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.”

What the manuscript shows

The “Higher Laws” material in A is contiguous at points with material that developed into “The Ponds” and near material that ended up in “The Village” and “Baker Farm.” In the D, E, F, and G drafts of “Higher Laws,” Thoreau adds to this material and revises some of it. On the leaves representing the beginning of the “Higher Laws” material in E and F, respectively, he adds the chapter’s first title, “Animal Food,” in pencil.

Below, we see the top portion of a page from A. Here, a version of material located in “Higher Laws” paragraph 1c (in Walden as published)—“Fishermen and hunters . . . deshabille.”—is followed by a version of material that Thoreau would later relocate to “The Ponds” paragraph 28a: “Flints or Sandy pond our greatest lake . . .”. In pencil, above the first line of the material destined for “The Ponds,” Thoreau has added a catchphrase referencing what would become the first sentence of “The Village” 2a: “VS [Vide Scrap] It was very pleasant”. (The penciled catchphrase is faint; for a closer view, click the image below to open it in a new tab or window.)

Image 197 (Volume 1, p. 194) of HM 924, showing a draft version of “Higher Laws” 1c material followed by a draft version of “The Ponds” 28a material. The “Higher Laws” material begins on the recto of this leaf, where it immediately follows material that would become part of “The Ponds” 4. Following the “Higher Laws” 1c material, above the first line of the “Ponds” 28a material, Thoreau has penciled the catchphrase “VS It was very pleasant”, referencing what would become the first words of “The Village” 2a.

Zooming out just a bit from this location in the manuscript, we find, beginning with HM 924 image 194 (Volume I, p. 191) and running through image 203 (Volume I, p. 200), material that ended up in several chapters, in the following order: “The Village,” “The Ponds,” “The Village” (catchphrase), “Higher Laws,” “The Village” (catchphrase), “The Ponds,” “Baker Farm,” “Higher Laws.” And this sequence, varied as it is with respect to the ultimate disposition of content in the published Walden, tells only part of the story. At several points in this stretch of the manuscript, leaves are missing; these may have contained additional material from all of the chapters mentioned as well as “House-Warming.” (See J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden, with the Text of the First Version [U Chicago Press, 1957], pp. 186-190.)

The challenge: representing re-ordering as fluid text

The purpose of Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition is to facilitate comparison between Thoreau’s drafts. We do this not through a diplomatic transcription of individual manuscript pages but by constructing a critical apparatus in XML/TEI that documents witnesses to textual variants in the manuscript: places where the text on the manuscript surface differs from the text of Walden as published. We use the TEI’s parallel-segmentation method to encode witnesses and the Versioning Machine to produce an HTML display of the encoded text.

As we explain in our preface to the fluid-text edition and explore in further detail in our editorial introduction, the source of our critical apparatus is Ronald E. Clapper’s 1967 Ph.D. dissertation, The Development of “Walden”: A Genetic Text. Clapper’s dissertation presents a running text of Walden as published from first word to last, with witnesses recorded in footnotes; by re-casting his information in TEI, we can remediate these witnesses as “versions” of a Walden-in-progress. These versions are perforce partly conceptual representations of Thoreau’s drafts, given that in each draft after A, Thoreau did not indite an entirely new Walden but rather combined, both literally and mentally, new material with material he had already written, in ways that cannot be reconstructed with any certainty.

To build his critical apparatus, Clapper had to decide on some basic units of analysis. He divides his genetic text into the eighteen chapters of the published Walden, and within chapters, he subdivides the text into paragraphs and (when they have distinct revision histories), sub-paragraphs, ordering these, too, so as to follow Walden as published. As a result, material in Clapper’s genetic text appears at its location in the published Walden even if it appeared elsewhere in a previous draft or drafts. Clapper’s footnotes detail instances where Thoreau has re-ordered material within or across drafts.

Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition follows Clapper in organizing Thoreau’s material by chapter, paragraph, and sub-paragraph (“paragraph segment” in our encoding, represented using TEI’s seg element.) To help readers understand how Thoreau re-ordered material, we reproduce Clapper’s detailed notes in pop-up windows that appear when mousing over paragraph and paragraph segment markers. “Revision notes” pop up when mousing over the letter “r” within the text, showing an additional witness or witnesses in cases where the manuscript contains more than one version of a passage within a single draft.

Nevertheless, readers face a significant challenge in using either Clapper’s dissertation or the fluid-text Walden to understand the manuscript’s development within a version or from one version to the next: the flow of material as represented in both of these editions sometimes deviates significantly from the flow of material on the surfaces of a given manuscript version. The panel displaying each version of a chapter presents its paragraph segments in their final, 1854, order even if the order within a particular version differs from that of 1854. The same principle applies to the disposition of material with respect to chapters.

“Higher Laws”: Fluid text vs. manuscript

For the reasons just given, readers will not see the contiguity of “Higher Laws” 1c and “The Ponds” 28a directly represented in the fluid text panel for A, and they will see the paragraphs and paragraph segments of “Higher Laws” in their final, 1854, order in every panel, including that for A, where the order in the manuscript is in places quite different. The mouseover notes are an essential aid here, as in the example of “Higher Laws” 1b, whose note explains that in the manuscript of A,

or the example of “The Ponds” 4, whose note explains that in the manuscript of A,

In addition to the notes, there are other tools readers can use to get a fuller grasp of the manuscript’s development.

Filtering on “Higher Laws” in our table Written and Re-written in Walden displays the chapter’s 25 paragraph segments, showing Clapper’s determination of each one’s origin and development across the versions. The same information for any given paragraph segment can be found by mousing over that segment’s marker in the text.

In our manuscript search tool, filtering on “A” (Version) and “HL” (In Chapters) will display all the A leaves containing “Higher Laws” material, together with information about the paragraph segments of “Higher Laws” and “The Ponds” visible on each leaf. In addition, the catchphrases for “The Village” 2a, and text not represented in 1854, are noted. (The manuscript search tool is still under construction, but all of the “Higher Laws” leaves have been accounted for.)

Ultimately, the best way to understand the flow of content in A is to consult the manuscript itself. As part of our Walden Manuscript Project, members of the Digital Thoreau editorial team have been experimenting with an approach to encoding selected leaves of Walden in a manner designed to help elucidate the relationships among these leaves and facilitate a clearer view of Thoreau’s revision process. This supplemental encoding effort uses TEI to capture details of individual manuscript surfaces and produce a quasi-diplomatic transcription of each one.

The two images below show the recto and verso, respectively, of a leaf in A. (We already looked, above, at a portion of the verso.) The text on the recto begins in the middle of a sentence from “The Ponds” 4 (“dimpling the surface . . .”). Near the bottom of the page we see the beginning of a version of “Higher Laws” 1c (“The main . . “). Thoreau has canceled the text with two parallel, angled lines. Along the left margin, writing from the bottom up, he’s inserted a sentence that would ultimately become the first sentence of “The Ponds” 3. After the sentence, in pencil, he’s written the catchphrase we earlier noted on the verso, referencing what would become the first sentence of “The Village” 2a: “VS [Vide Scrap] It was very pleasant”. As we saw earlier, “Higher Laws” 1c material continues on the verso (“Fishermen and hunters . . . deshabille.”) and is canceled with a wavy line. After the repeated, faint catchphrase for “The Village” comes material from “The Ponds” 4; Thoreau has boxed it on three sides and drawn two vertical lines through it.

The next two images show the recto and verso of another leaf a little further on in the manuscript. We can clearly see how the flow of text on the manuscript differs from what a reader will find in either Clapper’s dissertation or the fluid-text Walden. The recto begins in the middle of a sentence that would form part of “Higher Laws” 5a. The order of the subsequent “Higher Laws” material on recto and verso is, as stated in the fluid text’s pop-up note to 1c, as follows: 1c, 3a, 1b, 3b, 1d, 3d, 5b. We can see that the 1c material interlined in pencil a little above the midpoint of the page (“It introduces me to the night & to the wildest scenes & detains me . . .”) is a relocated and revised version of material Thoreau canceled at the bottom of the recto and top of the verso of the leaf displayed and transcribed above (images 196 and 197). Reading the material in this sequence is the best way to understand what Thoreau actually wrote in this draft. Viewing Thoreau’s interlineations and cancellations as effected on the manuscript surface is also the best way to gain whatever limited insight is possible into the thinking behind his revisions.

We’ll continue to experiment with the best way to encode and describe selections from the more than 600 leaves that make up HM 924, as well as Walden leaves not included in HM 924, and to share our experiments here.

Our TEI for the leaves described in this blog post is available for download.