SOURCE: "Re-Creating Walden: Thoreau's Economy of Work and Play," in American Literature, Vol. 65, No. 4, December, 1993, pp. 673-701.

In this article, Gleason looks at Thoreau's treatment of leisure, labor, and self-culture within the social and cultural context of widespread industrialization and Irish immigration.

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 lofty, pure and good," declared Sumner. "Let us from them learn to bear hardship and privation."² Although in one sense Thoreau...