Like Goethe, Emerson wanted to be the cultural historian and
interpreter of his age--its business, politics, discoveries. The
journals and notebooks included in this volume and covering in
depth the years 1848 to 1851 reflect Emerson's preoccupations with
the events of these often turbulent years in America.
On his return to Concord from his successful lecture trip to
England and visit to Paris in 1847-1848, Emerson resumed his
familiar life of writer, thinker, and lecturer. Impressions of his
recent European travels appear in passages in this volume which are
used later in "English Traits" (1856). He writes of technological
and scientific discoveries in America and abroad--one of which, the
discovery of ether, was to involve his brother-in-law in legal
embroilment. He ponders the meaning, for "the age" or "the times,"
of reports on the Dew textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, of
faster steamers daily breaking records, of new geological and
paleontological findings, of theories of race, and many other
matters that were coming increasingly to the fore in the
mid-nineteenth century. Many passages on these topics, used first
in lectures, later appear in his essays "Fate," "Wealth," and
"Power" in "Conduct of Life" (1860). He was also adding to his
critical biographies for Representative Men (1850), with special
attention to Swedenborg, always a source of particular interest for
Emerson.
Between 1850 and 1853, Emerson traveled farther west to lecture
than he had hitherto ventured--to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St.
Louis, and many other cities in the midwest. One notebook in the
present volume records his customary percipient observations of
places and people encountered duringthese western trips.
The tragic drowning of Margaret Fuller Ossoli and her family on
her return from Italy in 1850 prompted Emerson to consider a
collaboration on her life and writings, and another notebook
printed here contains her memorabilia, including original entries
by Emerson. "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli" by Emerson, William
Henry Charming, and James Freeman Clarke was published in 1852.
Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 brought to a boil
something in Emerson that had long been simmering. Concerned with
slavery, freedom, and the future of the black population in America
more than his public record had shown, he now delivered himself of
an outburst--pained, vitriolic, ironic--a more sustained response
to a single issue than appears elsewhere in all his journals. In
this latest move in a compounding national tragedy he could see
only chicanery and deterioration, the crumbling of America's moral
fiber. He saw the Fugitive Slave Law in a larger context of a sick
age; like Tennyson and Arnold in England, he lamented in moods of
spite and chagrin the loss of faith and of an old world where
political men of honor stood firm for the moral law. Most of his
journal outburst went into his addresses "The Fugitive Slave Law,"
1851 and 1854.
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