The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is a two act play written by Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence, and it tells the story of famed transcendentalist poet and author Henry David Thoreau, and the night he spent in jail in Massachusetts with another man, as they ruminate on their lives, their past and their freedom.

The play opens with middle aged Ralph Waldo Emerson, a good friend of Thoreau’s and a fellow transcendental literary leader. Despite their friendship, Waldo is unable to remember his friend’s name, and needs his wife to remind him of it so he can tell the story. The rest of the beginning of the play enters into the life of Henry, and how he would have graduated from Harvard if he had agreed to pay a dollar for his diploma, but did not. Instead he became a schoolmaster, teaching the children against the curriculum in an attempt to free them from the same bonds that held him. Later, he leaves this position when his boss tells him that he must flog the children, so Henry disagrees and decides to open his own outdoor school. This school of his fails miserably when the mothers of the children take them away from it, worried of the influence that this tax-resister, troublemaker and political rebel had on their children, and apparently rightly so.

A lot of the stories Thoreau tells, especially the one about opening a school, also include his brother John, who is a main character who also shares many of the beliefs as his younger brother. Other major characters are, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also Edward Emerson, Ralph’s son who befriends Henry when the Emersons hire Thoreau on as a helper around the house.



The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is less of a play of action, and more one of contemplation. Multiple stories are recounted, however they are all within Henry David Thoreau’s mind, and seldom play out on the stage. They are told out of order and within the confines of a cell. Henry is in this cell because he refused to pay a poll tax, which isn’t out of character for the real Henry David Thoreau, because he believed that this particular sum of money would contribute to the Mexican American war, which Thoreau detested.

Most of the drama happens in the jail cell – this is also where he meets his cellmate, Bailey, a destitute man accused of arson, and in his opinion mistakenly so. While Henry and Bailey share stories from their pasts, Henry forms a bond with this vagrant and decides to help him learn so that when he is released he can be more productive – and he starts by teaching him how to write his own name.

Back to his stories, Thoreau mentions a sibling of one of his old classmates, Ellen. Thoreau loves Ellen with a great passion. Ellen comes to the school because she wants to learn about Transcendentalism and she shows great interest in it. When Thoreau’s outdoor school is disbanded, Thoreau takes it upon himself to educate her about the teachings of Transcendentalism in a more personal manner. He takes her on a boat ride, during which they talk about Transcendentalism, including the nature of love and the love of nature. In the end, Thoreau confesses his love to her. Ellen does not share these feelings, so the boat ride becomes awkward. Soon, she leaves. Henry decides to let her go, as she is not interested, and tells her to go meet with his brother John Thoreau at the church. John now is the one to confess his love for her, and he proposes marriage, which at first she considers; however, her father is very strict and would not allow her to marry either one of them, and she breaks his heart. Shortly after, John Thoreau dies from shaving – he cut himself quite harshly and suffers blood poisoning, passing away and leaving his younger brother with a long time to mourn.