EMERSON, RALPH WALDO. (1803-1882). American essayist and poet; the Transcendentalist movement’s leading figure. ADS. (“R. Waldo Emerson”). 1p. Oblong 12mo. N.p., N.d. A handwritten order instructing Boston’s Atlantic Bank to pay $100 to Concord public official and, later, Massachusetts state legislator GEORGE HEYWOOD (1826-1897), whose endorsement is on the verso.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson entered Harvard College at age 14 and served as class poet. He traveled to the South after his graduation and became deeply affected by the institution of slavery. Returning to Massachusetts, he worked as a teacher and in the law offices of Daniel Webster, before distinguishing himself as a student at Harvard Divinity School. Eventually, he grew disillusioned by the church’s teachings and left for England where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Upon his return to the United States, he settled in Concord and joined the booming lecture circuit, delivering his first public talk in 1833 and, over the next five decades, Emerson continued to speak on topics as diverse as science, religion, history, and philosophy. He became known in Europe and America as “the bringer of a new religion which somehow squared with the times even while it supplied a method for criticizing them,” (DAB). Emerson’s Concord home became Transcendentalism’s epicenter as he became increasingly and reluctantly drawn into movements for social reform. Despite his involvement, “his attitude… was the attitude of a poet and philosopher; his game was the intellect, and his goal the triumph of invisible – though none the less potent – ideas,” (ibid.).
Heywood was a prominent Concord citizen and the town’s clerk for 40 years. He also served as the town’s treasurer, assessor, and tax collector. Not only would Emerson have known Heywood in these administrative capacities but they were also both involved in Concord’s Town Library Committee, of which Heywood was a member and which Emerson chaired from 1875 until his death in 1882.
Normal staining and wear with a small cancellation hole barely touching the “R” in Emerson first initial. Framed between two pieces of glass and not examined out of the frame.
