Interesting facts about Henry David Thoreau
He actually wasn't 'Henry David Thoreau' Henry David Thoreau was actually named David
Henry Thoreau. No one knows why he switched his first two names after moving on from Harvard.
Straight from college, Thoreau chose to switch his forenames up and become known as Henry David,
however he never officially had his named changed and remained, formally, David Henry.
'Civil Disobedience' was in his blood
Henry David Thoreau's granddad on his mom's side was Asa Dunbar, who had instigated the
very first student rebellion in America, the alleged 'Butter Rebellion' at Harvard in 1766.
(The protest was set off by the unfortunate food given to students at the college;
it was a piece of particularly rancid butter that put Dunbar over the edge.)
One can see where Thoreau got his spirit of 'civil disobedience' from.
At Harvard, Thoreau graduated in the middle of his class
In 1828 Thoreau's parents sent him to the Concord Academy, where he impressed
his teachers and he was recommended to prepare for college. Upon graduating from the academy,
he entered Harvard University in 1833. There he was a good student, but he was indifferent to
the rank system and preferred to use the school library for his own purposes.
The youthful Thoreau was a devoted student at college (he concentrated on works of art
and dialects) and amassed about 5,000 pages of notes on the material he'd gobbled up.
Further down the road, he would decipher Greek tragedy (outstandingly Aeschylus' play Seven
Against Thebes) and compose on everything from Indian writing to Sir Walter Raleigh.
Thoreau graduated in the middle ranks of the class of 1837.
Friendship with Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in Concord
during Thoreau’s sophomore year at Harvard, and by the autumn of 1837 they were becoming friends.
Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true disciple—that is, one with so much Emersonian self-reliance
that he would still be his own man. Thoreau saw in Emerson a guide, a father, and a friend.
With his magnetism Emerson also attracted others to Concord. Out of their heady speculations and
affirmatives came New England Transcendentalism. In retrospect, it was one of the most significant
literary movements of 19th-century America, with at least two authors of world stature,
Thoreau and Emerson, to its credit. Essentially, it combined romanticism with reform.
It celebrated the individual rather than the masses, emotion rather than reason,
nature rather than man. Transcendentalism suggested that there were two ways of knowing,
through the senses and through intuition, but asserted that intuition transcended tuition.
Similarly, the movement acknowledged that matter and spirit both existed. It claimed,
however, that the reality of spirit transcended the reality of matter. Transcendentalism strove
for reform yet insisted that reform begin with the individual, not the group or organization.
He didn't actually live in the wilderness
Contrary to popular belief, Thoreau didn’t go to live in the wilderness.
Thoreau’s most famous work, the 1854 book Walden, documents his time (more precisely two years,
two months, and two days) living by Walden Pond, endeavouring to be self-reliant.
It’s a quintessentially American move, a mini-declaration of independence, and one of
the key texts in the American Transcendentalist movement. However, Thoreau did not go and live
miles from civilisation, but just a couple of miles from his family home in Massachusetts.
While at Walden Pond, Thoreau described the various realities of life:
his intimacy with the small animals he came in contact with; the sounds, smells, and look of
woods and water at various seasons; the music of wind in telegraph wires—in short, the felicities
of learning how to fulfill his desire to live as simply and self-sufficiently as possible.
"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her
smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain," he wrote.
The social reformer Midway through his time at Walden,
Thoreau spent a night in jail. On an evening in July 1846 he encountered Sam Staples,
the constable and tax gatherer. Staples asked him amiably to pay his poll tax, which
Thoreau had omitted paying for several years. Thoreau declined, and Staples locked him up.
The next morning a still-unidentified lady, perhaps his aunt, Maria, paid the tax.
Thoreau reluctantly emerged, did an errand, and then went to collect huckleberries.
After just a single night in custody, he had decided, to make his point that he could not
support a government that endorsed slavery and that waged an imperialist war against Mexico.
His defense of the private, individual conscience against the expediency of the majority found
expression in his most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which was first published in
May 1849 under the title “Resistance to Civil Government.” The essay received little attention
until the 20th century, when it found an eager audience with the American civil rights movement.
To many, its message still sounds timely: there is a higher law than the civil one,
and the higher law must be followed even if a penalty ensues. So does its consequence: “Under
a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
People don't know how to pronounce his name Although it is most commonly pronounced ‘the-ROH’
but in Thoreau’s own lifetime it appears to have been pronounced ‘THOR-oh’, at least in the part of
New England where Thoreau lived. Fellow inhabitant of Concord, Massachusetts, Amos Bronson Alcott
(father of novelist Louisa May Alcott), wrote that the name was usually pronounced like the
word ‘thorough’ in American English, though ‘THOR-oh’ was more common in New England.
Thoreau's influence has been immense Thoreau's books, articles, essays,
journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are
his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings
of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.
Thoreau’s writing has influenced a number of key twentieth-century political figures.
His essay on ‘Civil Disobedience‘ (1849) helped to inspire Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
The essay, also known as ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, grew out of a lecture Thoreau gave
after he’d spent a night in the cells for refusing to pay his poll tax. (He refused on ethical
grounds, partly because he opposed slavery in the United States.) Along with with Walden it is now
considered by many Thoreau’s defining work. As he wrote, "There is no value in life except
what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place
except what you bring to it yourself." Thoreau’s life, so fully expressed in his writing,
has had a pervasive influence because it was an example of moral heroism and
an example of the continuing search for a spiritual dimension in American life.