A History of New York

by Washington Irving

  On the heels of his History, Irving briefly took a position as the editor of the Analectic Review, a literary journal based in Philadelphia, but the needs of a family business venture in England was incentive enough to lure him to England in 1815. The venture failed, but Irving stayed on, traveling through England, Germany, and France with a letter of introduction to the celebrated Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (who had reported “sides ... sore from laughing” while reading Irving’s “excellent jocose history of New York”) and a fistful of glowing reviews for the History (and for Salmagundi, which had been published in book form in England in 1810). It would be sixteen years before Irving returned to the United States, and his stay abroad also marked a turning away from the long format of the History to the genre of the “sketch,” a picturesque and often sentimental vignette whose gentle humor and brevity made it the ideal format for the observations of a curious and romantic American. Irving would publish three collections of sketches in very quick succession, including The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824), as well as several historical works inspired by an extended stay in Spain: The Conquest of Granada, Life and Voyages of Columbus, Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, and The Alhambra. Diedrich Knickerbocker reappears only rarely in Irving’s sketch collections, to narrate “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.) as well as other tales of the Hudson River Valley and New Amsterdam, including “Dolph Heyliger” (Bracebridge Hall) and the “Money Diggers” section of Tales of a Traveller, among whose contents can be found “Wolfert Webber, Or, Golden Dreams,” an evergreen fable of New York real estate. The scarcity of these Knickerbocker tales, the only American elements in collections that are otherwise decidedly Anglophile (or at least Eurocentric) in nature, gives them a precious, endangered quality that mirrors their shared subtext—the disintegration of the Dutch elements of life in and around New York City.

  Not all of Irving’s American observers toasted his international success. Some perceived his absence as abandonment, and his European subject matter as a canny marketing strategy rather than an artistic choice. The American poet Philip Freneau spoke for Irving’s critics with his 1823 poem “To a New England Poet,” in which he urges a nameless colleague not to waste his talents in “such a tasteless land/Where all must on a level stand.” Instead, he recommends, “like Irving, haste away” to England, “and with the glittering nobles mix/Forgetting times of seventy-six.” Once a critical darling overseas, Freneau continues, the subject of his sarcastic ode is sure to triumph in America as well:

  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[.]

  Freneau’s recipe for success may have been bitter, but it was also prescient: when Irving finally did return to New York in 1832, he was besieged with invitations to valedictory dinners in his honor, requests by artists and sculptors to sit for his portrait, and demands for public appearances and addresses. In one particularly memorable encounter, he served as a kind of American literary ambassador to Charles Dickens, then visiting Baltimore on a national tour. The two authors reportedly shared an enormous mint julep sent by a well-wisher, a confounding image that is made even more so by Dickens’s recollection that Irving sipped from the giant cocktail with a straw. Writing after Irving’s death, William Makepeace Thackeray noted that the author of “Rip Van Winkle” was shy and awkward in the face of this universal welcome, even when mint juleps were not present: “He stammered in his speeches, hid himself in confusion, and the people loved him all the better.” Affection for Irving, Thackeray concluded, was a “national sentiment.” Irving himself had a lifelong aversion to “having to attempt speeches, or bear compliments in silence,” but his initial bewilderment may have also been due to the transformations he discovered in his native city. Like Wolfert Webber, who sees his cabbage plots transformed into apartment lots, Irving came back to a New York that was changed beyond expectation—and, in some cases, beyond recognition. Manhattan was now the largest city in the United States; the Erie Canal had been opened. Little wonder, then, that Irving marveled, at one of his public welcome dinners, at the “seeming city” that now extended itself over “heights I had left covered with green forests.”

  The exigencies of fame and what must have seemed like time travel ultimately spurred Irving’s retreat from the city; in 1835 he purchased and remodeled an old cottage in the Westchester County hamlet of Tarrytown, on a hill sloping down to the Hudson River. But the final product, a yellow-brick, gable-fronted cottage that its owner christened Sunnyside, was as much homage to the charms of Dutch New York as to Irving’s own writings, and it quickly became a destination for pilgrims seeking an audience with the creator of Knickerbocker. This pilgrimage was later accelerated by the new railroad tracks laid against the banks of the river just below Sunnyside, a development that would be at once the source and the scourge of Irving’s quest for privacy: the payment he received for allowing the tracks to be laid on his property helped defray the cost of an addition on the famous house. Sunnyside, which Henry James would later describe as a “shy ... retreat of anchorites,” became, in Irving’s lifetime, a metonym for the writer himself, and bore as many “compliments in silence” as the man who lived there. The house was hymned in Andrew Jackson Downing’s seminal Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1849), which suggested that “there is scarcely a building or place in America more replete with interest than the cottage of Washington Irving, near Tarrytown,” and was subsequently a prominent feature of The Homes of American Authors (1853) and the subject of a profile in Harper’s magazine (1856). From that riverside perch Irving wrote The Crayon Miscellany, a collection of travel sketches and histories; Astoria; and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. Despite (or perhaps because of) his retreat, New York City did not abandon its first literary champion: in 1838 Irving was nominated for mayor of Manhattan by Tammany Hall, an honor he graciously refused.

  Irving did leave his Tarrytown aerie in 1842 at the request of President Tyler, who appointed him minister to Spain, where he would begin the multivolume Life of George Washington that would turn out to be his final project. When he returned to Sunnyside in 1846, he found New York in the middle of a particularly fascinating romance: a passion for all things Knickerbocker. “Before the appearance of my work the popular traditions of our city were unrecorded” Irving marveled,the peculiar and racy customs and usages derived from our Dutch progenitors were unnoticed, or regarded with indifference, or adverted to with a sneer. Now they form a convivial currency... they are the rallying points of home feeling; the seasoning of our civic festivities; the staple of local tales and local pleasantries; and are so harped upon by our writers of popular fiction, that I find myself almost crowded off the legendary ground which I was the first to explore, by the host who have followed in my footsteps.

  In the nearly forty years since he introduced his opinionated and ornery historian, he added, Knickerbocker had become a “household word... used to give the home stamp to Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice,” and claimed by “New Yorkers of Dutch descent” who called themselves “ ‘genuine Knickerbockers[.]’ ” This expression of amazement and delight came from Irving’s “Author’s Apology,” which was appended to the revised 1848 edition of the History as part of a commitment with his publisher, G. P. Putnam and Sons, to publish all of his works in revised and deluxe editions. This revision was certainly not the first time Irving had amended the History since its initial publication, but it was the most drastic. In Putnam’s 1848 edition, the racy humor and earthy language of Knickerbocker’s original has been rendered parlor ready: but if it was less daring, the book was also decidedly les
s delightful.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that America’s first maverick writer should cede his place to other rebels: within a decade, Walt Whitman would mail Leaves of Grass to an unsuspecting Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Irving himself had already heard Herman Melville read aloud from his first novel, Typee (1846). But Irving’s “Apology,” written partly to assuage the feelings of some prominent Dutch New Yorkers who felt misused by his satire and partly to contextualize his book and his narrator for a contemporary audience, suggests that even if Irving had been “crowded off the legendary ground,” his narrator would triumphantly remain. By the time of Irving’s “Apology,” the name Knickerbocker had, as Irving notes with evident pleasure, evolved into recognizable shorthand for an authentic New Yorker: a cultivated, civic-minded native, preferably of Dutch descent. The Dutch customs and traditions described in the History were embraced by the cultural elite of nineteenth-century New York, and Irving’s tale and its teller became the springboard for more than a century’s worth of literature, iconography, and advertising—all designed to lend a product the same genteel, homely cachet that Knickerbocker ascribed to the Dutch “vrouws” and “mynheers” who peopled his book. In fact, a much wider range of high- and lowbrow cultural forms appropriated the Knickerbocker imagery than Irving acknowledges: even within his lifetime, there were stagecoach lines and spice companies named for the Dutchman; a literary magazine (which conscripted the historian to serve as its muse, and later Irving himself to serve as “permanent contributor”); and the first baseball team in the United States, the New York Knickerbockers.

  Irving’s historian also became the mascot of a collection of younger writers, poets, and editors who considered him their mentor, and dubbed themselves the “Knickerbocker School” in his creator’s honor. This group, which often used the totems, quintessential images, and “authentic” rhetoric of Irving’s New York themes in their own portraits of the city and its countryside, included Irving’s early collaborator James Kirke Paulding, Giulian Verplanck (like Paulding, one of few “Knickerbocker” writers of genuine Dutch descent), Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of Knickerbocker magazine, and the poets William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck. Unfortunately, few of the disciples of Irving who wrote under the “Knickerbocker” umbrella inherited his feverish imagination or his talent for portraying local color, and their works seem dated and damp in comparison. Many of these writers were present at Irving’s funeral in 1859, at which mourners packed the little Episcopal church in Tarrytown nearly to bursting and left a thousand more to gather outside, waiting for the chance to pay the author their last respects. Strangely, few of Irving’s memorializers take note of the rambling, possibly deranged fictional historian who charmed the world and brought the author his early fame. “The genial products of his pure and graceful pen will forever continue to afford a solace to the sick and weary,” Daniel F. Tiemann, the mayor of New York, noted in a leaden public tribute, while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “In the Churchyard at Tarrytown” mourned him as the “gentle humorist, who died in the bright Indian Summer of his fame!” But as Andrew B. Myers points out, Longfellow neglected to mention that Irving’s “simple stone, with but a date and name” was actually a replacement head-stone: the first had been vandalized beyond repair by inconsolable readers, making Irving’s grave the nineteenth-century equivalent of the tomb of Jim Morrison at Père-Lachaise. These shards had not been chipped off in memory of the biographer of Columbus or John Jacob Astor, but for the creator of Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, and for their biographer, Diedrich Knickerbocker. In a city with more stories than the Arabian Nights, a fictional Dutchman was its first and best Scheherazade.

  New York is still imbued with Knickerbocker, even if most of its citizens no longer know who Diedrich Knickerbocker was. A consciousness of all things Knickerbocker hovers at the edges of the city’s everyday life. In the last century, “Father Knickerbocker” supervised the consolidation of New York into five boroughs; promoted the New Deal; and, until recently, marketed Knickerbocker Beer: “New York’s Famous Beer.” Today, New Yorkers routinely cheer teams, cross avenues, visit dry cleaners, frequent restaurants, and belong to clubs named Knickerbocker. Yet “Knickerbocker,” thus divorced from its context, has been reduced to a comical moniker, a Dutch-inflected sound. This may be the result of Irving’s banishment from academe: by 1933 Carl Van Doren could assert that Irving’s reputation had “shrunk and faded” without fear of contradiction, and few contemporary scholars and literary critics have bothered to investigate the proto-postmodern innovations of the History, or to grapple with the implications of his founding mythologies, even as they celebrate the same inventive qualities in such subsequent American writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. But this oversight in no way diminishes the larger, lasting significance of Irving’s historian, whose “curious kind of a written book” marked the creation of a genre that persists to this day: the genre of the New York Story. The combination of delight and mockery that marked the History has become the vernacular of centuries of New York storytelling: regardless of the medium, all of its chroniclers share a belief in the singularity of the New York experience, and a mission to share this experience with the larger world. Readers everywhere take it for granted that New York City warrants all the encomiums, epithets, nicknames, and slogans that have been showered on it, and demand to be told more. What other city could at once be Walt Whitman’s “Mighty Manhattan,” Kander and Ebb’s “city that never sleeps,” and J. J. Hunsecker’s “dirty town”? Knickerbocker was not only the first narrator to identify this market: he was the architect of the market itself. “A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,” Walt Whitman would write in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “others will see the islands, large and small” that made up his beloved New York. His hymn to the city, and those “a hundred years hence,” are made possible not by the ferry, but by the example of Washington Irving, who built New York’s first literary bridge.

  ELIZABETH L. BRADLEY

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Aderman, Ralph M., ed. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

  Avery, Kevin J. “Selling the Sublime and Beautiful: Landscape and Tourism.” Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

  Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

  Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Burstein, Andrew. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

  Clark, Lewis Gaylord. Knick-Knacks from an Editor’s Table. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1853.

  Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth Century America. Los Angeles: University of California-Los Angeles Press, 1990.

  Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1809. New York: I. Riley, 1811.

  Duyckinck, Evert A. Irvingiana: A Memorial of Washington Irving. New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1860.

  Hiller, Alice. “‘An Avenue to Some Degree of Profit and Reputation’: The Sketchbook as Washington Irving’s Entrée and Undoing.” Journal of American Studies 31 (1997): 275-93.

  Irving, Pierre. Life and Letters of Washington Irving. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1864.

  Irving, Washington. A History of New York. Edwin T. Bowden, ed. 1848, Albany: 2nd ed. Twayne Publishers, 1964.

  ————. Washington Irving: Tales, History and Sketches. James W. Tuttleton, ed. New York: Library of America, 1983.

  —————. Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alahambra. Andrew B. Myers, ed. New York: Library of America, 1
991.

  Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

  James, Henry. The American Scene. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. Richard Howard, ed. New York: Library of America, 1993.

  Jones, Brian Jay. Washington Irving: An American Original. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008.

  Knickerbocker magazine

  Kurlansky, Mark. The Big Oyster. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

  Mitchill, Samuel L. The Picture of New York, or, The Traveller’s Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States, by a Gentleman Residing in This City. New York: L. Riley and Co., 1807.

  Murray, Laura. “The Aesthetic of Dispossession: Washington Irving and Ideologies of (De)Colonization in the Early Republic.” ALH (1996): 205-31.

  Myers, Andrew B., ed. A Century of Commentary on Washington Irving: 1860-1974. Tarrytown: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1976.