A Yankee in Canada, With Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. First edition. Very Good +. Bound in publisher's original green cloth, stamped in blind on the front board and gilt titles on the spine. BAL 20117. One of 1546 copies. A Very Good+ copy with a few short tears to the cloth at the crown and a pencil owner's name and address on the rear end paper. An excellent copy internally.

After Henry David Thoreau's 1862 death, the Boston publishers Ticknor and Fields, who had published Walden, gathered together and published a collection of Thoreau's essays. The majority of the essays in A Yankee in Canada outline Thoreau's commitment to social reform, especially Thoreau's abolitionist work. Slavery in Massachusetts as well as A Plea for Captain John Brown appear here. But the most famous and influential of Thoreau's essays included in this title is Civil Disobedience. This landmark essay was previously published with the title Resistance to Civil Government in Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers, but it appears in the present volume with the title that encapsulates one of its central arguments: how civil disobedience can be a just response to governmental tyranny. An important collection of influential essays from a profound American thinker. Very Good +.