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“Henry's Brilliant Sister”:1 the Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her

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“Henry's Brilliant Sister”:1 the Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her “Henry’s brilliant sister”:1 The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother’s Posthumous Publications Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/89/2/222/1792882/tneq_a_00529.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 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. 222 “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 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/89/2/222/1792882/tneq_a_00529.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 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 na- ture 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. 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 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/89/2/222/1792882/tneq_a_00529.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 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 com- panions. 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. “HENRY’S BRILLIANT SISTER” 225 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 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/89/2/222/1792882/tneq_a_00529.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 with denunciations and denigrations of them both as individ- uals 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 descrip- tion of the experience suggests what Sandra Petrulionis calls “an almost Wordsworthian closeness between brother and sis- ter.”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.
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