Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)

1. Life

Ralph Waldo (known to friends and family as ‘Waldo’) was the fourth of eight children born in Boston to the Reverend William Emerson and Ruth Haskins Emerson. He lost his father to tuberculosis just before his seventh birthday and was brought up by his mother and his father’s sister Mary Moody Emerson. After four undistinguished years at Harvard, he became a schoolteacher and studied theology there, preparing for the ministry.

In 1829, Emerson was ordained pastor of the Second (Unitarian) Church of Boston and married Ellen Tucker. Ellen died of tuberculosis in 1831, and the following year Emerson resigned his position on the grounds that he could no longer administer the sacrament of the Last Supper, which he considered a ‘dead form’. On Christmas Day, 1832, he set sail for Europe, where he toured Malta, Italy, France, Switzerland, England and Scotland. In Britain, he visited the ageing poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the historian and philosopher of culture Thomas Carlyle, who became a lifelong friend.

Soon after his return in November 1833, Emerson gave his first lecture, ‘The Uses of Natural History’, at the Masonic Temple of Boston, embarking on a career as an orator that would continue for the next half-century. He married Lidian Jackson in 1835 and settled in Concord, Massachusetts, from which he set out on lecture tours through the northeastern United States and later to England (1847–8 and 1872–3) and the American midwest.

Emerson’s published works, derived from his lectures and journals, include Nature (1836), Essays, First Series (1841), Essays, Second Series (1844), Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), The Conduct of Life (1860) and Society and Solitude (1875).