Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The journals of 1835–1838, perhaps the richest Ralph Waldo Emerson had yet written, cover the pivotal years when he brought to Concord his second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, published Nature (1836), and wrote “The American Scholar” (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838). As he turned from the pulpit to the lecture platform in the 1830’s, the journals became more and more repository for the substance of future lectures; his annual winter series, particularly those dealing with The Philosophy of History, in 1836–1837, and Human Culture, in 1837–1838, were drawn largely from materials contained in this volume.

One notebook contains Emerson’s translations of Goethe; another is devoted to his brother Charles and includes excerpts from Charles’s letters to his fiancée. A third contains an interview with a survivor of the battle of Concord and household accounts from just after Emerson’s marriage to Lydia Jackson.

The pages of these five journals from the years 1843 to 1847 document Emerson’s struggle to formulate the true attitude of the scholar and disinterested, independent writer to the vexing question of public involvement. He notes to himself that he “pounds…tediously” on the “exemption of the writer from all secular works.”

Emerson’s journals of 1847–1848 deal primarily with his second visit to Europe, occasioned by a British lecture tour. The journals, notebooks, and letters of these years recorded materials for lectures that Emerson composed abroad and shortly after his return to Concord, and ultimately for English Traits, which he was to publish in 1856.

The twelfth volume makes available nine of Emerson’s lecture notebooks, covering a span of twenty-seven years, from 1835 to 1862, from apprenticeship to fame. These notebooks contain materials Emerson collected for the composition of his lectures, articles, and essays during those years.

These journals show the ripeness of Emerson’s thought overshadowed by the grave problem of slavery. In addition to completing English Traits (1856) and Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson wrote many of the pieces that made up Society and Solitude. He also contributed often to The Atlantic Monthly after helping to found that magazine in 1857.

The Civil War is a pervasive presence in the journals in this volume. “The war searches character,” Emerson wrote. Both his reading and his writing reflected his concern for the endurance of the nation, whose strength lay in the moral strength of the people.

The final volume of the Harvard edition presents the journals of Emerson’s last years. In them, he reacts to the changing America of the post–Civil War years, commenting on Reconstruction, immigration, protectionism in trade, and the dangers of huge fortunes in few hands—as well as on baseball and the possibilities of air travel.