Description
The manuscript of the discourse read by Ralph Waldo Emerson on September 12, 1835 came to the library in 1985 as the gift of David Emerson (great-grandson of Ralph Waldo) in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of Concord’s incorporation. Containing numerous emendations and deletions in the author’s hand, the manuscript was used not only for delivering the speech, but also (as the presence of footnotes suggests) as printer’s copy for the 1835 first publication of the discourse.
In his Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography, Joel Myerson refers to a copy of the printed discourse inscribed by Charles Eliot Norton in 1860: “This discourse has become very rare, most of the copies having been destroyed, many years ago, in a fire at the office of the Town Clerk in Concord.”
