A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851

I recently wrote about A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, and the pros and cons of using it as an introduction to the Journal as a whole. But aside from noting the missing hyena, I didn’t say much about what you will actually find in this cross-section of Thoreau’s great work.

Thoreau seems to have done more sightseeing this year than usual. He went to a menagerie more than once, and he viewed a painted panorama of the Rhine, perhaps planting the seed for this elegiac passage from 1858. He went to Boston Harbor, and sketched the egg cases of skates that washed up on the beach. Thoreau’s 34th birthday left him in a philosophical mood, inspiring an entry that became the “different drummer” passage in Walden.

Thoreau also explored the world of Concord after dark. I’ve quoted here from his account of a moonlight walk he took two years later, but he went on many in 1851, and they produced some evocative writing.

Thoreau also had a lot to say about crickets in 1851. The cricket may have been the animal with the most significance to Thoreau, tied as it is to the turn of the seasons and Thoreau’s themes of resurrection and anticipation. Thoreau noted the first crickets of spring as a promise of warm weather to come, and the last crickets of November left him bereft.

1851 includes an account of Thoreau at a party ("I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour—simply because she has regular features"), of the unfortunate accident of “Perch” Hosmer, and his description of the little Irish boy Johnny Riordan on his way to school, a passage that Thoreau reworked repeatedly.

There are also a couple of ominous entries about the local gunpowder mill, foreshadowing the deadly explosion of 1853. On September 4, he wrote, “At the Powder mills--the carbonic acid gass in the road from the building where they were making charcoal made us cough for 20 or 30 rods.” And on September 15 there was this. (Sure enough, it was the kernel mill that blew up first, sixteen months later.)

Found one intermediate boundstone near the Powder mill drying-house on the Bank of the river. The workmen there wore shoes without iron tacks-- He said that the Kernel house was the most dangerous--the Drying house next--the Press house next. One of the Powder-mill buildings in Concord?