SOURCE: Gleason, William. “Re-Creating Walden: Thoreau's Economy of Work and Play.” American Literature 65, no. 4 (December 1993): 673-701.

In the following essay, Gleason examines the influence of the influx of Irish immigrants on Thoreau's writing. Gleason finds that Thoreau's anxiety about immigrants and how they might change the character of the nation is reflected in his varied, sometimes contradictory treatment of Irish characters in Walden.

It is in obedience to an uninterrupted usage in our community that, on this Sabbath of the Nation, we have all put aside the common cares of life, and seized respite from the never-ending toils of labour. …

—Charles Sumner, The True Grandeur of Nations

On 4 July 1845, as Thoreau (“by accident”) “took up [his] abode in the woods,”¹ Charles Sumner exhorted Sabbath-seizing Bostonians to honor the “venerable forms” of the “Fathers of the Republic” in his Independence Day oration. “Let us imitate what in them was...