Edward Waldo Emerson
Edward Waldo Emerson
Edward Waldo Emerson was the youngest of Ralph Waldo and Lidian’s four children. He was born on July 10, 1844 and died on January 27, 1930.
Sadly, the Emersons’ first son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever at the age of five before Edward was born. Their two daughters, Ellen and Edith, were born between Waldo and Edward.
Edward attended Harvard University but due to health issues left for a period before graduating in 1866 as Class Poet. He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1874 and set up a practice in Concord, where he lived for virtually his entire life.
He married Annie Shepard Keyes—also a lifelong Concord resident—in 1874 and they had seven children, only one of whom survived to adulthood.
Dr. Emerson left the medical profession in 1882, the year his father died. Like his father, Edward was also a writer and lecturer. His written works include Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917) and Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (1888), a biography of his father. Edward was largely responsible for editing his father’s manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers after Emerson’s death.
Providing wonderful insights about his father, Edward wrote, “He had the grace to leave to his children, after they began to grow up, the responsibility of deciding in more important questions concerning themselves, for which they cannot be too grateful to him; he did not command or forbid, but laid the principles and the facts before us and left the case in our hands.” Additionally, Edward shared his father’s advice to many young people:
Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.
Edward Waldo Emerson with his father, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and son, Charles Emerson.
An accomplished painter, Edward also taught art anatomy at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Like his father, he was highly engaged in Concord life, serving as Superintendent of Schools and on the Board of Health, the Cemetery Committee, and the Library Committee. He was a founding member of the Concord Antiquarian Society—now the Concord Museum—and a member of the Social Circle.
Edward Waldo Emerson and his brother Waldo died 88 years apart but on the same day, January 27th.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
