Digital Thoreau’s Manuscript Search Tool has a new feature: a table describing the 26 leaves of HM 924 Volume 8. Twenty-five of these leaves are handwritten; one is printed.
Why have we put the leaves of Volume 8 in their own table?
When Ronald Clapper wrote and later updated the dissertation that is the basis for Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition of Walden, he restricted himself—with one important exception—to the leaves in HM 924 Volumes 1–7. These are the leaves that J. Lyndon Shanley had earlier determined to belong to the seven draft versions of Walden composed by Thoreau between 1846 and 1854. (For discussions of Shanley’s detective work on the manuscript, see the editorial introduction to our fluid-text edition and the main page of our Walden Manuscript Project.) The important exception is the leaf in Volume 8 containing a manuscript version of the “Complemental Verses” that follow the chapter “Economy” in the published Walden. As this leaf represents the only manuscript presence of the verses in HM 924, Clapper included it in his transcription, noting that the verses were “Added on a leaf that does not belong to any of the seven major groups.”
The leaf from HM 924 Volume 8 containing the “Complemental Verses” that follow the chapter “Economy” in the published Walden of 1854.
To understand how HM 924 Volume 8 is related to the rest of the Huntington’s Walden manuscript, it’s helpful to review the changing physical disposition of the manuscript since its acquisition by the museum in 1918. When Shanley worked with the manuscript in the 1950s, he saw evidence that the leaves had been ordered by someone other than Thoreau to align them with the published text. That someone, most likely Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, had also scribbled notations on many leaves of the manuscript tying passages in it to the pages of Houghton Mifflin’s 1889 edition of Walden and later editions based on it. As a result of this ordering, Shanley at first “did not perceive any extended consecutive version of Walden in the manuscript’s 628 leaves.” Re-ordering the leaves according to their physical characteristics and textual continuity, he arrived at nine groupings, which he labeled using roman numerals I–IX. In Group I he discerned a more or less continuous narrative that he conjectured to be a complete first draft of Thoreau’s work, likely finished by the time he left Walden Pond in 1847. Shanley posited that his next six groups (II–VII) represented six subsequent stages in the manuscript’s composition, written at various times between 1847 and the work’s publication in 1854. (See Shanley, The Making of Walden, pp. 1–17.) He would come to refer to these seven draft stages using the letters A–G.
Group VIII, consisting of 28 leaves, “short pieces written—some in ink, some in pencil—between the seven major groups,” he ultimately distributed among the envelopes in which he placed groups I–VII.
That left Group IX, 25 “leaves of all sorts and sizes, some torn from journals and notebooks,” that Shanley judged to be “a bare fraction of the notes [Thoreau] used in preparing Walden.” All of these leaves contained Walden material; several of them also held material found in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Resistance to Civil Government,” and “Thomas Carlyle and His Works.”
Shanley’s eight envelopes eventually became the eight bound volumes at the Huntington today. If you’ve stuck with the explanation this far, you can see the potential for numerical discombobulation in the fact that Volume 8 contains Shanley’s original Group IX.
Each volume of HM 924 contains Shanley’s envelope that originally held the leaves of that volume, and images of the envelopes (recto and verso) are included in the digitized manuscript. On the recto of the envelope included in Volume 8, we can see Shanley’s penciled note indicating that the envelope contains “Mostly material written before ‘A’ / Some of it from Journals– / 25 pieces.” Two notes in lighter pencil are also visible. “Group IX / see p. 13” refers to Shanley’s Making of Walden, where a note on p. 13 explains the relationship between the nine groupings and eight envelopes. “+ 1 printed” refers to the single printed leaf in Volume 8. The recto of this leaf contains the “Complemental Verses” that follow “Economy” and the verso contains the first page of the second chapter, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
The top portion of the envelope (recto) originally holding Shanley’s Group IX, now contained, along with the leaves of Group IX, in HM 924 Volume 8.
A crucial fact about the composition of Walden is that a number of passages have their origin in the Journal Thoreau kept from October 1837 until a few months before his death in 1862. Some of these passages were written before the first or A draft, and Thoreau removed a number of leaves containing such passages from the Journal manuscript volumes themselves, keeping them with the evolving Walden manuscript.
Although Clapper excludes the material on the Volume 8 leaves from his transcription, which focuses solely on drafts A–G, the material nevertheless belongs to the larger story of Walden‘s evolution. Our new search table will interest those readers looking for a fuller view of the work’s development from journaled observations, anecdotes, and reflections to lecture text to literary masterpiece.
Of course, even this fuller view excludes Walden leaves not included in HM 924. More than 50 of these leaves are known to exist, some in other libraries, some in private hands; others are still not accounted for.
On our to-do list: a guide to what’s currently known about the location and content of these other leaves. On our wish list: a third search table, devoted to these leaves, and the ability to link to or display the leaves as part of our Walden Manuscript Project.