Mr. Emerson’s Journals
Emerson started his first journal in 1820 while a student at Harvard University. Naming it The Wide World, he continued to write entries until 1875. The journals served as the vital source of Emerson’s many essays, lectures, and poems and he referred to them as his “Savings Bank.” In his entries, he coalesced his ideas, thoughts, and insights prior to sharing them with a wider audience.
The journals were a platform for Emerson to evaluate and make decisions; to react to news, good or bad; and to form a record of the people he met and the places he visited.
Emerson started his journal, titled The Wide World, in 1820.
Emerson often sketched in his early journals. This is a sketch of his room at Harvard.
The following are examples of journal entries reflecting different periods of Emerson’s life:
While at Harvard, Emerson wrote in his journal about his decision to become a Minister.
April 18, 1824: In Divinity I hope to thrive. I inherit from my sire a formality of manner and speech, but I derive from him, or his patriotic parent, a passionate love for the strains of eloquence.
After his first wife—Ellen Tucker Emerson—succumbed to tuberculosis, Emerson traveled to Europe, returning nine months later. In November of 1834 he moved to the Old Manse in Concord and declared his intentions for his future.
November 15, 1834: Henceforth I design not to utter any speech, poem or book that is not entirely and peculiarly my work. I will say at public lectures, and the like, those things which I have meditated for their own sake, and not for the first time with a view to that occasion.
During the 1840s, Emerson bought plots of land at Walden Pond to protect his favorite place to walk and to be part of nature.
April 9, 1840: We {poet Jones Very and Emerson} walked this afternoon to…Walden Pond. …the water seemed made for the wind, and the wind for the water…I said to my companion, I declare this world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.
When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in late 1850 as a compromise between the South and North, Emerson was incensed.
May 1851: We shall never feel well again until that detestable law is nullified in Massachusetts and until the Government is assured that once for all it cannot and shall not be executed here. All I have and all I can do shall be given and done in opposition to the execution of the law…
Emerson met President Lincoln on a lecture tour to Washington, D.C. in 1862; it was their second meeting.
February 2, 1862: The President…[is] a frank, sincere, well-meaning man with a lawyer’s habit of mind, good clear statement of his fact, correct enough, not vulgar, as described; but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness…
As Emerson entered his 68th year, he reflected on what he had witnessed over his lifetime.
June, 1871: In my lifetime have been wrought five miracles, — namely, 1, the Steamboat; 2, the Railroad; 3, the Electric Telegraph; 4, the application of the Spectroscope to astronomy; 5, the Photograph; — five miracles which have altered the relations of nations to each other.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
