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“Henry’s brilliant sister”:1 The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother’s Posthumous Publications

kathy fedorko

“I have admired yr ﬁdelity in the publishing of his books.” —William Ellery Channing, the Younger

FTER the deaths of their brother John from lockjaw A in 1842, at twenty-eight, and their thirty-seven-year-old sister Helen from tuberculosis in 1849, the two remaining Thoreau siblings, Henry David and Sophia Elizabeth, became close companions and conﬁdants. Alluding to their losses, Sarah Pomeroy writes, “Fate decreed that the two youngest were to become all in all to each other.”2 Their close relationship for the remaining thirteen years, until Henry’s death in 1862, led to Sophia’s role as her brother’s sole literary executor and

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding the Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop, “Concord Massachusetts: Transcendentalism & Social Action in the 19th Century,” and to the workshop sponsor, The Community College Humanities Association, for selecting me as a participant. It was there I learned that Henry Thoreau had sisters. 1Mabel Loomis Todd, The Thoreau Family Two Generations Ago (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: The Oriole Press, for The Thoreau Society, 1958), p. 3. According to Loomis Todd, “It used to be said that Rowse [the portrait painter Samuel Worcester Rowse] greatly desired to marry Sophia, Henry’s brilliant sister.” See Mary Alden Wilder to John Augustus Wilder, 6 October 1854, Mabel Loomis Todd Papers, MS 496C, series V, John Augustus Wilder (1836–1870), John Augustus Wilder Correspondence, box 30, folder 28, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. 2Sarah Gertrude Pomeroy, Little-Known Sisters of Well-Known Men (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1912), p. 257.

The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIX, no. 2 (June 2016). C 2016 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00529.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 223 editor, as a discussion of the preparation process of each of the posthumous editions will show. Love of nature united Henry and Sophia, for they “were very much alike in their love of humor, happy dispositions and fond- ness for nature in all its forms.”3 As children, they had hiked with their parents and siblings, and all six family members had collected plant, rock, and insect specimens.4 As adults, Sophia and Henry both created herbaria, compared plant findings and nature sightings, and, when each traveled, tucked botanical specimens into the lengthy and affectionate letters they ex- changed.5 Sophia exhibits the kind of excitement and scientific knowledge about natural “finds” that her brother does in an 1839 letter she wrote to Prudence Ward while teaching in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Describing a walk with her students, Sophia exclaims, “I must give vent to my ecstasies by writing you about the flowers I have found” and then lists them with their Latin names.6 Together Henry and Sophia explored nature by walking, taking carriage rides, and boating. In his Jour- nal Henry recorded Sophia’s discoveries of plants and animals7

3Pomeroy, Little-Known Sisters, p. 254. 4Annie Russell Marble, Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books (New York: AMS Press, 1902), p. 44. 5David Wood, curator of the Concord Museum, noting Sophia’s skill at “botanizing,” explains that she and Henry used plant presses for specimens they then attached to sheets and identified to create a herbarium for studying botany (An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum [Concord: Concord Museum, 2006], p. 102). Sophia also inscribed pressed leaves. One set of shagbark hickory leaflets bears her signature, the date—13 October 1868—and the place, Fair Haven, on one of the leaflets, and Henry’s poem “Fair Haven” on the other leaflets. Most impressive is a checkered game board she created for her friend Martha Bartlett, “a work of exquisite delicacy” featuring a fern specimen on each of the sixty-four squares. Wood points out that “The brilliant cobalt blue paper used to cover the dark squares is like the paper used to cover John Thoreau and Company pencil boxes” (p. 104). 6Sophia Thoreau to Prudence Ward, 6 May 1839.HM68726, The Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. 7The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Volume 5: 1852–1853, ed. Patrick F. O’Connell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 351; The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Volume 6: 1853, ed. William Rossi and Heather Kirk Thomas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 163; The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, In Fourteen Volumes Bound as Two Volumes, vols. 8–14 (November, 1855–1861), ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1962), 8:1031. For other entries about Sophia’s finds see also 9:1079; 10:1304.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 224 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and described their shared experiences in the natural world, such as hearing the “booming of the snipe,” studying acorns and brown acorn grubs, and watching a magniﬁcent silk moth unfold after dropping from its cocoon.8 As Henry indicated in words and actions, he was very particular about those with whom he would spend time. About companions, he asserts: “I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk,” and “the wood-path and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred solitude and cannot admit promiscuous company.”9 Clearly Sophia met his discriminating standards. Those who knew Henry and Sophia noted the similarities of disposition, character, and intellect that kept them close companions. They were, as an “intimate personal friend” of Sophia’s wrote in 1899, “in perfect accord ...andherthoroughknowl- edge of botany formed a special bond of sympathy between them.”10 Indeed, Elizabeth Weir, a student of Sophia’s who became Emerson’s copyist and the governess of the Emer- son children, recalled that Henry and Sophia were “like twins” and that Henry “opened his thought to her.”11 Irving Allen, a family friend, writes that both Sophia and Henry possessed “a certain weight and gravity of thought and utterance,”12 and Walton Ricketson, the son of Henry and Sophia’s friend Daniel Ricketson, recalled that Sophia’s resemblance to her brother Henry, in many respects, is very marked; there is the same power of description in which he so much excelled, the same cast of countenance, and the same sweet quiet manner

8Torrey and Allen, eds., The Journal, vols. 8–14, 10:1273; 11:1718,andThe Journal, vols. 1–7 (1837-October, 1855), 7:895. 9Torrey and Allen, eds., The Journal, vols. 8–14, 11:1388; 12:1515. 10“Reminiscences of Thoreau,” Outlook, 2 December 1899,p.816. 11Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn From Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs By Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Jillmarie Murphy (Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 38; Edward Waldo Emerson and Emerson Family Papers, 1845–1971 (Bulk 1876–1922), vault A45, Emerson, unit 3,series1,box1,folder19: Elizabeth J. Weir, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass. All references to the Special Collections are quoted with the permission of the Concord Free Public Library Corporation. 12Irving Allen, “American Women to Whom the World is Indebted: Sophia Peabody, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wife—Her Inﬂuence on the Great Author—Thoreau’s Mother and Sister,” The Independent 47 (25 July 1895), p. 988.

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of speech which was so perfect in him, and which always exerts a beneficial influence over others.13 The special closeness between Henry and Sophia casts doubt on a sweeping statement made by Walter Harding, Thoreau’s first contemporary biographer, that, “Thoreau’s attitude toward women was almost entirely negative and his pages are filled with denunciations and denigrations of them both as individuals and as a group.”14 In his Journal, Henry describes the adventures he and Sophia have while boating together: finding a stranded “little dot of a kitten” that they bring home in the boat; seeing a painted tortoise, a wood tortoise, and two red- winged blackbirds; hearing the chickadee, phoebe, and jay.15 In a long 1853 entry, he describes a moonrise boating excursion with Sophia, then their climb up Nawshawtuct Hill, smelling sweet briar along the way. Under an almost full “midsummer night’s moon,” he writes, “From the hill top we see a a [sic] few distant lights in farm houses down below . . . like Italian dwellings on the shores of Italian lakes.”16 The sensual description of the experience suggests what Sandra Petrulionis calls “an almost Wordsworthian closeness between brother and sister.”17 F. B. Sanborn suggests this comparison in his obituary of Sophia: Death confers a momentary distinction on every son and daughter of Adam. But the claim of Sophia Thoreau to a place in the memory

13A Troutbeck Letter-Book (1861–1867): Being Unpublished Letters to Myron B. Benton From Emerson, Sophia Thoreau, Moncure Conway, and Others, Troutbeck Leaﬂets Number Nine (Amenia New York: Troutbeck Press, Christmas, 1925), pp. 12– 13. 14Walter Harding, afterword to The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 476. 15Sattelmeyer, ed., The Writings, Journal, Rossi and Thomas, eds., Volume 6, p. 143; Torrey and Allen, eds., The Journal, 8:936; 9:1078. For other journal entries about boating with Sophia, see The Journal, 7:880, 909, 9:1078; The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, Volume 7:1853–1854, ed. Nancy Craig Simmons and Ron Thomas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 103. 16Sattelmeyer, ed., The Writings, Journal, Rossi and Thomas, eds., Volume 6, pp. 257, 258, 259. 17Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn From Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs By Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), p. xxix.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 226 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of others rests neither on this, nor alone on her devotion to the poet-naturalist, her brother, of whom she was as much the worthy associate, as Dorothy Wordsworth was of the English poet.18 When advanced tuberculosis rendered Henry bedridden in late 1861, Sophia took on a professional role as his amanuen- sis and assistant editor, in addition to being his caretaker and companion, an obvious outcome given that Henry “placed great reliance—as did all who knew her—on his sister’s rare judgment and ability in practical matters.”19 Sophia competently and gladly helped her brother revise his manuscripts and con- duct business with Ticknor and Fields. During his illness Sophia assisted Henry in revising and editing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and began the process of negotiating for new editions of A Week and Walden. She also ensured that “Autumnal Tints,” “The Higher Law,” “Wild Apples,” and “Walking,” which they had worked on together, were published in the Atlantic Monthly after Henry’s death in May 1862.20 Sophia’s most demanding task after Henry’s death involved dealing with his manuscripts left in three trunks, comprising, as William Howarth describes, “about sixty bound volumes, mostly Journal and extract books ...supplemented by several thousand single leaves of notes and rough drafts, which he had sorted into groups and fastened with ribbon or straight pins.”21 Most important to posterity, and contrary to critical disdain about her ability to do so, Sophia kept these manuscripts in meticulous order, selected an editor for her brother’s Jour- nal, and, on her own, edited four posthumous volumes of Henry’s essays. In his obituary for Sophia, editor and writer F. B. Sanborn conﬁrms that she inherited her brother’s papers

18F. B. Sanborn, “Sophia Thoreau,” Springﬁeld Republican, 10 October 1876,p.27, Obituary Scrapbooks, Concord, Mass., 1840–1963,vol.1, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library. 19“Reminiscences,” p. 816. 20The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York: New York University Press, 1958), pp. 636–37, 638–39, 640.WhenTicknor and Fields asked Henry to change the title for “The Higher Law,” Sophia wrote them with his new title, “Life Without Principle.” 21William L. Howarth, The Literary Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau (Colum- bus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. ixx.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 227 and “published many of them in volumes, as he had expected her to do.”22 Bibliographers of Henry’s work, however, have erroneously credited two men, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing the Younger, with editing or co-editing with Sophia the posthumous editions. The misattributions no doubt oc- curred, in part, because no editors’ names are indicated on the title pages of the first editions of the posthumous collections, belying Wendell Glick’s assertion that “the names of the editors of the four posthumous volumes issued earlier by Ticknor and Fields [before A Yankee in Canada] appear on the title pages.”23 On the other hand, the misattributions may also reflect the assumption that, as a woman, Sophia could not possibly have handled the editing on her own. In 1890, Henry’s first bibliographer, Samuel Jones, listed no editor for the first volume, Excursions, published in 1863, and he credited Ellery Channing for editing The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866).24 In his revised 1894 “Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau, With an Out- line of His Life,” however, Jones indicated that Excursions was edited jointly by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sophia Thoreau, and that Sophia Thoreau and Ellery Channing jointly edited The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers.25 The next major bibliography of Henry’s work, compiled by Francis H. Allen and published in 1908, credited Sophia for collecting the papers for Excursions, named Sophia and Ellery Channing as editors of The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, and indicated no editor for A Yankee in Canada.26

22Sanborn, “Sophia Thoreau,” p. 27. 23The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 220. 24Samuel Arthur Jones, “A Contribution Toward a Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau,” in Thoreau’s Thoughts: Selections from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. H. G. O. Blake (Boston: Houghton, Mifﬂin and Company, 1890), p. 136. 25Samuel Arthur Jones, Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau, With An Outline of His Life (New York: The De Vinne Press, 1894), pp. 47, 48, 50. 26Francis H. Allen, A Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 1908), pp. 15, 17, 20, 23–24.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 228 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Subsequent scholars have provided variants of these editors’ attributions. No one has given Sophia the credit she deserves for being the sole editor of all of her brother Henry’s posthumous editions. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, however, editor of the deﬁnitive Princeton University Press editions of Excursions, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod, has credited Sophia with doing most if not all of the editing of the collections. In his historical and textual introductions to these works, as well as in an essay on The Maine Woods, Moldenhauer discusses Sophia’s role as editor and casts doubt on Ellery Channing’s assistance. The thorough study of the manuscript preparation process and of letters, diary entries, and textual evidence upon which my argument rests reveals that Sophia alone completed the work to see Excursions, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers through to publication. Early twentieth-century critics speak highly of Sophia’s business acumen and her ability to handle Henry’s manuscripts and reputation. Annie Russell Marble, who borrowed letters and diaries from Thoreau friends and relatives and interviewed surviving friends of Henry and Sophia for her 1902 book, Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books, reminds her readers that “Much has been written of the famous men who have immortalized Concord but inadequate praise has been given to the coterie of noble, brilliant women of these families of renown,” among them “Mrs. Thoreau and her daughters.” Sophia, for instance, “showed keen, sage ability” in running the Thoreau pencil business and she “lived . . . to redeem his [Henry’s] character from the unjust representations of ultra- stoicism and an egotistic autocracy. To her true and loving memory are due the later testimonies to her brother’s home- tenderness and his friendships.”27 Sarah Gertrude Pomeroy, in her 1912 book, Little-Known Sisters of Well-Known Men, also notes Sophia’s business success and credits her for meeting the challenge to “clearly interpret [her brother] to a public which,

27Marble, Thoreau, pp. viii, 19, 21, 54.

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at length, appreciated him.”28 Several letters written by Sophia and Henry’s aunt Maria Thoreau in 1878 afﬁrm Sophia’s man- agerial ability. In them Maria casts doubt on biographer H. A. Page’s assessment of Henry’s involvement in the family pencil business. As she exclaims to her friend Mrs. LeBrun, “The idea that Henry could or would apply himself for any length of time, as Mr. P—says, ‘To his Father’s Craft, pencil making is simply absurd.”29 Maria similarly sets the record straight in a letter to F. B. Sanborn: “his Father left no will but a competency at least to his family, and what was done relative to the business after his death was accomplish’d by his daughter Sophia.”30 Mid-twentieth-century Thoreau biographers argue, however, with varying degrees of gender stereotyping, that Sophia’s emo- tions and other personal limitations prevented her from sound judgment and rendered her incapable of editing her brother’s work and dealing with his publisher. In his 1939 biography of Thoreau, Henry Canby dismisses Sophia with the accusation that,inrelationtoHenry,she lived in his memory and often wept over it. She had to be handled carefully by friends and publishers, for even when they escaped from the volubility of her mother, they found her fanatical in her desire to carry out what she thought would have been her brother’s wishes.31 Meanwhile, in his 1948 biography of Thoreau, Joseph Krutch puts Sophia in the company of champions more “fanatical than wise” by explaining that “Sister Sophia, to whom Thoreau had entrusted his papers, was fussily assiduous.”32 Perry Miller asserts that Sophia was “as crotchety a creature as any of the

28Pomeroy, Little-Known Sisters, pp. 267, 258. 29H. A. Page [Alexander H. Japp], Thoreau: His Life and Aims (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), p. 90; Maria Thoreau to Mrs. [Jennie M.] LeBrun, 17 January 1878;see also Maria Thoreau to Mrs. [Harriet Lincoln] Wheeler, 4 March 1878, Thoreau Family Correspondence, 1836–1878, vault A45, Thoreau, unit 3,folder1, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library. 30Maria Thoreau to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, 18 March 1878, Abernethy Manuscripts, Special Collections and Archives, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt. 31Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton, Mifﬂin Company, 1939), p. 441. 32Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau (New York: William Sloane Asso- ciates, Inc., 1948), p. 249.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 230 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Thoreaus.”33 For this part, Philip Stern, in 1970, claims that “practically every word that Thoreau ever wrote was subject to posthumous censorship by his sister Sophia and other relatives and friends.”34 As proof, he speciously notes that “since Thoreau cut up his Journals and other manuscripts to use the clipped pages in his work, the clipping process could be continued after he was dead and not be detected.”35 Given Sophia’s retort that Henry’s Journal contained nothing offensive when Thomas Wentworth Higginson suggested that some parts of it might be too private to publish, it seems highly unlikely that she would censor her brother’s Journal in any way, let alone by cutting out offensive sections in manuscripts she treasured. Much suspicion of both Sophia’s dedication to her brother’s work and her ability—or lack thereof—to edit it appears to stem from her supposed criticism of Henry’s writing as blasphemous. In a helter-skelter February 1849 letter to Prudence Ward, Aunt Maria notes that Henry is preparing his book “Waldien” [sic] for publication (admitting that she doesn’t know how to spell it). A bit later she explains: as for Henry’s book, you know I have said, there were parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy, and I did not believe they would publish it, on reading it to Helen the other day Sophia told me, she made the same remark, and coming from her, Henry was much surprised, and said she did not under stand it.36 Although Maria mentions Walden, her second reference to “Henry’s book” is probably to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, given its controversial “Sunday” chapter in

33Perry Miller, “A Journal, of No Very Wide Circulation,” Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840–1841) Together With Notes and a Commentary (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 1958), p. 6. 34The Annotated Walden: Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1970), p. 22. 35Stern, ed., The Annotated Walden, p. 23 n12. William Howarth explains that Thoreau clipped pages from his Journal for article drafts and that “In the 1840she nearly devoured some volumes this way, leaving behind only unbound fragments.” The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer (New York: The Viking Press, 1982;repr. New York: Penguin Press, 1983), p. 5. 36Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, 28 February 1849,HM64932, The Huntington Library.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 231 which Henry, in his stern questioning of Christianity and Chris- tians, makes blunt comments like, “Some to me seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations” are, for some people, “everlastingly settled,—as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my wanderings, I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things.”37 In discussing Maria’s letter, Henry Canby skewers all the Thoreau women, as he does throughout his biography: Henry must often have wished himself back in the woods or at Emer- son’s. Cynthia, nervous and conventional, Helen, rigidly moral and dying of tuberculosis, Sophia with her headaches, so admiring and yet so easily shocked, Aunt Maria and her sarcastic Toryism—they were all passing his book around and begging him to take out this or that.38 Subsequent biographers continued to assert that Sophia considered “Henry’s book” blasphemous. In 1982, Harding follows Canby’s 1939 reading of Maria’s letter as an indictment of Sophia. Rather than examining Maria’s letter and Sophia’s role, Lebeaux (1984) and Richardson (1986) refer to Canby. Lebeaux accuses Henry’s mother Cynthia, sisters Sophia and Helen, and his aunt Maria of having “adverse reactions” to parts of Henry’s work, and Richardson repeats Canby’s erroneous conclusion by asserting that “Sophia was so far from understanding what he [Henry] had been after in A Week that she could be reported as having found ‘parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy.’”39

37Linck C. Johnson, “Historical Introduction” in Henry D. Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 70.Krutch, in Henry, p. 102, assumes Maria refers to Walden in her letter. Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965; repr. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1982), p. 246, and Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 300, assume Maria refers to A Week, as does Johnson, who cites Harding (p. 469). Richard Lebeaux, Thoreau’s Seasons (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), concludes that it is unclear to which book Maria refers (p. 102). 38Canby, Thoreau, p. 249. 39Harding, The Days, p. 246; Lebeaux, Thoreau’s Seasons, p. 103; Richardson, Henry Thoreau, p. 300.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 232 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY A more accurate reading of the reference to blasphemy in Maria’s confusingly punctuated letter, however, seems to be that Sophia relayed her sister Helen’s remark to her aunt. The “she” in “on reading it to Helen the other day Sophia told me, she made the same remark” more grammatically refers to Helen, not to Sophia. Indeed, Marble explains that Helen “was always fearful lest people might misinterpret her brother’s frank aims and speech.”40 This reading of the letter is also substantiated by F. B. Sanborn’s assumption that Helen had already seen ﬁt to apologize for Henry’s views. In his Familiar Letters, Sanborn printed an 1837 letter from Henry to Helen and explains that the controversial turn of Thoreau’s mind . . . must have given to his youthful utterances in company the air of something requiring an apology. This, at all events, seems to have been the feeling of Helen Thoreau, whose pride in her brother was such that she did not wish to see him misunderstood. Ralph Waldo Emerson omitted this letter when he compiled Henry’s Letters to Various Persons, but Sanborn believed it deserved publication because it marks the moment when it became clear to Henry “that he must think for himself, whatever those around him might think.”41 In the letter Henry defends his writings and tells Helen that For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise, he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self-respect. Now when such a state of things exists, that the sacred opinions one advances in argument are apologized for by his friends, before his face, lest his hearers receive a wrong impression of the man,—when such gross injustice is of frequent occurrence, where shall we look, & not look in vain, for men, deeds, thoughts? As well apologize for the grape that it is sour,— or the thunder that it is noisy, or the lightning that it tarries not.42

40Marble, Thoreau, p. 47. 41Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Houghton, Mifﬂin and Company, 1895), pp. 11–12. 42Sanborn, ed., Familiar Letters, pp. 11–12.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 233 We do not know what caused her brother’s irritation with her, but this letter does suggest that Helen had said something apologetic about Henry’s views. Later, she might have expressed discomfort with A Week. Sophia’s impatience with religious dogma and practice, akin to her brother’s, also makes it unlikely that she considered Henry’s work blasphemous. Mabel Loomis Todd, who con- fesses that her “childhood and early girlhood idol was Sophia, as vital and fascinating as a woman could be,” remembers that one of Sophia’s favorite quotations, supporting religious sub- stance over dogma, came from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”: Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds. At last he beat his music out; There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.43 In her diary, Mabel recorded a story about Sophia’s religious views told to her grandmother by Maria Thoreau. Maria told Mabel’s grandmother that Sophia had walked out of an Epis- copal service when communion was administered. “Sophia is Unitarian in her sentiments,” Maria supposedly declared. Ma- bel, as a result, determined that “if one strong-minded sensible woman has got herself into this same ﬁx [of having unortho- dox views and an orthodox family], and can get over it and be happy & repair the mischief, why I certainly can do the same. I shall never take the communion again.”44 Maria, one of the “orthodox” Thoreaus, expressed her regret in a letter to her friend Harriet Wheeler that F. B. Sanborn, in his obituary of Sophia, “gave the impression that she thought so lightly of death.” Maria admits that “in our Faith we differ’d, for while she believed in ‘Immortality’ and in the kindness of her heav- enly Father, she did not see that Christ was the way He had appointed by which in faith we as sinners were to go to Him.”45

43Todd, The Thoreau, pp. 15, 17. 44Tuesday, 2 June 1874, Mabel Loomis Todd Diary, MS 496C, series III, box 45, folder 46, Mabel Loomis Todd Papers, Yale University Library. 45Maria Thoreau to Mrs. Harriet Lincoln Wheeler, 5 December 1876, vault A45, Thoreau, unit 3,folder1, Thoreau Family Correspondence, 1836–1878, Special Col- lections, Concord Free Public Library.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 234 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Sophia’s demonstrated lack of Christian orthodoxy weakens the claims by critics such as Canby, Krutch, and Harding that she considered her brother Henry’s writing “blasphemous” and so, by extension, could not be a competent editor of his work. Contemporary critics, on the other hand, acknowledge that without Sophia’s devotion to her brother and his work, the posthumous volumes might not exist. Lebeaux, for instance, remarks, “Aided by his absolutely devoted sister, who copied over his rough drafts and who, as he grew weaker, took dictation from him, [Henry] reaped a ﬁnal harvest.”46 Petrulionis notes that, as Henry’s “literary executor,” Sophia “exercised a savvy editorial sense as well as a proprietary defensiveness about Henry’s writings,” and Moldenhauer credits Sophia with “taking upon herself the care of her brother’s reputation and the enormous labor of overseeing the publication of his uncollected papers and unpublished manuscripts.”47 Clearly, these critics recognize Sophia’s ability to edit her brother’s manuscripts. Perhaps because Ellery Channing walked, talked, and traveled with Henry as one of his closest friends, bibliographers and biographers have assumed that he deserves credit for assisting Sophia with editing Henry’s four posthumous volumes of essays. This conclusion, however, is belied by the preponderance of attestations regarding Channing’s shoddy writing habits and bombastic style, as well as his editorial slackness and overall disinterest in his three newspaper jobs. Despite his prickliness and unreliability, Ellery Channing en- tertained Henry with his “witty & poetic” conversation. Henry considered him a close companion and “an inexhaustible fund of good-fellowship.”48 When he got around to writing however, Channing produced disorganized, hyperbolic prose, a trait not conducive to editing others’ work.49 Henry himself once

46Lebeaux, Thoreau’s Seasons, p. 369. 47Petrulionis, ed., Thoreau, p. xxix; The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph L. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 130. 48Harding and Bode, eds., The Correspondence, p. 413. 49Reviews of Channing’s biography of Henry, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, were scathing, with many noting the biography’s “disagreeable” style, described best by the New York Times as “so obtrusively bad as to suggest the suspicion that Mr. Channing

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 235 observed in his Journal, “In our walks C. takes out his notebook some times & tries to write as I do—but all in vain. He soon puts it up again—or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of the landscape.”50 Robert Hudspeth, one of two Chan- ning biographers, observes that Emerson noticed “the painful contrast” between Channing’s “imaginative conversation and the stilted writing.”51 His poetry, as well, held “a storehouse of chaotic treasure which others might sometime fit into ac- ceptable patterns” according to Channing’s other biographer, Frederick McGill.52 In an 1839 letter to Samuel Ward, who had sent him some of Channing’s poems, Emerson recognizes the virtues of the poems but notes that Channing “goes to the very end of the poetic license, & defies a little too disdainfully his dictionary & logic.” When he wrote to Channing about wanting to publish the poems in The Dial, Emerson referred again to Channing’s careless writing and suggested “a running commentary in prose that would shade the abruptness & frag- mentary character of several pieces.” In a letter to Elizabeth Hoar, however, Emerson mentions Channing’s refusal to ac- cept his editing of the “bad grammar & his nonsense” in the poems he was preparing to publish in the October 1840 issue of The Dial.53 Ellery Channing’s flamboyant, careless writing style suggests that he would make an unlikely editor; in addition, bibliographers and biographers such as Hudspeth note that Channing did not have “the temperament or talent for editing.”54 Francis

has purposely adopted it, the better to set off the simplicity and clearness of the extracts he gives from Thoreau. . . . Thoreau’s clear and clean-cut sentences shine like diamonds in a dust heap.” New York Times, 25 October 1873. 50The Writings, Journal, ed. Robert Sattlemeyer, Volume 4: 1851–1852, ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 170. 51Robert N. Hudspeth, Ellery Channing (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), p. 43. 52Frederick T. McGill, Jr., Channing of Concord: A Life of William Ellery Channing II (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), p. 72. 53The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 227, 253, 331. 54Robert N. Hudspeth, general introduction to The Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau, Volume I: 1834–1848, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2013), p. 410.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 236 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Allen, in discussing Henry’s editors, observes that Channing was “a poet and litterateur´ without temperament or training . . . for the exactnesses of scholarship. His treatment of Thoreau’s journals in quoting them in his Thoreau: The Poet- Naturalist shows how untrustworthy he was in such matters.”55 Allen no doubt is referring to Channing’s failure to identify material from Henry’s Journal, inserting his own punctuation and wording into the entries, occasionally deleting lines without indicating he had done so, and moving randomly from one entry to another within a single set of quotation marks.56 Although recognizing Channing’s lack of training for scholarship, Allen still credited Channing with co-editing The Maine Woods and Cape Cod with Sophia. Despite this information about Channing’s weaknesses as a writer and editor, scholars routinely refer to his supposed editorial experience to support the contention that he co-edited Henry’s posthumous volumes with Sophia. Evidence suggests otherwise. A closer look at Channing’s biography reveals that, for the most part, Channing hardly worked at the editing posts he held. McGill, for instance, in acknowledging that “Sophia would have been happy to remain the sole editor” of the posthumous editions, argues that since she was “quite unskilled in the craft, she turned for help to Henry’s closest companion.” Although McGill admits that “Channing himself was ill ﬁtted for the exacting demands of such a task,” he adds that “he had been an editor of sorts,” “of sorts” being the operative words.57 In November 1841, Channing received a “subeditorship” at the Cincinnati Gazette,58 but after several months of not being

55Francis H. Allen, Thoreau’s Editors: History and Reminiscence (Monroe, N.C.: Nocalore Press, for The Thoreau Society, 1950), p. 8. 56For an example of Channing’s negligence, see William Ellery Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist. With Memorial Verses (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873;repr. new ed., enl., ed. F. B. Sanborn [Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902]), pp. 173– 74 (hereafter cited as Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist) and Henry’s 3 September 1851 entry, Neufeldt and Simmons, eds, The Writings: Journal, Volume 4, pp. 33–34.See also Torrey and Allen, eds., The Journal, vols. 1–7, 2:206, 216, 221, 225–26, 248–70 and 3:275–86, 299–301, where footnotes indicate which entries Channing uses on pages of Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist. 57McGill, Channing, p. 158. 58McGill, Channing, p. 65.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 237 paid, he returned to the East in July 1842.59 Francis Dedmond notes that Channing, in his autobiographical satire “Leviticus,” “wrote at some length about his short stay on the Gazette.The editor, he said, had ‘quite a number of dullards & dunces’ about him. ‘These he called his assistant editors; but, in fact, he kept them there to bully & to bite, to fault & shout at.’”60 Chan- ning’s veiled vilification of his boss reminds us that he himself could not have been easy to work with. Various discussions have referred to Channing as eccentric, undependable, rude, unfocused, self-pitying, troubled, irresponsible, capricious, untrustworthy, and “insufferably loutish.”61 In November 1844, after an employment hiatus of more than two years, Ellery Channing’s sister-in-law Margaret Fuller got him a position at the New York Tribune. Hudspeth writes of this position that “Channing . . . had only the routine office chores of clipping stories from exchange papers and of running errands” and contends that “he thoroughly detested his work.”62 McGill describes Channing as beginning the job “without any clear knowledge of either his duties or his wages.”63 After about four months he left the job at the Tribune and returned to Concord in 1845.64 Eleven years later, in February 1856, Ellery Channing became assistant editor of the New Bedford Mercury, this time with Daniel Ricketson’s help.65 Sanborn refers to Channing as “an indifferent editor” and indicates that, “The labors of Mr. Channing in The Mercury office cannot have been very exacting, and precisely what they were cannot now be

59Hudspeth, Ellery, p. 26. 60Francis B. Dedmond, ed.,“The Selected Letters of William Ellery Channing the Younger (Part One),” Studies in the American Renaissance 1989, ed.JoelMyerson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 172 n7. 61McGill, Jr., Channing, p. 122. For additional discussion of Channing, see Don Mortland, “Ellery Channing and Daniel Ricketson: Thoreau’s Friends in Conﬂict,” The Concord Saunterer, 19,no.1 (July 1987), pp. 22–43; Dedmond, “The Selected Letters (Part One),” pp. 115–31; and Hudspeth, Ellery. 62Hudspeth, Ellery, p. 31. 63McGill, Channing, p. 83. 64Hudspeth, Ellery, p. 31. 65McGill, Channing, p. 150.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 238 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY ascertained.”66 According to McGill, Channing “wrote editori- als and news articles, poems, and reviews,” but he adds that Channing’s “writings were anonymous,” thereby devaluing his claim.67 Bronson Alcott wrote to his wife in April 1857 while visiting Ricketson that, although Channing seemed “saner & sounder” than usual, he remained secretive about his life in New Bedford, and no one “finds any thing of his in ‘The Mer- cury’ he edits, and to which for three or four days of the week he devotes his wits without finding them as far as he or his readers can discover.”68 Channing stayed with the Mercury through 1858 but “found more and more time for rambles in Concord.” McGill reports that, “He took a vacation of at least twelve days in April of 1857, and that summer he stretched a leave to something like two months.” In late 1858, Ricketson found Channing in the Mercury office twice, “but even between these two occasions, some five weeks apart, Channing was walking with Thoreau to Walden and Fairhaven Hill.”69 Channing makes no mention of this editing job in his letters during this period.70 Thus, although occasionally employed as an editor, Channing apparently did not work as one. No bibliographer has suggested that Channing was involved with Excursions, the first posthumous collection of Henry’s writings, which Ticknor and Fields published on 10 October 1863. Channing belittled Excursions in his letter to Benjamin Marston Watson in July 1863: “Mr. Thoreau’s last book is now through the press, hardly any original matter.”71 Biographers

66F. B. Sanborn, “William Ellery Channing and Daniel Ricketson,” The New Bed- ford Mercury, 7 August 1907, pp. 9, 8. 67McGill, Channing, p. 150. 68The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, ed. Richard L. Herrnstadt (Ames: The Iowa State University Press, 1969), p. 240. 69McGill, Channing, p. 154. 70Francis B. Dedmond, ed., “The Selected Letters of William Ellery Channing the Younger (Part Two),” Studies in the American Renaissance 1990, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1990), pp. 159–241. 71Francis B. Dedmond, ed., “The Selected Letters of William Ellery Channing the Younger (Part Three),” Studies in the American Renaissance 1991, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 318. Channing’s information about the publication date is obviously incorrect. See Raymond A. Borst, Henry David

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 239 do credit Emerson for editing the collection with Sophia, however. As with all of the posthumous collections, the title page did not include an editor. Despite this, Samuel Jones, for instance, indicates in 1894 that the volume was edited jointly by Emerson and Sophia.72 Allen, on the other hand, in both 1908 and 1950, credits Sophia alone, but only with collecting the papers that compose the book.73 Annie Fields, the wife of Henry’s publisher James T. Fields, refers, in a July 1863 diary entry, to Emerson’s “new volume containing his address upon Henry Thoreau,” but she discusses only his difﬁculty complet- ing “his address,” by which she means Emerson’s “Biographical Sketch” of Henry that would serve as the introductory essay for Excursions.74 His sketch was a “slightly revised” version of his memorial essay for Henry, titled “Thoreau,” published in the August 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. “Thoreau,” in turn, was an expanded version of the eulogy Emerson had given at Henry’s funeral in Concord on 9 May 1862.75 According to An- nie, Emerson was “careful of words and ﬁnds many to be considered again and again, until it is almost impossible to extort a manuscript from his hands. He has written but little, of late.”76 In 1995, Moldenhauer, like Allen earlier, credited Sophia with the compilation: “Taking upon herself the care of her brother’s reputation and the enormous labor of overseeing the publication of his uncollected papers and unpublished manuscripts, Sophia Thoreau assembled Excursions (1863) for Ticknor & Fields.”77 More recently, in 2007, Moldenhauer remarked that

Thoreau: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), p. 41. 72Jones, Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau, p. 47. 73Allen, A Bibliography, p. 15,andThoreau’s Editors, p. 7. 74M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friend- ships, Drawn Chieﬂy From the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), p. 14. 75The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 331. 76Howe, Memories, p. 14. 77Joseph L. Moldenhauer, “The Maine Woods,” The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 130.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 240 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Excursions was edited by Sophia, who was “probably assisted in some measure by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and possibly assisted in mechanical matters by her friend and neighbor Elizabeth Hoar.” He also referred to Fields and Sophia together deter- mining what to include in this ﬁrst posthumous volume of essays and to Sophia deciding which essays needed more work.78 Sophia’s editorial work on Excursions and the three volumes that followed demonstrated her increasingly knowledgeable and professional understanding of the editorial process. The meticulous care with which she protected Henry’s manuscripts as literary executor during the creation of these volumes helped ensure that posterity would appreciate the full extent of her brother’s achievements. For Excursions, in addition to Emer- son’s essay, Sophia collected and edited ﬁve essays that had been published in Henry’s lifetime: “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” “A Walk to Wachusett,” “The Landlord,” “A Winter Walk,” and “An Address on The Succession of For- est Trees.”79 The remaining four essays included in Excur- sions had been published in The Atlantic Monthly, thanks to Sophia’s efforts in the months following Henry’s death: “Walk- ing” in June 1862; “Autumnal Tints,” October 1862; “Wild Ap- ples,” November 1862; and “Night and Moonlight,” November 1863.80 Howarth suggests that Sophia constructed “Night and Moonlight” using a draft and lecture sheets when Fields asked for one more essay to complete the volume, so it was most likely her edited version that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly around the time Excursions was published.81 Reviews for Ex- cursions, while not mentioning an editor, commented positively on the collection of essays. One reviewer, for instance, explains

78Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, pp. 331, 336. Perhaps Moldenhauer bases his idea about Hoar’s assistance on Abigail May Alcott’s 24 March 1862 letter about Henry to her brother, Samuel J. May: “Elizabeth Hoar is arranging his papers—Miss Thoreau copying for him—he is too weak to do any of the mechanical part himself.” Frederick Wagner, “Mrs. Alcott Reports Thoreau’s Response to ‘The Forester,’” The Concord Saunterer, 14,no.3 (Fall 1979), p. 1. I have found no manuscript evidence of Hoar’s assistance. 79Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, pp. 339–40. 80Allen, A Bibliography, pp. 72–73. 81Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 332 n4.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 241 that “all of the essays are of wonderful excellence—yet very diverse in their manner. It is easy to trace the ripening of Thoreau’s powers in this succession of papers written at inter- vals during the last twenty years of his life.”82 Remarkably, in addition to enduring the loss of her brother, Sophia edited Excursions while suffering from an illness that, as she wrote to her friend Daniel Ricketson in August 1862, “prostrated” her all summer.83 Sophia described her work on Excursions as well as her tenuous health in a May 1863 letter to her cousin Mary Anne Dunbar:

Our previous afﬂictions, & this terrible shock to my nerves, added to the fatigue of nursing mother has seriously impaired my frail health, & the spring ﬁnds us miserable indeed. . . . Ticknor & Fields are about to issue a volume of my brother’s papers. Every moment of my time is occupied. I have been preparing some of my brothers Mss. for the press & of course I have household duties so that you will not wonder if I neglect my correspondents.84

In December 1863, she wrote to Ricketson, “I hope you like the new volume ‘Excursions.’ I am quite reconciled to the title,” suggesting that she had initially preferred something else. She also confessed that “For many weeks I have had a lame wrist, which has compelled me to neglect all my correspondents; nothing taxes it so severely as writing.”85 In Excursions, of the ninety-nine manuscript pages of “Walking,” thirteen are in

82“Literary Review,” Boston Commonwealth, 23 October 1863,p.1,col.4–5. 83Daniel Ricketson and His Friends, Letter, Poems, and Sketches, Etc., ed. Anna Ricketson and Walton Ricketson (New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1902), p. 148. Sophia eventually died in October 1876 after great suffering with Ascites, a ﬂuid accumulation in the peritoneal cavity, perhaps as a result of tuberculous peritonitis. See Dr. Fred S. Piper to Christopher McKee, 17 June 1956, The Thoreau Society, Harding Series III.P.35.d., Correspondence, 1941–1962. This and all subsequent citations from The Thoreau Society Collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, Lincoln, Mass., are used with its permission. 84Sophia Thoreau to Mary Anne Dunbar, 19 May [1863]. The year was determined by Walter Harding, “The Correspondence of Sophia Thoreau and Marianne Dunbar,” The Thoreau Society Bulletin 33 (October, 1950), p. 2. 85Ricketson and Ricketson, eds., Daniel, pp. 159, 160. Perhaps Sophia preferred Field Notes, a title Fields had initially considered, or Excursions in Field and Forest (Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, pp. 335–36, 343).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 242 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Sophia’s handwriting, as are twelve of the manuscript pages for “Autumnal Tints.”86 Sophia may have ceded her preferred title for Excursions, but she proved a tough bargainer concerning other matters. In a letter to James T. Fields in September 1863, Emerson wrote that “Miss Thoreau” had come to see him “to consult on the draft of a contract you have sent her, touching the ‘Excursions’” and that Sophia had asked Emerson to talk to Fields for her.87 She must have initially doubted her ability to deal with Fields directly, for in October Emerson wrote to him that he was enclosing the contract with “the alterations suggested by Miss Thoreau”:

1. The compensation for the engraving is to be struck out as agreed [sic] 2. She prefers a term of ﬁve years, as in the contract for “Walden,” to the term herein proposed. 3. She is sorry to ﬁnd that her allowance for copyright is to be reduced to 10 cents [sic] She would prefer 15.Butifyou persist in the views expressed in your statement to me, she will acquiesce.88

The “engraving” refers to a plate bearing the crayon drawing of Henry done by Samuel Rowse in 1854. Sophia had designated it as the frontispiece to Excursions, but she did not want to pay for it.89 Bronson Alcott advised Fields that if he talked to Sophia he should make her “feel that Henry will receive as much for his books as if he had made his own bargain, for he was good at a bargain,” suggesting that Sophia could be manipulated during contract negotiations. He added, “they [Sophia and her mother] are a little hard—that is, they do

86The “Walking” manuscript is held by the Concord Free Library Special Collec- tions, and the “Autumnal Tints” manuscript is held by the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 87The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 336. 88Rusk, ed., The Letters, 5:339. 89Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 342.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 243 not understand all the bearings of many subjects.”90 Alcott underestimated Sophia. Her contract negotiations with Fields clearly proved that she understood the publishing process and had some bargaining savvy. Sophia also followed up on payment for the Atlantic articles she had submitted. Emerson wrote in his pocket diary in 1863, “Miss T. [Thoreau] thinks that $35 or $40 may be due on Articles in the Atlantic, now.”91 Most scholars have credited Ellery Channing with co-editing The Maine Woods, Henry’s second posthumous book to be published by Ticknor and Fields, this one in May 1864. Mold- enhauer comments that Sophia had “some indeterminate help from Channing.”92 Both textual and circumstantial evidence suggest, however, that Sophia and Henry and then Sophia alone prepared the essay collection for publication.93 The Maine Woods includes the essays “Ktaadn,” “Chesuncook,” and “The Allegash & East Branch,” in addition to appendices of ﬂora, fauna, and animals; a list of Indian words; and a description of the outﬁt Henry suggested for an excursion to Maine. Textual evidence of Sophia’s editing exists primarily in the essay “The Allegash & East Branch,” where Sophia’s handwriting appears frequently on the drafts: in the title, the expanded abbrevi- ations, the rewriting in ink of Henry’s pencil notations, the occasional word changes, and a transcription for the printer of all or part of Henry’s last draft. Fields must have learned from Sophia in February 1863 that the essay and the appendix needed extensive work.94 Manuscripts of The Maine Woods at

90Howe, Memories, p. 74. Moldenhauer notes in Excursions that the company 1 ended up paying Sophia 12 /2 cents per copy, p. 342. See also Borst, ed., Henry, p. 40 n2. 91The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 15,ed. Linda Allardt et al., (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1982), p. 504. 92Moldenhauer, “The Maine Woods,” p. 130. 93Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 73, writes that Channing edited The Maine Woods; Francis Allen indicates that Sophia and Channing together edited the collection, Allen, A Bibliography, p. 17, as does McGill, Channing, p. 158. 94The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 364–65, 383; Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 336. Moldenhauer details the editorial work done by Sophia in The Maine Woods, pp. 449 and 453–56. Critics agree that the ﬁrst edition of The Maine

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 244 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Houghton Library, Harvard University, show no evidence of Channing’s handwriting. Nor does circumstantial evidence support the view that Ellery Channing helped Sophia edit this collection. His correspondence from 1863 and 1864 makes no mention of working on Henry’s manuscripts, nor do Sophia’s extant letters to her cousin Mary Anne Dunbar or to Ricketson, two of her closest confidants after Henry’s death, mention Channing’s assistance with her work.95 Indeed, Sophia’s comment to Ricketson about Channing in a December 15, 1863 letter suggests only a casual relationship at this time: “Mr. Channing is quite neighborly, although he did not condescend to make any inquiries as to his New Bedford friends when he first met me after my re- turn [from New Bedford].”96 As for The Maine Woods itself, Moldenhauer contends that Channing “seems to have taken the publication lightly,” since his copy of the first edition is “pris- tine, and the inscription ‘W. E. Channing From his grateful friend S. E. Thoreau,’ has been erased—presumably by Chan- ning himself.”97 Ticknor and Fields published Cape Cod in 1865, and, as with the preceding books, scholars have credited either Channing alone or both Sophia and Channing for editing the volume. Again, evidence strongly demonstrates otherwise.98 Molden- hauernotesthat,“Itisunclear...whatformshis[Channing’s]

Woods contained many errors, and they often blame Sophia or Sophia and Channing. Francis Allen accuses both of “careless editing” that caused “the misplacement of two pages and a half of matter belonging to the record for August 2nd, which was shifted to the end of the entry of July 30th” (Allen, Thoreau’s Editors, p. 7). Moldenhauer observes that the mistake could have happened “from the shufﬂing or dropping of the manuscript while Sophia was at work on it or after it had been delivered to Ticknor and Fields” (The Maine Woods, p. 356). 95Demond, ed., “The Selected Letters (Part Three),” pp. 314–43. 96Ricketson and Ricketson, eds., Daniel, p. 159. 97Moldenhauer, ed., The Maine Woods, pp. 355–56. 98Harding, The Days, p. 361, says that only Channing edited the manuscript, but the following indicate both Sophia and Channing as editors: Jones, ed., Bibliography, p. 48; Allen, A Bibliography, p. 20 and Thoreau’s Editors, p. 9; Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, vol. 2 (Boston: Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1909), p. 394; The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Cape Cod, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 286; and McGill, Channing, p. 159.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 245 assistance took,” and, agreeing with earlier scholars who note Channing’s lack of editorial interest or skill, he suggests that Channing’s help was probably limited or nonexistent: “Chan- ning’s talents lay in the area of invention. Moody, brilliant, and eccentric, he was unsuited to the exacting work of an editor.”99 Channing’s contemporaries agreed. Bronson Alcott suggested that Sophia alone was responsible for seeing Cape Cod to press by relating to Ricketson in early 1865 that she was “busily engaged in overlooking her brother’s Papers, copying some, reading proof sheets of the books of Cape Cod and the Let- ters, finding no moment for correspondence.”100 A few months earlier, Sophia herself had updated Ricketson about the collection: “The ‘Cape Cod’ papers have been printed,” adding “I believe that the publisher wishes to issue the letters first, so the volume is delayed.”101 Eventually Ticknor and Fields published Cape Cod first, in March 1865,withLetters to Various Persons, edited by Emerson, appearing several months later.102 At the time of the volumes’ publication, Sophia mentioned to Ricketson that she liked some of “Mr. C’s verses” but said nothing about their having worked together on Cape Cod.103 In October 1865, Sophia refers, in a letter to Ricketson, to “my publisher” sending Reginald Cholmondeley, the brother of Henry’s friend Thomas Cholmondeley, “some volumes of his [Henry’s] works.”104 Bibliographers express uncertainty about who edited the fourth—and last—posthumous collection of Henry’s essays, A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, published by Ticknor and Fields in August 1866, but the evidence strongly suggests that Sophia accomplished the task alone. In

99Moldenhauer, ed., Cape Cod, pp. 286–87. 100Herrnstadt, ed., The Letters, pp. 362–63. 101Ricketson and Ricketson, eds., Daniel, p. 161. Moldenhauer surmises that Sophia is referring to revised proofs or sample sheets (Cape Cod, p. 287). 102Borst, ed., Henry, pp. 52, 60. 103Sophia Thoreau to Daniel Ricketson, March 1865, Ricketson and Ricketson, eds., Daniel, p. 162. 104Sophia Thoreau to Daniel Ricketson, 28 October [1865], The Thoreau Society Collections. The letter includes no year, but the mention of Edith Emerson’s wedding suggests 1865,not1866 as the Finding Aid indicates.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 246 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY July of 1865, Bronson Alcott reported in his journal: “Miss Thoreau tells me that Fields wishes to print Henry’s political papers, and that she has them nearly prepared for the press.”105 Sophia gathered together ﬁfteen of Henry’s essays for the volume, two of which, “The Walls of Quebec” and “The Scenery of Quebec and the River St. Lawrence,” had not been published before. Stephen Adams and Donald Ross make the point that because the Canada essays have an “emphasis on vision impaired by political circumstance,” they are correctly included with the Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers rather than in Excursions, where they were moved in the 1893 Riverside edition of Henry’s essays and have been included ever since.106 Moldenhauer, too, notes the connection among the essays that Sophia included in the volume: “Because of its insistent concern with government and with the striking differences between the conditions of mankind under colonial and democratic rule, ‘A Yankee in Canada’ was tolerably compatible with the other contents.”107 Further evidence that Sophia alone edited A Yankee in Canada comes from a May 26, 1866 letter Sophia wrote to

105The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938), p. 374.Jones,ed.,Bibliography, pp. 49–50, indicates that A Yankee in Canada was “edited jointly by Sophia Thoreau and William Ellery Channing,” as does the Bibliography of American Literature (Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 356). Francis Allen gives no editor in A Bibliography, and in Thoreau’s Editors he writes that he has “no information as to who made up the volume” (pp. 22–24 and p. 10, respectively). McGill states that it is unknown whether Sophia and Channing worked together on the volume (Channing, p. 159). He adds that “the choice of Channing would have been obvious, since he and Henry had visited Quebec together,” suggesting that either Sophia or Ticknor and Fields would have done the choosing (p. 159). Glick, ed., Reform Papers, pp. 220–21, 219–20, categorically states that Excursions, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod “were demonstrably the work of Sophia Thoreau and Ellery Channing” and that “Sophia’s role as copyist, custodian of Thoreau’s manuscripts following his death, and editor of the posthumous Excursions, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod, suggests of course that she had a hand in editing A Yankee as well.” 106Stephen Adams and Donald Ross, Jr., Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau’s Major Works (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), p. 119. 107Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 354. Glick, editor of the Princeton edition entitled Reform Papers, includes two essays not included in the ﬁrst edition of A Yankee in Canada: “Service,” rejected for publication in The Dial by Margaret Fuller and never published by Henry, and “Reform and the Reformers,” left unﬁnished. Glick omits the six essays about Canada, as well as “Prayers” and “Thomas Carlyle and His Works.” He includes “Civil Disobedience” but uses the title “Resistance to Civil Government.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 247 Ricketson, in which she complains that, “Mr. Channing leaves our neighborhood tomorrow, but we shall not miss him for he never comes to see us,” an almost conclusive indication that they had not been working together.108 She reiterates this com- plaint in an 1868 letter to Ricketson in which she writes that, “Mr. C has not been at our house for more than two years.”109 Indeed, the only scant evidence of Ellery Channing’s possible involvement in the publication rests on correspondence Fields supposedly conducted with Channing. The men were presumably writing about the collection’s length; Channing wrote to Fields on 22 June [1866] that the book would be about 250 pages long and that he had copies of two months of Henry’s journal entries for additional material. Channing added that he had “written to Miss Thoreau, to see what she has to say about this.”110 Because, as Sophia writes to Ricketson, “It was Mr. C’s custom to destroy letters when once read,” we have no extant copy of the letter Fields sent to Channing that might explain why he even consulted him about the collection, nor does a letter from Sophia to Channing or Sophia to Fields during this time appear to be extant.111 The request from Fields seems odd, given that the collection was published less than two months later. Most importantly, as Moldenhauer comments, “No documentary evidences of Channing’s involvement in the project are known other than this letter.”112 Convincing evidence that Ellery Channing had not been involved in helping to build the last posthumous Thoreau volume

108Thomas Blanding, “A New Sophia Thoreau Letter to Daniel Ricketson,” The Concord Saunterer, 7,no.3 (September 1972), p. 2. 109Sophia Thoreau to Daniel Ricketson, 25 May 1868, The Thoreau Society Collections. 110William Ellery Channing to Mr. [James T.] Fields, 22 June [1866], FI 883,The Huntington Library. Though the letter does not include a year, Dedmond dates it as 1866, no doubt because Channing adds a postscript referring to articles about Henry published in 1866 and late 1865. “The Selected Letters of William Ellery Channing the Younger (Part Four),” ed. Francis B. Dedmond, Studies in the American Renais- sance 1992, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 3. 111Sophia Thoreau to Daniel Ricketson, 28 October [1865], Thoreau Society Collections. 112Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 356.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 248 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY is his dejected 1 March 1867 journal entry that “for my part I am not only so incurious but I am so heavy and dull, that I never so much as discovered that I should have arranged H’s papers in his last book . . . till it was all printed.”113 Then, in January 1868, Channing wrote to Sophia, “I have admired yr ﬁdelity in the publishing of his [Henry’s] books,” which also suggests that Sophia had done all the work.114 A copy of AYan- kee that Channing received from Sophia bears her inscription: “‘W. E. Channing With the kind regards of S. E. Thoreau.’” As Moldenhauer writes, this note “does not suggest that he assisted her substantially,” especially when compared to her inscription in The Maine Woods, “‘from his grateful friend.’”115 Sophia makes no mention of help from Channing when she writes to her cousin Mary Anne on 1 February 1867 about her achievements: “As you may suppose much of my time has been devoted to the publication of his [Henry’s] papers. Five volumes have been printed since his death. —I trust that you have read them, & also the many friendly criticisms which discriminating readers have bestowed.”116 Sophia accomplished this work despite what she refers to in this same letter as “overwhelming cares & responsibilities”: the death of her aunt Jane two years before; her aunt Louisa’s death a year later after “a long and trying illness”; and her mother’s continuing disability after a fall in December 1862, about which Sophia writes, “I wish you to realize how feeble my dear mother is. Since her fall she has never been able to dress herself, or use her needle—the right arm being nearly helpless, & owing to weak eyes she is much of the time deprived of reading.” Sophia

113William Ellery Channing 1867 Journal, bMS Am 800.6, Houghton Library, Har- vard University. 114William Ellery Channing to Sophia Thoreau, 4 January 1868, William Ellery Channing Papers, 1843–1901, vault A35, W. E. Channing, unit 1, series II, Corre- spondence: box 2,folder1, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library. The lists of Channing’s publications in his obituaries do not include any of the Thoreau posthumous editions. 115Moldenhauer, ed., Excursions, p. 357. 116Sophia Thoreau to Mary Anne Dunbar, 1 February 1867, The Thoreau Society Collections. The ﬁve volumes probably include Letters to Various Persons edited by Emerson, with assistance from Sophia.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 249 also mentions her own “long continued illness.” The extent of Sophia’s troubles is corroborated by a July 1865 diary entry by Annie [Mrs. James T.] Fields, after she and her husband visited Sophia in Concord: She is a woman borne down with ill health. She seemed to possess, as we saw her, something of the self-sustaining power of her brother, the same repose and confidence in her fate, as being always good . . . Her aged mother, learning we were there, got up and dressed herself and came down, to her daughter’s great surprise. She has an immense care in that old lady evidently.117 Perhaps Sophia’s most difficult decision concerning her brother’s papers involved finding an editor for his Journal, “over two million words in forty-seven manuscript volumes.”118 As both James and Annie Fields comment in their diaries, Sophia believed the right man for the task would turn up. An- nie explains that “His [Henry’s] journal is in thirty-two volumes and when J. T. F. spoke of wishing for an editor to condense these, she said there was no hurry and she thought the man would come.”119 While not sure who would be the best editor for Henry’s Journal, Sophia well knew the people she did not want to handle this task. When Mr. and Mrs. Fields suggested [Franklin B.] Sanborn, Sophia responded, “He knows a great deal, but I never associate him with my brother,” an assertion that might have surprised Sanborn.120 After all, Sanborn and his sister had eaten the noon meal at the Thoreau home for three years, from 1855 to 1858, occasions on which, according to Sanborn, Henry usually led the discussion, fed by “the dramatic narratives of Sophia, who had all the liveliness of her mother, with a more modern culture, and without the occasional tartness that flavored her mother’s remarks on persons

117Howe, Memories, p. 68. 118The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, ed. John C. Broderick, Volume 1: 1837–1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 578. 119Howe, Memories, p. 68; Annie A. Fields, James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches, with Unpublished Fragments and Tributes From Men and Women of Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifﬂin and Company, 1882), p. 101. 120As quoted in Howe, Memories, p. 68.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 250 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and things.”121 Sanborn believed he had had a “long friendship” with Henry.122 Francis Allen notes, however, that, “there was no great cordiality of feeling between him and the Thoreau family.”123 Sophia’s sense of Sanborn’s unsuitability to edit the Journal turned out to be sound, given others’ observations about him as well as his later editorial carelessness. Soon after Sophia’s death, three individuals key to establishing what Raymond Adams has called “the foundations for Thoreau’s modern reputation” took up the effort Sophia had labored on after her brother’s death, of seeing Henry and his work accurately portrayed.124 The three, Alfred W. Hosmer, Henry S. Salt, and Dr. Samuel A. Jones, felt particular antipathy toward Sanborn for, among other things, creating an inaccurate, demeaning portrayal of Henry’s parents, Cynthia and John Thoreau, in his 1882 biography of Henry.125 Modern scholars provide more damaging evidence of Sanborn’s ineptitude and hubris. Harding discusses Sanborn’s carelessness with dates and annotations, as well as his cavalier changes to Thoreau’s manuscripts, remarking about Sanborn’s biography of Thoreau that he “apparently considered himself a better writer than Thoreau and did not hesitate to take liberties with his manuscript materials. Thus, his text can never be completely trusted.”126

121Harding, The Days, p. 353;F.B.Sanborn,The Personality of Thoreau (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1901), p. 12. 122See Sanborn’s introduction to Channing, Thoreau: The Poet Naturalist, p. xiv. 123Allen, Thoreau’s Editors, p. 9. Noting the slight mention of Sanborn in Henry’s Journal, John W. Clarkson, Jr., “F. B. Sanborn, 1831–1917,” The Concord Saunterer 12,no.2 (Summer 1977), also writes of Sanborn’s ambition: he became “notorious over the years for his very obvious proprietary feelings towards both Emerson and Thoreau (not to mention John Brown),” p. 7. 124Raymond Adams, “Fred Hosmer, The ‘Lerned Clerk,’” The Thoreau Society Bulletin 36 (July 1951), p. 2. 125In his Henry David Thoreau (American Men of Letters Series) (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1882; repr., New York: Chelsea House, 1980), Sanborn refers to Cynthia’s “malicious liveliness” and her “sharp and sudden ﬂashes of gossip and malice” (p. 24). He describes John as leading a “plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village” (p. 27). See Jean Munroe Le Brun’s corrective defense of Cynthia, Henry Thoreau’s Mother [Collectanea, Number Two] (Lakeland, Michigan: Edwin B. Hill, 1908). 126Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, p. 18.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 251 Sophia also rejected the request of Thomas Wentworth Hig- ginson to edit the Journal, despite the imprimatur of James T. Fields. In a long, somewhat supercilious letter to Sophia on 21 September 1865 Higginson requested the job, indicating that Fields wanted him to edit Henry’s Journal and that, in skill and character, he fit the role. Higginson explains that he has read one of the volumes and, while praising the “thought and ob- servation” in it, judges that many passages shouldn’t be printed because they are “incomplete, too personal, or mere compilation.” He presumptuously declares, “Of course, the work must be done here,” presumably at his home in Newport, Rhode Island, continuing, “I should wish to begin it by a pretty full examination of the boxes with you,—that is, if, as I suppose, they are not all as clear or intelligible as the one I examined.” Making what was probably his greatest mistake, he ends with the suggestion that, given the limited appeal of the Journal, he does Sophia a favor by editing it: “I ought to warn you that such an enterprise cannot be pecuniarily profitable, or not for years; indeed, I was rather surprised at Mr. Fields’ undertaking it at all.”127 Sophia sent Higginson a polite but pointed response five days later, thanking him for “the compliment implied in your willingness to edit my brother’s journals” while refuting his presumptions by stating how “very sacred” the thirty volumes that Henry “left in my charge” are. She tells Higginson that she is not ready to publish the journals; that they con- tain nothing offensive, as Higginson has suggested; that they will make money; and that, to the contrary, “judging from the sale of my brother’s late works, I feel confident that a selec- tion might be made, which would prove successful in every respect.”128

127Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Sophia Thoreau, 21 September 1865, vault A45, Thoreau, unit 3,folder1, Letters 1836–1878, Thoreau Family Correspondence, 1836–1878, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library. 128Sophia E. Thoreau to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 26 September 1865,MA 1443, Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, The Morgan Library & Mu- seum, New York, N.Y., “Sophia Thoreau, T. W. Higginson, and the Journal,” Thoreau Society Bulletin 181 (Fall 1987), p. 2. Based on Sophia’s response to Higginson’s 1865 letter, Howarth believes that Sophia’s “ﬁerce desire to idealize Henry’s memory

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 252 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Four years later, in a December 1869 letter to Ellen Sewell Osgood, Sophia mentions having “a very pleasant interview” with Higginson in Boston earlier that month. She reports that Higginson “is anxious some day to edit dear Henry’s journals,” and adds, with some amusement, that he had sent her two letters from strangers, “two gentlemen connected with banks,” both “begging that he would do so.” One writer “calls himself a lover of Thoreau & thereby entitled to all his thoughts” and “The other speaks of Henry as his Redeemer.”129 Higginson remembered the meeting with Sophia somewhat differently, writing in his essay “Henry David Thoreau” that he was “en- deavoring, about 1870, to persuade Thoreau’s sister to let some one edit his journals” (emphasis mine). He goes on to say that he “invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord of the manor in Concord” to help his cause with Sophia. In the same essay on Henry, Higginson writes that Sophia “seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts.”130 No doubt Higginson’s heavy-handedness and what Sophia interpreted as disrespect for Henry annoyed her, for she never gave Higginson permission to edit the Journal. Nor did Sophia want Ellery Channing to edit Henry’s Jour- nal. In his introduction to the second edition of Channing’s Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, Sanborn writes that when the biography was published in 1873, its inclusion of large portions of Henry’s Journal “possibly” caused Sophia “some vexation.”131 A December 1873 letter from Sophia’s Concord friend Fanny

accounts for this ambivalence” about the Journal being both sacred and proﬁtable, but Petrulionis seems more accurate in attributing Sophia’s response to her “savvy editorial sense.” Howarth, The Literary, p. xx, and Petrulionis, ed., Thoreau, p. xxix. Thomas Blanding writes that, “Sophia’s withholding of the Journal was an act of faith. Her brother would speak for himself, and she had only to be sure that she chose the right man to see that his words rang as solidly in print as they did when he wrote them.” “Beans, Baked and Half-Baked (4),” Concord Saunterer, 12,no.2 (Summer 1977), p. 18. 129Sophia Thoreau to Ellen Sewell Osgood, 14 December 1869,HM64945,The Huntington Library. 130Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Henry David Thoreau,” Caryle’s Laugh, and Other Surprises (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 1909), pp. 67–69. 131Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, p. xiii.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 253 Prichard to her sister Lissie confirms this vexation: “The no- tices of Mr. Channing’s book about ‘dear Henry’ have somewhat disturbed her [Sophia’s] serenity.”132 Sophia further admits her displeasure with Channing’s biography when she confides, in a July 1874 letter to her cousin Mary Anne, “The book has pained me very much.”133 Channing’s flagrant misuse of Henry’s Jour- nal had no doubt caused her pain. Also, Channing’s declarations about Henry that “He was a natural Stoic” and “He enjoyed what sadness he could find” supported Emerson’s assertions of Henry’s stoicism in his eulogy, a characterization Sophia whole- heartedly disagreed with.134 Choosing someone to trust with Henry’s voluminous Journal clearly was not easy for Sophia. In October 1869, Bronson Alcott reported in his journal: “Miss Sophia tells me that she has almost consented to have a book of selections made from Henry’s papers,” but in March 1873, when Sophia left Concord to settle with relatives in Bangor, Maine, Alcott indicated that she would be leaving the Journal manuscripts with him. He noted Sophia’s stipulation that they are “not to be public, nor copied for publication by anyone.” When Henry’s three trunks arrived at his house, Alcott understood his instructions about the contents:

I am to hold them sacred from all but Thoreau’s friends, allow none to take them away for perusal, subject to his sister’s pleasure during her lifetime, and if I survive her, then they become mine for quotation or publishing. Many volumes may be compiled from them, and will be when his editor appears. I house them under lock and key safely in my attic.135

132Frances Jane Hallett Prichard to Elizabeth Hallett Prichard, 7 December 1873, vault A45, Prichard Unit 2,seriesVI,A.1,box7,folder3, Prichard, Hoar, and Related Family Papers, 1799–1948, Papers of Elizabeth Hallett Prichard Hoar, her husband Edward Sherman Hoar, her in-laws, and her descendants, 1836–1941, Special Collec- tions, Concord Free Public Library. 133Sophia Thoreau to Mary Anne Dunbar, 8 July [1874], The Thoreau Society Collections. The year was determined by Walter Harding, “The Correspondence of Sophia Thoreau and Marianne Dunbar,” The Thoreau Society Bulletin 33 (October, 1950), p. 3. 134Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, p. 6. 135Shepard, ed., The Journals, pp. 401, 431.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 254 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Eventually, as indicated in the 1874–1875 Concord town records, Sophia deposited the papers in an “iron safe” in the Concord Library with Emerson named as their trustee.136 As trustee of Henry’s papers and editor of his letters, Emer- son might have seemed the ideal editor of the Journal, but by 1874 he was experiencing memory problems, along with other signs of aging that made editing the Journal improba- ble.137 Besides, he had only reluctantly edited Henry’s letters ten years earlier, with Sophia’s close assistance. Both Emerson and Bronson Alcott had thought that Henry’s friend Harrison Gray Otis Blake would agree to edit Henry’s letters, and Sophia had hoped so too, but he had refused.138 Later Sophia returned to Blake as the most suited to edit Henry’s Journal. Called “one of Thoreau’s most devoted dis- ciples,” Blake ﬁrst wrote to Henry in March 1848, seeking a teacher at the beginning of a “spiritual pilgrimage.”139 At the time a thirty-one-year-old former Unitarian minister, Blake was working as a private schoolteacher and tutor in Worces- ter, Massachusetts.140 Blake had met Henry a few years earlier when visiting Emerson, who introduced them. That introduction resulted in a fourteen-year friendship during which Blake and Henry stayed at one another’s houses in Worcester and Concord and hiked together up Mount Wachusett in October 1854, up Mount Monadnock in June 1858, and in the White Mountains in July 1858.141 Sophia mentioned that she was considering committing Henry’s Journal “to the care of Mr. Blake of Worcester” while visiting Bronson Alcott and his family in Concord after she had moved to Maine. Alcott concurred, writing in his journal

136Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Thoreau in Concord Church and Town Records,” The New England Quarterly 12,no.2 (June, 1939), p. 359. 137Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), p. 482. 138Shephard, ed., The Journals, p. 357. 139Harding, The Days, p. 39; Henry David Thoreau: Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, ed. Bradley P. Dean (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 11. 140Dean, ed., Thoreau: Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, p. 13. 141Harding, The Days, pp. 347, 397, 398–400.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 255 that Blake was “a friend and disciple of Thoreau’s and a ﬁt- ting person to edit selections” from Henry’s Journal.142 Blake did agree to edit the Journal, and in so doing he helped at- tract more attention to Henry’s work. He arranged selections from his Journal in seasonal order and published them in four volumes over a span of eleven years: Early Spring in Mas- sachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), and Autumn (1892). As Howarth writes, however,

the Thoreau papers were to suffer from considerable mishandling while Blake retained them. His ﬁrst major effort, attempting to sort and classify the various notebook volumes, proved to be the most damaging. On the front of each notebook he pasted a label, giving a volume number, date, and title for the supposed contents. The labels still survive: many of Blake’s titles are misleading, most of his dates are inaccurate, and none of his numbers correspond to Thoreau’s original sequences.143

Sophia chose Blake as the best of the lot, but neither he nor anyone else thereafter would care for Henry’s manuscripts as meticulously and professionally as Sophia had. When Sophia died on 7 October 1876, her contemporaries acknowledged her extraordinary contribution to her brother’s legacy. Bronson Alcott wrote in his journal that “Her devotion to her brother Henry was of the most affectionate kind, even to the sacredness with which she cherished his memory and his writings.”144 Irving Allen refers directly to Sophia’s pivotal role in her brother’s publications:

It is probable that during the latter years of his life Thoreau’s closest, most conﬁdential friend and companion was his sister; and it is certain that she, more than all others, was devoted to his memory; for it is to her we are chieﬂy indebted for the preservation and subsequent publication of letters and other precious memorials of a life all too brief.145

142Shepherd, ed., The Journals, pp. 450–51. 143Howarth, The Literary Manuscripts, p. xxii. 144Shepherd, ed., The Journals, p. 471. 145Allen, “American Women,” p. 988.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021 256 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Indeed, without Sophia’s assiduous dedication to Henry and his manuscripts, without her editing ability and drive, Henry would not have “reaped a ﬁnal harvest” before he died, and we would not have his four posthumous essay collections. Contrary to previous scholarly claims and bibliographers’ assumptions that Sophia had editing assistance for the posthumous collections, she alone, as the evidence provided here shows, edited Excursions, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers andhelpedsee them through to publication. We have “‘Henry’s brilliant sister’” Sophia to thank for preserving her precious brother’s work for posterity.

Kathy Fedorko earned her PhD in English from Rutgers Uni- versity and is professor emerita at Middlesex County College, where she taught writing and literature and directed the college’s Center for the Enrichment of Learning and Teaching. A past president of the Edith Wharton Society, she is the author of Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton (1995) as well as many articles about Wharton. Her essay “Revisiting Henry’s Last Words” will appear in the summer 2016 issue of The Thoreau Society Bulletin.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00529 by guest on 23 September 2021

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