“Our Pan” — Henry Thoreau and the Alcotts

I am pleased to present this guest post by Richard Smith.

Meeting Thoreau

In March 1840, Bronson Alcott and his family moved to Concord, Massachusetts. Along with Bronson were his wife, Abigail May, and their three young daughters: nine-year-old Anna, seven-year-old Louisa, and Elizabeth, aged four. There would soon be a fourth daughter added to the family; Abigail was six months pregnant with a child who would be named Abigail May after her. 

The family moved into a yellow cottage on the outskirts of Concord. Known locally as the “Hosmer Cottage,” it would be called “Dovecote” after Louisa used the house as a setting in Little Women. Their first residence in Concord, the Alcotts would live there for three years. It was here that the family would begin a long friendship with Henry David Thoreau. 

Anna would attend Concord Academy, the school Henry Thoreau and his brother John ran between 1838 and 1841, while Louisa and Lizzie were taking classes taught by Miss Mary Russell at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The girls had previously been homeschooled by their father, so attending classes outside the home was a significant change for them.  Much like Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston, the Thoreau school was progressive. It was a coeducational school comprised of local students and children from out of town who boarded with the Thoreau family. The curriculum included English, Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, physics, and natural history; Henry taught language and sciences, while his brother John taught English and math. They often took their students on field trips to the meadows and woods of Concord and businesses to see how things worked. There was no corporal punishment. 

The Thoreau school closed in April 1841, thus ending Anna’s education with the Thoreau brothers. By then, Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had struck up a close friendship, and the Alcott girls came to know Thoreau particularly well. 

Deepening Friendships

After the Fruitlands experiment failed in late 1843, the Alcotts would find themselves back in Concord, this time in an old house on Lexington Road that Bronson dubbed The Hillside. The three years they spent there (1845 -1848) were probably the happiest of Louisa’s life. Imagine being a 13-year-old girl who loves writing, and suddenly, you’re surrounded by a bevy of writers who also happen to be your father’s friends! On any given day, Louisa could walk over to Emerson’s house and browse through his private library (where he would often suggest books for her to read) or talk with Margaret Fuller, one of Emerson’s frequent guests. Or, she might run into the elusive Nathanial Hawthorne, himself a writer who had just published his book of short stories, Mosses From an Old Manse. And sometimes, she and her sisters would walk to Walden Pond to visit Henry Thoreau at his one-room writer’s retreat in the woods. How could she not have been influenced to be a writer when surrounded by such brilliant and encouraging company? 

Thoreau, in particular, was like a cool uncle or older brother. Louisa may have had a crush on him (as she did with Emerson), and although they were children, he always treated the Alcott girls as equals. He encouraged Louisa’s sense of wonder and imagination as he took the Alcott and Emerson children on nature walks. As Louisa would later recall, on one such walk, Thoreau called her attention to a little plant with a cobweb draped over it. Thoreau asked her, “What do you see here?” And she replied, “Why, I see a cobweb.” “No, no, no”, Thoreau answered. “That’s the handkerchief of a fairy!”

One of the most frequent visitors during Thoreau’s two-year sojourn at Walden Pond was Bronson Alcott, and it’s no stretch to believe that he took his daughters (at least Anna and Louisa) with him. Alcott and Thoreau greatly admired each other, and Thoreau even went so far as to commemorate his friend in Walden, calling Bronson “a true friend of man” and “the only friend of human progress.” “He is,” Thoreau wrote, “perhaps the sanest man…of any I know.”

John Brown Comes to Concord

In the late 1850s, the Alcotts and Thoreau admired the radical abolitionist John Brown. Brown spoke in Concord in 1857 and 1859, and it was during his second visit that he met them. Bronson would write in his journal that Brown’s long, white beard gave him the look of “a prophet” and that he was “the manliest man I have ever seen; the type and synonym of the Just.”

It was Thoreau who publicly defended Brown after the latter’s failed attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. While Thoreau compared Brown’s life and death to that of Jesus Christ, Louisa Alcott was just as effusive; she referred to Brown as “St. John the Just” on the day of his execution. She wrote in her journal, “Living, he made life beautiful. Dying, he made death divine.” 

In March 1861, an “Exhibition of the Schools of Concord” was held in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa Alcott (the daughter of the Superintendent of Concord Schools, Bronson Alcott) wrote a special song to be sung by the children at the exhibition’s opening.

Called “With A Rose That Bloomed on the Day of John Brown’s Martyrdom,” it caused quite the uproar in Concord, upsetting many who were not abolitionists. Louisa called the naysayers “a queer, narrow-minded set” and felt that she had won “quite a little victory over the old fogies” when the song was performed at the Exhibition. 

Louisa’s poem would gain even more notoriety when William Lloyd Garrison published it in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator.

Our Pan is Dead

In the spring of 1862, it was clear to his family and friends that Thoreau was dying, the victim of tuberculosis. Alcott would report in his journal that Thoreau was “failing and feeble,” on one of his last visits to Thoreau, as he left his friend, he tenderly bent over and kissed him on the forehead. Thoreau would pass away on May 6, 1862. 

Thoreau’s funeral took place at First Parish in Concord three days later. Alcott read selections from Thoreau’s journal while Emerson gave the eulogy. All in all, many people approved of the funeral service. Louisa Alcott commented on the full church and the many honors bestowed on her dead friend, saying, “Though he wasn’t made much of while living, he was honored at his death.”

In the late 1840s, Sophia Foord (the Governess for the Emerson children and a sometimes tutor for the Alcott girls) had proposed marriage to Henry Thoreau, convinced that they were “twin souls.” Thoreau turned down her offer, and she left Concord soon after, devastated by Thoreau’s refusal. Upon his death, Louisa Alcott would write to Foord to tell her of Thoreau’s passing. She would tell Foord, “If ever a man was a real Christian it was Henry” and that his writings were “wise and pious thoughts.” 

Thoreau would be publicly honored by two of the Alcotts at the time of his death. The April 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly carried an essay by Bronson Alcott entitled “The Forester,” a commemorative piece about Thoreau, appearing a month before Thoreau died. Calling him “a son of nature” and a “peripatetic philosopher,” Alcott was sure that Thoreau would one day be regarded as the great man he knew his friend to be.

A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame has not yet travelled far from the banks of the rivers he has described in his books; but I hazard only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and sense it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time, and that he is sure of a reading in the future.

Bronson would not be the only Alcott to grace the pages of the Atlantic with a piece honoring Thoreau. Among articles by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Julia Ward Howe, and Louis Agassiz, the September 1863 issue featured a poem by Louisa called “Thoreau’s Flute.” The poem is a tender, beautiful remembrance of Thoreau, whom Louisa called the “the Genius of the woods.” Much like her father, Louisa knew that Thoreau’s fame would last far into the future:

O lonely friend! he still will be

A potent presence, though unseen,

Steadfast, sagacious, and serene;

Seek not for him — he is with thee.

REFERENCES 

Eden’s Outcasts; The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. W. W. Norton & Company; 2007

To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord by Sandra Petrolionus. Cornell University Press. 2006

John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds. Vintage Books. 2006 

Henry David Thoreau; A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. University of Chicago Press. 

Richard Smith has lectured on and written about antebellum United States history and 19th-century American literature since 1995. He has worked in Concord as a public historian and Living History Interpreter since 1999 and has portrayed Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond and around the country. Richard has written six books for Applewood Books and is a regular contributor to “Discover Concord Magazine.”

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