18. Thoreau Refers to the Middlesex in Walden

In many ways, life at the Middlesex Hotel was the antithesis of everything that Henry David Thoreau sought when he moved into a cabin on Emerson’s property at Walden Pond in 1845. Coming into town on errands and to visit family and friends, Thoreau could not fail to notice the contrast between the simplicity of his life, his deliberate solitude, and the presence of nature at Walden—where he could think clearly and could train his senses on expressions of spirit—with the bustle, noise, material excess, and superficial sociality of hotel life.

In his opening to the chapter “Visitors” in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (first published in 1854), Thoreau referred specifically to the “Middlesex House” (another name by which the hotel was known) in suggesting that greater luxury in living arrangements did nothing to ennoble the individual or to enhance the meaningful connection of one human being to another. The image shown here is from Volume 2 of the 1906 Manuscript Edition of Thoreau’s writings.