s earlier years, and his adulthood literary works were directly effected by his childhood. David Thoreau’s childhood was an unsettled one set in the early 1800’s. David Henry Thoreau being his birth name which he received on July 12, 1817 at his Grandmother Minott’s farm. Not until the age of twenty, when he was about to graduate Harvard, did he flip his first and middle name. Thoreau was born the youngest of three children; he had a much older sister Helen, an older brother John, and it wasn’t until the birth of his little sister Sophia that he became a middle child. His family was very poor, and his father’s various attempts at making a living left them much like nomads. It happened not to be until Henry was six that the family finally settled in Concord at the call of his father’s successful pencil-making business. The Thoreau family structure appears not to be so different from the normal of the time period. Derleth even describes the family as, “a closely-knit family of lifelong duration”(2). Henry’s father was a grave, quiet man, yet not prepossessing like many men of the time period. He was likable, but his tendency toward deafness made it hard to communicate with him. Henry’s mother was an opinionated, insightful woman, and her lively and bustling presence often brought these opinions to the surface. Derleth states, “Mrs. Thoreau... could sometimes make sharp observations about her fellow citizens, though she was not in any sense mean, and she was very much liked” (2). Mrs. Thoreau was clearly the dominant force in the household, and the house was regularly filled with women. Aunt Louis Dunbar, Henry’s Grandmother Minott before she died, and none other than Lucy Jackson Brown the sister of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife, were all welcomed boarders at the Thoreau household. Henry spent most of his life in the Concord Village and town, which at ...
