1822 Another collection of Irving’s sketches and stories, Bracebridge Hall, is published.
1823 The Monroe Doctrine is established to curtail European advancement into the Western Hemisphere.
1824 Irving publishes Tales of a Traveller, inspired by his visits to Europe.
1825 While in England, he becomes romantically involved with novelist Mary Shelley.
1826 Irving becomes a diplomatic attaché to the American embassy in Madrid. The Last of the Mohicans, by American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, is published.
1828 While in Spain, Irving publishes A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in several volumes. American lexicographer Noah Webster publishes An American Dictionary of the English Language.
1829 The historical novel A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, written by Irving under the pseudonym Fray Antonio Agapida, is published.
1831 American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of his anti-slavery newsletter The Liberator.
1832 Irving returns to America after a seventeen-year absence and is welcomed as a celebrity. He publishes The Alhambra, a series of sketches about Spain.
1833 Slavery is abolished in the British Empire.
1835 Irving’s A Tour of the Prairies, based on a recent trip through the American West, is published. He buys land in Tarrytown, New York, along the Hudson River, and builds a house he names Sunnyside. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (pseudonym Mark Twain) is born.
1836 Astoria, Irving’s history of American financier John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, is published. Davy Crockett is killed at the Alamo during the Texas Revolution.
1837 Irving’s novel about the American frontier, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., is published.
1839 American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes Hyperion.
1840 After spending months doing research for a book on the conquest of Mexico, Irving abandons the project when he finds that noted historian William Prescott is writing a similar work. Irving becomes a regular contributor to the monthly Knickerbocker Magazine, a literary publication.
1841 American essayist and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Essays.
1842 Irving is appointed American minister to Spain, a position he holds until 1846. English author Charles Dickens’s American Notes (a criticism of America) appears.
1844 Emerson publishes a second series of Essays.
1845 Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and Other Poems appears.
1848 Irving becomes president of the Astor Library (now the New York Public Library).
1849 Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith is published.
1850 Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter are published.
1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by American novelist and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, is published in book form.
1854 Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, is published.
1855 Wolfert’s Roost, a compilation of Irving’s contributions to the Knickerbocker, is published. Irving begins publishing his five-volume biography of George Washington, The Life of George Washington.
1859 Shortly after finishing the final volume of The Life of George Washington, Washington Irving dies at Sunnyside on November 28.
The First American Man of Letters
In April 1789, George Washington arrived in New York City for his inauguration as the first president of the newly formed republic of the United States. He met with a hero’s welcome. In the weeks that followed, well-wishers and admirers regularly approached him in the streets, among them a Scottish-born woman who cornered him in a shop on Broadway. Drawing before her a six-year-old child, she exclaimed, “Please, Your Excellency, here’s a bairn that’s called after ye.” It was Washington Irving. In retrospect, the scene seemed prophetic. Later in life, after having established a reputation as the first American man of letters, Irving recalled in an interview how Washington “laid his hand upon my head, and gave me his blessing” (Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, vol. 1, p. 10; see “For Further Reading”). Three generations after the Revolutionary War, George Washington was revered as the father of our country. Irving likewise was recognized as a founding father of America’s national literature.
Such a title might strike today’s reader as an exaggeration. Irving’s best-known characters, Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, do not seem substantial enough to serve as foundational figures in an American literary tradition. However, the stories Irving set in Sleepy Hollow, a secluded village in the Hudson River Valley, provided American culture with a local habitation and a name. Along with James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, Irving was one of America’s pioneer writers. He helped sketch the contours of a cultural landscape that was unique to the United States, not a pale imitation of the literature of England and Europe. Sleepy Hollow is an early example of American authors self-consciously setting out to create an imaginative space for artistic creativity. Nathaniel Hawthorne described this sort of space in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter as “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real-world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1, p. 36). By providing such a “neutral territory” for his readers, Irving contributed to the new nation’s efforts to generate a collective cultural memory from native sources.
In the wake of the American Revolution, as the Constitution was being ratified, the general public sentiment was that a distinctively American literature was essential for the success of America’s democratic experiment. For what did the states share in common other than their opposition to colonial rule? As Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were publishing The Federalist to promulgate common political principles and beliefs for the nation’s citizens, American authors were also being called on to promote a common set of cultural values. “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics;” Noah Webster declared, ”as famous for arts as she is for arms” (Spencer, The Quest for Nationality, p. 27). However, the barriers to such cultural independence were formidable. Because there was no international copyright law, American booksellers could reprint English editions without paying royalties. As a result, the literary marketplace was flooded with foreign works. Why publish—or purchase, for that matter—the work of an American writer when one could have the writings of the best-known authors of Britain and Europe for little more than the cost of paper and ink? Magazines and newspapers also capitalized on this situation by reprinting poetry, essays, and criticism culled from the latest British periodicals. An odd phenomenon began to occur: In order for American authors to win approval from the American public, they first had to establish a critical reputation in the British press.
The extent of the public’s reliance on British critical opinion is captured succinctly in Philip Freneau’s satirical advice “To a New England Poet.”
Dear bard, I pray you, take the hint,
In England what you write and print,
Republished here in shop, or stall,
Will perfectly enchant us all:
It will assume a different face,
And post your name at every place.
Cultural subservience to England was further compounded by the British disdain for all things American in the decade following the War of 1812. In the January 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith famously posed the rhetorical question: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?” Washington Irving responded directly to such criticisms in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Published in England in the same year as Smith’s notorious taunt, The Sketch-Book established Irving’s reputation, according to John Gibson Lockhart in the February 1820 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, as an author whose writings “should be classed with the best E
nglish writings of our day.” It was hailed as evidence that America possessed the raw materials necessary to produce a culture of its own. In his review, Lockhart wrote, “[The Sketch-Book] proves to us distinctly that there is mind working in America, and that there are materials, too, for it to work upon, of a very singular and romantic kind.”
While helping American literature gain legitimacy in England and Europe, Irving’s Sketch-Book also introduced British and European romanticism into American culture. In post- Revolutionary America, literature was considered part of public discourse rather than the unique expression of an individual artist. Poetry and fiction had a well-defined civic purpose: to educate readers in the virtues of citizenship. This was especially important in the newly formed republic, where common law practices were being implemented across regions with widely divergent social customs, from puritan New England to the plantation-based South. Writers were expected to produce stories and poems that were morally instructive, domestic and national allegories that illustrated how and why individuals should subordinate their personal interests and inclinations to the public good. Purely imaginative literature, and especially the novel, was suspect, because it elicited from readers emotional and psychological responses that were unregulated by principles of community. However, the public conception of literature began to change as British and European romanticism made its way across the Atlantic. The works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and other prominent romantic writers were printed and reprinted by American booksellers and magazine editors. Gradually, fiction came to represent a space of imaginative freedom, a setting suitable for the self-reliant individualism championed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. What appeared as a dangerous and seductive wilderness to the citizen of the early republic came to be perceived as a symbolic space of unlimited possibility.
Washington Irving’s writings were an integral part of this transformation. He was among the first American writers to separate literary fiction from public discourse. Although his early writings contain elements of social and political satire, he refused to put his writing in the service of a single party or cause. Evidence of this can be found in his 1848 “Preface to the Revised Edition of The Sketch-Book,” in which Irving relates his struggle to find a publisher. He appealed to Sir Walter Scott for help; Scott, after reading some parts of the manuscript, offered Irving the editorship of a weekly periodical but warned him that it would have “somewhat of a political bearing.” Irving’s reply makes clear that he preferred to write when and what he pleased.
[I am] peculiarly unfitted for the situation offered to me, not merely by my political opinions, but by the very constitution and habits of my mind.... I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weather cock. Practice and training may bring me more into rule; but at present I am as useless for regular service as one of my own country Indians, or a Don Cossack.
I must, therefore, keep on pretty much as I have begun; writing when I can, not when I would. I shall occasionally shift my residence and write whatever is suggested by objects before me, or whatever rises in my imagination; and hope to write better and more copiously by and by (Irving, The Complete Works of Washington Irving, vol. 8, p. 5).
What is remarkable about this retrospective account of his correspondence with Scott is the extent to which Irving identified as his own character traits he attributed to Geoffrey Crayon, the narrative persona he constructed for The Sketch-Book. In “The Author’s Account of Himself,” Irving describes how he spent the “holiday afternoons” of his youth “in rambles about the surrounding country [making himself] familiar with all its places famous in history or fable [and] neglect[ing] the regular exercises of the school” (pp. 49-50). These idle, romantic habits informed his peculiar narrative perspective, that of an outside observer of “the shifting scenes of life.”
In describing this point of view, Irving presents writing as an activity that affords an aesthetic pleasure akin to travel or to shopping for prints.
I have wandered through different countries, and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher; but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape (p. 51).
More than a simple pun on the title of his book, this description exemplifies a significant shift in the public conception of reading. The subjects of his sketches are not meant to illustrate ethical norms for citizenship. They are meant to provide some distraction and relief from the pressures and anxieties of modern, professional life. Literature had become a leisure activity rather than a moral exercise in character formation.
If Geoffrey Crayon is a self-portrait, then Irving clearly thought of himself as a romantic writer recording his unique impressions with little regard for instructing readers in the political or moral truths of the moment. In so doing, he assumed a narrative persona that Nathaniel Hawthorne later imitated when he wrote in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, “I am a citizen of somewhere else” (Hawthorne, vol. 1, p. 44). Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon inaugurated a literary tradition of interiority and introspection that led subsequent writers such as Henry David Thoreau to declare that the true American frontier was to be found within each individual’s experience. “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,” Thoreau wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “[they are] wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor.... Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT” (Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, pp. 323-324). Irving’s insistence that literature was a species of imaginative entertainment rather than a means of moral or political instruction helped usher in a new conception of artistry that contributed to the formation of an American literary culture conducive to democratic individualism.
Irving grew up in a post-Revolutionary America torn between its democratic aspirations for the future and its memories of the colonial era. During his boyhood, British sympathizers lived next door to veterans of the Continental army. Memories of the hardships endured while quartering British troops during the occupation of New York were mixed with frustration over financial losses incurred from the severing of ties with Great Britain. The War of 1812, often referred to as the Second War of American Independence, rekindled and put to rest some of these memories, but the early republic continued to be haunted by its British colonial past. The story “Rip Van Winkle” wonderfully illustrates Irving’s strategy for putting these ghosts to rest. Set in Sleepy Hollow, “a little village of great antiquity ... founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province,” this story conjures up the ghosts of New York’s Dutch colonial past in a way designed to erase the memory of America’s subservience to British rule. Rip wanders from the village and out into the Kaatskill Mountains at a time when “the country was yet a province of Great Britain” (p. 74). When he returns after a twenty-year nap in the wilderness, the Revolutionary War is over and the signs of British colonial rule have been replaced by symbols of American independence. The village inn, which used to be “designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George the Third” (p. 77), has been renamed the Union Hotel, and the sign bearing the portrait of King George has been repainted to look like George Washington. “The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON” (p. 84).
Irving’s story exemplifies the shift in public discourse that coincided with this transformation of the signs of colonial rule into the symbols of American nationalism. When he returns to the
village Rip walks into the midst of a political debate led by “a lean, bilious-looking fellow . . . haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens—elections—members of congress—liberty—Bunker’s Hill—heroes of seventy-six—and other words, which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle” (p. 84). When asked ” ‘Whether he was a Federal or Democrat,’” Rip is equally bewildered (p. 84). Irving’s story, at this point, becomes a satire on the American public’s preoccupation with political matters. The explanation for Rip’s mysterious twenty-year absence turns out to be a legend derived from New York’s Dutch colonial past. It is given by “old Peter Vanderdonk,” whom we are told was “a descendant of the historian of that name, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the province” (p. 87). He assures the villagers of “a fact, handed down from his ancestor,” namely, that the Dutch explorer “Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country,” returned to Sleepy Hollow every twenty years to “keep a guardian eye upon the river, and the great city called by his name” (p. 87).
Oddly, Hudson’s protective intervention takes the form of playing nine-pins and drinking from “a stout keg” of Hollands gin. Rip, being “naturally a thirsty soul” joins in the carousing, and after repeated draughts from the flagon, “his senses were overpowered” (p. 81) and he passed out for the duration of the Revolutionary War and its political aftermath. Rip’s long nap leads him to forget—or better, to never know—the traumatic separation from the land of their fathers that marks the memories of his fellow citizens. Moreover, in the story’s conclusion, Irving cast Rip in the role of a storyteller so that his fellow citizens could share the bliss of forgetting. Loafing on the bench outside the Union Hotel, Rip tells his story to every stranger who arrives in the village and, in so doing, becomes a kind of living history that provides the younger generation with an alternative to the political turmoil of the post-Revolutionary period. He prefers “making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor,” and soon becomes “reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war’ ” (p. 88). Those old times constitute a pre-history for the new republic free of the emotional scars of its having severed ties with England. By having Rip take up the task of the historian, Irving turns his story into an allegory of how to construct a “legendary” past, one that presents the origins of the nation as idyllic and therefore free of the political conflict that is inherently part of democracy (Horwitz, “‘Rip Van Winkle’ and Legendary National Memory;’ p. 37).
Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2