On May 10 the winds changed, and the brothers surged up Champlain by sloop, arriving in Montreal, unmolested, seven days later. Reunited with Brevoort, they carried out their transaction, then promptly traded business for pleasure. They spent the next two weeks dancing, drinking, and dining with Canadian belles and businessmen.
By the beginning of June the Irvings were back in the United States, when they learned their sister Ann had died. It had been five years since Washington had seen Ann, and the loss hit him hard; she was only thirty-eight years old. “One more heart lies still and cold that ever beat towards me with the warmest affection,” he wrote to Mrs. Hoffman, “for she was the tenderest, best of sisters, and a woman of whom a brother might be proud.” He was even more upset that he had diverted Peter from his visit to Ann to romp with him in Canada. The brothers postponed their return to New York City to tend to their widowed brother-in-law and his five children in Johnstown. “Would to Heaven I had gone there a month ago,” Washington sighed.8
Despite their successful Canadian expedition, the family business still suffered from the embargo, and Irving's pocketbook was emptying quickly. “I am sorry for the lowness of your purse, and might possibly bestow a sixpence in charity,” his sister Catharine teased playfully, “but I fear you are not a deserving object.”9
In August small help came in the form of an offer from bookseller Isaac Riley to translate one of the two volumes of the French work A Voyage to the Eastern Part of Terra Firma; or, The Spanish Main during the Years 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804. Irving split the $300 commission with George Caines, who translated the other volume. The resulting hackwork, credited simply to “an American Gentleman,” was a mess. When the books were published, one Boston critic remarked that the translator appeared to know very little French, and even less English. Amused, Irving mischievously informed Caines that he would take the blame for the poor French, so long as Caines took the heat for the ignorance of English.10
His pen reactivated, Irving revisited the unfinished burlesque. “I have been very free with my pen of late,” he told one of the Lads, “and have written myself completely blank.”11 Yet esta obra only continued to bloat, an increasingly unwieldy work-in-progress.
Who could blame Irving for his lack of focus when there was Mary Fairlie to distract him?—especially since she had recently acquired a dance instructor who had taught her to kick up her heels in a manner even Irving thought approached immodest. Both Mary Fairlie and Ann Hoffman were trying at every opportunity to display their new dancing skills to Irving and his male friends. “Mary and Ann have been pestering Petronius [Peter Kemble] and myself with their abominable steps whenever we have been in their company of late,”12 he wrote another bachelor friend with unconvincing exasperation.
Irving could walk the fine line between gentleman and rogue with remarkable acuity, and appears to have struck just such a balance one evening. Mary and Ann “insisted upon shewing us a new way of coming into a room, but we disappointed them by displaying an old way of going out—and actually made a safe retreat to our own homes.” Ever the gentleman, he told Dick McCall with a wink that he had since “foresworn & abandoned their society,” at least until the young ladies “regained their understanding (meaning a pun)…” The next lines are heavily inked out, the denouement obscured by a later, more discreet hand.13
Ann's athletic ability wasn't limited to dancing. That autumn, while she was attending a performance at the Park Theater, a cry of “Fire!” sent her leaping in a graceful arc from her box to the stage below. A perplexed Thomas Cooper escorted the shaken Ann to the wings, where she promptly fainted, but the gossip around town, Irving reported with amusement, was that Ann had intentionally leaped from her box into Cooper's arms. In truth, Cooper was far more interested in Mary Fairlie, while Ann was involved in an on-again, off-again relationship with Charles Nicholas, the man she would marry.
Irving had known Ann since she was twelve, when they had laughed and sung together on their trip to Montreal in the summer of 1802. While he was in Europe, it was Ann he always inquired after in his letters home. He had been part of her household, practically part of her family, for seven years. Now he was twenty-five, she nineteen. They seemed an ideal couple, with mutual interests in theater, books, parties, and conversation. By all accounts, she was a handful and a good catch—vivacious, witty, smart, and attractive. Yet here was Ann, preparing to marry another man, while Irving watched approvingly and without any visible indication, even in his most private journals, of any kind of regret.
Irving responded strongly to lively, independent women of character and substance. All his life, he would be drawn to smart, outgoing women like Ann and Maria Hoffman, Mary Fairlie, and Madame de Stael. To Irving, these were women with whom to flirt, spar, dance, and chat—but they weren't women one loved or married. Love and marriage were reserved for those who met a different and, in Irving's eyes, higher standard. Quiet, tender, and less aggressive, these women were more likely to look upon his face and tell him that everything was all right—in other words, they were more like his mother. Or Ann's younger sister, Matilda.
Irving himself could never pinpoint the exact moment, sometime in late 1808, that he had fallen in love with Ann's soft-spoken seventeen-year-old sister. Looking back years later, he imagined the romantic spark had been kindled following his return from Europe in 1806: “She came home from school to see me. She entered full of eagerness, yet shy from her natural timidity, from the time that had elapsed since we parted, and from the idea of my being a travelled man, instead of a stripling student—However, what a difference the interval had made…. I thought I had never beheld any thing so lovely—” This was romantic hindsight, tinted by time and distance. Only a year before, he had been writing playfully to Ann, castigating her for not responding to his letters, without ever mentioning or asking about Matilda. As late as June 1808, he was singing Ann's praises to Brevoort, telling him how “fair & beautiful as ever & full of fascination” she was. If his attention had shifted, Irving explained later, he could hardly be blamed, for even Ann was constantly explaining that “people began by admiring her, but ended by loving Matilda.”14
“Matalinda dinda dinda,” she called herself, and Irving adored her. Based on her surviving letters and the one remaining miniature portrait we have of her, Matilda Hoffman seemed to possess neither stunning intellect nor great beauty—a far cry from the vivacious women Irving socialized with. Pierre Irving wrote that while she was “not a dazzling beauty, she is described as lovely in person and mind, of the most gentle and engaging manners, and with a sensibility that mingled gracefully with a delicate and playful humor.”15
Irving idolized—and idealized—Matilda. A look from her set his spirits soaring. “I would read to her from some favourite poet,” he recalled in his journal some years later: “… when I came to some tender passage it seemed to catch my excited feelings I would close the book and launch forth into his praises and when I had wrought myself into a strain of enthusiasm…. Her fine eyes would kindle and beam upon me…. I would drink in new inspiration from them until suddenly [she] seemed to recollect herself—& throw them down upon the earth with a sweet pensiveness and a full drawn sigh.”16
He had fallen in love with her. But despite his affection for Matilda, his intimacy with her family, and his good rapport with Judge Hoffman, he brought no real prospects to the relationship. His family's business was still struggling—a second trip to Canada in late 1808 had been unsuccessful—and his career as a lawyer was virtually nonexistent. Yet Irving clung to the belief that the law was his only real avenue for financial security and a future. It was a dreadful thought; but so, too, was that of having no prospects at all. He explained later, “I felt my own deficiency and despaired of ever succeeding at the Bar. I could study anything else rather than Law, and had a fatal propensity to Belles lettres. I had gone on blindly, like a boy in Love, but now I began to open my eyes and be miserable. I had nothing in purse nor in expectation�
��. I anticipated nothing from my legal pursuit,” he concluded, disgusted with himself, “and had done nothing to make me hope for public employment or political elevation.”17
To his further dismay, Peter had departed for Liverpool on January 1, 1809, to assist the slumping family business. Their abandoned esta obra was incomplete, rambling, and swollen, but Washington thought he might be able to salvage something from the wreckage. Still, writing wasn't the way a respectable gentleman supported his family; writing was a pastime, not a vocation. He needed not just a job, but a career, or he would have no chance of winning Matilda's hand.
“Young men in our country think it a great extravagance to set up a horse and carriage without adequate means,” Irving later said wistfully, “but they make no account of setting up a wife and family, which is far more expensive.”18 He needed something, anything, to help him make money. He contacted Peter, who knew a thing or two about get-rich-quick schemes, and asked him to keep an eye out for opportunities in Liverpool or elsewhere. Nothing happened.
Judge Hoffman took mercy on the floundering suitor. Hoffman approved of Irving but, like a father, wanted to ensure Matilda would be provided for by any potential husband. Over the last seven years, Hoffman had treated Irving like a son, leaving the family in his care time and time again. But the Judge had also tutored and mentored the young man since 1802, and clearly understood Irving's dreamy nature and inclination toward laziness.
In the winter of 1808, Hoffman proposed a quid pro quo. If Irving applied himself to the law in earnest, proving that he could support a family, then Hoffman would give him a position in his own firm, and his daughter's hand with it. “Nothing could be more generous,”19 Irving said, but it was a decision that needed serious consideration.
Irving had watched a number of his friends slowly amass wealth, which not only made them eligible bachelors but also enabled them to enjoy very comfortable lifestyles. He understood the value of marrying into one of New York's established, well-connected families, which the Hoffmans most decidedly were. Even Henry Brevoort—who came from a good family, had a knack for business, and seemed to need no help making his own way—had received from his brother-in-law John Jacob Astor a plum position managing Astor's affairs in Canada. Irving knew that building and maintaining the kind of life he wanted—indeed, was expected to lead, if he wished to marry Matilda—would require not just a job, but work, two things he hated.
The choice was his. Would he put his nose to the legal grindstone, cast his pen aside, and live a happy if rather ordinary life as a lawyer and man of business? Or would he refuse Hoffman's offer, relinquish Matilda's hand, and pick up his pen to take his chances as a writer?
The answer was obvious to Irving. He enjoyed writing and had a knack for it, but he also coveted financial security. He accepted Hoffman's offer—and hated every moment thereafter.
To his credit, while Irving always claimed that Hoffman had a better opinion of his legal capacity than he merited, he worked hard. “I set to work with zeal to study anew,” he explained, “and I considered myself bound in honor not to make further advances with the daughter until I should feel satisfied with my proficiency in the Law.”20
With the title of fiancé, he could visit Matilda with some impunity, and he spent more and more time at the Hoffman home. “We saw each other every day and I became excessively attached to her,” Irving remembered. “The more I saw of her the more I had reason to admire her.” Although esta obra was officially shelved for the moment, he scribbled at it in secret when staying at his mother's home a few blocks east of the Hoffmans’, away from the Judge's watchful eyes. “I tried to finish the work which I was secretly writing, hoping it would give me reputation and gain me some public employment,” he said later.21
Most of his time, however, was devoted to the hated law books, the bane of his existence. It proved more than he could bear. “It was all in vain,” Irving said later, still shuddering at the memory of the moldy volumes. “I had an insuperable repugnance to the study—my mind would not take hold of it; or rather by long despondency had become for the time incapable of dry application. I was in a wretched state of doubt and self-distrust.”22
Had Irving persevered, his life would have been very different. With his job at the firm, and Hoffman's wallet to sustain him, it is unlikely he would ever have turned to his pen in any meaningful way. He wouldn't have had the financial pressures that usually motivated him to write in earnest.
Despite all his hard work, Irving was fated to receive neither a place in Hoffman's business nor his daughter's hand in marriage. One evening in February 1809, Matilda Hoffman came home with a cold. “Nothing was thought of it at first,” Irving said, “but she grew rapidly worse and fell into a consumption.” The family, understandably, went into a nervous panic, and Irving tended to Matilda as the illness slowly and painfully wore her away. “I was often by her bed side and in her wandering state of mind she would talk with me,” he remembered. “I saw more of the beauty of her mind in that delirious state than I had ever known before.”23
Matilda was dying; the only question was how long she would linger. By late April, after a two-month illness, her death throes began. “Her dying struggles were painful & protracted,” Irving wrote more than a decade later, still haunted by the memory. “For three day[s] & nights I did not leave the house & scarcely slept.” By April 26 she was gone. “I was by her when she died,” Irving wrote, “—all the family were assembled round her, some praying others weeping, for she was adored by them all. I was the last one she looked upon…. She was but seventeen years old when she died.”24
Irving was destroyed. It was one of the most traumatic events he would ever face, and her death stayed with him for the rest of his life. During periods of hardship or uncertainty, his mind wandered back to those last moments with Matilda in the house on Greenwich. In one notebook, he scrawled, “1809 retd. Jany Peter gone,” and on the line just below, “Mat died in April.” In the German dictionary he purchased in London in 1816, he scribbled “M Hff died April 26, 1809 aged 17 yr 5 M.” In one of his journals he wrote that Matilda “died in the beauty of her youth and in my memory she will ever be young and beautiful.” His grief was profound: “She died. It seemed as if all the odour of life was exhaled. There was no longer joy under the sun—the world was blank & nothing was left worth living for.”25
In the nearly two centuries since Matilda Hoffman's death, Irving scholars have struggled to determine her impact on his life and work. The more romantic biographers tend to throw Matilda's shadow over every moment of his life after 1809, using it to explain his lifelong bachelorhood and tendency toward sentimentalism in his work, while the more cynical believe that he overstated his attachment to Matilda, using it both as a crutch for sympathy and as an excuse to avoid the financial obligations of marriage. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.
Irving was shaken to his very core by Matilda's death. It took him the better part of a year to really get over the loss, yet he did get over it. While sentimentalists would have us believe otherwise, the post-Matilda Washington Irving was neither celibate nor uninterested in marriage. He moved on to experience the highs and lows of love with various women—and men—again and again throughout his life. On the brink of fame, in London, he romped with a group of artistic young men, one of whom he likely was in love with, while at the very height of his success he proposed marriage to another young woman. Irving's perpetual bachelorhood was due mainly to his failure as a suitor rather than to any lack of interest in love or the institution of marriage.
Irving's possible homosexuality must also be considered. While it is clear from his journals and correspondence that he adored Matilda, he also “felt at times rebuked by her superior delicacy & purity, and as if I am a coarse unworthy being in comparison.”26 Her hand, with all its “superior delicacy,” also promised the financial security he craved. As a popular young man who would all his life seek not only reputation but acceptance, it is
not unlikely that Irving, as a closeted homosexual, would willingly enter into a marriage with a woman he may have idolized but didn't love, not only for the financial stability, but also to keep up the public appearance that he was straight. Once Matilda died, however, Irving the gay bachelor—perhaps literally—was off the hook for the rest of his life. He could simply claim, as sentimental biographers did for decades, that Matilda's death had so scarred him that it was impossible for him to ever marry another.
Irving, the master publicist, knew full well the value of a carefully cultivated public personality. While the private Washington Irving may have recovered from the death of his seventeen-year-old fiancée and gone on to woo others, the public Washington Irving—that writer of elegant, sometimes sentimental stories—mourned his first love for the rest of his life. Indeed, as he grew in age and fame, he surely knew that such a story—true love snatched from him by death's cold hand!—was good for his image, and he did nothing to publicly refute it. A romance novelist of the era couldn't have written a better story, and it was all true—or at least as true as the image-conscious Irving would allow.
Whatever his motivation later in life, one thing remains obvious: the first days after Matilda's death were extremely difficult. Irving was depressed and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Not quite certain what to do with himself, he retreated 130 miles up the Hudson River to Kinderhook, the estate of his friend William P. Van Ness. He took the still unfinished esta obra with him.
Complaining that he “could not bear solitude yet could not enjoy society,” he welcomed the relative calm and quiet at this old New York village, where Van Ness's uncle still preached in Dutch at the Claverack Dutch Reformed Church. Religion was no balm to Irving—the Deacon had seen to that—but he always took great comfort in picturesque rural settings, which the Van Ness estate exemplified.
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