The concept of the "Walden Lilliputian spell" refers to the spellbinding effect that Henry David Thoreau's book Walden has on its readers. Walden, published in 1854, is a memoir and philosophical treatise that explores Thoreau's experience of living a simple and self-reliant life in a cabin he built by Walden Pond. Thoreau's writing style and the themes he explores in Walden have captivated readers for over a century. The book, which delves into topics such as nature, solitude, and the meaning of life, has a way of drawing readers into its world and leaving a lasting impression on them. The term "Lilliputian" is a reference to the fictional island of Lilliput in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels. In Lilliput, everything is scaled down to miniature proportions, and the people are physically tiny.
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The so-called consensus historians of the nineteen-forties and fifties argued that the seeds of capitalism came in the first ships and were planted on American soil by the earliest Colonial settlers. But Thoreau wasn t so much battling the market revolution as dodging it, not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.
In Lilliput, everything is scaled down to miniature proportions, and the people are physically tiny. The Lilliputian spell, therefore, can be seen as the pull that Walden has on its readers, drawing them into Thoreau's own world and inviting them to see the world in a new, more contemplative way. Thoreau's vivid descriptions of the natural world, his reflections on the simplicity of life, and his call for self-examination and introspection have a transformative effect on readers.
Vast Designs
In February, 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson rhapsodized about young America, “the country of the Future,” as “a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” That May, Samuel F. B. Morse telegraphed the message “What hath God wrought,” from Washington to Baltimore, overthrowing, in one electric instant, the “tyranny of distance.” The next month, a railroad from Boston reached Emerson’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts. Less than a year later, in the spring of 1845, by which time the Boston railroad had snaked its way to Fitchburg, forty miles west, and telegraph wires had begun to stretch across the continent like so many Lilliputian ropes over Gulliver, Emerson’s eccentric friend, the twenty-seven-year-old Henry David Thoreau, dug a cellar at the site of a woodchuck’s burrow on a patch of land Emerson owned, on Walden Pond, about a mile and a half outside town. (Thoreau had lived in Emerson’s house, as his handyman.) He borrowed an axe, and hewed framing timbers out of white pine. “We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation,” Thoreau later wrote, from the ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin he built over that cellar, at a cost of twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents. He used the boards from an old shanty for siding. He mixed his own plaster, from lime (two dollars and forty cents: “that was high”) and horsehair (thirty-one cents: “more than I needed”). He moved in on the Fourth of July, 1845. Before winter, he built a chimney from secondhand bricks, and reckoned it an improvement, but he didn’t think the same could be said for the nation’s “rapid strides” and “vast designs.” The telegraph? “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The postal system? “I never received more than one or two letters in my life . . . that were worth the postage.” The nation’s much vaunted network of newspapers? “We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.” Banks and railroads? “Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.”
Daniel Walker Howe’s ambitious new book, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” (Oxford; $35), chronicles every development that Thoreau despised, many that he admired, and a great deal about which the man in Walden’s woods cared not one whit. Between 1815 and 1848, the United States chased its Manifest Destiny all the way to the Pacific; battled Mexico; built thousands of miles of canals, railroads, and telegraph lines; embraced universal white-male suffrage and popular democracy; forced Indians from the South and carried slavery to the West; awaited the millennium, reformed its manners, created a middle class, launched women’s rights, and founded its own literature. “What Hath God Wrought” is both a capacious narrative of a tumultuous era in American history and a heroic attempt at synthesizing a century and a half of historical writing about Jacksonian democracy, antebellum reform, and American expansion.
Howe’s book is the most recent installment in the prestigious Oxford History of the United States. This would not be worth mentioning except that the book that was initially commissioned to cover this period, Charles Sellers’s “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,” was rejected by the series editor, the late, distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward, and it is Sellers against whom Howe argues, if with a kind of gentlemanly diffidence. (Oxford did publish Sellers’s book, in 1991, just not as part of the series.) Sellers, a historian at Berkeley, claimed that the greatest transformation of the first half of the nineteenth century—indeed, the defining event in American and even in world history—was no mere transformation but a revolution, from an agrarian to a capitalist society. “Establishing capitalist hegemony over economy, politics, and culture, the market revolution created ourselves and most of the world we know,” Sellers wrote.
Sellers’s energetic, brilliant, and strident book may not have reached readers outside the academy—perhaps Woodward anticipated this—but among scholars it enjoyed a huge influence, not least because “The Market Revolution” was published just after many of the nation’s best historians had written essays sounding urgent calls for synthesis in American historical writing. During the nineteen-sixties and seventies, historians had produced longer and longer monographs on smaller and smaller subjects. A decade in the life of a town. A year in the life of a family. Dazzling studies, many of them, but pieces of a puzzle that no one had been able to put together. “The great proliferation of historical writing has served not to illuminate the central themes of Western history but to obscure them,” Bernard Bailyn complained, in 1981, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association. There followed similar, heartfelt laments by Eric Foner (“History in Crisis”), Herbert G. Gutman (“The Missing Synthesis”), and Thomas Bender (“Making History Whole Again”). Sellers’s paradigm seemed to offer an answer; he had dumped all the pieces out of the box, and put them together, joining decades of meticulous empirical research about Western farmers, Eastern bankers, Southern slaves, artisans, immigrants, politicians, everyone.
Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around “enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.” After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash, to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets; they were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely. “Inherent and ongoing contradictions between capitalist market relations and human needs” plagued the nation, as Sellers had it, and plague us still. For leading the anti-market struggle against the “business class” and attacking paper money and credit, Andrew Jackson served as Sellers’s hero, especially for having vetoed, in 1832, the charter for the Second Bank of the United States. But Old Hickory, and democracy, proved no match for the tyrannical business minority of bankers, merchants, and strivers, whose capitalist machinations made the poor poorer; the middle-class smug, pious, and bourgeois; and the rich richer. As Thoreau put it, “A few are riding, but the rest are run over.”
The literary scholar Perry Miller once said that “Walden” is “a manifesto of Yankee cussedness.” Sure, but, even if high-school sophomores forced to wade through “Walden” miss it, Thoreau can be very, very funny. “I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business,” he wrote, mischievously. “It is a good port.” His experiment was, of course, not a business but an anti-business; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything. Instead, he bartered, and lived on twenty-seven cents a week. At his most entrepreneurial, he planted a field of beans, and realized a profit of eight dollars and seventy-one and a half cents. “I was determined to know beans,” he writes in a particularly beautiful and elegiac chapter called “The Bean-Field.” He worked, for cash, only six weeks of the year, and spent the rest of his time reading, writing, hoeing beans, picking huckleberries, and listening to bullfrogs trumping, hawks screaming, and whip-poor-wills singing vespers. “Mr. Thoreau is thus at war with the political economy of the age,” one reviewer commented, after “Walden” was published, in 1854. But Thoreau wasn’t so much battling the market revolution as dodging it, “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.”
What Thoreau tried to escape, historians studying his America have found in every sparrow’s fall. Sellers’s was the thesis that launched a thousand dissertations; evidence of the market revolution seemed to be everywhere; it seemed to explain everything. In “The Market Revolution Ate My Homework,” a thoughtful essay published in Reviews in American History in 1997, the historian Daniel Feller observed that “a monograph that presupposes a market revolution will certainly discover one.” His caution went unheard.
So it is a rare and refreshing kind of heresy that Daniel Walker Howe, who studied briefly under Sellers at Berkeley in the nineteen-sixties, and who is best known for his 1979 book, “The Political Culture of the American Whigs,” refuses to use the term “market revolution” in his grand synthesis. (Signalling his quarrel with the other recent sweeping interpretation of this period, Sean Wilentz’s pro-Jackson “The Rise of American Democracy,” Howe dedicates his book to the memory of John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s political nemesis, and avoids using the phrase “Jacksonian America,” on the ground that “Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people.”) Howe has three objections to Sellers’s thesis. First, the market revolution, if it happened at all, happened earlier, in the eighteenth century. Second, it wasn’t the tragedy that Sellers makes it out to be, because “most American family farmers welcomed the chance to buy and sell in larger markets,” and they were right to, since selling their crops made their lives better. Stuff was cheaper: a mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815 (which meant that almost no one owned one) cost five in 1848 (and everyone slept better). Finally, the revolution that really mattered was the “communications revolution”: the invention of the telegraph, the expansion of the postal system, improvements in printing technology, and the growth of the newspaper, magazine, and book-publishing industries.
Howe offered an early version of his critique of Sellers at a conference held in London in 1994, in which he demurred, “What if people really were benefitting in certain ways from the expansion of the market and its culture? What if they espoused middle-class tastes or evangelical religion or (even) Whig politics for rational and defensible reasons? What if the market was not an actor (as Sellers makes it) but a resource, an instrumentality, something created by human beings as a means to their ends?” Sellers summarized Howe’s argument as “Market delivers eager self-improvers from stifling Jacksonian barbarism” as against his own “Go-getter minority compels everybody else to play its competitive game of speedup and stretch-out or be run over.” Fair enough. “Where Howe’s assumptions suggest that I undervalue capitalism’s benefits and attractions,” Sellers continued, “my assumptions suggest that he underestimates its costs and coercions.” Again, fair enough. But Sellers attributed these “warring assumptions” not to different evidence, methods, theories, or strategies of analysis but to the two historians’ different values. Howe writes from “within the bourgeois middle-class culture,” Sellers scoffed, while his own (presumably more Waldenesque) life had taught him that “relations of capitalist production wrench a commodified humanity to relentless competitive effort and poison the more affective and altruistic relations of social reproduction that outweigh material accumulation for most human beings.” In other words, money talks, but it can’t buy you love.
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” Thoreau demanded. One question woke him up every morning, as regularly as the screech of the whistle of the Fitchburg locomotive that chugged by his cabin, on tracks built just up the hill from Walden Pond: Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? In truth, no. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
Howe, quoting Samuel Morse quoting Scripture (Numbers 23:23), asks more or less the same question: “What hath God wrought”? Howe’s debate with Sellers is provocative and important because the answer to this question ought to explain, or at least illuminate, the historical relationship between capitalism and democracy. The so-called consensus historians of the nineteen-forties and fifties argued that the seeds of capitalism “came in the first ships” and were planted on American soil by the earliest Colonial settlers. With this, Sellers and Howe disagree, but differently. For Sellers, capitalism is the imported kudzu strangling the native pine of democracy. For Howe, capitalism is more like compost, feeding the soil where democracy grows.
Consider two major nineteenth-century events: the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening and the temperance movement. In 1776, about one in six Americans belonged to a church; by 1850, that number had risen to one in three. In roughly the same period, the amount of alcohol that Americans drank dropped from more than seven gallons per adult per year to less than two gallons (about what it is today). If you were to look at a map, and chart these changes, you’d see that they follow the course of the nation’s growing network of canals and railroads. The canal or railroad arrives, and the people join churches; the people join churches, and they drink less. How do historians account for these correlations? The answer, at first, seems obvious: preachers spread the Gospel; the same boats and trains that carried cash crops from farms to towns brought revivalist ministers from towns to farms. But, once they got there, why did anyone listen to them? Sellers argues that the heightened religiosity and teetotalling of nineteenth-century Americans can be attributed to “class needs for work discipline, social order, and cultural hegemony.” (In factory towns, some bosses required their workers to go to church.) The market needs industrious, reliable, orderly workers; the market produces them. Howe disagrees. “Evangelical religion was not foisted upon the industrial working classes,” he writes. Factory workers and farmers joined churches, and stopped drinking, for the same reason that their middle-class counterparts did: they were persuaded by evangelism’s embrace of egalitarianism, and “its trust in the capacities of ordinary people.”
Or consider sex. In agrarian America, as Sellers conjures it, “unsegregated nudity, casually exposed genitalia, and the sounds and smells of coition were commonplace in crowded cabins.” The market revolution replaced this earthy carnality with unrelenting prudishness: restrictive clothing, private bedrooms (with mattresses!), revivalist ministers’ militant campaigns against masturbation, and “an unprecedented denigration of eroticism.” In the eighteen-twenties and thirties, the Reverend Sylvester Graham, a founder of the American Vegetarian Society and the inventor of the eponymous cracker, argued that, with a proper (flesh-free) diet, lust could be almost entirely extinguished. Sellers acknowledges that the “radical redefinition of gender” associated with these developments eventually led to a powerful movement for women’s rights, but his grim conclusion is that “female power was won at the cost of female as well as male libido.” The market needs workers who don’t think about sex all day long; the market produces them.
petty; trivial: Our worries are Lilliputian when compared with those of people whose nations are at war.
Through his detailed observations and reflections, Thoreau encourages readers to slow down, reconnect with nature, and examine the way they live their lives. The "Walden Lilliputian spell" is not just about the book itself, but also about the impact it has on its readers. Many who have read Walden report feeling a sense of enchantment and a desire to change their own lives in some way. Thoreau's ideas and observations resonate with readers on a deep level, causing them to question their own values and priorities. In conclusion, the "Walden Lilliputian spell" refers to the mesmerizing effect that Thoreau's Walden has on its readers. Through his insightful observations and thought-provoking reflections, Thoreau draws readers into his world and invites them to reevaluate their own lives in light of his philosophy. The book's enduring popularity speaks to the lasting impact of this spell, as readers continue to be captivated by Walden and its call to live deliberately and intentionally..
Reviews for "Unearthing the Lilliputian Treasures of Walden: A Voyage of Wonder"
1. John - 1 out of 5 stars - I was really disappointed with "Walden lilliputian spell". The writing was convoluted and pretentious, making it difficult to follow the story. The characters were shallow and boring, and I struggled to connect with any of them. The plot felt disjointed and lacked any real depth. Overall, I found this book to be a complete waste of time, and I would not recommend it to anyone.
2. Sarah - 2 out of 5 stars - "Walden lilliputian spell" had potential, but unfortunately, it fell short for me. The narrative was slow-paced and dragged on without much purpose. I found myself losing interest and having to force myself to keep reading. The characters felt one-dimensional and lacked development. The themes explored in the book were interesting, but they were not explored in a meaningful or thought-provoking manner. Overall, I found the book to be mediocre and forgettable.
3. Michael - 2.5 out of 5 stars - "Walden lilliputian spell" had some intriguing ideas, but it failed to deliver a cohesive story. The writing style was overly descriptive and self-indulgent, making it difficult to engage with the plot. The characters felt artificial and lacked depth, making it hard to care about their journey. While the book touched upon interesting themes, it failed to explore them in a satisfying way. Overall, I was left feeling underwhelmed and unsatisfied with this novel.
4. Emily - 1.5 out of 5 stars - I did not enjoy "Walden lilliputian spell" at all. The writing style was overly verbose and seemed to prioritize showcasing the author's vocabulary rather than telling a compelling story. The characters were unrelatable and lacked any real substance. The plot meandered without a clear direction, and I found myself struggling to stay engaged. Overall, I found this book to be a tedious and frustrating read.
5. David - 1 out of 5 stars - "Walden lilliputian spell" was a complete disappointment. The writing was overly flowery and excessively descriptive, making it difficult to grasp what was actually happening in the story. The characters were forgettable and lacked any memorable traits. The pacing was slow and tedious, with no sense of urgency or excitement. I was expecting to be immersed in a captivating world, but instead, I found myself struggling to finish this book. I would not recommend it to anyone.