When A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appeared in 1849, it was not badly reviewed — even James Russell Lowell had some good things to say of it — but neither was it widely reviewed. Thoreau had assumed the cost of its publication. The publisher, James Munroe of Boston, did not promote it vigorously, and the book did not sell well. Its financial failure prompted Munroe to back out of an agreement to publish Walden. "Resistance to Civil Government" appeared at the same time as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers — an idealistic and short-lived venture that, like The Dial, had a limited readership. Ultimately one of Thoreau's most influential writings, "Resistance to Civil Government" did not create much of a ripple on its first publication.
Although Thoreau sometimes complained in his journals of the level of comprehension of his lecture audiences, he nevertheless continued to lecture and to work lecture material into publishable form. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he was presenting material that would be incorporated into Walden (1854). In 1852, he published "The Iron Horse" and "A Poet Buying a Farm" — both of them parts of Walden — in two issues of Sartain's Union Magazine. When it finally appeared, then, Walden had already received what amounted to significant advance publicity.
The book was published in an edition of two thousand copies in August of 1854 by the Boston firm of Ticknor and Fields. As the premier literary publisher in America in the mid-nineteenth century, the company was in a position to see that Thoreau's work was well promoted and distributed. A sufficient number of notices and reviews appeared to assure broad interest in the book, which sold well. Walden was praised not only by those who knew Thoreau and his writings, but also in a variety of newspapers and magazines around the United States and in England. The Boston Daily Bee urged, "Get the book. You will like it. It is original and refreshing; and from the brain of a live man." Pieces about Walden were published in, among other publications, the Boston Daily Journal and Daily Evening Traveller; Concord's own Monitor; the New Bedford Mercury; Dwight's Journal of Music; the Circular of the community at Oneida; the Worcester Palladium; the Newark Daily Advertiser; the Cincinnati Daily Gazette; the New Orleans Daily Picayune; the Philadelphia Register; the Daily Alta California; the New York Morning Express, Daily Tribune, and Times; in National Era, Putnam's Monthly, Knickerbocker, and Godey's; and in the British periodicals Westminster Review, Chamber's, and Critic. This reception of the book gave Thoreau greater recognition as an author between 1854 and his death in 1862 than his earlier literary efforts had brought him.
