“I have,” confided Washington Irving to his friend and effective literary agent Henry Brevoort, “by patient & persevering labour of my most uncertain pen, & by catching the gleams of sunshine in my cloudy mind, managed to open to myself an avenue to 〈a〉 some degree of profit & reputation.” The “avenue” in question was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – America's first internationally acclaimed work of literature – which, by March 1821, had become a direct route to respectability and the British establishment, opening to Irving the world of stately homes and their real-life avenues, previously only glimpsed from afar. Pieced together after the collapse of his family business, the collection of sketches may have been a carefully engineered career move, but Irving avoided any suggestion of personal cost in catching only those “gleams of sunshine,” and apparently censoring his cloudier, less amenable self. He continued: “I value it the more highly because it is entirely independent and self created; and I must use my best endeavours to turn it to account” (LI.614). In the context, “independent” – a charged word for his generation – is striking, given that The Sketch Book was anything but.

When, in September 1971, I published The Distant Magnet, I planned a personal synthesis, supplemented by small pieces of my own research. I was not taking up a position in any controversy, nor was I engaging in polemic with any other scholar. Yet I did intend some change of emphasis, and in particular I wanted to stress Europe more than anyone had done since Marcus Hansen. I sought realism in the description of travel conditions, rather than dwelling on the wholly exceptional horrors of 1847. I demonstrated how foreign was America's working class. I stressed the American conditions common to all immigrants, rather than the differences between ethnic groups. I showed how British capitalism, supplemented by that of France, Belgium, and, later, Germany, opened up overseas areas and at the same time undermined, further and further eastwards, Europe's peasant economies. I had in mind the impact of factory competition and railway construction in eroding the secondary occupations on which so many peasants depended. In other words, I asserted that the modernization of a small corner of Europe was responsible, to use old-fashioned language, for both “push” and “pull.” To restrict length, and to acknowledge my own shortcomings, I omitted the Colonial period, and also all Hispanic and Oriental migrations – and, of course, before World War II these latter were not very big.

Laurence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, £27.95). Pp. 586. ISBN 0 674 25861 4.

In an MLA survey conducted in 1991 American professors proclaimed Walden the single most important work to teach in the country's nineteenth-century literature. Walden got 45% of the vote, as against 34% for The Scarlet Letter and 29% for Moby Dick. And, as Professor Buell reminds the readers of this wide-ranging, scholarly, and beautifully written book, Walden has always had a popular readership to match its early incorporation into the canon of American classics as studied in schools and universities. And there is hardly an American special-interest group – from nudists and whole-earthers, through civil-rights marchers, John-Birchers and survivalist cults – that has not claimed Thoreau at one time or another as its patron saint. The Unabomber is said to have been a particularly avid reader. Above all, it has been an inspiration to ecologists and environmentalists, starting with the pioneer of conservation legislation, John Muir.