The World of Henry David Thoreau, Walden,
and ”Civil Disobedience”
| 1817 | Henry David (christened David Henry) Thoreau is born on July 12, in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Thoreau; he is the third of four children. |
| 1818 | Henry’s family moves to nearby Chelmsford; his father opens a grocery store, which does not prove profitable. |
| 1819 | Walt Whitman is born on May 31. |
| 1821 | Financial straits force Henry’s family to move again, this time to Boston, where his father takes a job as a schoolteacher. |
| 1823 | The Thoreau family returns to Concord, where Henry’s father takes over the family pencil-making business. Henry enters the Concord Center School. Continued financial strain forces his mother to take in boarders. |
| 1827 | Henry writes his earliest known essay, “The Seasons.” John James Audubon’s The Birds of America is published. |
| 1828 | Henry and his brother, John, attend Concord Academy, where they study the classics, geography, science, and history. Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language is published. |
| 1829 | Henry first attends talks at the Concord Lyceum, where he will frequently speak as an adult. |
| 1833 | Thoreau enters Harvard University, the only child in his family to attend college; he spends many solitary hours studying the classics , numerous languages, history, and the sciences. The Abolition Act of 1833 outlaws slavery in the British Empire. |
| 1835 | During a semester’s leave of absence from Harvard to teach school in Canton, Massachusetts, Thoreau lives in the home of the Unitarian minister Orestes Brownson, who instructs him in German. |
| 1837 | Thoreau graduates from Harvard. He begins teaching at the Concord Center School, but resigns after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. He begins attending Trancendentalist meetings at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house. At Emerson’s urging he starts a journal, which becomes a lifelong project. |
| 1838 | Thoreau travels to Maine in search of a teaching job but soon returns to Concord; he and his brother, John, open a private school at the Concord Academy, which they operate until 1841. They find a devoted pupil in the young Louisa May Alcott. Thoreau gives the first of many speeches at the Concord Lyceum. |
| 1839 | Thoreau and John take a two-week trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in a homemade boat; the journey inspires Thoreau’s later well-known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is published. |
| 1840 | Ralph Waldo Emerson founds the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial, which serves as the forum for Thoreau’s first published essay and poem. Ellen Sewall rejects the marriage proposals of both Thoreau brothers. |
| 1841 | Thoreau moves into Emerson’s home, where he works for two years as a groundskeeper and repairman and reads widely from Emerson’s library. He comes up with the idea of living in a cabin on nearby Flint’s Pond. The first series of Emerson’s Essays is published. |
| 1842 | Thoreau’s brother, John, dies from lockjaw. Shortly after John’s death, Thoreau meets Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery is published. |
| 1843 | Thoreau contributes to several publications and coedits The Dial with Emerson. He moves for half a year to Staten Island, where he tutors Emerson’s children. In New York he meets and associates with abolitionists and reformers. |
| 1844 | Upon his return to Concord, Thoreau becomes more active in the abolition movement, writing essays and speaking out against slavery. The second series of Emerson’s Essays is published. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems is published. Thoreau accidentally sets fire to the Concord Woods. |
| 1845 | In a small space on Emerson’s property, Thoreau builds his Walden Pond cabin, where he will live for the next two years. At Walden Pond, he writes A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers and his first version of Walden. Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems is published. |
| 1846 | Thoreau makes another trip to Maine, where he climbs Mount Katahdin. In July he is jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax, in protest against the government’s support of slavery and the Mexican War. After a night in jail, he is released when someone (presumably a family member) pays the tax. The experience inspires the work that later will be titled “Civil Disobedience.” |
| 1847 | Thoreau moves out of the Walden cabin and into Emerson’s home. He gives a speech at the Concord Lyceum titled “A History of Myself.” |
| 1848 | He moves back into his family home. He delivers “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government” at the Concord Lyceum; the speech, hardly noticed in Thoreau’s lifetime, later will be published as the highly influential “Civil Disobedience.” |
| 1849 | A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is published to lackluster reviews.“ Resistance to Civil Government,” the original published title of ”Civil Disobedience,“ appears. Thoreau visits Cape Cod for the first time. |
| 1850 | Thoreau travels to Cape Cod and Canada. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published. The Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850) is passed, stating that north- erners must return escaped slaves to their owners. |
| 1851 | Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is published. |
| 1854 | After five years of trying, Thoreau finds a publisher for Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book is warmly received by critics, including George Eliot, who praises it in Westminster Review (January 1856). |
| 1855 | Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published. Thoreau makes another trip to Cape Cod. |
| 1856 | Thoreau meets Whitman. |
| 1857 | Thoreau meets the activist and abolitionist John Brown. He travels to Maine and Cape Cod. |
| 1859 | Thoreau’s father dies. On October 16 John Brown makes his doomed raid to liberate slaves at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia); he is caught, tried, and hanged for treason. Thoreau speaks on behalf of Brown before, during, and after his execution. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is published. |
| 1860 | In December Thoreau contracts bronchitis that, compounded by tuberculosis, leaves him seriously ill. Abraham Lincoln is elected president. |
| 1861 | In hopes of improving his health, Thoreau travels to Minnesota, where he meets Native Americans and collects various specimens of plants. He returns home and makes preparations for his death, including the establishment of an estate for his mother and sister. The American Civil War begins. |
| 1862 | Thoreau continues to write and visit with friends despite his severe illness. He dies in Concord on May 6, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. |
| 1863 | Excursions is published. |
| 1864 | The Maine Woods is published. |
| 1865 | Thoreau’s letters are published in Letters to various Persons, edited by Emerson. Cape Cod is published. |
| 1866 | A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers is published. |
| 1906 | His journals are published in a 14-volume edition entitled The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. |
| 1993 | Faith in a Seed, a collection of Thoreau’s writings on natural history, is published. |
| 2000 | His last discovered manuscript, Wild Fruits, also on natural history, is published. |