As you can see on this PDF immediately below, our assigned chapter from Thoreau's Walden (1854) is chapter two, and chapter one of Walden is revealingly titled "Economy":

Contents first pg of WALDEN-Thoreau.pdf

So while Thoreau can be stereotyped from the right, by social conservatives and certain pro-business thinkers, as a "tree hugger" and socialist, from the left he's often held as the godfather of the American environmental movement, an at-times needlessly abstract thinker and writer, and even sometimes considered a hypocritical son of privilege. This last view (abstract as a thinker, wordy as a writer, privileged as a person) is consistent with Thoreau's close connections to the cultural and artistic movement and philosophy known as transcendentalism.

Yet if we are to accurately contextualize him, not only did he originate the concept of "Civil Disobedience," the principle of non-violent protest of unjust laws that Gandhi and Martin Luther King learned well and utilized to stage their socio-political revolutions, but he was also (in the 1840s and 1850s) one of America's harshest critics of slavery, and of the 1840s Mexican War.

In addition to being his personal record of a two-year experiment in sustainable and secluded living, Walden's primary motive is nonetheless broadly economic. Its concern from the outset is for the plight of the common American worker, farmer, and young student at the time, when society was still primarily agricultural but the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum. For example, the first five pages of Walden's chapter one ("Economy") climax with the following, often-quoted piece of social criticism: "The mass of men lead lives of quite desperation" (Thoreau 5).

To your knowledge or via your educated speculation, what was the average worker's life like back then? What was the American economy like? Was there an American dream? What was it then, and how readily attainable was it? Why, or why not?