and skills to the lust for the latest manufactured goods. But he reserved special contempt for a somewhat surprising target, the newspaper. This meditative writer who wanted to share his ideas with a receptive audience had no use for the single greatest vehicle for the exchange of ideas in the 19th century. And he was just as contemptuous of his countrymen for their appetite for news, including the latest news from all around the world.
Thoreau asserted that newspapers held nothing truly new, and that his fellow townsmen’s appetite for news was silly and self-indulgent:
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
Thoreau portrayed newspaper publishers and readers as silly, flighty, gossipy old women. He, by contrast, was a “philosopher,” one who presumably grappled with more important and more enduring matters and had no use for gossip. Thoreau asserted that no one who loves true wisdom will have any interest in or appetite for the ephemeral accidents of human existence. This stance was very much in keeping with Thoreau’s studied and performative attempts, chronicled throughout Walden, to appear as dissimilar to his fellow townsmen as possible.
Nevertheless, the oft-repeated contempt with which Thoreau refers to newspapers throughout Walden deserves more consideration. What was it about the newspaper in particular that elicited angry personal insults rather than meditative reflections from Thoreau, a writer whose prose could be wonderfully lyrical?
During the 19th century, the newspaper played a central role in American life, and the greatest newspaper editors knew it. More than any other institution or establishment, newspapers both called forth and shaped “the public” and the public mind. As the larger-than-life Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune well understood, newspapers were the chief organs of broad public education and cultural formation. In 1854, the very year that Walden went to print, Greeley’s first biographer, James Parton, lauded “the Cheap Press” as the “great leveler, elevator, and democratizer” of the age, making “this huge Commonwealth, else so heterogeneous and disunited, think with one mind, feel with one heart, and talk with one tongue.”
As those who edited them and those who wrote for them knew, newspapers both reflected and guided the values and aspirations of the masses of American people who tended not to the skepticism of the cultural critic but rather to the enthusiasm of the self-cultivating cultural aspirant. Newspapers not only conveyed information, but also constituted a means of formation: the formation of the concept of nationhood, of political identity, of cultural norms, of taste.
And here we come back to Thoreau, who despised the newspapers not only because of their general industrialization of knowledge — churning out mass-produced and mass-distributed constellations of ideas without due attention, he believed, to what was truly meaningful — but also because, in his mind, they ruined his fellow citizens’ taste.
How did he measure this ruination? His fellow townsmen were always hungry for “news,” while his own ideas about American life and culture, perceptive though they were and important though his later readers have found them, never drew such an eager readership. Thoreau, a hand-craftsman of critical and singular insights, could not compete in an intellectual economy of mass-manufactured knowledge designed to both sate and whet the appetites of its readers.
Indeed, Thoreau’s gendered dismissal of newspapers as filled with old women’s gossip, written and read by mere gossipers, reminds one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s bitter complaint in an 1855 letter to publisher William Ticknor that the author’s books could find no audience because of all the “scribbling women” whose popular novels captured the attention of the reading public. Ticknor was Thoreau’s publisher as well, and Walden was no match for the “scribbling women” either.
In fact, it may not have been “scribbling women” in the abstract who bothered Thoreau. In venting his spleen about the silliness and success of newspapers, he may have had one particular scribbling woman in mind.
Why do I think so? Let me lay out the clues.
Immediately after smearing newspaper editors as gossipy old women chatting over tea, Thoreau includes an anecdote.
There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy.
Set aside for the moment that, immediately after condemning “gossip,” Thoreau passes along a sensational bit of gossip he has heard, and let us consider what happened, and when it happened. What happened is clear enough: residents of Concord, Massachusetts, rushed to an “office” — the Post Office, perhaps, or a local stationer— and were so eager to read the most recent news from overseas taped up against the windows of the establishment that the pressure of the crowd pushing forward broke some of the glass in the windows.
That part is easy to figure out. But when did this happen? And what was the news? That part is a bit more tricky.
Though Walden was published in 1854, it was drafted and revised over many years, beginning with the journals Thoreau kept during his “two years, two months, and two days” in the woods. So this incident could have taken place any time between Thoreau’s first forays into tiny house living, right up to the time that the final edited manuscript went to press.
Fortunately, there are archival and manuscript experts who can help answer this question. One of them is Elizabeth Witherell at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor-in-chief of the multivolume project, Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a scholarly endeavor that in seeks to answer just these kinds of questions and many others of greater importance in terms of influence, chronology, and intertextuality, in the course of publishing in one series all the known works, published and unpublished, of this celebrated Transcendentalist.
I wrote to Witherell earlier this year to ask for her help in dating this particular incident Thoreau described; she responded with a wealth of information. The passage in question was not a late addition to Walden; it first appeared in Thoreau’s journals during his time at Walden Pond. “The leaf containing the passage is one of 16 extant leaves from a Journal MS volume that Thoreau probably filled from late 1846 or early 1847 through Spring 1848,” Witherell told me. “If Thoreau was describing a current event, you might be able to find a report in a Boston or New York newspaper,” she said.
So, some time between early 1847 and the spring of 1848, citizens of Concord rushed to “one of the offices” to see the latest reporting from abroad. And much indeed was happening abroad during that period, as the popular political uprisings and deadly armed conflicts that form the closing acts of what historians call “The Age of Revolutions” took place throughout Europe. There were popular revolts in France, in Germany, in Hungary, in Italy, and all across the Continent. Many Americans saw these uprisings as a fight for civilization—a fight to establish liberal democratic republics modeled on the United States, and a fight to transform “backward” European countries into centers of industrial productivity. For political, economic, and even idealistic reasons, American readers followed these developments closely and with great interest. Foreign correspondence, especially from eye-witness reporters, was prized and popular.
During this closing act of the Age of Revolutions, there was one foreign correspondent with very close ties indeed to Concord: Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalist author and editor, the close confidant of Emerson, the first editor of the short-lived Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, and in that capacity an early editor of Thoreau’s published writing. Since her days at The Dial, Fuller had embarked on a more public career as a leader of “Conversations”—a cross between lyceum lectures and reading discussion groups—before moving to New York to find a wider scope for her voice and her writing.
During the time Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, Margaret Fuller was a foreign correspondent for none other than Horace Greeley, for whom she had already been writing cultural criticism and book reviews since 1844. Her dispatches to the New York Tribune during these years of turmoil in Europe were reprinted in other newspapers and reached the eyes of millions of readers. For a time during the Italian revolution of the 1840s, she was the only foreign correspondent left in Rome, and hers was the only eyewitness account of the fight for “civilization” in the Eternal City to reach American readers.
So it is a distinct possibility that the news-hungry gentlemen of Concord were rushing downtown to read the latest foreign reporting from one of their own, Margaret Fuller.
However, just because something was possible doesn’t mean that it was so. As a historian, I cannot say, “Thoreau’s animus against newspapers was motivated in part by envy of Margaret Fuller’s success.” That would not only require a leap of interpretation far beyond what the evidence can justify, but it would also be a bit unfair to Thoreau, who went at Emerson’s request and searched vainly up and down the coast of Fire Island for any relic or remains of Fuller or her family when they drowned in a shipwreck in 1850.
Thoreau and Fuller had a long and complicated friendship, and envy and frustration certainly made their appearance on both sides. But to reduce Thoreau’s distaste for newspapers to a passing or even enduring resentment of Margaret Fuller’s popular success and ease of mastery of multiple languages and styles would be to miss other dimensions of his critique aimed not at a single antagonist but an an entire age.
Still, we should entertain this possibility as a way of enriching or deepening the dimensions of Thoreau’s contempt for the newspaper as a particular symbol of “civilization.” There were all kinds of reasons that Thoreau “went to the woods”: he was grieving the death of his brother, he was appalled by the way industrialization had turned his townsmen into clock-watchers and timekeepers, he wanted to get away from the cloying atmosphere of the very idea of “home” in mid-19th-century America and all the clutter that went along with it. He wanted to suss out the relationship between man and nature as the foundation for the relationship between man and man. He wanted to cosplay as a real-life Natty Bumppo, minus the warfare.
But whatever he wanted to gain, Thoreau wanted to demonstrate his utter disdain for “civilization” and its “progress,” whether that progress could be found in the railroad timetable or the riveting writing of women who could draw more readers with a single newspaper column than Thoreau could ever summon in his life.
WRITTEN BY
