From Walden manuscript

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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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.

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.