Representing re-ordering

One of the biggest challenges to understanding how Walden evolved across the work’s seven extant draft versions—and to representing that evolution in Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition—is Thoreau’s frequent and extensive re-ordering of material within and between drafts.

The manuscript of Walden at the Huntington, HM 924, bears the evidence of this re-ordering in many different forms. Examples include Thoreau’s lines circling words and phrases, numbers added in the margins beside blocks of text, and cross-references to other manuscript pages inserted between, within, or beside lines of text. Thoreau sometimes relocates text by interlining it or copying it in the margin near the desired location, rotating the page ninety degrees to do so and using a caret to indicate placement. He sometimes strikes out text at the location where he first wrote it—using some combination of lines surrounding text and vertical, angled, or wavy lines through the text—and re-copies that text, with or without revisions, in a new location.

Pinholes and slashes in the margins of many Walden leaves testify to Thoreau’s repeated re-collations of the manuscript in order to reuse the leaves across drafts or re-sequence the material they contain.

As published in 1854, Walden consists of eighteen chapters, from “Economy” to “Conclusion.” But there are no chapter divisions in the first or “A” draft, which Thoreau had more or less completed by the time he left Walden Pond in 1847. As he continued drafting, Thoreau took some passages that were immediate or near neighbors in A and gave them new homes in the various chapters he created. His decision to separate these passages presents a particular challenge to representing the Walden manuscript as a “fluid text.”

For one small illustration of this challenge, let’s look at a portion of the manuscript in A containing material from “Higher Laws.”

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Thoreau on Mount Monadnock

Robert M. (Bob) Young is a member of the Thoreau Society and the author of Tramping Monadnock! New Discoveries with Henry David Thoreau. The author thanks Digital Thoreau editors Paul Schacht and Beth Witherell for their assistance in writing this post.

Tourists atop Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire

Climbers at the summit of Mount Monadnock. In Thoreau’s time as in ours, the mountain was a popular tourist attraction. Mt. Monadnock summit view by Robert Laliberte on Flickr, CC-BY-NC 2.0.

At 8:30 a.m. on August 4, 1860, accompanied by his close friend Ellery Channing, Thoreau set off from Concord on what was to be his fourth and final visit to “one of his favorite mountains,” as Walter Harding tells us: Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire (Harding 1982, 171). He’d made his first visit in 1844, traveling alone. Now, with Channing, “who had never been camping before,” he slogged “straight through a rainstorm,” writes Laura Dassow Walls, “to the very same hollow on Monadnock’s summit where he and [H. G. O.] Blake had camped two years before” (Walls 2017, 469).

In Journal entries dated August 4 through August 9, Thoreau provides a chronological account of the 1860 excursion. (See Journal 1906, 14:8-52.) In the entry for August 9, he includes lists and descriptions of the natural phenomena he observed, and he draws a map of the mountain that includes bearing lines and several of the features mentioned in his account.

In my self-published monograph Tramping Monadnock! New Discoveries with Henry David Thoreau (available in print from The Shop at Walden Pond, Lulu, or Amazon, and in several digital formats at the Internet Archive) I describe my effort to retrace Thoreau’s four journeys, walking the roads and paths he walked, riding the rail lines he rode, seeking, as I went, answers to a number of practical, scientific, and philosophical questions. For example, after his death, what became of the pocket compass that Thoreau used on his Monadnock journeys, as well as many others? (Spoiler alert: for a time, at least, it was in the possession of the poet Emma Lazarus. Chapter Eight of Tramping Monadnock! explains how she came into it and where it went next.) What did Thoreau learn about nature from these four trips? What did he learn about place? About life?

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Reading “T” Leaves

At the July 2024 annual gathering of the Thoreau Society, Beth Witherell and I gave a presentation titled “Reading ‘T’ Leaves.” We were on a panel moderated by Kathleen Coyne Kelly titled “The Durable Text: Editing Thoreau.” Beth and I wanted to talk about some of the things we’ve discovered since launching the Walden Manuscript Project with the digitized images of HM 924—the collection of Walden manuscript leaves at the Huntington—and HM 925, the publisher’s proof sheets of Walden.

In particular, we wanted to emphasize what can be learned from focusing on the manuscript and proof sheets as material objects. Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition of Walden attempts to model how the text of Thoreau’s book changed across the seven drafts that make up HM 924. But it has little to say about things like how and where on the manuscript page Thoreau inserts text (e.g., above a previously written line, below it, or in the margin), how he deletes text (e.g. by striking out, rubbing out, or scraping off material on the page), or the physical evidence suggesting how he re-used and re-ordered existing material in moving between drafts.

Tracking the textual changes across HM 924’s seven drafts helps us understand the development of Walden as a work—the formal expression of Thoreau’s evolving thought. Inspecting the manuscript and proof sheets as material objects complements this understanding by providing insight into Thoreau’s methods of revision, what we might call his workflow.

In our presentation, Beth and I reviewed the manuscript’s complicated transmission history before diving headlong into the minutiae of manuscript leaves and proof sheets. The slides below for the most part explain themselves, but they’re best viewed in conjunction with our brief explanation of the manuscript’s history on the main page of the Walden manuscript project.

Remembering Ron Clapper

Today marks one year since the passing of Ronald Earl Clapper, whose 1967 UCLA dissertation “The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text” is the basis of Digital Thoreau’s Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition.

From its first appearance, Ron’s genetic text of Walden has provided the Thoreau scholarly community with a tool of incalculable benefit. It’s been widely cited in books and articles, especially those seeking to understand Thoreau’s most important work through the lens of its long and complicated evolution. As correctly noted in this tribute on the website of California State University Fullerton, where he held a faculty appointment beginning in 1974, Ron’s dissertation has been “universally acknowledged as an indispensable and foundational resource—one scholar has referred to it as a ‘bible’—for serious Thoreau scholarship.”

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Tapping into the magic of Thoreau’s manuscripts

Digital Thoreau intern Emily Aikens is an undergraduate English major at Yale University.

In an age when most literary drafting takes place digitally and can be erased forever with a keystroke, there is something awe-inspiring about engaging with a physical record of an author’s thoughts, mistakes, and ideas. Philip Larkin writes that all literary manuscripts have “a magical value and a meaningful value.” The meaningful value refers to how manuscripts give readers additional context for understanding a printed text. The magical, on the other hand, describes the physical properties of the manuscript: the notes in the margins, the ink stains on the corners, and the kind of paper an author chose to use. Observing these qualities with one’s own eyes is what brings a manuscript to life. It’s what allows one to feel like they are in the room with an author, privy to the secrets that go into constructing a masterwork of literature.

This magical feeling was overwhelming as I paged through high-resolution digital images of Thoreau’s Walden manuscripts. Although I had read the print version of Walden several times, physically seeing Thoreau’s handwriting on the manuscript pages made me feel even more connected to him as a writer.

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A new take on Thoreau’s deep cut

I’m excited to announce the latest addition to Digital Thoreau: an electronic version of William Rossi’s essay “Making Walden and Its Sandbank,” which first appeared in print in the Concord Saunterer Vol. 30 n.s. (2022), 10–58. Rossi is co-editor of two volumes of Thoreau’s Journal in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, published by Princeton University Press, and (with John Lysaker) of Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship (Indiana UP, 2009). He also edited the Norton Critical Edition of Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (3rd edition, 2008).

Making Walden and Its Sandbank revisits one of the most famous passages of Walden—Thoreau’s description, beginning in paragraph 6 of “Spring,” of the “forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village”—in light of what the Walden manuscript reveals about just when and how Thoreau first drafted, and subsequently revised, the passage. The essay represents an important new contribution to our understanding of both Walden’s and Thoreau’s development. As explained in the abstract to the Saunterer version of the essay:

Close and contextual analysis of Thoreau’s early expansion of Walden’s famous sandbank passage provides considerable insight into his shift toward greater literary and scientific naturalism. Together with its subsequent revisions, this passage, drafted in the spring 1848 Journal six or seven months after he left the Pond, already comprises the core of the narrative’s universally celebrated climactic epiphany. Although scholars have long known of its existence, when its revisions are dated and examined in the contexts of the Walden manuscript’s development, Thoreau’s practice of using the Journal to compose Walden material, the contemporary evolution debate, and his engagement in what historians call “public science,” this remarkable event can be seen both to illuminate and to complicate Thoreau’s career-defining “turn to science” in the early 1850s.

After Rossi generously agreed to republish his essay here, Digital Thoreau editor (and Writings Editor-In-Chief) Elizabeth Witherell and I worked with him to develop a web presentation of his content designed to improve the readability of his manuscript transcriptions and allow readers to compare those transcriptions directly to the corresponding manuscript images in the Huntington Library’s digital collection. To embed the Huntington’s IIIF-compliant images in the essay, we used the community-developed, open source Universal Viewer.

Our collaboration with Rossi led to additional refinements of the essay, as the three of us took a deep dive into the manuscript’s interlineations, cancellations, marginal notations, and “overwritten” stretches (where Thoreau replaced words or letters by writing new ones directly on top of them) and gained additional insight into some of Thoreau’s changes. Preparing the essay for web publication also provided an opportunity to tighten the terminology used to describe the various stages of composition represented on the manuscript.

It’s worth comparing Rossi’s detailed analysis of the sandbank passage’s evolution with the revision model presented in Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition as a measure of how much there is still to learn about the timing and content of Thoreau’s revisions, and about the relationship between Walden and Thoreau’s other writings, especially the Journal. “Making Walden and Its Sandbank” will undoubtedly provoke new conversations about Walden’s development, Thoreau’s revision process, and the meaning of a passage central to any understanding of both the book and Thoreau’s thought. It should also bring renewed appreciation for the Huntington’s decision to digitize and freely share one of its most precious holdings and an invaluable resource for both scholars and the general reading public.

Digital Thoreau and Huntington Library collaborate to digitize the Walden manuscript

I’m excited to announce that Digital Thoreau has embarked on a new project, funded by an Innovative Instruction Technology Grant from the State University of New York, to produce a fresh encoding of HM 924, the manuscript of Walden.

The grant has made it possible for the Huntington Library to digitize the manuscript and host the manuscript images in its Digital Library, where they can be freely accessed by the public.

The grant team will create online open educational resources on the practice of digital scholarly editing, using the Walden manuscript as a “laboratory” for introducing learners to principles, issues, and tools central to scholarly editing in general and the production of digital scholarly editions in particular.

Whether using these modules as part of a class or on their own, learners will have the opportunity to develop and hone their documentary editing skills by contributing to a brand-new encoding of the manuscript. Using an interactive transcription interface, they’ll be able to view the manuscript images and identify a variety of manuscript features (such as Thoreau’s insertions and cancellations) either through a suite of editing tools or by directly entering XML-TEI.

This new manuscript encoding will serve as an invaluable companion to Digital Thoreau’s current fluid-text edition of Walden, based on a collation of witnesses across the manuscript’s seven draft versions undertaken by Ronald E. Clapper for his 1967 PhD dissertation, The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text. In the intervening years, there has been no comparable effort to chart the evolution of Thoreau’s masterpiece by examining his extensive rewriting and redeployment of passages as the manuscript grew between 1846 and its publication in 1854. We expect that the Huntington’s high-resolution scan of the manuscript will yield numerous new insights and permit the correction of various errors.

The team collaborating on the SUNY grant-funded project, A Laboratory-Based Introduction to Digital Scholarly Editing, includes the following scholars:

  • Dr. Paul Schacht, Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo and Director, Digital Thoreau (PI)
  • Dr. Elizabeth Witherell, Editor-in-Chief, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton University Press)
  • Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for the Digital Text, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
  • Dr. Caroline Woidat, Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo
  • Dr. Rebecca Nesvet, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin — Green Bay
  • Dr. Fiona Coll, Assistant Professor of Literature and Technology, SUNY Oswego
  • Dr. Nikolaus Wasmoen, Visiting Professor of English, University at Buffalo

200th Birthday Gift to Readers: “Walking”

Happy 200th Birthday, Henry David Thoreau! In your honor, we’ve added a new text to The Readers’ Thoreau, Digital Thoreau’s platform for reading Thoreau socially.

The text is “Walking,” one of Thoreau’s most popular essays, published in 1862.

As our “Note on the Text” explains,

On April 23, 1851, Thoreau “tried out a new lecture, entitled ‘The Wild,’ on the Concord Lyceum and on May 31 repeated it in Worcester. It was to become one of his favorite lectures, one that he repeated many times, working it over and adding to it each time until eventually it became large enough to break into two, the new part entitled “Walking.” Because he knew the market for it would vanish once it reached print, he was careful not to have either part published in his lifetime. But just before his death, he put the two back together again and sold the essay to the Atlantic Monthly where it was published in the issue of June 1862 . . .” (Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962: 286).

Start reading “Walking” now or register an account on the main site and join the public group “General Discussion” to start a conversation in the margin.