Concord-born Henry David Thoreau is among the town’s most quoted writers. One of his best-known sentiments is telling the reader that you should “endeavor to live the life that [you have] imagined.” But not even he could imagine where part of his life’s work would end up one day.

In July of 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where, in his own words from his book Walden: or, Life in the Woods: “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months…. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.”

Manuscript Edition of The Works of Henry David Thoreau with documentation

| © Barrow Bookstore

Walden was published in 1854. In the same year, Thoreau presented a lecture at the Railroad Hall in Providence, Rhode Island, titled “What shall I profit?” The lecture discussed man’s race for fame and fortune at the expense of principles and a life of purpose and meaningful work.

Over the next few years, Thoreau edited this essay several times, making notes and corrections on his papers. In a section about “a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow” who wanted to hire Thoreau to help dig for three weeks in preparation for building a cosmetic and unnecessary wall, Thoreau wrote,  “If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose and devote myself to a certain labor which yields more real profit though but little money, they may be inclined to look upon me as a loafer. Yet, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow’s undertaking, any more than in money and enterprise of our own foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a different school.” After Thoreau’s early death in 1862, his amended essay was republished under the title “Life Without Principle,” and the passage above was included.

In 1906, the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin acquired some of Thoreau’s personal papers, which they then broke up and bound into limited edition sets of The Manuscript Edition of The Works of Henry David Thoreau. It’s at this point that Thoreau’s life of principle crashes into the hands of rare book collector Cortlandt Field Bishop, who purchased the set and put his bookplate inside. 

Cortland Bishop

| Commons.wikimedia.org. Public domain.

Born in 1870 and remembered by his own obituary as a “crackbrained visionary and troublemaker,” Cortlandt didn’t just “front the essential facts of life” like Thoreau; he owned them. Literally. Through generational wealth and several inheritances, including one through a spinster cousin who had died as the wealthiest woman in America, Cortlandt Bishop was worth millions and owned properties on Madison Avenue, New York City, and Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as a massive collection of antiques, fine art, rare books, hot air balloons, and those new-fangled contraptions called airplanes and automobiles. 

He was in the upper echelon of New York’s aristocracy, among which flitted, repeatedly, Amy Bend, the daughter of a former governor of the New York Stock Exchange who had lost all his money in the Panic of 1893. Amy didn’t let financial hardship keep her down and moved with great tenacity through high society, reportedly getting engaged twenty-five times, including to a Vanderbilt old enough to be her father, and to John Jacob Astor IV. Luckily for Amy, her broken engagement to Astor may have saved her life as the unfortunate man and his second wife later died aboard the Titanic.

Cortland Field Bishop bookplate

| © Barrow Bookstore

Perhaps Amy’s changing mind was genetic, for Amy was a cousin of the infamous Revolutionary War turncoat Benedict Arnold; specifically, his third cousin, four times removed.

But, when it comes to men, perhaps the only number that really matters here was the millions of dollars that came along with lucky bachelor number twenty-six, daredevil Cortlandt Field Bishop. The two were married in 1899 and moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, where Cortlandt hired workers to tear down a mansion he had inherited and build him a new one.

To Lenox, Cortlandt brought with him not just Amy, but a gasoline-propelled three-wheeled bicycle that locals nicknamed “the holy terror.” It was the first automobile in the Berkshires, and, with Cortlandt at the wheel, it terrorized people to such an extent that the town put in new laws governing anything with wheels. 

In 1902, Cortlandt and Amy traveled to Italy, where he acquired a car and drove so badly through small villages that a group of locals ambushed him and Amy in a tunnel and beat them with long sticks. Italian police did not appear to arrest anyone, particularly Cortlandt, who, reports say, had struck a number of people and objects with his car, but they escorted him out of town with a non-negotiable invitation to leave.

Back in America, Cortlandt continued to amass antiques, fine art, and rare books, including a 1906 Manuscript Edition of The Works of Henry David Thoreau containing the quoted-above draft page from “Life Without Principle” in which Thoreau talked about not needing police “to regulate me” a sentiment Cortlandt probably agreed with as he carried on his wild adventures, becoming president of the American Aero Club, and sponsoring and participating in balloon, car, and airplane races.

In 1923, Bishop purchased the American Art Association, America’s premier auction house, which would eventually become Sotheby’s Auction House. After an adrenaline-filled, fast-spent life, Cortlandt died of heart failure in 1935. 

Whereas Thoreau had preached in Walden, “Simplify, simplify,” (it should be noted that Thoreau said it twice), Cortlandt’s double life was seemingly revealed in his will, in which he left half of his fortune to his wife, Amy (age 70), and the other half to his mistress, Irish housekeeper Edith Nixon (age 44).  

Replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond State Reservation

| © Barrow Bookstore

From the shelf in Cortlandt’s library, perhaps Amy and Edith could hear Thoreau’s words shouting for them from the draft page, “I do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this.”  We can only speculate their true thoughts on the arrangement. But you know who did know? The immigration records and the United States Census.

In the month after Cortlandt’s death, an official passenger list manifest shows that Amy and Edith went on a cruise together to Europe. They returned to America and lived together in the Lenox mansion for at least the next five years. During that time they auctioned off Cortlandt’s possessions, possibly including the Henry David Thoreau Manuscript Edition set which, after many decades, in 2025, made its way to Thoreau’s hometown of Concord and onto the shelves of Barrow Bookstore where booksellers’ research revealed the tale with, as Thoreau wrote in Walden, “a chuckle of surprise.”

For a list of sources, contact BarrowBookstore@gmail.com.