Reading “T” Leaves

by Paul Schacht

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

by Paul Schacht

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.”

Ron himself was an indispensable resource to the CSUF community. As the tribute goes on to explain,

… Clapper soon became the coordinator of the liberal studies program, a position he held from 1975–99. Recognized for his superb curricular, administrative and advisory skills in this role, Clapper’s many awards over the years culminated in the Faculty of the Year Award for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Following his long service as coordinator, Clapper continued to teach in liberal studies until his retirement in 2011.

Clapper was a tireless champion of the notion that a good education should cultivate understanding of the historical and thematic interconnections of the arts and humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. He opened unique and enduring opportunities for faculty from across these disciples to collaborate in the construction and maintenance of a strong and vital interdisciplinary program, including the development of innovative team-taught classes. As an instructor, Clapper inspired countless students to take up this interdisciplinary approach, teaching classes ranging from large lecture formats to small senior seminars. Following his retirement, Clapper continued his active support of the Department of Liberal Studies, most notably in his organizational assistance and financial sponsorship of an annual interdisciplinary conference and the Jane Hipolito Scholarship for Liberal Studies students.

My first contact with Ron came when I tracked him down in hopes of obtaining permission to use his dissertation as the basis for a project—at that point only roughly formulated—to create an edition of the Walden drafts that would place them side-by-side on a screen. A few emails and phone calls later, I understood just how excited he was by the prospect of reaching a wider audience with his scholarship through the internet. In fact, he explained, he had recently transformed his print dissertation into an electronic version in Microsoft Word, inspired by requests to put a version of his dissertation online, the first of which had come from the late Bradley P. Dean, who had himself worked extensively with Thoreau’s manuscripts. Ron enthusiastically shared his Word files, generously giving Digital Thoreau unrestricted permission to use them for our envisioned fluid-text edition.

In the summer of 2013, I had the privilege of meeting Ron at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, together with Beth Witherell, Editor-in-Chief of the The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, published by Princeton University Press. We looked together at HM 924, which constitutes the bulk of Thoreau’s manuscript drafts of Walden, and discussed ongoing progress with the fluid-text edition. At that point, Ron had already been playing a crucial role in helping the Digital Thoreau project team develop the encoding strategy for the fluid text. For several years afterwards, he and Beth kindly made themselves available to share their perspectives not only on Thoreau and his revision process, but on the special challenges and rewards involved in doing manuscript work, with my students at SUNY Geneseo. (Beth, a member of the Digital Thoreau editorial team, is a regular visitor in my classes to this day.)

The September following that summer meeting, Ron, at my request, emailed me a brief account of how he came to write about the genesis of Walden. In the very lightly edited excerpt from the email below, he carries the narrative beyond “The Development of Walden” to give his own description of the dissertation’s digital afterlife, up to and including our collaboration to produce the fluid-text edition:

I began developing the genetic text of Walden almost by accident. When I was a graduate student in one of Leon Howard’s seminars at UCLA, he suggested that I compare Thoreau’s published version of “Life Without Principle” with the passages in his Journal to determine if some of the inconsistencies in the published version were the result of their having been written at different times in Thoreau’s life. While studying Thoreau’s Journals, I discovered that passages of Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, that were written several years after he had left the pond were very different from passages he wrote while living at the pond. Since J. Lyndon Shanley had recently discovered that the Walden manuscript was divided into seven distinct stages based on differences in the paper, ink, and handwriting, and the manuscript was in the Los Angeles area at the Huntington Library in San Marino, I quickly applied Leon’s method for “Life Without Principle” to Walden.

While there was a distinct first version of Walden, which Shanley published in The Making of Walden, the other six stages did not form complete versions in themselves. Scholars who approached the manuscript could look at the leaves contained in manuscript stages B through G, but they had very little sense of where these leaves fit into the working manuscript. My challenge was to create a genetic text that would allow scholars and students to understand the changes Thoreau made to his manuscript from versions B through G. I began with a printed text of Walden and seven colored pens (red for stage A, pink for B, orange for C, yellow for D, green for E, blue for F and purple for G), and, reading through each set of manuscript leaves, marked each paragraph of the printed text with the color of the stage in which it first appeared in the manuscript. (It would be nice to still have that marked version of Walden, but, unfortunately, it was lost in my move from California to Virginia in 1967 or in my return to California in 1973.) I then, in the form of footnotes, recorded all the substantive variants in the various manuscript versions of that paragraph.

As much as I was indebted to Lyn Shanley for discovering the seven manuscript stages of Walden, I strongly disagreed with his conclusion in The Making of Walden (1957) that “the essential nature of Walden did not change from first to last. Much material was added over the years, but it did not introduce a new element and create a new strain; it was absorbed by and used according to the nature of the original piece” (p. 6). It did change, significantly, in the material he wrote from 1950-54 (Versions D-G). I discussed this with him during lunches while he was visiting the Huntington. Robert Sattelmeyer supported my claims in his important essay, “The Remaking of Walden” and Robert Milder in his important book, Reimagining Thoreau. …

As all Thoreau scholars know, Walter Harding is very special to us all and his generous comment in The New Thoreau Handbook (1980) meant more to me than anything that has been said since: “Since Shanley made his studies, Ronald Clapper has investigated the Huntington manuscripts further. His doctoral dissertation,”The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text” (1967) is one of the most important doctoral dissertations of recent years. No serious student of Walden can afford to ignore it” (p. 50). I must in all honesty add that in spite of my disagreement with Lyn Shanley on the development of Walden, I enjoyed the conversations I had with him at the Huntington, which he acknowledged in the Princeton edition of Walden, and know that the genetic text would not have been possible without his bringing order to the Walden manuscript. His views about the development of the Walden manuscript in no way diminishes his importance in preparing the way for Sattelmeyer, Milder, and others who have drawn on the genetic text for a better interpretations of how Walden developed. One of the joys of scholarship is the way in which we draw and build upon one another’s work. I drew from Shanley, Sattelmeyer and Milder drew from me, and, I think, all Thoreau criticism has benefitted from this.

When I had decided on the genetic text of Walden for my dissertation I went to Leon Howard and asked him if he could recommend a first-rate typist who would be up to this difficult task. He knew just the person and put me in touch with Marina. This became truly a collaboration. I would bring her my work from the last few days I spent at the Huntington in San Marino (which is east of Los Angeles, between Pasadena and San Gabriel, where I live) to her sp[a]cious working apartment in West Los Angeles (near UCLA and Santa Monica) and pick up what she had previously typed, which was always flawless.

I received a summer grant while at the University of Virginia to revise the genetic text along with a graduate student who soon learned Thoreau’s handwriting so well that he could check my work against the microfilm copy of the Walden manuscript that the Huntington gave me when I left the Huntington itself to accept my new job in the English department of the University of Virginia. 

After six years in Charlottesville, Virginia, enjoying the novelty of its fall colors and snow in the winter but dreading the thunderstorms and humidity of its summers, I was anxious to return to my native southern California and its delightful Mediterranean climate. That opportunity came when California State University, Fullerton was looking for someone to coordinate its newly established Liberal Studies program.

The state of California had just eliminated its Education major and now required that those who teach in elementary school must compete a subject-matter B. A. before being eligible to enter a credential program. Each campus of the California State University developed a Liberal Studies degree program that included individual courses in natural science and mathematics, social science, humanities and arts, and language and literature. Since most of these courses were merely selected from various departments of the university, they bore little relation to one another. The Fullerton faculty, however, decided to take this opportunity to create a truly interdisciplinary (not merely a multidisciplinary) program and developed a group of interdisciplinary core courses, drawing from the two leading models of the time, the one associated with the University of Chicago and the other associated with Columbia University.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was embarking on a career similar to the one Thoreau pursued after Walden. As Laura Dassow Walls describes Thoreau in Seeing New Worlds, he is a “theorist” at the “crossroads of disciplines,” mediating between the disciplinary economies of ‘literature’ and ‘science’ through particular linguistic and conceptual structures, in an effort to see them as fundamentally coincident” (p. 8). 

In the meantime, the revision of the genetic text that I had made while at the University of Virginia needed another great typist like Marina. (Word processing was still at least a decade away.) I found her in Karen, who was assigned one summer to the Liberal Studies office. Although I do not remember the details of it, some agency concerned with providing jobs for senior citizens assigned a typist to Liberal Studies at no cost to the university. … While Karen, with her wonderful energy and pleasant personality, was anxious to work for us, there seemed very little for her to do. It was then that I knew I had found my typist. Karen was an extremely fast and accurate typist and once I turned the genetic text over to her, the job was done brilliantly and she seemed to enjoy every minute of it.

After serving as coordinator of Liberal Studies from 1975-1999, I turned to full-time teaching and watched the program develop into a department as it hired some of the best young faculty with interdisciplinary interests to emerge from graduate programs in the first decade of the twentieth-first century, and, especially during the summers, I returned to the Walden manuscript by creating it as a word processing document in Microsoft Word, which is the form I submitted to SUNY Geneseo.

I had received a couple of inquiries about putting the genetic text on line, the first from the late Bradley Dean in 2005, so that is what prompted me to create a Microsoft Word version of the text. I had just finished all but the “Conclusion” when I retired in August 2011, at exactly the time Paul Schacht contacted me. He tried to reach me by phone but my office had just been turned over to a colleague and my phone was disconnected. Fortunately, since I was given Emeritus status, my e-mail remained the same, and Paul reached me that way and we arranged for a phone conversation at my home. I knew from that conversation that Paul had a vision to successfully complete this project. Once I got to know Joe Easterly, I knew the project was in great technical hands. One of the greatest benefits of working with Paul, Joe, and Paul’s wonderful students was sharing some time with Beth Witherell, the editor-in-chief of the Princeton edition of Thoreau’s works. Her support of this project has been essential. And finally, it is most appropriate that this project be centered at SUNY Geneseo, where it will be a part of the Harding legacy. 

After reading the memorial to Ron on the CSFU website, written by April Bullock, Professor of Liberal Studies and Environmental Studies and chair of the Department of Liberal Studies, I reached out to Dr. Bullock to express my condolences. “We held a memorial celebration of [Ron’s] life in October on campus in the Arboretum,” she wrote in her reply, “which seemed a fitting place. Colleagues and former students shared stories about Ron and some lovely food and drink. Several of us sailed out from Newport Beach to scatter Ron’s remains in the ocean. A seagull circled and we tossed roses in the water. It was very moving.”

Earlier this month, on April 11, the liberal studies department’s commons room was officially renamed “Clapper Commons” at a ceremony in which colleagues and students shared memories of a scholar and friend who leaves an enduring legacy.

Tapping into the magic of Thoreau’s manuscripts

by Emily Aikens

Digital Thoreau intern Emily Aikens is a sophomore at Yale University majoring in English.

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. Might a stray mark mean that he was absentmindedly trailing his pencil on the page while deep in thought? Did Thoreau’s change from tight to loose cursive a few pages into “Economy” in Draft A indicate that his hand got tired after pages of furious writing? Even more fascinating, however, were the differences between various drafts of his text. Each of the seven drafts provides its own clues to what Thoreau was thinking. More than that, however, Thoreau’s extensive revisions remind writers today what level of care goes into creating a masterpiece. Although Thoreau scholar James Lyndon Shanley, who worked closely with the manuscript in the 1950s and first arranged the leaves in seven drafts, writes in The Making of Walden with the Text of the First Edition (1957) that the “essential nature of Walden did not change from first to last” (p. 6), careful examination of Thoreau’s manuscripts demonstrates that he evolved as a writer and a thinker from 1845 to 1854. We can learn about Thoreau’s evolution from what he chose to exclude from the published version of Walden as well as from the words that he actually submitted to the printer. Although one can walk into any Barnes and Noble and pick up a modern edition of Thoreau’s published book, that book would not give a full picture of Thoreau’s two-year experiment at the pond.

The history of the Walden manuscripts is complicated. Although Shanley identified seven different drafts of Walden, which the Huntington Library has labeled A-G, none of these drafts is complete. Draft A is the most complete, and subsequent drafts build on what Thoreau wrote in this first draft. While the manuscripts sat largely untouched for many years, Ronald E. Clapper’s 1967 UCLA dissertation “The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text” traces the various drafts of Walden and analyzes the implications that these drafts have for the modern analysis of the text. Clapper is one of several scholars who have attempted to understand what Thoreau’s revisions can tell us about the meaning of Walden. The most recent of these is William Rossi, who uses the manuscripts to illuminate one of Walden‘s most important passages, the description of the thawing sandbank in the chapter “Spring.”

While Clapper’s work throws light on questions concerning the content of Walden, there are still magical qualities of the manuscripts to uncover, namely how the physical properties of the manuscripts affect our understanding of the way Thoreau worked. One of these mysteries is the parallel lines that appear in pencil throughout the seven drafts. Although there are countless markings throughout the manuscript pages of Walden, most of which come from Thoreau himself, many are from when Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who produced editions of Thoreau’s letters and other works, marked the manuscripts with ink, graphite, and colored pencil while analyzing them for William Bixby, who owned the manuscripts in the early twentieth century. The frequency and range of these markings complicate any attempts to discern their meaning. However, the consistency of the parallel lines conveys that these lines had some significance for the publication process of Walden. Usually coming at the end of a sentence or at the break between two words, these parallel lines do not have any obvious purpose like some of Thoreau’s other pencil markings, such as his notations to reposition passages and revise wording (see example below). Still, given that other pencil markings on the manuscripts are clearly made in Thoreau’s handwriting, without further investigation it is impossible to rule out that Thoreau made these markings.

Bottom portion of manuscript image 357 showing a variety of Thoreau's markings

Bottom portion of image 357, from Draft B of the Walden MS, showing a variety of Thoreau’s markings. The passage is from paragraph segment 20b of the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”

Portion of manuscript image 290 showing parallel lines in pencil dividing a line of Thoreau's writing

Portion of manuscript image 290 showing penciled parallel lines dividing “rubbers over calf-skin.” from “you are no doubt”.

With this question in mind, I embarked on a project to examine instances of parallel lines like those shown above across the seven drafts in HM 924. While I had access to physical copies of some of the manuscript leaves at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the Huntington Library’s digital collection allowed me to examine each manuscript page in high resolution. I began with a spreadsheet prepared by Digital Thoreau editor and Thoreau Edition Editor-in-Chief Beth Witherell containing instances of parallel lines she had found so far. Beth’s partially tested hypothesis was that these markings correspond to turnovers in the proof sheets that the publisher of Walden, Ticknor and Fields, sent to Thoreau as the manuscript was being prepared for publication. Starting with Draft B, which appeared to have the most instances of parallel lines from Beth’s initial survey, I recorded in a spreadsheet the manuscript image number of each page that showed parallel lines. I then noted the location of parallel lines on the page and transcribed the words on either side of the markings. After going through this process for each of the drafts, I matched the text surrounding the parallel lines to a location in Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition, which presents the information in Clapper’s dissertation in an accessible digital format. This information allowed me to compare the text on each manuscript page to Walden as published. Once I completed this process for each of the instances of parallel lines, Beth checked my work and marked which instances she thought might correspond to proof sheet turnovers. Paying special attention to these likely cases, I went back through all my recorded instances of parallel lines and checked them against the proof sheets. If the text from a specific manuscript page made it into the published version of Walden, I found the location of that text in the final proof sheets that Thoreau sent to his publisher. For the text that did not make it into the published version, those words did not appear on the final proof sheets.

The information I assembled in this way would appear to confirm Beth’s hypothesis. For example, on manuscript image 1254 we read, “Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy ∥ books & newspapers.” This section of Walden corresponds to the proof sheet numbers 117 and 118. When one looks at the final line of text on the recto of proof sheet number 117, the last word before the turn of the page is “buy.” The text then continues on the recto of proof sheet number 118 with the word “books” and goes on to finish the sentence. While this instance occurred in Draft F, a similar phenomenon occurs in Draft E. For example, on manuscript image 757 we find,

There is a period in the history of the individual as of ∥ the race when the hunters are the “best men,” as the Algonquins called them.

This line of text comes from “Higher Laws” and corresponds to proof sheet numbers 76 and 77. As was the case with Draft F, the turn of the proof sheet happens between the words “as of” and “the race”—a location that matches exactly with the occurrence of the penciled parallel lines. Ultimately, I discovered that each of the seven drafts (A-G) has at least one instance of these parallel lines corresponding to a proof sheet turnover.

Can we be sure that Thoreau, not Sanborn, made these parallel lines? I brought this question to one of my meetings with Beth and Digital Thoreau director Paul Schacht. One piece of evidence that Thoreau is responsible for them is that there is a marking on manuscript image 905 that says “end of 2nd proof” to the right of the parallel lines and above the word “now.” The text on this image corresponds to the proof sheet turnover from page 28 to page 29 (found on proof sheet numbers 9 and 10, respectively), and the top of the proof sheet containing page 29 has the marking “2d.”, which likely refers to the second version of the proof. Beth noted that the words “end of 2nd proof” appear to be in Thoreau’s handwriting.

Portion of manuscript image 905 showing 'end of 2nd proof'

Portion of manuscript image 905. Thoreau has penciled in “end of 2nd proof” above and to the right of parallel lines.

Top portion of proof sheet showing

Portion of an image from the proof sheets of Walden, HM 925 in the Huntington’s collection, showing “2d.” in the top margin in ink, as well as Thoreau’s penciled instruction to the printer, “Let Shelter be the running title soon.”

In addition to analyzing Thoreau’s handwriting to tell whether he made the markings, we also considered the history of the Walden manuscripts and asked who else could have made the markings. There is no record of Sanborn having access to the proof sheets for Walden, so it seems impossible that he would know which sections of text corresponded to the proof sheet turnovers. In any event, Sanborn was mainly focused on identifying passages that do not appear in Walden as published so that he could incorporate them into his own version of the work, the Bibliophile Society’s 1909 edition. Throughout the manuscript leaves he added notes about material he wanted to copy for or omit from his version. Correlating text in the manuscript with proof sheet turnovers would not have been helpful to his research.

Top portion of manuscript image 290 showing notation in left margin in Sanborn's hand

Sanborn’s penciled notation in the left margin of manuscript image 290, from Draft B, reads “Copy & insert — page 28.” Sanborn’s notation in the top margin reads “omit”.

Given this evidence, it is reasonable to assume that Thoreau made parallel line markings throughout Walden to correspond with proof sheet turnovers. Yet a question remains: Thoreau didn’t mark every correspondence between the manuscript and the proof sheet turnovers, only a selection of them. Why? While sometimes there are over fifty pages between two instances of parallel lines, there are also cases in which parallel lines appear on two consecutive pages. Given this lack of consistency, I began another examination of each instance of parallel lines to discern what their significance might be.

My own hypothesis is that Thoreau used them to mark areas of the text that he had heavily edited and wanted to pay special attention to when reviewing the proof. This pattern of heavily edited paragraphs corresponds with the large majority of the parallel line markings that I was able to identify. For example, paragraphs 7 and 8 of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” underwent extensive edits from Draft F to the published version. Thus, Thoreau might have included parallel lines in the middle of paragraph 7—which corresponds to the proof sheet turnover from page 91 to page 92 (found on proof sheet numbers 30 and 31, respectively)—to flag this area of text as one that requires special review. A similar instance occurs in Draft E: Thoreau made parallel lines in the middle of paragraph 15 of “Spring,” and these lines correspond to the proof sheet turnover from page 333 to page 334 (found on proof sheet numbers 111 and 112, respectively). Thoreau also made significant edits to this paragraph between Draft E and the published version.

This theory also accounts for why some parallel lines do not correspond to proof sheet turnovers. While I found 49 instances of these parallel lines throughout Walden, only 25 of them correspond to proof sheet turnovers, which leaves the question: Why are these parallel lines present in the manuscript leaves if not to indicate proof sheet turnovers? One explanation is that Thoreau’s marks intended to identify content for deletion sometimes resemble parallel lines. An example, on manuscript image 383, is the two roughly parallel lines following the word “owl”—one through a comma and the other through a dash. (Thoreau also adds a period after “owl” and revises “and” to “And”.) On a larger scale, some of these areas of text were so heavily edited that they do not appear in the published Walden at all, which is why there is no proof sheet that corresponds to the text surrounding the parallel lines.

Portion of manuscript image 383 showing two lines used by Thoreau to mark content for deletion

Portion of manuscript image 383 showing two lines used by Thoreau to mark content for deletion.

Of course, there is no way to be sure whether Thoreau actually made these lines, nor can we definitively know their function. While some may look at this limitation as a disappointment, I found this lack of certainty exciting. By not having all the answers about the production of his text, we are left to continue wondering about Thoreau and his creative process. Treating the manuscripts as a mine from which there was more knowledge to uncover made my analysis of the text feel relevant and meaningful; it gave me a sense of active engagement with the text that I had not experienced as deeply when I simply read the published version of the book. In other words, this project helped me to tap into the “magical” value of Thoreau’s work.

Not only that, but the unanswered questions surrounding these parallel lines are a reminder that Walden remains a living, breathing text that scholars still do not fully understand. For me, working with Paul and Beth in a collaborative effort to determine the significance of the lines brought Walden to life in a new way and opened my eyes to the scholarly work that one can do in literature other than analyzing the content of a text. As Thoreau writes in “Reading,” “[m]ost men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience . . . but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.” Although the process is tedious, if one makes the effort to “stand on tiptoe” while reading Thoreau’s drafts of Walden, they will undoubtedly uncover what Phillip Larkin identifies as the “magical” element of examining manuscripts.

A new take on Thoreau’s deep cut

by Paul Schacht

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

by Paul Schacht

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

Thoreau bust comes to the web in 3D

by Paul Schacht

Mark Gallagher, doctoral candidate in English at UCLA, Research and Instructional Technology Consultant at the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, and editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin collaborated with Tom Hersey, who teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, to produce this 3D photogrammetric reconstruction of Walton Ricketson’s 1898 bust of Thoreau, based on the original at the Thoreau Institute Library of the Walden Woods Project.

If the model doesn’t show up for you below, you can go to it directly on Sketchfab here. Click the “play” button, zoom to fullscreen, and rotate the image for a full experience of Ricketson’s sculpture — or as full an experience as you’ll get without a trip to the Thoreau Institute Library itself (recommended).

If you have a VR headset or Google’s cardboard VR viewer, you can also see the bust in virtual reality.

Henry David Thoreau (1898) by Walton Ricketson
by Mark Gallagher
on Sketchfab

200th Birthday Gift to Readers: “Walking”

by Paul Schacht

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.

Students at Duke Kunshan University Use Readers’ Thoreau As They Analyze Thoreau Across Cultures

by Paul Schacht

This spring, about two dozen students in two sections at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China are taking “Walden International: Analyzing Thoreau Across Cultures” from Patrick Morgan, a Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Instructor in English at Duke University and a graduate of SUNY Geneseo (English, Geological Sciences, 2010).

Morgan’s Kunshan students are discussing Walden in the margins of Thoreau’s work at The Readers’ Thoreau, the online community of Digital Thoreau.

Campus of Duke Kunshan University
Duke Kunshan University

The students are also “analyzing [Thoreau’s] writings from an international perspective, focusing primarily on his engagement with Asian thought,” according to Morgan’s syllabus, asking how Thoreau “‘package[s]’ ancient Asian philosophies in order to comment on nineteenth-century American culture” and what “cultural forces and contexts … allow scholars like Lin Yutang to claim Thoreau as ‘the most Chinese of all American authors.'”

In addition to meeting with Morgan for 300 minutes each week in class and exchanging ideas online in the margins of Walden, the Kunshan University students are taking a digital field trip to Walden Pond thanks to a website Morgan has created that links passages of Thoreau’s text to YouTube videos he made in which he reads aloud from Walden while capturing the pond’s sights and sounds.

Morgan has been active in Thoreau studies since his undergraduate days at Geneseo, where he presented on “Thoreau’s Bedrock: Emerson’s Influence and the Geomorphological Significance of Emerson’s Cliff, Concord, Massachusetts” for Geneseo’s day celebrating undergraduate research, GREAT Day, in 2010. That same year, his article on “Aesthetic Inflections: Thoreau, Gender, and Geology” appeared in the Thoreau Society’s scholarly annual, The Concord Saunterer. In 2015, Morgan participated in an NEH summer institute for college instructors on “Transcendentalism and Reform in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller” conducted in Concord by a roster of scholars that included Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Phyllis Cole, Jayne Gordon, Robert Gross, John Matteson, Wesley T. Mott, and former Geneseo Harding lecturers Laura Dassow Walls, Megan Marshall, and Joel Myerson.

In addition to his studies and teaching at Duke University, Morgan serves as an editorial assistant at the scholarly journal American Literature, published by Duke University Press.

Life in the Digital Woods: Walden, A Fluid Text Updated

by Matt Spitzer

[See our update post on the Milne Library blog too!]

A Recap: What is Walden: A Fluid Text?

Screen Shot 2014-12-04 at 12.50.31 AMOur Fluid Text edition of Walden gathers eight years and seven versions of the American masterpiece using the Versioning Machine tool and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) mark-up. Want the modern edit of the masterpiece?– we also have the 1971 Princeton University Press edition, reproduced with permission. Readers can see the definitive version foremost (with or without our notes, easily toggled off for a clean read), and then view the older workings of the novel. Easily presented side-by-side, readers can wade time’s river in order to view the evolution of Walden as Thoreau honed it over the years. We’ve encoded the textual changes down to the word based on the scholarship of Ron Clapper. A simple click on the text will highlight the cross-edition variations; all the grunt work has been done for the fascinated student of Thoreau, and now further opportunities for scholarship are available with this publicly available text. Coders, too, can step behind-the-screen to see our TEI mark-up and XSLT. The Fluid Text edition of Walden takes the confident and singular challenge Thoreau gave us long ago even further through the field of digital humanities, and studies of encoding and authorial evolution:

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers . .  .

The Upgrade

With the release of the newly updated Walden: A Fluid Text comes plenty of detail, and quite a few major features. SUNY Geneseo’s Fluid Text team has worked primarily to clean up and edit the text, and to work on a new face for the project. Various bugs and textual errors reported by ours users have been amended, and we used this data to forecast how we wanted to improve the webpage for this update, and this is what we’ve done.

Our Walden: A Fluid Text Data Dictionary has been updated, so now TEI experts and novices alike can view the substratum of encoding mark-up–  the usage of TEI elements and attributes, as well as definitions and further usage tips. On a similar note for coders and the curious, our XSLT source code is now available [zip, tar.gz].

Support for Thoreau’s journal notes (added by Dr. Paul Schacht’s “Literature and Literary Study in a Digital Age” course students) are now available in our work as Notes studded throughout the text. These journal notes were the earliest conceptions of many famous thoughts and passages found in Walden, jotted down by Thoreau years in advance. If you want to take a look at the student work and how this was done through scholarship and various coding methods for this semester-long undertaking, head over here.

In our polishing, we’ve also overhauled the graphical qualities of Walden: A Fluid Text. Stylistic textual rendering has been tweaked, and the distinctive tables in Economy, the inaugural and often mathematical chapter, are reformatted for easier understanding. Currently, individual columns in the versioning machine layout can now scroll independently of each other as well, so that reader’s can compare different sections of Walden at once.

What’s Next

Screen Shot 2014-12-03 at 11.47.34 AMOur Fluid Text, as the name suggests, is always changing, and we have many more features in mind. In keeping with the possibilities of digital tools, and TEI in particular, we have a planned revamp of the website interface to gild our look with a simplicity inspired by Walden itself. Dr. Paul Schacht plans on involving students in this project through further work in his Digital Studies course. A new users manual is planned to accompany the new look. Special attention will also be paid to accessibility on tablet screens, for scholars who want to read Thoreau in the library and woods alike.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Illiad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics . . .