Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
THE AUTHOR’S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF
THE VOYAGE
ROSCOE
THE WIFE
RIP VAN WINKLE
ENGLISH WRITERS ON AMERICA
RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
THE BROKEN HEART
THE ART OF BOOK MAKING
A ROYAL POET
THE COUNTRY CHURCH
THE WIDOW AND HER SON
A SUNDAY IN LONDON
THE BOAR’S HEAD TAVERN, EAST CHEAP - A Shakespearian Research
THE MUTABILITY OF LITERATURE A COLLOQUY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
RURAL FUNERALS
THE INN KITCHEN
THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM - A Traveller’s Tale
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
CHRISTMAS
THE STAGE COACH
CHRISTMAS EVE
CHRISTMAS DAY
THE CHRISTMAS DINNER
LONDON ANTIQUES
LITTLE BRITAIN
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
TRAITS OF INDIAN CHARACTER
PHILIP OF POKANOKET - An Indian Memoir
JOHN BULL
THE PRIDE OF THE VILLAGE
THE ANGLER
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
L’ENVOY
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
NOTES
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW AND OTHER STORIES
WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859), America’s first successful professional writer, was born and raised in New York City. His literary talent manifesting itself early, he broke into print before he was twenty years old. In 1809, under the pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker, he published the rollicking burlesque A History of New York, the first work in belles lettres by an American to catch the public imagination and endure. Although he had trained to be a lawyer, the urge for authorship long distracted him from a serious career in law or business. Yet not until he was approaching forty did he attempt to support himself exclusively by writing. The Sketch Book (1819-20), published almost simultaneously in England (where he was then living) and the United States, won him immediate acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and established a demand for his work. Foreign travel inspired much of his writing. Between 1822 and 1832 he issued three more collections of humorous and lightly romantic sketches and tales, most of them evocative of European scenes and the European past: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, and The Alhambra In 1828 a biography of Columbus appeared, the first of several historical works by Irving notable for their romantic coloring. After seventeen years in Europe, he returned home in 1832 a national celebrity. His later writings include A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), biographies of Goldsmith (1849) and Mahomet (1850), and a five-volume Life of Washington (1855-59). Irving’s sprightly and often half-mocking prose style, together with the felicitous blend of humor, pathos, and the picturesque in his fiction, made a major impact on the popular literature of his age.
WILLIAM L. HEDGES was the author of Washington Irving. An American Study, 1802—1832 (1965) and numerous essays on Washington Irving, and coauthor-editor of Land and Imagination: The American Rural Dream (1980). He taught English and history at Goucher College, where he chaired the program in American Studies.
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This collection under the title The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
edited by Haskell S. Springer first published in the United States of
America by Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall & Co. 1978
Published with an introduction and notes by
William L. Hedges in Penguin Books 1988
This edition with the title The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and
Other Stories published in Penguin Books 1999
Copyright © G. K. Hall & Co., 1978
Introduction copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1988
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INTRODUCTION
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. is a literary anomaly that keeps eluding strict classification and analysis. Seldom, if ever, out of print in the nearly 170 years since its highly acclaimed initial publication (1819-20), Washington Irving’s loose assortment of essays, sketches, and tales has delighted large popular audiences in the United States and Great Britain and traveled worldwide in translation. Its critical reputation diminished as the nineteenth century waned: modern taste at times finds parts of the potpourri insufficiently seasoned, a bit thin and derivative, overly sentimental. Nonetheless “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” on the basis of which Irving is generally credited with inventing the short story as a distinct genre, still stand as undoubted American classics. And for readers who relish irony and burlesque humor, the wry, self-mocking imagination of Irving’s persona, Geoffrey Crayon, has a way of redeeming most of The Sketch Book from its apparent weaknesses.
Turning to the text, we find everywhere anomaly, irony, ambiguity. The book is Janus-faced, looking almost simultaneously back and forth across the Atlantic, fondly viewing selected English scenes, characters, and institutions, while voicing Crayon’s loneliness and homesickness for America. Although addressed primarily to an American audience, it has English readers also in mind before it is finished. It was written, moreover, at a time when some Americans suspected British writers and critics of a concerted effort to denigrate the new republic and its literature.
Structurally the miscellany seems to aspire to be something more than its fragmented self. We continually notice Crayon’s consciousness of himself as a writer or, we might more appropriately say, maker of books. Not that this alleged author/editor matches the blatant ego(ec)centricity of an earlier Irving persona, the addlepated Diedrich Knickerbocker, who keeps interrupting his own narrative, The History of New York, with ludicrous complaints about how hard it is to make a great book out of very
little material. But Crayon’s fantastic encounters with old texts in “The Art of Book Making” and “The Mutability of Literature” reveal a curious anxiety about authorship. Indeed we may ask ourselves what The Sketch Book would be without its quenchless flood of direct quotations from, and oblique allusions to, early authors (mostly British) great and small, to say nothing of the Bible (see the Notes to this edition), without its frequent comments on authors and texts, above all without Crayon’s pilgrimages to the Boar’s Head Tavern and Stratford-on-Avon, along with his need, in the face of the frequent reminders he has of the “mutability” of earthly things, to hold firm to the idea of Shakespeare’s universal appeal.
Irving had been living and traveling in England for almost five years when he brought the work out, but his actual experience of the country is filtered through the screen of Crayon’s obsessive bookishness. Surprisingly, contemporary readers in both the old world and the new responded positively to this nostalgic intertwining of imagination and reality, past and present, although being exposed to a past that republicanism had in theory discarded may have been disconcerting to some Americans of English descent.
Finally to all this oddity we must add the text’s publishing history. As Irving explains in the “Preface to the Revised Edition,” The Sketch Book appeared first in the United States in a series of seven installments or numbers, not all of which were in print before it was published complete in two volumes in London. The work was well received in both countries, but it was the British reviews, hailing The Sketch Book as the first genuinely distinguished specimen of imaginative writing by an American, that were decisive. British contempt for American literature had reached a climax in January, 1820, only two months before the first volume of The Sketch Book appeared in England, when the celebrated clergyman, reformer, and wit Sydney Smith asked in a great flourish in The Edinburgh Review, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Sensitive to British opinion in cultural matters, Americans had long been angered and embarrassed by such taunts. Yet at that very moment British reviews were already praising Irving’s work-in-progress. Only seven months later The Edinburgh Review itself was predicting that The Sketch Book would “form an era in the literature of the nation to which it belongs.”
And so it did. An international celebrity almost overnight, Irving now found himself fully in the business of writing books. Previously no American author had been able to earn a decent living by literary labor alone. But with Irving’s success, certain psychological barriers seemed to weaken. Having awarded high praise to one American author, British critics began to find other American books generally more acceptable, a development which encouraged American readers to take native authors more seriously. High literacy rates in the United States and a rapidly expanding economy gave magazine and book publishers a lucrative market. Before long other American writers were able to support themselves by the pen. Where they followed Irving’s lead and secured a separate English copyright for their works, they had a good chance of increasing their profits. His accomplishment thus established professional authorship as a real option for Americans.
Thirty-six years old when the book came out, Irving had been a writer on and off since he was nineteen, though he had published nothing in his own name. It was an open secret in New York City, his hometown, that he was the author or coauthor of letters by “Jonathan Oldstyle” (1802-03) in the New York Morning Chronicle, of the comic periodical (Salmagundi (1807-08), and of Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809). Richard H. Dana, Sr., reviewing the still incomplete Sketch Book in The North American Review in 1819, seemed to take it for granted that the quality and popularity of his earlier writings had made Irving an American literary “success” already. But he had not been able to make a living by writing. Indeed, he had not even made a serious attempt to become a professional writer until he began The Sketch Book. Few Americans at this point had. Prejudices in part derived from Puritanism still persisted in some quarters against the seeming frivolity of certain kinds of writing, fiction and drama especially. Those who wrote were expected to do so in their spare time, unless they happened to possess independent means.
Irving’s father, a Presbyterian immigrant from Scotland, had subjected his large family to a heavy regimen of church attendance, Bible reading, prayers, and psalm singing. In his five sons he had tried, with mixed success, to instill the Puritan ethic of hard work, frugality, and temperance. All five ultimately became involved in one way or another in the family importing businesses. Two, however, including Washington, went into law first, and a third became a doctor. For Washington, the legal profession was a way of avoiding business, which he hated. But his writing in turn distracted him from the law. Two of his brothers were also partially addicted to the questionable habit of writing. Subject to pangs of guilt over his “idleness,” the young Irving at times threw himself energetically into what bourgeois society considered real work. But he lived for years without a clear sense of purpose, unsettled, unproductive, and often dispirited. Recognizing his talent, his older brothers partially subsidized his literary labors, making him, after the publication of Knickerbocker, a business partner with only minimal responsibilities. But this arrangement did not work well. If the jobs he was asked to do—lobbying in Washington for the family enterprises, for instance—were not arduous, he somehow made them time-consuming; perhaps uneasiness at depending on his brothers stifled his muse.
In 1815, embarking on what was supposed to be an extended nonbusiness trip to Europe, he got only as far as Liverpool, where he found his brother Peter ill, and the family importing firm, under his charge in England, going bankrupt. Washington’s gentlemanly leisure was abruptly terminated. He worked strenuously in Liverpool for two and a half years in an effort to mitigate the family’s financial disgrace. Meanwhile, more appalled than ever at the prospect of a business career, he resolved to give professional authorship a try. The obstacles he faced were formidable, beginning with the low spirits and feelings of loneliness to which he was subject. He had never quite recovered from the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, in 1809. And in the middle of the bankruptcy he had learned of the death of his mother, to whom he was strongly attached. Living in a foreign country, he was cut off from what he knew best, the society he could write about as an insider. There were also the constraints attendant upon the need to produce a money-making work.
As an amateur, Irving had been a freewheeling, irreverent humorist. “Oldstyle,” Salmagundi (on which he collaborated with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding), and Knickerbocker thrive on caricature, satire, even flagrant self-contradiction. The writing often mocks the literary conventions it uses, the periodical essay, for instance, or the figure of the whimsical gentleman (usually a bachelor) of the old school, emblem of an outmoded, narrow, arbitrary, ultrarespectable gentility, who nonetheless simultaneously provides a viewpoint for mocking contemporary fads and follies. Parody so pervades Salmagundi and Knickerbocker (especially the original edition, 1809) that at times they seem to amount to little more than the ludicrously pretentious rhetoric of individuals blinded by illusions. One of the prime targets of such ridicule is the self-aggrandizing vision of itself that the United States was developing.
Seeking to win broad acceptance from a paying public for The Sketch Book, Irving substantially transformed himself as a writer, closely watching popular tastes and experimenting with some of the milder, less threatening forms of romanticism—pathos, sentimentality, and fantasies evoking the remote and the supernatural. He began to look into German folklore, which he discussed with Walter Scott on a visit to Abbottsford in 1817. He deliberately chose the format of the miscellany so as to appeal to a diversity of tastes. No longer trying to startle and unsettle, he saw to it that he was less persistently and boisterously humorous than in his early writings. His style grew smoother, more ingratiating. The prose of The Sketch Book seems quite consciously crafted, the language at times clearly striving for poetic effects
. There is a studied avoidance of vulgarity.
The new manner won over the British critics. The Quarterly Review, seeing “the hand of the master” in The Sketch Book, called Irving the “best writer of English ... that America has produced since the era of her independence. He seems to have studied our language in all its strength and perfection—in the writings of our old sterling authors....” The Edinburgh Review noted with pleasure that Irving had modeled his “diction” on “the most elegant and polished of our native writers.” It hoped that other Americans would follow his example. Dana, however, in his essay in The North American Review noted above, voiced reservations about the new style. While he knew that The Sketch Book was going to be popular, his assessment of the new work was mixed. On the whole he seemed to prefer Irving’s earlier writings. American literature, he believed, had needed the wit and humor of Salmagundi and Knickerbocker to counteract its excessive earnestness, a quality derived from the nation’s “being rather raw in authorship” and thus fearful of being adjudged coarse and undignified. Dana discerned an admirable naturalness and freedom in the youthful Irving but found The Sketch Book a bit too “dressy,” too “elegant,” slightly artificial or foreign.
Dana’s strictures on Irving’s new style take on added significance in the context of a debate that had been in progress in the United States for at least two decades, a disagreement related to American sensitivity to British criticism. With the American Revolution had come a conviction that the new nation ought to have a literature commensurate with its lofty political ideals. But the early results, particularly in belles lettres, disappointed many. In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), for instance, the Reverend Samuel Miller of New York asserted that American writings were “in general, less learned, instructive, and elegant than are found in Great-Britain and some of the more enlightened nations on the Eastern continent.” The causes were not hard to find, he maintained: American institutions of higher education were inferior; there was no system of patronage to provide authors with financial support and the leisure to write; the “spirit of our people is commercial”; and, “still connected with [Britain] by the ties of language, manners, taste, and commercial intercourse,” Americans were inclined to consider “her literature ... as ours.” All in all, Miller found that Americans had few incentives to encourage the work of native writers.
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