Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

by Washington Irving

  The disturbances that mar the idyllic composure of these localities ring familiarly in the context of The Sketch Book. Either Rip Van Winkle or Ichabod Crane might be a figure in Crayon’s dreams. Both are collectors and tellers of stories. Rip, in conflict with the nose-to-the-grindstone mentality of his wife, has “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour.” Ichabod will work as a schoolmaster if he has to, but he would rather sing, dance, or tell stories for his supper—and his appetite is voracious. Although the aura of mystery and the supernatural in these two texts derives largely from Irving’s reading in German folklore and romantic fiction, they seem nonetheless remarkably American, not only in setting and character but in their social or cultural implications as well.

  Though sometimes hinting that Dame Van Winkle’s shrewishness may be a function of her husband’s reluctance to work his land, Rip’s story is largely sympathetic to his “idle humour” and “vagrant imagination.” Following them away from his marriage and into the mountains, he loses the prime of his life in a dreamless sleep. But when he gets over the shock of waking up, he finds himself, at an age when no one can expect him to work, comfortably provided for. And he has a fantastic story to tell.

  If the issue in that story is a tension between imagination or artistic inclination and industry or industriousness, in “Sleepy Hollow” it seems to be between imagination and money. We find Ichabod Crane referred to curiously as a “man of letters.” The remark is of course ironic. His one-room schoolhouse is called “his literary realm.” In the village he passes for a man of “superior taste,” a “kind of idle gentleman like personage.” These phrases resonate ludicrously in the context of The Sketch Book. For Ichabod is “in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity,” a superstitious, psalm singing Connecticut Yankee with an eye to the main chance. He uses his music and storytelling as a false front masking his more serious intentions. What his “imagination” truly “expanded with,” we are told, was the prospect of winning Katrina Van Tassel’s hand and thereby gaining possession of her father’s ample acres. These he would convert into “cash,” to be used in turn for speculating in western real estate.

  In the face of this threat the community imagination seems to materialize and frighten the imposter out of the region. Later, it is rumored, he migrates to a “distant part of the country,” probably to the west and closer to the frontier, where, by Yankee ingenuity and calculation apparently, instead of an advantageous marriage, he rises from schoolmaster and law student to lawyer, politician, and finally small-time judge. Oh yes, along the way he also writes, for the newspapers. Back in Sleepy Hollow there are no writers, but the people thrive on storytelling. A flourishing oral literature gives the locality a sense of itself and its past. It turns out that Knickerbocker is only the conveyor of the story we have read. He heard it in the city and wrote it down; Crayon apparently gets it into print. The man who told it at the “corporation meeting” in New York, which Knickerbocker attended, seems to have heard it from an “old farmer,” who thus turns out to be the creator of the second “legend of Sleepy Hollow,” that is, the legend of Ichabod Crane—unless, of course, Brom Bones had a hand in it.

  Crayon’s compendium finally becomes an artful comment on authorship or storytelling in a rapidly expanding democratic and commercial society, a comment, in effect, on itself, on the writer’s effort to satisfy both a popular audience and himself. But Crayon the writer and Crayon the traveler are not easily separated. His literary longings and anxieties closely relate to what general readers of The Sketch Book are apt to be more aware of—the traveler’s yearning for a home. Metaphorically integral to the work as a whole, the re-creation of old English Christmas at Bracebridge Hall is crucial in Irving’s promotion of Anglo-American amicability. He is helping his compatriots discover what Hawthorne was to call in the title of his own book on England (1863) Our Old Home.

  The Christmas sequence, a major event in early American popular culture, needs to be seen against the background of Puritanism’s long-established hostility, especially in New England, to Christmas as a pagan and popish holiday. Here Crayon’s felicitous style wraps the major themes and images of the book together in an attractive package, a special gift for the reader. The landscape, the manor house, the family, the servants, and the villagers unite, with Crayon, a welcome guest now in “the land of my forefathers,” to form a glowing image of peace and good will. But what gives this Christmas its full meaning is the sense of tradition behind it, a tradition in which Christianity blends with vestiges of pagan rites and customs derived from the Druids, Romans, Saxons, and Scandinavians. Holly, ivy, mistletoe, the “yule clog,” the lord of misrule, “an enormous pig’s head, decorated with rosemary, with a lemon in its mouth”—such bows to the past adorn the occasion. Simultaneously Crayon draws copiously on English Christmas poetry that he has resurrected from his libraries.

  In the juxtaposition of his writing to the earlier texts, readers may begin to sense the meaningful continuity between present and past that Crayon in his more joyful moods can count on as at least a temporary stay against the all-encompassing mutability. Irving had rediscovered Christmas for many American and even English readers. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1883 went so far as to call him “the laureate of English Christmas” because of the extent to which “the spirit of Dickens’s Christmas, and of Thackeray‘s” and of the Christmas of the Illustrated London News—the emphasis on abundant feasting, quaffing, frolicking, and good cheer—derives from The Sketch Book. Or it may be more accurate to say that Irving had invented a new Christmas out of the old, invented the Christmas of modern commercial popular culture. True, it was to be a long time before the festooned Christmas tree became a fixture in American households, before Christmas cards were mass-produced or merchants began to promote Christmas buying the day after Thanksgiving. Yet only three years after The Sketch Book was published, a New York writer named Clement Moore, capitalizing on Irving’s having made Americans aware of St. Nicholas in Knickerbocker’s History, was to give Santa Claus his biggest boost with “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (officially “A Visit from St. Nicholas”). And in 1825, with the publication in Philadelphia of The Atlantic Souvenir, a new kind of literary product appeared on the market, designed specifically for purchase as a gift for Christmas or New Year. Soon similar annuals or giftbooks were available in most of the cities on the east coast, and gradually they spread westward.

  Predecessors of the monthly magazines that were to flourish in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century on, the giftbooks were miscellaneous gatherings of original literary pieces by a variety of authors. Unlike the magazines, however, they had cloth or leather bindings that were often elaborately embellished, gilded, for instance, or inlaid with mother-of-pearl. And many contained lavish illustrations. The annuals were designed, in other words, to be particularly appealing to the eye and the touch, as Christmas or Valentine boxes of chocolates are today, and were often bought by conspicuously consuming Americans as much for drawing room display as for reading.

  The literary fare inside these volumes was generally light and entertaining, its prevailing moral sentiments appropriate to the season. Looking back, one is struck by the extent to which The Sketch Book in its format, style, tone, and domestic longing anticipated the miscellanies that Americans became so fond of in the decades before the Civil War. Not incidentally, the holiday annuals, as business ventures, helped support American literature. Editors paid good money for original contributions. Work by almost every American writer of any significance—including Irving himself—appeared in the giftbooks.

  He had given form to both the literary sketch and what was eventually to be called the short story. Such major fiction writers as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville benefited by his efforts. The “sketch” book became a recognized genre, as did the more-or-less Crayonesque persona who went with it in half-random assortments such as The Idle Man (1821-22), by Irving’s
critic, Dana; Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man (1832), by Theodore Fay; Crayon Sketches (1833), by William Cox; Pencillings by the Way (1832-36), by Nathaniel P. Willies; Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), by Donald Grant Mitchell; and Leaves from the Diary of a Dreamer (1853), by Henry Tuckerman. Women also compiled sketch books, and the domestic fiction written in great quantities by American women authors beginning in the 1820’s was by no means unaffected by Crayon’s style, sentiment, wit, and humor. The period from the publication of The Sketch Book through the early 1840’s became, as Van Wyck Brooks aptly observed, “the age of Washington Irving.”

  No deep thinker, the new nation’s first successful professional author tended to live, though rather uneasily, by relatively commonplace ideas that made headway in his time in the slackening of the harsher religious convictions that had prevailed in colonial America. Having rejected his father’s Presbyterianism, Irving fell back, particularly for consolation in times of trouble, on a faith in the saving power of good fellowship, which, whether officially promoted by Protestant denominations or not, was the religious drift of many in the nineteenth century. Most fully realized in literature by his English heir, Charles Dickens, this was the underlying faith of Irving’s miscellany. Only five years before its publication, the second of the two wars between Britain and the United States in a little more than a generation had come to an end. Though prompted largely by Irving’s personal frustrations and financial distress, The Sketch Book, as the projection of Crayon’s longing for peace and domestic tranquility, succeeded in giving literary form to an emotional need widely shared by Americans in what was coming to be called the Era of Good Feelings.

  -William L. Hedges

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The text of this edition is that established by Haskell Springer for the Twayne edition (Boston, 1978) of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., volume VIII of The Complete Works of Washington Irving. Based on modern editorial principles, the Twayne text is certified by the Modern Language Association’s Center for Editions of American Authors. It is reprinted here with permission. The complicated publishing history of The Sketch Book made for many difficulties in establishing an authoritative text. For a complete explanation of the decisions made by Springer, the reader is referred to his “Textual Commentary” in the Twayne edition (pp. 340-79). Briefly, however, he has used Irving’s manuscripts, where they survive, as his copy-texts, except where a sketch was later so much revised as to become virtually a new work. Such copy-texts are the basis for almost one-third of the book. Somewhat more than a third is based on the first American edition (1819-20). And the first English edition (1820) provides the copy-texts for the remainder of the Twayne edition of The Sketch Book, except for a few small sections added in the Author’s Revised Edition (1848). The arrangement of the items in the book is that of the 1848 edition. As Springer observes, “This use of multiple copy-texts results ... in some unevenness of texture in the book as a whole.” The variation in spelling and punctuation, however, is apt to be scarcely noticeable to readers who are not looking for it. The compensation is that the text for each sketch or tale comes as close to being what Irving originally intended as possible.

  THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.

  “I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.”

  BURTON

  PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

  The following papers, with two exceptions, were written in England, and formed but part of an intended series for which I had made notes and memorandums. Before I could mature a plan, however, circumstances compelled me to send them piecemeal to the United States, where they were published from time to time in portions or numbers. It was not my intention to publish them in England, being conscious that much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press.

  By the time the contents of the first volume had appeared in this occasional manner, they began to find their way across the Atlantic, and to be inserted, with many kind encomiums, in the London Literary Gazette. It was said, also, that a London bookseller intended to publish them in a collective form. I determined, therefore, to bring them forward myself, that they might at least have the benefit of my superintendence and revision. I accordingly took the printed numbers which I had received from the United States, to Mr. John Murray, the eminent publisher, from whom I had already received friendly attentions, and left them with him for examination, informing him that should he be inclined to bring them before the public, I had materials enough on hand for a second volume. Several days having elapsed without any communication from Mr. Murray, I addressed a note to him, in which I construed his silence into a tacit rejection of my work, and begged that the numbers I had left with him might be returned to me. The following was his reply.

  MY DEAR SIR,

  I entreat you to believe that I feel truly obliged by your kind intentions towards me, and that I entertain the most unfeigned respect for your most tasteful talents, My house is completely filled with workpeople at this time, and I have only an office to transact business in; and yesterday I was wholly occupied, or I should have done myself the pleasure of seeing you.

  If it would not suit me to engage in the publication of your present work, it is only because I do not see that scope in the nature of it which would enable me to make those satisfactory accounts between us, without which I really feel no satisfaction in engaging—but I will do all I can to promote their circulation, and shall be most ready to attend to any future plan of yours.

  With much regard, I remain, dear sir,

  Your faithful servant,

  JOHN MURRAY.

  This was disheartening, and might have deterred me from any further prosecution of the matter, had the question of republication in Great Britain rested entirely with me; but I apprehended the appearance of a spurious edition. I now thought of Mr. Archibald Constable as publisher, having been treated by him with much hospitality during a visit to Edinburgh; but first I determined to submit my work to Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott, being encouraged to do so by the cordial reception I had experienced from him at Abbotsford a few years previously, and by the favourable opinion he had expressed to others of my earlier writings. I accordingly sent him the printed numbers of the Sketch Book in a parcel by coach, and at the same time wrote to him, hinting that since I had had the pleasure of partaking of his hospitality, a reverse had taken place in my affairs which made the successful exercise of my pen all important to me; I begged him, therefore, to look over the literary articles I had forwarded to him, and, if he thought they would bear European republication, to ascertain whether Mr. Constable would be inclined to be the publisher.

  The parcel containing my work went by coach to Scott’s address in Edinburgh; the letter went by mail to his residence in the country. By the very first post I received a reply, before he had seen my work.

  “I was down at Kelso,” said he, “when your letter reached Abbotsford. I am now on my way to town, and will converse with Constable, and do all in my power to forward your views—I assure you nothing will give me more pleasure.”

  The hint, however, about a reverse of fortune had struck the quick apprehension of Scott, and, with that practical and efficient good will which belonged to his nature, he had already devised a way of aiding me. A weekly periodical, he went on to inform me, was about to be set up in Edinburgh, supported by the most respectable talents, and amply furnished with all the necessary information. The appointment of the editor, for which ample funds were provided, would be five hundred pounds sterling a year, with the reasonable prospect of further advantages. This situation, being apparently at his disposal, he frankly offered to me. The work, however, he intimated, was to have somewhat of a political bearing, and h
e expressed an apprehension that the tone it was desired to adopt might not suit me. “Yet I risk the question,” added he, “because I know no man so well qualified for this important task, and perhaps because it will necessarily bring you to Edinburgh. If my proposal does not suit, you need only keep the matter secret and there is no harm done. ‘And for my love I pray you wrong me not.’ If on the contrary you think it could be made to suit you, let me know as soon as possible, addressing Castle street, Edinburgh.”

  In a postscript, written from Edinburgh, he adds, “I am just come here, and have glanced over the Sketch Book. It is positively beautiful, and increases my desire to crimp you, if it be possible. Some difficulties there always are in managing such a matter, especially at the outset; but we will obviate them as much as we possibly can.”

  The following is from an imperfect draught of my reply, which underwent some modifications in the copy sent.

  “I cannot express how much I am gratified by your letter. I had begun to feel as if I had taken an unwarrantable liberty; but, somehow or other, there is a genial sunshine about you that warms every creeping thing into heart and confidence. Your literary proposal both surprises and flatters me, as it evinces a much higher opinion of my talents than I have myself.”

  I then went on to explain that I found myself peculiarly unfitted for the situation offered to me, not merely by my political opinions, but by the very constitution and habits of my mind. “My whole course of life,” I observed, “has been desultory, and 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.