Between Thoreau's completion of the 1849 Walden and his return to the manuscript early in 1852, his life underwent a series of outward and inward changes that would seriously affect the emphases of his book. Published at his own expense, A Week had sold poorly, leaving Thoreau in debt and forcing him “to confront more directly than before the stark reality that, after nearly a decade of writing for various magazines, lecturing, and publishing a book, he was unlikely to be even moderately remunerated for his work.” The family pencil business, prospering now (thanks partly to Thoreau's innovations), provided one source of income, his increasing skill and initiative as a surveyor, another. The debts were a burden that would gradually be lifted; the experience of failure, and concomitantly of humiliation, pressed more heavily, with no end in sight.

Walden's most caustic remarks on trade date largely from this period, as does its parable of the Indian basket-maker, adapted from an anecdote Thoreau heard in 1850 (PJ 3, 130–31).