Thoreau's Bog People

Abstract

T is not necessary to go to the history books to gain a sense of the impact of Irish immigration on the Massachusetts world in which Henry David Thoreau was so widely traveled. Many of the 1.7 million Irish who became Irish Americans in the twenty years before the Civil War settled near Boston, where the Irishborn population swelled from one in fifty in 1845 to one in five in 1855.' These immigrants appear regularly in the pages of Thoreau's formal and informal writings. In Concord, Irish women cooked, washed, and served as hired girls; Irish men were ditch diggers, farm laborers, wood cutters, ice cutters, and railroad workers. Thoreau's journals reveal that he gave them clothing, enjoyed their warm simple social relations, wrote letters for them, and on at least one occasion raised money to help an Irishman bring his family from the old country.2 He also attempted-with notable lack of success-to convert them to the way of life he pursued at Walden. Thoreau frequently indicated sympathy for the plight of Irish Americans, and Joseph Wood Krutch concludes that Thoreau's sympathy for them was extensive and arresting, even though their presence threatened his stable society.3 Other commenta-