Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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7 (p. 320) The Story of the Young Italian: “The Story of the Young Italian” concludes the sequence of stories that began with “Adventure of the Mysterious Picture.” Irving set “Adventure of the German Student” in Paris and “The Story of the Young Italian” in Genoa, cities he stayed in on more than one occasion; but his descriptions lack the verisimilitude of his evocative accounts of the Hudson River Valley. This may in part explain why a critic for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (September 1824) found Tales of a Traveller to be derivative, except for the concluding stories set in America, which were “not only worth the bulk of it five hundred times over, but really, and in every respect, worthy of the author and his fame.”
8 (p. 346) About six miles ... within its clutches: This description of the strait at the mouth of the East River, which provides access to Long Island Sound from New York Harbor, provides the frame-narrative for the fourth part of Tales of a Traveller. Irving uses it to establish the narrative voice of Diedrich Knickerbocker (fictional narrator of A History of New York), with his characteristic allusions to classical antiquity and New York’s Dutch colonial history.
9 (p. 349) Kidd the Pirate: “Kidd the Pirate” is a second frame-narrative for the fourth part of Tales; it is designed to bridge the gap between history and fiction. Irving begins with a popular history of William “Captain” Kidd (c.1645-1701), a Scottish privateer who was ultimately convicted of piracy and murder and hung for his crimes in London. This history provides the basis for the stories that follow.
10 (p. 355) The Devil and Tom Walker: This is one of the few stories Irving sets in New England. Walker’s encounter with the Devil in the swamps of Back Bay perhaps anticipates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” but Irving’s characteristic vein of light humor sets a very different tone than Hawthorne’s puritan sensibility.
A History of New York
1 (p. 369) The following work ... : Irving first published A History of New York in 1809, but he significantly revised it on five separate occasions throughout his career, culminating with the Author’s Revised Edition of 1848. This last version is the one included in this edition, and as it reflects Irving’s later style and political sensibilities, it has been placed at the end of the volume. The selections included here are designed to introduce readers to the major historical figures around whom Irving chose to organize his work: Oloff Van Cortlandt, founder of the Dutch colony at Manhattan, and the subsequent director-generals of the colony, Wouter Van Twiller, Willem Kieft, and Peter Stuyvesant. Irving’s decision to limit his History to the Dutch colonial period preceding England’s control of the colony is significant insofar as it provided his contemporary readers with an historical past free from the influence of English cultural traditions (see the Introduction, pp. xviii, xix and xxx).
2 (p. 373) Notices: In the weeks prior to the publication of A History of New York, Irving published these notices as a promotional hoax to increase sales (see the Introduction, p. xxiii). His ploy was successful, and a second edition of A History was printed in 1812.
Inspired by Washington Irving
Let us not, then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their elements shall never perish. Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them-and from whom they had stolen.
—Washington Irving, from “The Art of Book-Making”
Literature
America’s first man of letters inspired a host of American authors who alternately revered, questioned, lambasted, and imitated him. The first generation of great American writers—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others—all explicitly acknowledged Irving’s influence. Some of them even published their works in Knickerbocker Magazine, one of the many invocations of Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving’s narrator in A History of New York (1809). The term “Knickerbocker” eventually came to refer to the descendants of the Dutch of New York and finally to identify all New Yorkers; it is now found in dictionaries.
Poe’s tales of horror—some of them blackly comic and dealing with the supernatural—are often cited as the first American works that distinctly show Irving’s influence. Primarily a poet and writer of short stories, Poe struggled through most of his writing life for favorable attention. Looking to establish a reputation for himself in the American press, he courted Irving, and Irving, in his way, mentored the younger author. When he began to receive letters from Irving, the famously insecure Poe was jubilant. “I am sure you will be pleased to hear that Washington Irving has addressed me 2 letters, abounding in high passages of compliment in regard to my Tales—passages which he desires me to make public,” Poe wrote in a November 11, 1839, letter to his old friend Joseph Evans Snodgrass. “Irving’s name will afford me a complete triumph over those little critics who would endeavor to put me down by raising the hue & cry of exaggeration in style, of Germanism & such twaddle.” Poe built on the foundation of American folklore and mystery found in Irving’s works, adding to it his own lyricism and quiet beauty. Despite this, Poe never enjoyed literary success during his lifetime to rival Irving’s.
Another writer to whom Irving played mentor is Twice- Told Tales author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne is said to have modeled “The Custom-House,” a chapter that precedes the action in The Scarlet Letter (1850), after Irving’s work. Following publication of that novel, Hawthorne’s celebrity soared, and Irving became of one of the many admirers of Hawthorne’s genius. Their mutual affection established, Hawthorne sent the following letter to Irving on July 16, 1852, along with a copy of his newest effort, The Blithedale Romance (1852):
I beg you to believe me, my dear Sir, that your friendly and approving word was one of the highest gratifications that I could possibly have received, from any literary source. Ever since I began to write, I have kept it among my cherished hopes to obtain such a word; nor did I ever publish a book without debating within myself whether to offer it to your notice. Nevertheless, the idea of introducing myself to you as an author, while unrecognized by the public, was not quite agreeable; and I saw too many faults in each of my books to be altogether willing to obtrude it beneath your eye. At last, I sent you ‘The Wonder Book,’ because, being meant for children, it seemed to reach a higher point, in its own way, than anything that I had written for grown people.
Pray, do not think it necessary to praise my “Blithedale Romance”—or even to acknowledge the receipt of it. From my own little experience, I can partly judge how dearly purchased are books that come to you on such terms. It affords me—and I ask no more—an opportunity of expressing the affectionate admiration which I have felt so long; a feeling, by the way, common to all our countrymen, in reference to Washington Irving, and which, I think, you can hardly appreciate, because there is no writer with the qualities to awaken in yourself precisely the same intellectual and heartfelt recognition.
Poetry
American poet Philip Freneau, in “To a New England Poet” (1823), derides Irving’s seeming subservience to Britain’s popular literary tastes: “Lo! he has kissed a Monarch’s—hand! / Before a prince I see him stand, / And with the glittering nobles mix, / Forgetting times of seventy-six.” But a host of American poets emerging in Irving’s wake thought him to be the most important literary figure among them. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one such writer who in his works gave Irving his due. In addition to his prose volume Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1833-1834), which is heavily influenced by Irving, Longfellow composed the poem “In the Churchyard at Tarrytown” in tribute to the author:
Here lies the gentle
humorist, who died
In the bright Indian Summer of his fame!
A simple stone, with but a date and name,
Marks his secluded resting-place beside
The river that he loved and glorified.
Here in the autumn of his days he came,
But the dry leaves of life were all aflame
With tints that brightened and were multiplied.
How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!
Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,
Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;
Dying, to leave a memory like the breath
Of summers full of sunshine and of showers,
A grief and gladness in the atmosphere.
Another poetic tribute to the writer of the The Sketch-Book came in the form of A Fable for Critics (1848), by James Russell Lowell. Lowell’s ten-part poem reads like a who’s who of American letters, including nods to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poe, Longfellow, and Lowell himself. The stanza concerning Irving follows:
To a true poet-heart add the fun of Dick Steele,
Throw in all of Addison, minus the chill,
With the whole of that partnership’s stock and good will,
Mix well, and while stirring, hum o’er, as a spell,
The fine old English Gentleman, simmer it well,
Sweeten just to your own private liking, then strain
That only the finest and clearest remain,
Let it stand out of doors till a soul it receives
From the warm lazy sun loitering down through green leaves,
And you’ll find a choice nature, not wholly deserving
A name either English or Yankee,—just Irving.
Film
Today, encomiums to an author’s genius usually come in the form of film adaptations rather than verse. Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has been the stuff of spine-tingling cinema for more than a century, with versions including a handful of shorts from the silent era; the beloved Disney cartoon of 1958, narrated and with songs sung by Bing Crosby; a humorous 1980 television adaptation starring Jeff Goldblum; and, perhaps the most faithful adaptation, a 1999 movie made for Canadian television. The most innovative of the lot is by auteur director Tim Burton. Known for his macabre humor, Burton lends his visionary genius to the Headless Horseman myth with 1999’s Sleepy Hollow. The film’s lush atmosphere is accented by poignant and memorable images: a horse carriage careening through a valley reminiscent of Hudson River School paintings; a moonlit New England village enclosed, even preserved, in curtains of fog and mist; and, of course, an epic and unforgettable Headless Horseman, with a cloud of flittering fallen leaves in his terrible wake.
Burton’s film, featuring a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, takes place in 1799. The coming century seems to promise order for the newly minted American nation, but for now, superstition reigns supreme. Ichabod Crane, played by a typically eccentric Johnny Depp, is a Manhattan-based, rational-to-a-fault solicitor, rather than the guileless schoolteacher of Irving’s narrative. Crane is investigating a series of gruesome decapitations, attributed by village locals to the legendary Headless Horseman. Scoffing at what he considers superstitious imaginings, Crane conducts his inquiry with a Holmesian levelheadedness, only to discover that his modern methods and theories are no match for the supernatural phenomena local to Sleepy Hollow. Though the film sags beneath a belabored plot, its heavily atmospheric setting is pitch perfect.
Sleepy Hollow, as its truncated title seems to suggest, is less reverent to its source than are other Irving adaptations. In fact, Burton seems to have cast his eye elsewhere, including at the campy horror films of the 1950s and 1960s produced by the British company Hammer Film Productions Ltd. It is Hammer luminary Christopher Lee playing an imperious New York judge who banishes Crane to Sleepy Hollow in Burton’s film. The Headless Horseman, played by a grotesque Christopher Walken and shown in various flashbacks, is revealed in all manner of gory detail to be a serial decapitator—the ghost of a Hessian soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War on the British side and who was buried sans head. The ensemble cast includes Christina Ricci and Miranda Richardson.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
WALTER SCOTT
I beg you to accept my best thanks for the uncommon degree of entertainment which I have received from the most excellently jocose history of New York. I am sensible that as a stranger to American parties and politics I must lose much of the conceald satire of the piece but I must own I have never read anything so closely resembling the stile of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests and our sides have been absolutely tense with laughing. I think too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses powers of a different kind & has some touches which remind me much of Sterne. I beg you will have the kindness to let me know when Mr. [Irving] take[s] pen in hand again for assuredly I shall expect a very great treat which I may chance never to hear of but through your kindness.
—from a letter to Henry Brevoort (April 23, 1813)
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Mr. Irving is by birth an American, and has, as it were, skimmed the cream, and taken off patterns with great skill and cleverness, from our best-known and happiest writers, so that their thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow.’ He succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a sort of prescriptive title and traditional privilege ...
Mr. Washington Irving’s acquaintance with English literature begins almost where Mr. Lamb’s ends,—with the Spectator, Tom Brown’s works and the wits of Queen Anne. He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor do we think he has tasked his own faculties much, at least on English ground. Of the merit of his Knickerbocker and New York stories we cannot pretend to judge. But in his Sketch-book and Bracebridge-Hall he gives us very good American copies of our British Essayists and Novelists, which may be very well on the other side of the water, or as proofs of the capabilities of the national genius, but which might be dispensed with here, where we have to boast of the originals. Not only Mr. Irving’s language is with great taste and felicity modelled on that of Addison, Goldsmith, Sterne, or Mackenzie: but the thoughts and sentiments are taken at the rebound, and, as they are brought forward at the present period, want both freshness and probability...
Mr. Irving’s writings are literary anachronisms.
—from The Spirit of the Age (1825)
CHARLES DICKENS
There is no living writer, and there are very few among the dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so. If you could know how earnestly I write this, you would be glad to read it—as I hope you will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of the hand I autobiographically hold out to you over the broad Atlantic.
—from a letter to Washington Irving (1842)
EDGAR ALLAN POE
The Spectator, Mr. Irving, and Mr. Hawthorne have in common that tranquil and subdued manner which we have chosen to denominate repose; but, in the case of the two former, this repose is attained rather by the absence of novel combination, or of originality, than otherwise, and consists chief
ly in the calm, quiet, unostentatious expression of commonplace thoughts, in an unambitious, unadulterated Saxon. In them, by strong effort, we are made to conceive the absence of all.
—from Graham’s Magazine (May 1842)
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
The “Sketch Book,” and the two succeeding works of Irving, “Bracebridge Hall” and the “Tales of a Traveller,” abound with agreeable pictures of English life, seen under favorable lights and sketched with a friendly pencil. Let me say here, that it was not to pay court to the English that he thus described them and their country; it was because he could not describe them otherwise. It was the instinct of his mind to attach itself to the contemplation of the good and the beautiful, wherever he found them, and to turn away from the sight of what was evil, misshapen and hateful. His was not a nature to pry for faults, or disabuse the world of good-natured mistakes; he looked for virtue, love and truth among men, and thanked God that he found them in such large measure. If there are touches of satire in his writings, he is the best natured and most amiable of satirists, amiable beyond Horace; and in his irony—for there is a vein of playful irony running through many of his works—there is no tinge of bitterness.
—from “A Discourse on the Life, Character and Genius of Washington Irving” (1860)
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Was Irving not good, and, of his works, was not his life the best part? In his family, gentle, generous, good-humoured, affectionate, self-denying: in society, a delightful example of complete gentleman-hood; quite unspoiled by prosperity; never obsequious to the great (or, worse still, to the base and mean, as some public men are forced to be in his and other countries); eager to acknowledge every contemporary’s merit; always kind and affable to the young members of his calling: in his professional bargains and mercantile dealings delicately honest and grateful; one of the most charming masters of our lighter language; the constant friend to us and our nation; to men of letters doubly dear, not for his wit and genius merely, but as an exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life.