Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Critical Reception and Genre Classification. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to the publisher Evert Duyckinck about his friend Thoreau's account of his trip with his brother on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: It had "extraordinary merit," he said, and it was "attractive to lovers of nature . . . and to poets [and to] scholars for its excellent literature, and to all thoughtful persons for its originality and profoundness" (Fink 143). Every phrase of Emerson's words about A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers fits the great book, Walden, that was yet to appear; like the more famous book, A Week is hard to classify. On one level it purported to be a travel adventure, but the actual activities of each "day" are a small part of the book (Professor Harding thinks about 40 percent). The rest is a complex of philosophic and scientific reflections.

In its own day, even Emerson called them "big beads and ingots." James Russell Lowell's long review (one of some dozen) had much the same complaint, declaring that "the door of the portfolio page has been left open, and thoughts have flown out of themselves." Lowell voices the thoughts of many others in his observation that when Thoreau is "the Boswell of Musketaquid and Merrimack," the book is "delightful," but when he veers into digressions on the classics or topics like friendship, he stops us cold: "We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost" (Introduction, A Week xiii-xiv). Even committed 20th-century Thoreauvians found these wanderings annoying: Carl Bode says that "the original narrative [of the trip with John] has been weighted down with learned allusions and quotations" (Bode 138), and perhaps the most ardent Thoreau admirer and biographer of all, Walter Harding, says that the thoughts not related to the journey are "dumped in like plums into a pudding" (247).

Narrative Framework and Travel Itinerary. One wonders at these complaints because the actual events of the Thoreau brothers' excursion from Massachusetts to New Hampshire do not seem to be the point of the book, which is not to diminish the importance of the travel memoir. Between the "plums" or "digressions"—usually at the beginning and end of each chapter—that is to say, of each day—the reader can trace the trip. The two brothers set off to great fanfare from friends on August 31, 1839.

A fast-forward of their trip would go this way: to Ball's Hill for blueberries, seven miles downriver to Billerica for supper and the night, a view of Lowell city's furnaces in the night as if made for entertainment. The next day they reached the Middlesex Canal, where (it was Sunday) churchgoers literally and figuratively looked down on them; 12 miles farther they camped in Tyngsborough. That was just the first two days: The next few took them well into New Hampshire, past Manchester to New Hampshire's Concord, and on to Lincoln.

They took time to climb mountains, take coach rides, stay in a hotel, and do much more. They met with rain and with high winds that "shook the foundations of the tent" (221), and they were in close contact with cows and they feared, with bears (269). For all the complaints about the wandering nature of the book, one could easily follow the trip on a map, and, in fact, some Thoreauvians have taken this trip in memory of the brothers.

Transcendental Themes and Structural Parallels. However, for some people, the better reason to read the book is not for the travel trivia but for the same whimsical expressions of the spirit that lead us to read Walden, for which A Week seems a rehearsal. For one thing, the organization of A Week anticipates the greater, later book. As Walden would move from spring through the year to the next ice thaw (though he actually lived there for two years), A Week obviously proceeds in a straightforward progression through the days of one week (though the trip took two). Thoreau may have also had another organizational principle within the straightforward Saturday-to-Friday sequence (he certainly did in Walden), as well, but topics interlace with each other so that there is a dollop of philosophy, natural science, and wry observations on human beings in each of the chapters/days.

The traveler/narrator announces that almost everything within the trip and the book is metaphorical; he introduces the river, a more important character than his brother (who is mentioned very little): In his first sentence he likens "The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River" to the Nile, and he plays with the names of all the rivers; the Grass River will be the Concord River "only while men lead peaceable lives" (3). From these topics the range is wide, but any reader of transcendentalism will recognize the provenance of the thoughts. Here is Thoreau, reworking Emerson, on the difference between the poet and everyone else: "Alas, the poet too is in one sense a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene thoughts . . . Other men lead a starved existence meanwhile, like hawks that would fain keep in the wing" (126).

What to some (Thoreau's own sisters, for example) seemed a shocking disdain for conventional Christian philanthropy appears in many guises in the book as well: Thoreau makes a distinction between himself and most people who are "mummies in museums" and says that it was "a pleasure to escape from Reformers" (160-162). Those who want a brief introduction to the Bhagavad Gita or Upanishads will find it in A Week. Those whose tastes are for Western literature will find much on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and others who are curious about the Fresh Water Sun-Fish will find three pages of description and analysis; those who, like Thoreau, are concerned about the history and future of Native Americans will find much about King Philip's War and other historic events.

Thoreau's tribute to his brother is really a continuation of the conversation he has started with himself as he tries to be ordinary and totally alive. If his attempt to extend that conversation to his neighbors, jarring them to be equally individualistic, fails, he will have other chances. The question he repeats in many ways—in his own poetry and that of others, in fable, in humor, and in preachments—is this: "What have I to do with ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see" (67).

For Discussion or Writing.
1. How often do you find Thoreau speaking about the brother whose memorial this is? What picture emerges of the siblings together? How might his pages on "Friendship" in the "Wednesday" chapter give insight into the relationship?

2. As he does in all his work, Thoreau here displays his interest in puns and symbolic languages. Find examples and discuss how thinking about the many possible meanings of a word can teach you about your own creative process.

3. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is obviously a frustrating one for most readers (even for Thoreau scholars). It is, however, filled with paragraphs of two or three pages that contain nuggets of gold; those nuggets match others in other chapters. Select one topic of the many in this volume and trace that subject—perhaps Homer or Eastern thought or the nature of a river—throughout the book.