Happy Birthday Mr. Emerson
Today is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 217th birthday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803. He was one of eight children born to William Emerson and Ruth Haskins. His father William was a Unitarian minister in Boston at the First Church.
Unfortunately, William passed away when Emerson was only eight years old and thereafter he moved many times with his mother and siblings between Boston and Concord. A very good listener even as a young boy, Emerson absorbed teachings by ministers who visited the family home, his aunts Mary Moody Emerson and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and others.
While at Harvard, Emerson lived in the Hollis Hall dormitory.
Emerson entered Harvard in 1817 at the age of fourteen—the common age for entering freshmen back then. He was described by professors as “calm and quiet in his manners; and no matter how much he felt externally he was never moved or excited.” Commencing a lifetime of writing, he started a journal while at Harvard and continued it for the rest of his life. In his senior year he decided he wanted to be called Waldo (an Emerson family name) instead of Ralph, and he was Waldo Emerson from then on.
After a brief career teaching, Emerson entered the ministry, being ordained in 1829. That same year he married Ellen Louisa Tucker and accepted a position as leader of the Second Church in Boston. Sadly, Ellen succumbed to tuberculosis in 1831 after only a year and a half of marriage. By 1832 Emerson had decided to leave the ministry and he sailed for Europe to try to recover from his grief.
While in Europe he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Walter Landor, and Thomas Carlyle, who became an influence on Emerson and a lifelong friend. Carlyle described Emerson as “a beautiful transparent soul.”
Returning to America in 1833, Emerson embarked on his new career as a lecturer, which became his major source of income for the next forty plus years. His brother Charles, hearing Emerson’s first lecture on “The Uses of Natural History,” remarked that he “was glad to have some of the stump lecturers see what was what & bow to the rising sun.”
Emerson married Lydia “Lidian” Jackson in 1835 and they had four children. He purchased a home on the Cambridge Turnpike in Concord before the wedding and they lived there for the rest of their married life; he for 47 years, she for 57.
After the publication of his essay “Nature” in 1836, Emerson became a prolific writer of essays and poems in addition to keeping a strenuous schedule of lecturing across America and Europe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson made enormous contributions to America’s place in intellectual literature — his 1837 address “The American Scholar” was described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Emerson had an innate ability to reach people with his words and he turned Concord, Massachusetts into the literary capital of the United States. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Franklin Sanborn, the Alcotts, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller and others either moved to Concord or ensured they spent as much time there as possible to be near this kind, generous and brilliant man.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
