Resources for Educators
An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum. By David F. Wood. (Concord, Mass.: The Concord Museum, 2006. Pp. 160. $39.95.)
Reviewed by Randall Conrad. Reprinted from The New England Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 2007), pp. 719-21.
Henry David Thoreau famously and wryly described himself as “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” By the twentieth century, the times had begun to catch up with his advanced ideas, so that the author of “Civil Disobedience” and Walden is now firmly established as an originator of both conscientious objection and environmentalism, practices which are by no means mystical and which have shaped far-reaching reforms in today’s social and political structures.
Perhaps we should consider Thoreau as the forerunner of another contemporary discipline—material culture studies. That is the idea proposed by David Wood, longtime curator of the Concord (Mass.) Museum, in a new monograph as rich in texture as it is informative.
The Museum is home to a substantial collection of items that were used or fabricated by Henry and other members of the Thoreau family, from pencils manufactured by John Thoreau and Son to a beautiful chess-and-checkers board (illustrated below) crafted by Sophia Thoreau, Henry’s sister, using pressed fern specimens and vivid blue paper (for the dark squares).
As the catalogue of a permanent exhibition, An Observant Eye artfully discharges its function. Descriptions and discussion of the Museum’s varied trove are ordered thematically, beginning with the physical traces of greatness (photographic portraits, manuscript leaves and first editions) and proceeding through tools and instruments, household furnishings, and the paraphernalia of a land-surveyor and naturalist, both professional callings of Thoreau’s.
The latter items include the spyglass (portable telescope) and ornithologist’s guidebook that Thoreau relied on for bird-watching, the surveying chain with which he and his assistants measured acreage “within almost any degree of exactness” (quoted 76) and the drafting instruments he used to create “[d]istinct and accurate Plans of Farms” for his clients.
There are tales attached to these objects, and Wood draws upon the deadpan humor of Thoreau’s lifelong journal and correspondence in retelling them. Thus, Thoreau’s iron surveying chain came in handy in 1857 when he worked with a property-owner who was hard of hearing: “I could never communicate with him when setting a stake or carrying the chain but by signs, and must first get his attention to the signs,” Thoreau wrote. “This I accomplished, when he had hold of the chain, by giving it several smart jerks” (quoted 76).
Every object also has its social and cultural context, and Wood’s ability to tell these stories provides one of this book’s strengths. Among household ornaments in the Museum’s Thoreau collection is a Staffordshire (England) ceramic figure depicting Uncle Tom and Little Eva, characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely influential antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The Thoreaus received this figurine as a gift from a runaway slave who was helped to freedom by Henry and his family.
“Displaying a figure like this,” Wood notes, “was a tasteful way to announce to visitors the homeowner’s position on the issue, still hotly argued in the 1850s” (47). Of all families in Concord, though, the Thoreaus didn’t need to show visitors a tasteful icon of their political views—any visitor calling upon the outspoken Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau would already know where she stood. The Thoreaus’ home was a safe-house for fugitives and their abolitionism more radical than Beecher Stowe’s. As Sandra H. Petrulionis has shown in her recent study To Set This World Right (2006), Cynthia’s naturalist son had good reason to embrace an increasingly militant abolitionism in a commonwealth disgraced by the antebellum Fugitive Slave Law.
Well beyond its prime purpose of displaying the Museum’s rich Thoreauvian trove, this intriguing monograph makes a persuasive case for Henry Thoreau’s historical role as an archeologist and student of material culture. Wood starts with a leading question—“why should a self-proclaimed idealist care about objects at all?” (9) The answer lies in Thoreau’s intimate relationship to material reality, whether as an observer of natural cycles, builder of his own house at Walden Pond, innovator in pencil-manufacturing, or all-round handyman. Thoreau, the lifelong collector of arrowheads and other artifacts, was a prototypical material culture historian, Wood shows, because he “had a way of looking at material that takes advantage of the information left inadvertently or unselfconsciously by the craftsman” (23).
Wood’s
handsome volume itself has been sumptuously crafted by Maureen Daniels and
Joseph Gilbert of Gilbert Design Associates, richly weaving Wood’s meticulous
text in and out of an eye-catching cascade of detailed photography. Possibly in
homage to Walden’s author, the layout here and there attests a dry
wit—the photograph of Thoreau’s three-rods-long surveying chain, with several of
its links extended, spans not just a two- but a three-page spread (74-76). An
Observant Eye is the sort of book that Thoreau himself might have prized.