Mailbag: On Thoreau: On Self-Reliance: On Thoreau having his mom do his laundry

(Ed.note: Last Sunday, in conversing with "Bear Trader" he made a comment on the simple life to come if the markets came down this week, and one of the group mentioned Thoreau---and then Bear Trader made a comment about Thoreau having his mom do his laundry--which I disputed. Here is his reply:)


We were talking last Sunday about H. D. Thoreau. I made a reference to
Thoreau, while at Walden Pond, having his mother and sister do his
washing. I remember reading this in an edition of Walden. Here is the
excerpt.

From pages xxii and xxiv of Stephen Fender's introduction to the Oxford
World Classics edition of Walden, available at Amazon.


"The central question is, who is 'Thoreau" There is the man who wrote
Walden and the voice that talks to us out of its pages. The 'Thoreau'
inside Walden 'can do without the post office' and disparages
newspapers. But according to his contemporary, and Walden's first
editor, Frank Sanborn, 'few residents in Concord frequented the post
office more punctually or read the newspapers...more eagerly than
Thoreau'. What looks like a solitary life in the woods was nothing of
the kind. The woods themselves were sparser around Concord and Walden
than at any time before or since in the natural history of the area.
(That is why Emerson wanted Thoreau to plant new trees there.) Walden
Pond was not a wilderness, but a popular resort of the townspeople.
Thoreau did not really 'live' at Walden - more like camp out - and his
life was anything but solitary. He was continually in and out of town,
or receiving visitors at his cabin. Though on p.56 he slyly admits to
having 'dined out occasionally', in fact he ate regularly at other
people's houses in Concord in return for odd jobs. Walter Harding notes
that almost every Sunday dinner was shared with Emerson and his family,
and that on his way back from Concord to the Pond he would call in on
Edmund Hosmer, often staying for supper. Emerson's house was just over
a mile from Walden down Brister's Hill. With equal frequency Thoreau
would call in at the house of his mother and sister on Main St., a walk
of a mile and a half down the railroad tracks to Concord, to eat a meal
and get his washing and mending done, sometimes in return for odd jobs."
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