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11. Groundwork for Beginning Your Project
12. Getting Started
Appendix 1. Qualitative Software: Where to Go Next
by Lyn Richards
Appendix 2. Applying for Funding
by Janice M. Morse
References
Author Index
Subject Index
 Detailed Contents

Preface
About the Authors
1. Why Readme First?
Goals
Methods and Their Integrity
Methodological Diversity and Informed Choice
No Mysteries!
Learning by Doing It: Qualitative Research as a Craft
Qualitative Research as a Challenge
Using Readme First
Terminology
The Shape of the Book
Doing Qualitative Research: What to Expect
Resources
PART I. THINKING RESEARCH
2. The Integrity of Qualitative Research
Methodological Purposiveness
Why Are You Working Qualitatively?
The Research Question Requires It
The Data Demand It
Should You Be Working Qualitatively?
How Should You Be Working Qualitatively?
From Selecting a Method to Making Data
From Choosing Sources and Sorts of Data to Managing and Analyzing
Data
 Methodological Congruence
Seeing Congruence by Doing It
The Armchair Walkthrough
And Now—Your Topic?
How to Find a Topic
You Are Already There
There Is a Gap in the Literature
Another Way of Looking Is Needed
What’s Going on Here?
Supplementing Quantitative Inquiry
Now, Consider the Research Context
Considering What You Want to Know
Considering What You Are Studying
Considering the Setting
Considering What You Want to Do
Considering Issues in Finding Participants
Considering Ethical Constraints
From Topic to Researchable Question: Focusing Qualitative Inquiry
What Can You Aim For?
Summary
Resources
3. Choosing a Method
Description and Interpretation
Starting Simple
Five Methods
Ethnography
What Sorts of Questions Are Asked?
The Researcher’s Stance
What Sorts of Data Are Needed?
What Do the Results Look Like?
Different Approaches Within Ethnography
Grounded Theory
What Sorts of Questions Are Asked?
The Researcher’s Stance
What Sorts of Data Are Needed?
What Do the Results Look Like?
 Different Approaches Within Grounded Theory
Phenomenology
What Sorts of Questions Are Asked?
The Researcher’s Stance
What Sorts of Data Are Needed?
What Do the Results Look Like?
Different Approaches Within Phenomenology
Discourse Analysis
What Sorts of Questions Are Asked?
The Researcher’s Stance
What Sorts of Data Are Needed?
What Do the Results Look Like?
Different Approaches Within Discourse Analysis
Case Study Method
What Sorts of Questions Are Asked?
The Researcher’s Stance
What Sorts of Data Are Needed?
What Do the Results Look Like?
Different Approaches Within Case Study Method
Summary
Resources
4. Qualitative Research Design
The Levels of Design
Planning Design
The Scope of the Project
Designing the Scope
The Nature of the Data
Doing Design
Designing for Validity
Project Pacing
Conceptualizing Stage
Entering the Field
Setting Up and Managing a Data Management System
Sampling and Theoretical Sampling
Analysis
Designs Using More Than One Study
 Mixed Method Designs
Combining Qualitative Studies
Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Studies
Multiple Method Designs
Synthesizing Multiple Studies
Using Different Ways of Looking
Comparative Design
Triangulated Design
Taking an Overview
Choosing Your Software
Using Your Software for Research Design
Approaches
Advances
Alerts
Summary
Resources
PART II. INSIDE ANALYSIS
5. Making Data
What Data Will Your Study Need?
What Will Be Data (and What Will Not)?
The Researcher in the Data
Good Data/Bad Data
Ways of Making Data
Interviews
Interactive Interviews
Semistructured Questionnaires
Conversations
Group Interviews
Observations
Online Sources
Video Recording
Photography
Documents
Diaries and Letters
Indirect Strategies
Who Makes Data?
 Transforming Data
Managing Data
Managing Focus Group Data
The Role of Data
Yourself as Data
You and Those You Study
Your Experience as Data
Using Your Software for Managing Data
Approaches
Advances
Alerts
Summary
Resources
6. Coding
Getting Inside the Data
A Reminder: The Distinctiveness of Qualitative Methods
Storing Ideas
Doing Coding
Descriptive Coding
What Is It Used For?
How Is It Done?
Where Is It Used?
Topic Coding
What Is It Used For?
How Is It Done?
Where Is It Used?
Analytic Coding
What Is It Used For?
How Is It Done?
Where Is It Used?
Theme-ing
Purposiveness of Coding
Tips and Traps: Handling Codes and Coding
Code as You Learn
Always See Coding as Reflection
Never Code More Than You Need
 Manage Your Codes
Monitor Coding Consistency
Using Your Software for Coding
Approaches
Advances
Alerts
Summary
Resources
7. Abstracting
The First Step: Categorizing
Categorization and Coding
Categorization as Everyday Strategy
The Next Step: Conceptualizing
Doing Abstraction
When Does It Happen?
How Is It Done?
Managing Abstraction
Documenting Ideas: Definitions, Memos, and Diaries
Growing Ideas
Managing Categories: Index Systems
Models and Diagrams
Using Your Software for Managing Ideas
Approaches
Advances
Alerts
Summary
Resources
8. From Method to Analysis: Revisiting Methodological Congruence
Ethnography
Working With Data
First-Level Description
Thick Description
Comparison
Strategies of Analysis
Grounded Theory
Working With Data
 Memos and Their Importance
Data Preparation
Strategies of Analysis
Strategies That Facilitate the Identification of Process
Strategies for Coding
Strategies With Memos
Theory-Building Strategies
Changing Grounded Theory
Phenomenology
Working With Data
Strategies of Analysis
Discourse Analysis
Working With Data
Strategies of Analysis
Case Study Method
Working With Data
Strategies of Analysis
Summary
Resources
PART III. GETTING IT RIGHT
9. On Getting It Right and Knowing if It’s Wrong
Ensuring Rigor in the Design Phase
Appropriate Preparation
Appropriate Review of the Literature
Thinking Qualitatively, Working Inductively
Using Appropriate Methods and Design
Ensuring Rigor While Conducting a Project
Using Appropriate Sampling Techniques
Responsiveness to Strategies That Are Not Working
Appropriate Pacing of the Project
Coding Reliably
When Is It Done?
Project Histories
Audit Trails
Your Findings and the Literature
Demonstrating Rigor on Completion of the Project
 Triangulating With Subsequent Research
Reaffirming Through Implementation
Summary
Resources
10. Writing It Up
Ready to Write?
Who Is It for, and Where Will It Appear?
Writing Qualitatively
Using Your Data
When Do You Use Quotations?
Editing Quoted Material
Using Yourself
Brevity and Balance
Re-revisiting Methodological Congruence
Protecting Participants
Evaluating Your Writing
Polishing
Using Your Software for Writing
Approaches
Advances
Alerts
Writing Your Thesis or Dissertation
Beginning to Write
Writing an Article for Publication
Beginning to Write
After Publication, Then What?
Findings Used Alone
Use the Theory as a Framework for Practice
Bring the Implicit and the Informal to the Fore
Delimit Scope or Boundaries of Problems or Concepts
Describe the Problem and Aid in Identification of the Solution
Provide an Evaluation of Nonmeasurable Interventions
The Cumulative Effect of Research Results
Summary
Resources
PART IV. BEGINNING YOUR PROJECT
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11. Groundwork for Beginning Your Project
Writing Your Proposal
Using the Literature Review
Writing the Methods Section
Estimating Time (and Related Resources)
Developing a Budget
A Note on Dealing With Available Data
Ensuring Ethical Research
The Challenge of Anonymity
Permissions
Participant Assent and Consent
Summary
Resources
12. Getting Started
Why Is It So Hard to Start?
How Do You Start?
Start in the Library
Start With an Armchair Walkthrough
Start Thinking Method
Start With Yourself
What Role Should the Researcher’s Personal Experience Play?
Hidden Agendas
Start Small
Start Safe
Start Soon
Start With a Research Design
Start Skilled
Start in Your Software
Congratulations, You’ve Started!
Resources
Appendix 1. Qualitative Software: Where to Go Next
by Lyn Richards
Appendix 2. Applying for Funding
by Janice M. Morse
References
Author Index
Subject Index
 Preface

Q ualitative research is rapidly expanding, constantly changing, and

becoming increasingly accepted in areas where, until very recently,
it was derided. The problems we and our students faced a decade
ago are quite different from the new challenges, yet much of the literature is
unchanged. Where qualitative methods previously were a minority activity in
most disciplines, learned as a craft in apprenticeship to experienced
researchers, they are now often attempted without training, and researchers
may have difficulty finding mentors. Where data handling was a gross
clerical load and data access limited by human memory, computer software
now provides ways of handling and analyzing data that were impossible to
achieve by manual methods. The widespread use of specialist software has
made qualitative research more attractive and more accessible to those
without qualitative training. Just as a decade ago, however, it remains
difficult to begin a qualitative project, make sense of methodological choices,
and get thinking—let alone started—on the right track. The researcher facing
these difficulties is much more likely now to be facing them alone.
We wrote this book in recognition that these changes have altered the
qualitative research world forever. Since the first edition, this book has been
used by researchers at many levels of experience and translated into several
languages. As change continued, we prepared a second and now a third
revised edition reflecting on new pressures on researchers and new
opportunities for them.
We share a conviction that if the changes are merely ignored or regretted,
damage is done to both the researchers and the methods. New researchers
need to get over those preliminary obstacles, to understand the language of
qualitative inquiry, and to know what questions to ask, where to look for
information, and how to start thinking qualitatively. They also need to
challenge myths and false expectations and to know what to expect before
they start the “real thing.” This involves placing the wonderful promises of
qualitative research in the context of the methods that make them work, and
facing up to the processes of choosing methods appropriate for your research.
It also involves placing the promises of technology in the context of tasks and
techniques.
This book is intended to be read first by those who are thinking about
becoming qualitative researchers—before they acquire data; before they
preemptively choose a method, let alone a software package; and before they
commit to a project. It may be used as a text for an introductory course, or it
may be used by those who are simply interested in qualitative inquiry and
want to get a feel for the qualitative research process. This new edition
includes an overview of what software can now do for you. On our new
companion website you will find advice on choosing software appropriate to
your method and links to sites carrying up-to-date reviews of software and
tutorials so that you may try out the computer tools and learn what they offer
—and what they don’t—before you propose your own project. Above all, the
aim of this book is not to teach a single method but to map the range of
methods, not to commit you to one sort of research but to show you why
there are so many ways of working qualitatively. As we wrote these chapters,
we discovered how different our own methods were. Readers who know our
work will recognize one voice or another as that of the first author of
particular chapters. But all our diverse experiences pointed to the same need
—a need for a book that would meet the approaching researcher at the
beginning of the path into the methodological maze.
The idea for this book grew from our shared frustration with the resources
to help novice researchers see into the fascinating jungle of qualitative
methods, and find their way through it. It draws on our separate and different
attempts to teach qualitative methods to students and professionals and to
assist with their research. We thank our students, colleagues, and friends for
their questions and challenges, for sharing their confusions and insights, and
for providing opportunities to explain abstract and complicated concepts and
techniques. We thank our husbands, Bob Morse and Tom Richards, for their
support and assistance. At SAGE, thanks to our editor, Vicki Knight, for her
enthusiastic help in making this edition happen and to the copy editor, Megan
Granger, for her fine attention to its final details.
 —Lyn Richards & Janice Morse

SAGE and the authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the

following reviewers: Rhonda R. Buckley, Texas Woman’s University;
Matthew A. Eichler, Texas State University–San Marcos; Sandra Mott,
Boston College; Cheryl L. Nosek, Daemen College; Ruth Segal, Seton Hall
University; Mona Shattell, DePaul University; and Irina L. G. Todorova,
Northeastern University.
 About the Authors

Lyn Richards, BA Hon. (political science), MA (sociology), is a qualitative

research writer and consultant and adjunct professor in the Graduate School
of Business at RMIT University in Melbourne. As a family sociologist, she
published four books and many papers on Australian families and women’s
roles. As a methodologist, she taught graduate and undergraduate qualitative
research at La Trobe University and went on to write for and teach the
teachers. Her tenth book is Handling Qualitative Data (second ed., 2009). In
university research with Tom Richards, she developed the NUD*IST
software and founded QSR International, Melbourne. In interaction with the
researchers using the software, and later development teams at QSR, she
worked on the design of the subsequent versions (to N6) and then NVivo, as
a principal member of the QSR software-development teams and author of
the software’s documentation. She was an invited speaker at all the
conferences in the first decade of qualitative computing and a leading teacher
and trainer internationally in qualitative computing and the handling of
qualitative data. Richards has taught qualitative methods and qualitative
software to some 4,000 researchers in 15 countries, and has learned from
them all.

Janice M. Morse, PhD (nursing), PhD (anthropology), FAAN, is a professor

and Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah College of Nursing
and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada. From 1991 to
1996, she also held a position as professor at Pennsylvania State University.
From 1997 to 2007, she was the founding director and scientific director of
the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta;
founding editor of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods; and
editor of the Qual Press monograph series. She remains the founding editor of
Qualitative Health Research (now in Volume 2, SAGE) and is currently
editor of the monograph series Developing Qualitative Inquiry and Essentials
of Qualitative Inquiry (Left Coast Press). Her research programs are in the
areas of suffering and comforting, preventing patient falls, and developing
qualitative methods. In 2011, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in
Qualitative Inquiry from the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry, was
an inaugural inductee into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse
Researcher Hall of Fame (2010), and was the fifth recipient of the Episteme
Award (also Sigma Theta Tau). She received honorary doctorates from the
University of Newcastle (Australia) and Athabasca University (Canada). She
is the author of 460 articles and chapters and 19 books on qualitative research
methods, suffering, comforting, and patient falls.
 1
Why Readme First?

W
hy Readme First? Why should a researcher, new to qualitative
inquiry, begin by reading a book on the range of ways of doing
qualitative analysis? Why not just start by collecting the data
and worry later about what to do with them?
The answer is simple. In qualitative research, collecting data is not a
process separate from analyzing data. The strength of qualitative inquiry is in
the integration of the research question, the data, and data analysis. There are
many ways of gathering and managing data, but because qualitative research
is always about discovery, there is no rigid sequence of data collection and
analysis. If you collect data and later select a method for analyzing them, you
may find that the method you have chosen needs different data. To start with
a method and impose it on a research question can be equally unhelpful.
Good qualitative research is consistent; the question goes with the method,
which fits appropriate data collection, appropriate data handling, and
appropriate analysis techniques.
The challenge for the novice researcher is to find the way to an
appropriate method. A researcher new to qualitative inquiry who evaluates
the possible paths well and makes good choices can achieve a congruence of
research question, research data, and processes of analysis that will
strengthen and drive the project. However, this may seem an impossible
challenge. The process of qualitative inquiry all too often appears as a
mystery to the new researcher, and the choice of an appropriate method of
analysis is obscured. The embattled researcher too often resorts to collecting
large amounts of very challenging data in the hope that what to do with them
will later become apparent. Some researchers end projects that way, still
wondering why they were doing this or what to do with all the data they
collected.
 Readme First is an invitation to those who have a reason for handling
qualitative data. We see qualitative research as a wide range of ways to
explore and understand data that would be wasted and their meaning lost if
they were preemptively reduced to numbers. All qualitative methods seek to
discover understanding or to achieve explanation from the data instead of
from (or in addition to) prior knowledge or theory. Thus, the goals always
include learning from, and doing justice to, complex data. In order to achieve
such understanding, the researcher needs ways of exploring complexity.
Qualitative data come from many sources (e.g., documents, interviews,
field notes, and observations) and in many forms (e.g., text, photographs,
audio and video recordings, and films). Researchers may analyze these data
using very many, very different methods. But each method has integrity, and
all methods have the common goal of making sense of complexity, making
new understandings and theories about the data, and constructing and testing
answers to the research question. This book is an invitation to new qualitative
researchers to see many methods—to see them as wholes and as
understandable unities. This makes the choice of method necessary but also
makes the process of choosing enabling rather than alarming.

In this book we use the term method to mean a collection of research

strategies and techniques based on theoretical assumptions that
combine to form a particular approach to data and mode of analysis.

This book provides the beginning researcher with an overview of

techniques for making data and an explanation of the ways different tools fit
different purposes and provide different research experiences and outcomes.
Our goal is not to present a supermarket of techniques from which the
researcher can pick and choose arbitrarily; rather, we aim to draw a map that
shows clearly how some methodological choices lead more directly than
others to particular goals. We see all qualitative methods as integrated and
good qualitative research as purposive. Until the researcher has an idea of the
research goal, sees from the beginning the entire research process, knows the
contents of the appropriate analytic toolbox, and recognizes from the start of
the project what may be possible at the finish, it is not advisable to begin.
This book is not intended to be a sufficient and complete sourcebook but,
rather, a guide to what it would be like to do a project. Indeed, it is intended
to be read before a researcher begins a project. The book is about how ways
of collecting and making data are connected to ways of handling data
skillfully, and how qualitative methods allow researchers to understand,
explain, discover, and explore. Our intention is to inform readers of the
research possibilities, direct them to the appropriate literature, and help them
on their way to trying out techniques and exploring the processes of analysis.
By informing themselves about the possibilities for analysis and the range of
methods available, new researchers can critically select the methods
appropriate to their purposes.
We wrote this book because as researchers, teachers, mentors, and
advisers, we have suffered from a vast gap in the qualitative research
literature. Most texts describe a single method, often not explaining how
purpose, data, and analytic technique fit together. A few display the range of
qualitative methods, but a novice researcher is seldom helped by such
displays if they include no explanation of how and why choices can be made.
The confusion is worsened if the researcher is led to believe that one method
is required for reasons of fashion, ideology, alleged superiority, or pragmatic
necessity (for example, when only this one method can be supervised or
approved in the research site). A researcher may be caught between
instructions for a particular method and research reports that offer no sense of
how those who did the research got there. In this volume, we offer to bridge
at least some of these gaps. In Part I, we discuss the very wide range of
methods and how to select among them. Then Part II takes the reader inside a
project, showing what it would be like to construct and conduct a project.
The present literature rarely helps readers envision, at the beginning, the
completion of a project. Researchers approaching qualitative inquiry need to
be able to see the end before they start. In the chapters in Part III, we advise
the reader on the goals to aim for, on rigor and reliability, and on the
processes of finishing and writing it up. In the final two chapters, we deal
with getting the reader started on his or her own project and smoothing the
challenges of the startup.
Readme First is neither a substitute for experience nor an instruction
manual for any particular method. Researchers who want to use the
techniques we describe here on their own data are directed to methodological
literature that offers fuller instruction in particular methods. Nor do we intend
this book to be a substitute for the new researcher’s learning how to think
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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
It was no such deep sentiment as this which Louisa Dunbar had
inspired in young Webster's breast; but he walked and talked with
her, took her to drive in his chaise up and down the New Hampshire
hills, and no doubt went with her to church and to prayer-meeting.
She once surprised me by confiding to me (as we were talking about
Webster in the room where Henry Thoreau afterwards died, and
where there hung then an engraving by Rowse of Webster's
magnificent head) "that she regarded Mr. Webster, under
Providence, as the means of her conversion." Upon my asking how,
she said that, in one of their drives,—perhaps in the spring of 1804,
—he had spoken to her so seriously and scripturally on the subject
of religion that her conscience was awakened, and she soon after
joined the church, of which she continued through life a devout
member. Her friendship for Mr. Webster also continued, and in his
visits to Concord, which were frequent from 1843 to 1849, he
generally called on her, or she was invited to meet him at the house
of Mr. Cheney, where, among social and political topics, Webster
talked with her of the old days at Boscawen and Salisbury.
Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry Thoreau, was born in Keene,
N. H., in 1787, the year that her father died. Her husband, John
Thoreau, who was a few months younger than herself, was born in
Boston. When Henry Thoreau first visited Keene, in 1850, he made
this remark: "Keene Street strikes the traveler favorably; it is so
wide, level, straight, and long. I have heard one of my relatives who
was born and bred there [Louisa Dunbar, no doubt] say that you
could see a chicken run across it a mile off." His mother hardly lived
there long enough to notice the chickens a mile off, but she
occasionally visited her native town after her marriage in 1812, and
a kinswoman (Mrs. Laura Dunbar Ralston, of Washington, D. C.),
now living, says, "I recollect Mrs. Thoreau as a handsome, high-
spirited woman, half a head taller than her husband, accomplished,
after the manner of those days, with a voice of remarkable power
and sweetness in singing." She was fond of dress, and had a
weakness, not uncommon in her day, for ribbons, which her austere
friend, Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of R. W. Emerson), once
endeavored to rebuke in a manner of her own. In 1857, when Mrs.
Thoreau was seventy years old, and Miss Emerson eighty-four, the
younger lady called on the elder in Concord, wearing bonnet-ribbons
of a good length and of a bright color,—perhaps yellow. During the
call, in which Henry Thoreau was the subject of conversation, Miss
Emerson kept her eyes shut. As Mrs. Thoreau and her daughter
Sophia rose to go, the little old lady said, "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs.
Thoreau, that I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I
did not wish to look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable
for a child of God and a person of your years."
In uttering this reproof, Miss Emerson may have had in mind the
clerical father of Mrs. Thoreau, Rev. Asa Dunbar, whom she was old
enough to remember. He was settled in Salem as the colleague of
Rev. Thomas Barnard, after a long contest which led to the
separation of the First Church there, and the formation of the Salem
North Church in 1772. The parishioners of Mr. Dunbar declared their
new minister "admirably qualified for a gospel preacher," and he
seems to have proved himself a learned and competent minister. But
his health was infirm, and this fact, as one authority says, "soon
threw him into the profession of the law, which he honorably
pursued for a few years at Keene." Whether he went at once to
Keene on leaving Salem in 1779 does not appear, but he was
practicing law there in 1783, and was also a leading Freemason. His
diary for a few years of his early life—a faint foreshadowing of his
grandson's copious journals—is still in existence, and indicates a gay
and genial disposition, such as Mrs. Thoreau had. His only son,
Charles Dunbar, who was born in February, 1780, and died in March,
1856, inherited this gaiety of heart, but also that lack of reverence
and discipline which is proverbial in New England for "ministers' sons
and deacons' daughters." His nephew said of him, "He was born the
winter of the great snow, and he died in the winter of another great
snow,—a life bounded by great snows." At the time of Henry
Thoreau's birth, Mrs. Thoreau's sisters, Louisa and Sarah, and their
brother Charles were living in Concord, or not far off, and there
Louisa Dunbar died a few years before Mrs. Thoreau. Her brother
Charles, who was two years older than Daniel Webster, was a person
widely known in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much
celebrated by Thoreau in his journals. At the time of his death, I find
the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3, 1856:—
"People are talking about my uncle Charles. George Minott
[a sort of cousin of the Thoreaus] tells how he heard Tilly
Brown once asking him to show him a peculiar inside lock
in wrestling. 'Now, don't hurt me,—don't throw me hard.'
He struck his antagonist inside his knees with his feet, and
so deprived him of his legs. Edmund Hosmer remembers
his tricks in the bar-room, shuffling cards, etc.; he could
do anything with cards, yet he did not gamble. He would
toss up his hat, twirling it over and over, and catch it on
his head invariably. He once wanted to live at Hosmer's,
but the latter was afraid of him. 'Can't we study up
something?' he asked. Hosmer asked him into the house,
and brought out apples and cider, and uncle Charles
talked. 'You!' said he, 'I burst the bully of Haverhill.' He
wanted to wrestle,—would not be put off. 'Well, we won't
wrestle in the house.' So they went out to the yard, and a
crowd got round. 'Come, spread some straw here,' said
uncle Charles,—'I don't want to hurt him.' He threw him at
once. They tried again; he told them to spread more
straw, and he 'burst' him. Uncle Charles used to say that
he hadn't a single tooth in his head. The fact was they
were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of
them by the time he was twenty-one. Ever since I knew
him he could swallow his nose. He had a strong head, and
never got drunk; would drink gin sometimes, but not to
excess. Did not use tobacco, except snuff out of another's
box, sometimes; was very neat in his person; was not
profane, though vulgar."
This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep
shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays
in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous,
ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and no
special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place to
place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler. One of
his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of the
plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the
landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his old
age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his
nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned
again, in connection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar
family.
Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious
liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above
hinted at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of
gentility and sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden
flashes of gossip and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-
nature, but greatly provoked the prim and commonplace
respectability that she so often came in contact with. Along with this
humorous quality there went also an affectionate earnestness in her
relation with those who depended on her, that could not fail to be
respected by all who knew the hard conditions that New England
life, even in a favored village like Concord, then imposed on the
mother of a family, where the outward circumstances were not in
keeping with the inward aspiration.

"Who sings the praise of woman in our clime?

I do not boast her beauty or her grace:
Some humble duties render her sublime,
She, the sweet nurse of this New England race,
The flower upon the country's sterile face;
The mother of New England's sons, the pride
Of every house where those good sons abide."
Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social
person, who found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all
affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first John
Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions, of
which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his
attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a
lucrative business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died
in 1859. He was a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad,
and "minding his own business;" very much in contrast with his wife,
who was one of the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord.
Her gift in speech was proverbial, and wherever she was the
conversation fell largely to her share. She fully verified the Oriental
legend, which accounts for the greater loquacity of women by the
fact that nine baskets of talk were let down from heaven to Adam
and Eve in their garden, and that Eve glided forward first and
secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a few years before his death,
wrote a letter to his son, towards the end of which he said, with
courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled a page with sentiments.
But a kind neighbor, Mrs. Thoreau, has been here more than an
hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her conversation
generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at her table
Henry Thoreau's grave talk with others was interrupted by this flow
of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and wait
with entire and courteous silence, until the interruption ceased, and
then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped
it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of comment on what
she had said.
Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in his
copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his
parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the
smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once
found a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious
meditation, and on the other a certificate to this effect:
"Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going
into business in that place, and is about to apply for license to retail
ardent spirits, I hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with
him, that he has sustained a good character, and now view him as a
man of integrity, accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct
morals." There is no date, but the time was about 1818. Chelmsford
is a town ten miles north of Concord, to which John Thoreau had
removed for three years, in the infancy of Henry. From Chelmsford
he went to Boston in 1821, but was successful in neither place, and
soon returned to Concord, where he gave up trade and engaged in
pencil-making, as already mentioned.
From that time, about 1823, till his death in 1859, John Thoreau led
a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village,
educating his children, associating with his neighbors on those terms
of equality for which Concord is famous, and keeping clear, in a
great degree, of the quarrels, social and political, that agitated the
village. Mrs. Thoreau, on the other hand, with her sister Louisa and
her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share
in the village bickerings. In 1826, when Dr. Lyman Beecher, then of
Boston, Dr. John Todd, then of Groton, and other Calvinistic divines
succeeded in making a schism in Dr. Ripley's parish, and drawing off
Trinitarians enough to found a separate church, the Thoreaus
generally seceded, along with good old Deacon White, whose loss
Dr. Ripley bewailed. This contention was sharply maintained for
years, and was followed by the antimasonic and antislavery
agitation. In the latter Mrs. Thoreau and her family engaged
zealously, and their house remained for years headquarters for the
early abolitionists and a place of refuge for fugitive slaves. The
atmosphere of earnest purpose, which pervaded the great
movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau
family an elevation of character which was ever afterward
perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life.
By this time, too,—I speak of the years from 1836 onward till the
outbreak of the civil war,—the children of Mrs. Thoreau had reached
an age and an education which made them noteworthy persons.
Helen, the oldest child, born in 1812, was an accomplished teacher.
John, the elder son, born in 1814 was one of those lovely and sunny
natures which infuse affection in all who come within their range;
and Henry, with his peculiar strength and independence of soul, was
a marked personage among the few who would give themselves the
trouble to understand him. Sophia, the youngest child, born in 1819,
had, along with her mother's lively and dramatic turn, a touch of art;
and all of them, whatever their accidental position for the time, were
superior persons. Living in a town where the ancient forms survived
in daily collision or in friendly contact with the new ideas that began
to make headway in New England about 1830, the Thoreaus had
peculiar opportunities, above their apparent fortunes, but not
beyond their easy reach of capacity, for meeting on equal terms the
advancing spirit of the period.
The children of the house, as they grew up, all became school-
teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in that profession. But
they were all something more than teachers, and becoming enlisted
early in the antislavery cause, or in that broader service of humanity
which "plain living and high thinking" imply, they gradually withdrew
from that occupation,—declining the opportunities by which other
young persons, situated as they then were, rise to worldly success,
and devoting themselves, within limits somewhat narrow, to the
pursuit of lofty ideals. The household of which they were loving and
thoughtful members (let one be permitted to say who was for a time
domesticated there) had, like the best families everywhere, a distinct
and individual existence, in which each person counted for
something, and was not a mere drop in the broad water-level that
American society tends more and more to become. To meet one of
the Thoreaus was not the same as to encounter any other person
who might happen to cross your path. Life to them was something
more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambitions, or an
incessant scramble for the common objects of desire. They were
fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look with a broader and
kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions of the plain and
the mists of the valley. Without wealth, or power, or social
prominence, they still held a rank of their own, in scrupulous
independence, and with qualities that put condescension out of the
question. They could have applied to themselves, individually, and
without hauteur, the motto of the French chevalier:—

"Je suis ni roi, ni prince aussi,

Je suis le seigneur de Coucy."

"Nor king, nor duke? Your pardon, no;

I am the master of Thoreau."

They lived their life according to their genius, without the fear of
man or of "the world's dread laugh," saying to Fortune what
Tennyson sings:—

"Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown,—

With that wild wheel we go not up nor down;
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.
Smile, and we smile, the lords of many lands;
Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands,—
For man is man, and master of his fate."
 CHAPTER II.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.

Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to
be distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name
which became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first
American Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter,
the first inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought
of the Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter
Bulkeley, a Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in
Bedfordshire, and was settled under their direction in 1635. Mr.
Bulkeley, from whom Mr. Emerson and many of the other Concord
citizens of Thoreau's day were descended, was the first minister of
the town, which then included the present towns of Concord, Acton,
Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and among his parishioners were the
ancestors of the principal families that now inhabit these towns.
Concord itself, the centre of this large tract, was thought eligible for
settlement because of its great meadows on the Musketaquid or
Meadow River. It had been a seat of the Massachusetts Indians, and
a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived between its two rivers, where
the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding Musketaquid. Thoreau, the
best topographer of his birthplace, says:—
"It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its
coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine
times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth of an
inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has
probably very near the smallest allowance. But wherever it
makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and
asserts its title to be called a river. For the most part it
 creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered
oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering
the ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf willows
borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a
greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples,
alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-
vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white,
and other grapes."
From these river-grapes, by seedling cultivation, a Concord gardener,
in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape,
which is now more extensively grown throughout the United States
than any other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small,
the hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in
many places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the
township is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak,
pine, chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with
a few mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a
quiet region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as
well as to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and
thrives. Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's
birth it did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and
little poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple,
and was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was
born, and for some years afterward, there was but one church, and
the limits of the parish and the township were the same. At that
time it was one of the two shire towns of the great county of
Middlesex,—Cambridge, thirteen miles away, being the other. It was
therefore a seat of justice and a local centre of trade,—attracting
lawyers and merchants to its public square much more than of late
years.
Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been
since the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long
lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont,
loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at the
taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market,
whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw
came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious
to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public
square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little
shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front
of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the
neighboring towns fastened there all day long; while the owners
looked over goods, priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour
together the calicoes, sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other
articles of domestic need,—bringing in, also, the product of their
own farms and looms to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an
assortment of "West India goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines,
furniture, boots and shoes, paints, lumber, lime, and the
miscellaneous articles of which the village or the farms might have
need; not to mention a special trade in New England rum and old
Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought up every week from
Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the glass, with an
ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now mentioned,
when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer, Abraham
Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation, William
Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there were five
stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where
intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body;
and it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty
cents' worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was
generally accepted." Such was the town when John Thoreau, the
Jerseyman, came there to die in 1800, and such it remained during
the mercantile days of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up
in a house on the public square, and learned the business of buying
and selling in the store of Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making,
the art by which he earned his modest livelihood during Henry
Thoreau's youth, was introduced into Concord about 1812 by William
Munroe, whose son has in later years richly endowed the small free
library from which Thoreau drew books, and to which he gave some
of his own. In this handicraft, which was at times quite profitable,
the younger Thoreaus assisted their father from time to time, and
Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the extent, says Mr.
Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best English ones. "His
friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to
fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil.
'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'"
Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for
he went on many years, at intervals, working at his father's
business, which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-
ground plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various
publishers, and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But
what he did in this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father,
his mother, or his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business
for some time after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family
employment, and must be pursued by somebody.
Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by
nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the
characteristics of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in
Concord for two hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has
held the office of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son,
for one hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John
Heywood filled the office (which is the most responsible in town, and
generally accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years,
beginning in 1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum
for thirteen years; his nephew, Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk
from 1796 to 1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr.
George Heywood, was the town clerk for thirty-odd years after
March, 1853.
Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish
church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the
first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line;
and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the
pastorate of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the
same name. Mr. Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which
was his lay parish for almost half a century after he ceased to
preach in its pulpit, counted among his ancestors four of the
Concord pastors, whose united ministry covered a century; while his
grandmother's second husband, Dr. Ripley, added a half century
more to the family ministry. For this ancestral claim, quite as much
as for his gift of wit and eloquence, Mr. Emerson was chosen, in
1835, to commemorate by an oration the two hundredth anniversary
of the town settlement. In this discourse he said:—
"I have had much opportunity of access to anecdotes of
families, and I believe this town to have been the
dwelling-place, in all times since its planting, of pious and
excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths
of common life, who served God and loved man, and
never let go their hope of immortality. I find our annals
marked with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous
laws, no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches,
no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes.
The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they
contrived to make pretty intelligible the will of a free and
just community."
Into such a community Henry Thoreau, a free and just man, was
born. Dr. Heywood, above-named, was the first town clerk he
remembered, and the one who entered on the records the marriage
of his father and mother, and the birth of all the children. He cried
the banns of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar in the parish
meeting-house; and he was the last clerk who made this Sunday
outcry.
He thus proclaimed his own autumnal nuptials in 1822, when he
married for the first time at the age of sixty-three. The banns were
cried at the opening of the service, and this compelled the town
clerk to be a more regular attendant in the meeting-house than his
successors have found necessary. Dr. Heywood's pew was about
half-way down the broad aisle, and in full view of the whole
congregation, whether in the "floor pews" or "up in the galleries."
Wearing his old-fashioned coat and small-clothes, the doctor would
rise in his pew, deliberately adjust his spectacles, and look about for
a moment, in order to make sure that his audience was prepared;
then he made his proclamation with much emphasis of voice and
dignity of manner. There was a distinction, however, in the manner
of "publishing the banns" of the white and the black citizens; the
former being "cried" in the face of the whole congregation, and the
latter simply "posted" in the meeting-house porch, as was
afterwards the custom for all. Dr. Heywood, from a sense of justice,
or some other proper motive, determined on one occasion to "post"
a white couple, instead of giving them the full benefit of his
sonorous voice; but, either because they missed the éclat of the
usual proclamation, or else felt humiliated at being "posted like
niggers in the porch," they brought the town clerk to justice
forthwith, and he was forced for once to yield to popular outcry, and
join in the outcry himself. After publishing his own banns, and just
before the wedding, he for the first time procured a pair of trousers,
—having worn knee-breeches up to that time, as Colonel May (the
father-in-law of Mr. Alcott) and others had thought it proper to wear
them. When Dr. Heywood told his waggish junior, 'Squire Brooks, of
the purchase, and inquired how young gentlemen put their trousers
on, his legal neighbor advised him that they were generally put on
over the head.
Dr. Heywood survived amid "this age loose and all unlaced," as
Marvell says, until 1839, having practiced medicine, more or less, in
Concord for upward of forty years, and held court there as a local
justice for almost as long. Dr. Isaac Hurd, who was his
contemporary, practiced in Concord for fifty-four years, and in all
sixty-five years; and Dr. Josiah Bartlett, who accompanied and
succeeded Dr. Hurd, practiced in Concord nearly fifty-eight years;
while the united medical service of himself and his father, Dr. Josiah
Bartlett of Charlestown, was one hundred and two years.
Dr. Bartlett himself was one of the most familiar figures in Concord
through Thoreau's life-time, and for fifteen years after. To him have
been applied, with more truth, I suspect, than to "Mr. Robert Levet,
a Practiser in Physic," those noble lines of Dr. Johnson on his humble
friend:—

"Well tried through many a varying year,

See Levet to the grave descend,
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend."

He said more than once that for fifty years no severity of weather
had kept him from visiting his distant patients,—sometimes miles
away,—except once, and then the snow was piled so high that his
sleigh upset every two rods; and when he unharnessed and
mounted his horse, the beast, floundering through a drift, slipped
him off over his crupper. He was a master of the horse, and
encouraged that proud creature to do his best in speed. One of his
neighbors mentioned in his hearing a former horse of Dr. Bartlett's,
which was in the habit of running away. "By faith!" said the doctor
(his familiar oath), "I recollect that horse; he was a fine traveler, but
I have no remembrance that he ever ran away." When upwards of
seventy, he was looking for a new horse. The jockey said, "Doctor, if
you were not so old, I have a horse that would suit you." "Hm!"
growled the doctor, "don't talk to me about old. Let's see your
horse;" and he bought him, and drove him for eight years. He
practiced among the poor with no hope of reward, and gave them,
besides, his money, his time, and his influence. One day a friend saw
him receiving loads of firewood from a shiftless man to whom he
had rendered gratuitous service in sickness for twenty years. "Ah,
doctor! you are getting some of your back pay." "By faith! no; the
fellow is poor, so I paid him for his wood, and let him go."
Dr. Bartlett did not reach Concord quite in season to assist at the
birth of Henry Thoreau; but from the time his parents brought him
back to his native town from Boston, in 1823, to the day of Sophia
Thoreau's death, in 1876, he might have supplied the needed
medical aid to the family, and often did so. The young Henry dwelt
in his first tabernacle on the Virginia road but eight months,
removing then to a house on the Lexington road, not far from where
Mr. Emerson afterwards established his residence, on the edge of
Concord village. In the mean time he had been baptized by Dr.
Ripley in the parish church, at the age of three months; and his
mother boasted that he did not cry. His aunt, Sarah Thoreau, taught
him to walk when he was fourteen months old, and before he was
sixteen months he removed to Chelmsford, "next to the meeting-
house, where they kept the powder, in the garret," as was the
custom in many village churches of New England then. Coming back
to Concord before he was six years old, he soon began to drive his
mother's cow to pasture, barefoot, like other village boys; just as
Emerson, when a boy in Boston, a dozen years before, had driven
his mother's cow where now the fine streets and halls are. Thoreau,
like Emerson, began to go to school in Boston, where he lived for a
year or more in Pinckney Street. But he returned to Concord in 1823,
and, except for short visits or long walking excursions, he never left
the town again till he died, in 1862. He there went on with his
studies in the village schools, and fitted for Harvard College at the
"Academy," which 'Squire Hoar, Colonel Whiting, 'Squire Brooks, and
other magnates of the town had established about 1820. This
private school was generally very well taught, and here Thoreau
himself taught for a while in after years. In his boyhood it had
become a good place to study Greek, and in 1830, when perhaps
Henry Thoreau was one of its pupils, Mr. Charles Emerson, visiting
his friends in Concord, wrote thus of what he saw there: "Mr. George
Bradford and I attended the Exhibition yesterday at the Academy.
We were extremely gratified. To hear little girls saying their Greek
grammar and young ladies read Xenophon was a new and very
agreeable entertainment." Thoreau must have been beginning his
Greek grammar about that time, for he entered college in 1833, and
was then proficient in Greek. He must also have gone, as a boy, to
the "Concord Lyceum," where he afterwards lectured every winter.
Concord, as the home of famous lawyers and active politicians, was
always a place of resort for political leaders, and Thoreau might
have seen and heard there all the celebrated congressmen and
governors of Massachusetts, at one time and another. He could
remember the visit of Lafayette to Concord in 1824, and the semi-
centennial celebration of the Concord Fight in 1825. In 1830 he
doubtless looked forward with expectation for the promised lecture
of Edward Everett before the Lyceum, concerning which Mr. Everett
wrote as follows to Dr. Ripley (November 3, 1830):—
"I am positively forbidden by my physician to come to
Concord to-day. To obviate, as far as possible, the
inconvenience which this failure might cause the Lyceum,
I send you the lecture which I should have delivered. It is
one which I have delivered twice before; but my health
has prevented me from preparing another. Although in
print, as you see, it has not been published. I held it back
from publication to enable me, with propriety, to deliver it
at Concord. Should you think it worth while to have it read
to the meeting, it is at your service for that purpose; and,
should this be done, I would suggest, as it is one hour
and three quarters long, that some parts should be
omitted. For this reason I have inclosed some passages in
brackets, which can be spared without affecting the
context."
It would hardly occur to a popular lecturer now to apologize because
he had delivered his lecture twice before, or to send the copy
forward, when he could not himself be there to read it.
Mr. Emerson began to lecture in the Concord Lyceum before 1834,
when he came to reside in the town. In October of that year he
wrote to Dr. Ripley, declining to give the opening lecture, but offering
to speak in the course of the winter, as he did. During its first half
century he lectured nearly a hundred times in this Lyceum, reading
there, first and last, nearly all the essays he published in his lifetime,
and many that have since been printed. Thoreau gave his first
lecture there in April, 1838, and afterwards lectured nearly every
year for more than twenty years. On one occasion, very early in his
public career, when the expected lecturer of the Lyceum failed to
come, as Mr. Everett had failed, but had not been thoughtful enough
to send a substitute, Henry Thoreau and Mr. Alcott were pressed into
the service, and spoke before the audience in duet, and with
opinions extremely heretical,—both being ardent radicals and "come-
outers." A few years after this (in 1843), Wendell Phillips made his
first appearance before the Concord Lyceum, and spoke in a manner
which Thoreau has described in print, and which led to a sharp
village controversy, not yet quite forgotten on either side.
But to return to the childhood and youth of Thoreau. When he was
three or four years old, at Chelmsford, on being told that he must
die, as well as the men in the New England Primer, and having the
joys of heaven explained to him, he said, as he came in from
"coasting," that he did not want to die and go to heaven, because he
could not carry his sled to so fine a place; for, he added, "the boys
say it is not shod with iron, and not worth a cent." At the age of ten,
says Channing, "he had the firmness of the Indian, and could
repress his pathos, and had such seriousness that he was called
'judge.'" As an example of childish fortitude, it is related that he
carried his pet chickens for sale to the tavern-keeper in a basket;
whereupon Mr. Wesson told him to 'stop a minute,' and, in order to
return the basket promptly, took the darlings out, and wrung their
necks, one by one, before the boy's eyes, who wept inwardly, but
did not budge. Having a knack at whittling, and being asked by a
schoolmate to make him a bow and arrow, young Henry refused, not
deigning to give the reason,—that he had no knife. "So through life,"
says Channing, "he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what
he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations." He was a
sturdy and kindly playmate, whose mirthful tricks are yet
remembered by those who frolicked with him, and he always
abounded with domestic affection. While in college he once asked
his mother what profession she would have him choose. She said,
pleasantly, "You can buckle on your knapsack, dear, and roam
abroad to seek your fortune;" but the thought of leaving home and
forsaking Concord made the tears roll down his cheeks. Then his
sister Helen, who was standing by, says Channing, "tenderly put her
arm around him and kissed him, saying, 'No, Henry, you shall not
go; you shall stay at home and live with us.'" And this, indeed, he
did, though he made one or two efforts to seek his fortune for a
time elsewhere.
His reading had been wide and constant while at school, and after
he entered college at the age of sixteen. His room in Cambridge was
in Hollis Hall; his instructors were such as he found there, but in
rhetoric he profited much by the keen intelligence of Professor
Channing, an uncle of his future friend and biographer, Ellery
Channing. I think he also came in contact, while in college, with that
singular poet, Jones Very, of Salem. He was by no means unsocial in
college, though he did not form such abiding friendships as do many
young men. He graduated in 1837. His expenses at Cambridge,
which were very moderate, compared with what a poor scholar must
now pay to go through college, were paid in part by his father, in
part by his aunts and his elder sister, Helen, who had already begun
to teach school; and for the rest he depended on his own efforts and
the beneficiary funds of the college, in which he had some little
share. I have understood that he received the income of the same
modest endowment which had been given to William and Ralph
Waldo Emerson when in college, some years before; and in other
ways the generous thought of that most princely man, Waldo
Emerson, was not idle in his behalf, though he knew Thoreau then
only as the studious son of a townsman, who needed a friend at
court. What Mr. Emerson wrote to Josiah Quincy, who was then
president of Harvard College, in behalf of Henry Thoreau does not
appear, except from the terms of old Quincy's reply; but we may
infer it. Thoreau had the resource of school-keeping in the country
towns, during the college vacation and the extra vacation that a poor
scholar could claim; and this brought him, in 1835, to an
acquaintance with that elder scholar, Brownson, who afterwards
became a Catholic doctor of theology. He left college one winter to
teach school at Canton, near Boston, where he was examined by
Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, then a Protestant minister in Canton. He
studied German and boarded with Mr. Brownson while he taught the
school. In 1836, he records in his journal that he "went to New York
with father, peddling." In his senior year, 1836-37, he was ill for a
time, and lost rank with his instructors by his indifference to the
ordinary college motives for study. This fact, and also that he was a
beneficiary of the college, further appears from the letter of
President Quincy to Mr. Emerson, as follows:—
"Cambridge, 25th June, 1837.
"My dear Sir,—Your view concerning Thoreau is entirely in
consent with that which I entertain. His general conduct
has been very satisfactory, and I was willing and desirous
that whatever falling off there had been in his scholarship
should be attributable to his sickness. He had, however,
imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college
rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if
not his exertions. His instructors were impressed with the
conviction that he was indifferent, even to a degree that
was faulty, and that they could not recommend him,
consistent with the rule by which they are usually
governed in relation to beneficiaries. I have always
entertained a respect for and interest in him, and was
willing to attribute any apparent neglect or indifference to
his ill health rather than to wilfulness. I obtained from the
instructors the authority to state all the facts to the
Corporation, and submit the result to their discretion. This
I did, and that body granted twenty-five dollars, which
was within ten, or at most fifteen, dollars of any sum he
would have received, had no objection been made. There
is no doubt that, from some cause, an unfavorable opinion
has been entertained, since his return after his sickness,
of his disposition to exert himself. To what it has been
owing may be doubtful. I appreciate very fully the
goodness of his heart and the strictness of his moral
principle; and have done as much for him as, under the
 circumstances, was possible. Very respectfully, your
humble servant,
"Josiah Quincy.
"Rev. R. W. Emerson."
It is possible the college faculty may have had other grounds of
distrust in Thoreau's case. On May 30, 1836, his classmate Peabody
wrote him the following letter from Cambridge,—Thoreau being then
at home, for some reason,—from which we may infer that the sober
youth was not averse to such deeds as are there related:—
"The Davy Club got into a little trouble, the week before
last, from the following circumstance: H. W. gave a lecture
on Pyrotechny, and illustrated it with a parcel of fireworks
he had prepared in the vacation. As you may imagine,
there was some slight noise on the occasion. In fact, the
noise was so slight that Tutor B. heard it at his room in
Holworthy. This worthy boldly determined to march forth
and attack the 'rioters.' Accordingly, in the midst of a
grand display of rockets, etc., he stepped into the room,
and, having gazed round him in silent astonishment for
the space of two minutes, and hearing various cries of
'Intrusion!' 'Throw him over!' 'Saw his leg off!' 'Pull his
wool!' etc., he made two or three dignified motions with
his hand to gain attention, and then kindly advised us to
'retire to our respective rooms.' Strange to say, he found
no one inclined to follow this good advice, and he
accordingly thought fit to withdraw. There is, as perhaps
you know, a law against keeping powder in the college
buildings. The effect of Tutor B.'s intrusion was evident on
the next Monday night, when H. W. and B. were invited to
call and see President Quincy; and owing to the tough
reasoning of Tutor B., who boldly asserted that 'powder
was powder,' they were each presented with a public
admonition.
 "We had a miniature volcano at Webster's lecture, the
other morning [this was Professor Webster, afterwards
hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman], and the odors
therefrom surpassed all ever produced by Araby the Blest.
Imagine to yourself all the windows and shutters of the
lecture-room closed, and then conceive the delightful
scent produced by the burning of nearly a bushel of
sulphur, phosphoretted hydrogen, and other still more
pleasant ingredients. As soon as the burning commenced,
there was a general rush to the door, and a crowd
collected there, running out every half minute to get a
breath of fresh air, and then coming in to see the volcano.
'No noise nor nothing.' Bigelow and Dr. Bacon
manufactured some 'laughing gas,' and administered it on
the Delta. It was much better than that made by Webster.
Jack Weiss took some, as usual; Wheeler, Jo Allen, and
Hildreth each received a dose. Wheeler proceeded to
dance for the amusement of the company, Jo jumped over
the Delta fence, and Sam raved about Milton,
Shakespeare, Byron, etc. He took two doses; it produced
a great effect on him. He seemed to be as happy as a
mortal could desire; talked with Shakespeare, Milton, etc.,
and seemed to be quite at home with them."
The persons named were classmates of Thoreau: one of them
afterward Rev. John Weiss; Wheeler was of Lincoln, and died early in
Germany, whither he went to study; Samuel Tenney Hildreth was a
brother of Richard Hildreth, the historian, and also died young. The
zest with which his classmate related these pranks to Thoreau seems
to imply in his correspondent a mind too ready towards such things
to please the learned faculty of Cambridge.
Mr. Quincy's letter was in reply to one which Mr. Emerson had
written at the request of Mrs. Thoreau, who feared her son was not
receiving justice from the college authorities. Thoreau graduated
without much distinction, but with a good name among his
classmates, and a high reputation for general scholarship. When he
went to Maine, in May, 1838, to see if there was not some school for
him to teach there, he took with him this certificate from his pastor,
Dr. Ripley:—
"Concord, May 1, 1838.
"To the Friends of Education,—The undersigned very
cheerfully hereby introduces to public notice the bearer,
Mr. David Henry Thoreau, as a teacher in the higher
branches of useful literature. He is a native of this town,
and a graduate of Harvard University. He is well disposed
and well qualified to instruct the rising generation. His
scholarship and moral character will bear the strictest
scrutiny. He is modest and mild in his disposition and
government, but not wanting in energy of character and
fidelity in the duties of his profession. It is presumed his
character and usefulness will be appreciated more highly
as an acquaintance with him shall be cultivated. Cordial
wishes for his success, reputation, and usefulness attend
him, as an instructor and gentleman.
"Ezra Ripley,

"Senior Pastor of the First Church in Concord, Mass.

"N. B.—It is but justice to observe here that the eyesight
of the writer is much impaired."
Accompanying this artless document is a list of clergymen in the
towns of Maine,—Portland, Belfast, Camden, Kennebunk, Castine,
Ellsworth, etc.,—in the handwriting of the good old pastor, signifying
that as young Thoreau traveled he should report himself to these
brethren, who might forward his wishes. But even at that early date,
I suspect that Thoreau undervalued the "D. D.'s" in comparison with
the "chickadedees," as he plainly declared in his later years. Another
certificate, in a firmer hand, and showing no token of impaired
eyesight, was also carried by Thoreau in this first visit to Maine. It
was this:—
"I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate
of Harvard University in August, 1837, to the confidence of
such parents or guardians as may propose to employ him
as an instructor. I have the highest confidence in Mr.
Thoreau's moral character, and in his intellectual ability. He
is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness, and
I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his
services.
"R. Waldo Emerson.
"Concord, May 2, 1838."
The acquaintance of Mr. Emerson with his young townsman had
begun perhaps a year before this date, and had advanced very fast
toward intimacy. It originated in this way: A lady connected with Mr.
Emerson's family was visiting at Mrs. Thoreau's while Henry was in
college, and the conversation turned on a lecture lately read in
Concord by Mr. Emerson. Miss Helen Thoreau surprised the visitor by
saying, "My brother Henry has a passage in his diary containing the
same things that Mr. Emerson has said." This remark being
questioned, the diary was produced, and, sure enough, the thought
of the two passages was found to be very similar. The incident being
reported to Mr. Emerson, he desired the lady to bring Henry Thoreau
to see him, which was soon done, and the intimacy began. It was to
this same lady (Mrs. Brown, of Plymouth) that Thoreau addressed
one of his earliest poems,—the verses called "Sic Vita," in the "Week
on the Concord and Merrimac," commencing:—

"I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied

By a chance bond together."
These verses were written on a strip of paper inclosing a bunch of
violets, gathered in May, 1837, and thrown in at Mrs. Brown's
window by the poet-naturalist. They show that he had read George
Herbert carefully, at a time when few persons did so, and in other
ways they are characteristic of the writer, who was then not quite
twenty years old.
It may be interesting to see what old Quincy himself said, in a
certificate, about his stubbornly independent pupil. For the same
Maine journey Cambridge furnished the Concord scholar with this
document:—
"Harvard University, Cambridge, March 26, 1838.
"To whom it may concern,—I certify that Henry D. Thoreau,
of Concord, in this State of Massachusetts, graduated at
this seminary in August, 1837; that his rank was high as a
scholar in all the branches, and his morals and general
conduct unexceptionable and exemplary. He is
recommended as well qualified as an instructor, for
employment in any public or private school or private
family.
"Josiah Quincy,
"President of Harvard University."
It seems that there was question, at this time, of a school in
Alexandria, near Washington (perhaps the Theological Seminary for
Episcopalians there), in which young Thoreau might find a place; for
on the 12th of April, 1838, President Quincy wrote to him as follows:
—
"Sir,—The school is at Alexandria; the students are said to
be young men well advanced in ye knowledge of ye Latin
and Greek classics; the requisitions are, qualification and a
person who has had experience in school keeping. Salary
$600 a year, besides washing and Board; duties to be
entered on ye 5th or 6th of May. If you choose to apply, I
 will write as soon as I am informed of it. State to me your
experience in school keeping. Yours,
"Josiah Quincy."
We now know that Thoreau offered himself for the place; and we
know that his journey to Maine was fruitless. He did, in fact, teach
the town grammar school in Concord for a few weeks in 1837, and in
July, 1838, was teaching, at the Parkman house, in Concord. He had
already, as we have seen, though not yet twenty-one, appeared as a
lecturer before the Concord Lyceum. It is therefore time to consider
him as a citizen of Concord, and to exhibit further the character of
that town.
Note.—The Tutor mentioned on page 55 was Francis
Bowen, afterward professor at Harvard; the other "B." was
H. J. Bigelow, afterward a noted surgeon in Boston.
 CHAPTER III.

CONCORD AND ITS FAMOUS

PEOPLE.
The Thoreau family was but newly planted in Concord, to which it
was alien both by the father's and the mother's side. But this wise
town adopts readily the children of other communities that claim its
privileges,—and to Henry Thoreau these came by birth. Of all the
men of letters that have given Concord a name throughout the
world, he is almost the only one who was born there. Emerson was
born in Boston, Alcott in Connecticut, Hawthorne in Salem, Channing
in Boston, Louisa Alcott in Germantown, and others elsewhere; but
Thoreau was native to the soil. And since his genius has been
shaped and guided by the personal traits of those among whom he
lived, as well as by the hand of God and by the intuitive impulses of
his own spirit, it is proper to see what the men of Concord have
really been. It is from them we must judge the character of the town
and its civilization, not from those exceptional, imported persons—
cultivated men and women,—who may be regarded as at the head
of society, and yet may have no representative quality at all. It is not
by the few that a New England town is to be judged, but by the
many. Yet there were a Few and a Many in Concord, between whom
certain distinctions could be drawn, in the face of that general
equality which the institutions of New England compel. Life in our
new country had not yet been reduced to the ranks of modern
civilization—so orderly outward, so full of mutiny within.
It is mentioned by Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, that this noble
Roman lived as a child in Marseilles; "a place," he adds, "of Grecian
culture and provincial frugality, mingled and well blended." I have
thought this felicitous phrase of Tacitus most apposite for Concord as
I have known it since 1854, and as Thoreau must have found it from
1830 onward. Its people lived then and since with little display, while
learning was held in high regard; and the "plain living and high
thinking," which Wordsworth declared were gone from England,
have never been absent from this New England town. It has always
been a town of much social equality, and yet of great social and
spiritual contrasts. Most of its inhabitants have lived in a plain way
for the two centuries and a half that it has been inhabited; but at all
times some of them have had important connections with the great
world of politics, affairs, and literature. Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the
founder and first minister of the town, was a near kinsman of Oliver
St. John, Cromwell's solicitor-general, of the same noble English
family that, a generation or two later, produced Henry St. John, Lord
Bolingbroke, the brilliant, unscrupulous friend of Pope and Swift.
Another of the Concord ministers, Rev. John Whiting, was
descended, through his grandmother, Elizabeth St. John, wife of Rev.
Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, from this same old English family, which, in
its long pedigree, counted for ancestors the Norman Conqueror of
England and some of his turbulent posterity. He was, says the
epitaph over him in the village burying-ground, "a gentleman of
singular hospitality and generosity, who never detracted from the
character of any man, and was a universal lover of mankind." In this
character some representative gentleman of Concord has stood in
every generation since the first settlement of the little town.
The Munroes of Lexington and Concord are descended from a
Scotch soldier of Charles II.'s army, captured by Cromwell at the
battle of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America.
His powerful kinsman, General George Munro, who commanded for
Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made
commander-in-chief for Scotland.
Robert Cumming, father of Dr. John Cumming, a celebrated Concord
physician, was one of the followers of the first Pretender in 1715,
and when the Scotch rebellion of that year failed, Cumming, with
some of his friends, fled to New England, and settled in Concord and
the neighboring town of Stow.
Duncan Ingraham, a retired sea-captain, who had enriched himself
in the Surinam trade, long lived in Concord, before and after the
Revolution, and one of his grandchildren was Captain Marryatt, the
English novelist; another was the American naval captain, Ingraham,
who brought away Martin Kosta, a Hungarian refugee, from the
clutches of the Austrian government. While Duncan Ingraham was
living in Concord, a hundred years ago, a lad from that town, Joseph
Perry, who had gone to sea with Paul Jones, became a high naval
officer in the service of Catharine of Russia, and wrote to Dr. Ripley
from the Crimea in 1786 to inquire what had become of his parents
in Concord, whom he had not seen or heard from for many years.
The stepson of Duncan Ingraham, Tilly Merrick, of Concord, who
graduated at Cambridge in 1773, made the acquaintance of Sir
Archibald Campbell, when captured in Boston Harbor, that Scotch
officer having visited at the house of Mrs. Ingraham, Merrick's
mother, while a prisoner in Concord Jail. A few years later Merrick
was himself captured twice on his way to and from Holland and
France, whither he went as secretary or attaché to our
commissioner, John Adams. The first time he was taken to London;
the second time to Halifax, where, as it happened, Sir Archibald was
then in command as Governor of Nova Scotia. Young Merrick went
presently to the governor's quarters, but was refused admission by
the sentinel,—while parleying with whom, Sir Archibald heard the
conversation, and came forward. He at once recognized his Concord
friend, greeted him cordially with "How do you do, my little rebel?"
and after taking good care of him, in remembrance of his own
experience in Concord, procured Merrick's exchange for one of
Burgoyne's officers, captured at Saratoga. Returning to America after
the war, Tilly Merrick went into an extensive business at Charleston,
S. C., with the son of Duncan Ingraham for a partner, and there
became the owner of large plantations, worked by slaves, which he
afterwards lost through reverses in business. Coming back to
Concord in 1798, with the remnants of his South Carolina fortune,
and inheriting his mother's Concord estate, he married a lady of the
Minott family, and became a country store-keeper in his native town.
His daughter, Mrs. Brooks, was for many years the leader of the
antislavery party in Concord, and a close friend of the Thoreaus,
who at one time lived next door to her hospitable house.
Soon after Mr. Emerson fixed his home in Concord, in 1834, a new
bond of connection between the town and the great world outside
this happy valley began to appear,—the genius of that man whose
like has not been seen in America, nor in the whole world in our
century:—

"A large and generous man, who, on our moors,

Built up his thought (though with an Indian tongue,
And fittest to have sung at Persian feasts),
Yet dwelt among us as the sage he was,—
Sage of his days,—patient and proudly true;
Whose word was worth the world, whose heart was pure.
Oh, such a heart was his! no gate or bar;
The poorest wretch that ever passed his door
Welcome as highest king or fairest friend."

This genius, in one point of view so solitary, but in another so

universal and social, soon made itself felt as an attractive force, and
Concord became a place of pilgrimage, as it has remained for so
many years since. When Theodore Parker left Divinity Hall, at
Cambridge, in 1836, and began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, he
fixed his hopes on Concord as a parish, chiefly because Emerson
was living there. It is said that he might have been called as a
colleague for Dr. Ripley, if it had not been thought his sermons were
too learned for the Christians of the Nine-Acre Corner and other
outlying hamlets of the town. In 1835-36 Mr. Alcott began to visit Mr.
Emerson in Concord, and in 1840 he went there to live. Margaret
Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, coadjutors of Mr. Alcott in his Boston
school, had already found their way to Concord, where Margaret at
intervals resided, or came and went in her sibylline way. Ellery
Channing, one of the nephews of Dr. Channing, the divine, took his
bride, a sister of Margaret Fuller, to Concord in 1843; and Hawthorne
removed thither, upon his marriage with Miss Peabody's sister
Sophia, in 1842. After noticing what went on about him for a few
years, in his seclusion at the Old Manse, Hawthorne thus described
the attraction of Concord, in 1845:
"It was necessary to go but a little way beyond my
threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of
men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a
circuit of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and
blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading
influence of a great original thinker, who had his earthly
abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind
acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with
wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long
pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young
visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been
imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came
to seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-
involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose
systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron
framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask
deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own
thralldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a
thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the
finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to
ascertain its quality and value."
The picture here painted still continued to be true until long after the
death of Thoreau; and the attraction was increased at times by the
presence in the village of Hawthorne himself, of Alcott, and of others
who made Concord their home or their haunt. Thoreau also was
resorted to by pilgrims, who came sometimes from long distances
and at long intervals, to see and talk with him.
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