Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  The long-awaited parcel arrived on September 9. Brevoort had enclosed multiple copies of the first two installments of The Sketch Book, as well as the positive reviews from Verplanck, the Evening Post, and others. “They go far, far, beyond my most sanguine expectations and indeed are expressed with such peculiar warmth and kindness as to affect me in the tenderest manner,” Irving said of his reviews.26 Despite the applause, he was always the first to see his glass as half empty. “Reading… some of these criticisms this morning have renderd me nervous for the whole day,” he confessed to Brevoort. “I feel almost appalled by such success, and fearful that it cannot be real—or that it is not fully merited, or that I shall not act up to the expectations that may be formed… now that it is so extravagantly bepraised I begin to feel afraid that I shall not do as well again.”27

  It was a strangely prescient concern. For now, Irving basked in the glow of his well-earned literary triumph, and he congratulated Brevoort for guiding the volumes to press in such an elegant manner. Brevoort downplayed his involvement with his usual aplomb. “I am truly delighted to find you were pleased with the style of your reappearance,” he wrote. “I think you fully entitled to it.”28

  The third installment of The Sketch Book appeared in mid-September, this one containing some of Irving's most English pieces. Readers admired “A Royal Poet,” a romanticized description of the literary King James I; “The Country Church,” in which Irving contrasted the quiet integrity of the nobleman with the offensive flashiness of the nouveau riche; and “The Boar's Head Tavern, East Cheap,” a detective story in which Crayon tries to find the tavern of Shakespeare's Falstaff. But once again, it was the sentimental “The Widow and Her Son,” in which an old woman tends to her dying son, that took with the public. If Irving wanted to know which pieces were resonating with readers, it was hankywringers like this one or “The Broken Heart,” which even Lord Byron claimed had made him weep!

  Copies of the first two volumes of The Sketch Book were being passed around in London, particularly among more refined readers, who grudgingly conceded that this American upstart could write. “Everywhere I find in it the marks of a mind of the utmost elegance and refinement,” the English historian William Godwin wrote to a literary friend, “a thing as you know that I was not exactly prepared to look for in an American.”29

  Writing in the North American Review, American critic Richard Henry Dana argued that “elegance and refinement” was exactly what was wrong with The Sketch Book. While Dana admitted to being an admirer, he preferred the punch of Knickerbocker to the grace of Crayon. Where Knickerbocker was “masculine—good bone and muscle,” Crayon was “feminine—dressy, elegant, and languid.”30 Dana's view, however, was in the minority.

  Where the British literati saw elegance, British publishers smelled easy profit. As Irving feared, his work was being reprinted in England without his consent—or payment. The most offensive pirate was the London Literary Gazette, which published long excerpts from The Sketch Book. Fuming, Irving sent the Gazette a cease-and-desist letter, informing the paper that he planned to publish a British edition himself. While the paper had no legal obligation to do so, it honored Irving's request. Fearing that others might not be as gentlemanly, Irving scrambled to find a suitable British publisher. “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,” he recalled, “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.”31

  Since Irving's initial meeting with Murray in 1817, the House of Murray had continued to produce a steady run of literary best sellers, due largely to Murray's ear for poetry. He had recently scored a major coup with the publication of the first installment of Byron's poem Don Juan, which was so popular that Murray had to barricade his doors against overeager booksellers, passing copies of the book through the dining-room windows instead. In the wake of such success, Murray could afford to be choosy about his projects. For several days, Irving heard nothing as Murray carefully read the first two volumes of The Sketch Book and talked it over with his business associates.32 The unbearable silence was broken on October 28.

  Murray's answer was no.

  Irving was disappointed, but determined. If he couldn't interest Murray, he would try Murray's former publishing partner, Archibald Constable. Constable had reprinted portions of The Sketch Book in his Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, and Irving believed he might be interested in the English rights. But Irving was so nervous about approaching Constable that he appealed to Walter Scott to plead his case. “I feel that I am taking a great liberty in making this request,” he told Scott, “but indeed my situation here is so peculiarly insulated that I do not know to whom else I can apply.”33

  Scott was characteristically magnanimous in his response. “I assure you nothing will give me more pleasure.” Constable, however, also declined—and no one was more disappointed than Walter Scott. Their friendship aside, Scott had been a fan of Irving's writing since A History of New York, and he was even more impressed with The Sketch Book. “It is positively beautiful,” he said.34

  Having struck out twice, Irving decided to publish the book himself, using profits from the American edition to pay all British publishing expenses. He entered into an agreement with John Miller—whom he had met in Murray's dining room during his 1817 visit—to publish a thousand copies of The Sketch Book under Miller's Burlington Arcade imprint. “It is certainly not the very best way to publish on one's own accompt,” advised Scott, who knew a thing or two about the perils of self-publishing. However, “I am sure of one thing,” he told Irving warmly, “that you have only to be known to the British public to be admired by them.”35

  New installments of The Sketch Book continued to roll off Van Winkle's American press with determined regularity. The fourth appeared in bookstalls on November 10, 1819. The fifth was released in the United States on the first day of 1820, missing its intended publication date by about a week—for this volume was comprised entirely of Christmas stories. While a number of other stories in The Sketch Book were better known, none would have a greater impact on American culture than these four Christmas essays.

  Irving had visited the topic before. In his 1812 revision of A History of New York, he had inserted a dream sequence involving “the good St. Nicholas… riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children,” introducing readers to a figure others would eventually dress up as Santa Claus.36 In The Sketch Book Irving described a Christmas gathering at the manor of the eccentric Squire Bracebridge. Moonlight glints off fresh snow, yule logs crackle in the fireplace, and Christmas greens and holly berries decorate windows. Stagecoaches arrive at rustic manors filled with antique furniture, where children sing Christmas carols and well-dressed couples dance, play games, and tell ghost stories. And then there was the food, something Irving excelled at describing: tables groan under the weight of ham, turkey, roast beef, and mince pie; tankards of beer gush with foam; and guests toast their host with mugs of wassail, ladled from a gigantic silver bowl, reflecting the flickering light of fat Christmas candles.

  Charles Dickens later fine-tuned the Christmas story, but Irving had laid the foundation. Americans embraced Irving's vision of Christmas as their own, marking the revival of a holiday that had been banned in parts of the country for the excessive drinking and fighting it spurred in the populace.

  Irving spent his winter working with John Miller to steer the first British edition of The Sketch Book toward its February publication date, and trying to convince John Howard Payne that he wasn't angry with him. In early 1820 Payne's reputation was in shambles, largely due to financial problems. A precocious child and gifted actor, he had written a play, edited a weekly theater newspaper, and made his New York public stage debut, all before the age of eig
hteen. Handsome, with a shock of black hair, a strong voice, pleasant manners, and a dry sense of humor, Payne had fallen in easily with Irving, Paulding, and Brevoort during his North American tour in 1809, and had corresponded regularly with Irving and the Lads as he traveled the eastern seaboard. Now, eleven years later, with a tour of Ireland, a Drury Lane premiere, and successful acting jobs in London behind him, Payne hoped to embark on a literary career as a playwright and poet.

  He wasn't having much luck. Payne's attempt at managing the Sadler's Wells theater was a bust, and he was evicted from his rooms at the end of 1819. With his creditors in pursuit, he took to free-loading off his friends, begging for loans while he tried to find backers for his plays. In some ways, it was an existence that mirrored Irving's own reliance on the goodwill of family and friends to sustain him as he pursued a writing career. Yet he had the audacity to lecture the twenty-eight-year-old Payne for not having a career or sustainable income.

  “I once did think you were acting inconsiderately and unjustifiable, in depending upon the casual assistance of others, without having any laudable object or definite pursuit,” Irving harangued. He told Payne he could forgive such behavior, since he understood that Payne was “busily employed when others considered you idle, & that your difficulties had been occasioned by the faithlessness of others, not by your own imprudence.”37 It was a stunning rebuke, coming from someone who, until very recently, had a similar reputation for idleness and lack of direction.

  The British edition of The Sketch Book, which included the first four installments of its American counterpart, landed in London bookstalls on February 16. As he had in the first American volume, Irving included a self-deprecating introduction: “The following desultory papers are part of a series written in this country, but published in America. The author is aware of the austerity with which the writings of his countrymen have hitherto been treated by British critics; he is conscious, too, that much of the contents of his papers can be interesting only in the eyes of American readers.”38 In this, he was wrong. The British loved Geoffrey Crayon, and Irving was lauded by British readers and critics with the same enthusiasm as in America.

  A month after the publication of the first British edition, the sixth installment of The Sketch Book was released in the United States. “John Bull,” which had been cut from the previous two issues, at last made its appearance, as did “The Pride of the Village,” another weepy piece about true love lost, then found again, too late to save the life of a heartbroken young maiden. But it was the third story—which Irving had outlined at the Van Warts’ two years earlier—that everyone agreed was his finest. It was “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and it propelled Irving from a mere man of letters into an international superstar.

  “It is a random thing,”39 Irving modestly called it, but “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was confident, cocky, and funny, much more in the vein of the rambunctious Knickerbocker than the elegant, inoffensive Crayon. Blending nuggets of Dutch customs, stories, and characters with dashes of German folklore, Irving's “Sleepy Hollow” was less about plot than mood. The story practically invented the spooky autumn atmosphere against which we now expect good Halloween tales to be set. And the characters were more vivid than any others Irving would ever create: the brash but likable Brom Bones, the plump but desirable Katrina Van Tassel, the gawky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane—Irving's nod to Jesse Merwin, who had kept him company at Kinderhook in the summer of 1809—and, always lingering in the background, the Headless Horseman.

  “In my opinion [it] is one of the best articles you have written,” Brevoort wrote to Irving in April 1820. “It unites all the excellencies of your old & new manner of writing.” It was no wonder British critics were hailing Irving as the finest British writer America had produced. “I think you will become a great favourite in England,” Brevoort said, “nor should I be surprised that they lay claims to you; proving their rights by your name & the purity of your style.” Brevoort's assessment was dead-on. “[Irving] seems to have studied our language where alone it can be studied in all its strength and perfection,” wrote a reviewer in the English Quarterly Review, “and in working these precious mines of literature he has refined for himself the ore which there so richly abounds.”40

  Such accolades and the sales they inspired couldn't save publisher John Miller, who, under his arrangement with Irving, received none of The Sketch Book’s profits. In early April 1820 Miller went broke, taking his Burlington Arcade printing house—and the unsold copies of The Sketch Book—down with him. It was a potential disaster, unless Irving could find another publisher willing to purchase the remaining stock and continue publication. Fortunately, Walter Scott was in London to receive his baronetcy. “I called to him for help, as I was sticking in the mire,” Irving explained, “and, more propitious than Hercules, he put his own shoulder to the wheel.”41

  “Murray has taken it in hand,” Irving proudly reported to Brevoort on May 13, 1820. Scott—now Sir Walter—had been as good as his word, and had convinced his publisher to buy the rest of Miller's stock. Even more encouraging, Murray wanted to publish a second volume.42

  Suddenly, the publisher who earlier had determined there was no profit to be made from Irving's work was demanding that Irving produce more of it. The pressure was immense. “The manner in which the work has been received here, instead of giving me spirit to write, has rather daunted me for the time,” he admitted to Brevoort. “I feel uneasy about the second volume, and cannot write any fresh matter for it.”43

  Such pressures aside, however, there were definite advantages to being Murray's author. His fashionable drawing room was now open to Irving, giving him access to the British literati and the best of European society. “Old D'Israeli is a staunch friend of mine,” Irving told Brevoort, his head spinning. “This evening I go to the Countess of Besborough's, where there is to be quite a collection of characters, among whom I shall see Lord Wellington, whom I have never yet had the good luck to meet with.”44

  There was a rising demand for his likeness, so Irving commissioned Newton to paint his portrait. “It is considered an excellent likeness, and I am willing that it should be thought so,” Irving told Brevoort, “though between ourselves, I think myself a much better looking fellow on canvas than in the looking-glass.”45

  On June 28 Irving shipped another packet to Ebenezer, this one containing “Little Britain,” a picturesque stroll through the heart of old London; “Stratford-On-Avon,” Irving's tribute to Shakespeare; “Westminster Abbey,” a contemplative tour of the famous building; and “The Angler,” a character sketch of the English naturalist Izaak Walton. They comprised the final volume of The Sketch Book. The pressures from Murray to complete the essays had worn him out. “I have had so much muddling work,” he told Ebenezer, “that I have grown tired of it, and have lost all excitement. I shall feel relieved from a cloud, when I get this volume printed and out of my sight.”46

  With the final four sketches in hand, Murray was ready to go to press immediately with the second British installment of The Sketch Book. The burnt-out Irving, eager to be done with it, agreed to a July publication date, which was significantly earlier than that of the seventh and final American volume scheduled for the fall. The second British volume contained all the material from issues five, six, and seven of its American counterpart, as well as three additional essays—the American Indian sketches “Philip of Pokanoket” and “Traits of Indian Character,” which Irving had originally written for the Analectic in 1814, and a short original piece, “L'Envoy,” in which Irving thanked his British readers for their indulgence.

  The Sketch Book was complete. Readers loved the stories and essays in The Sketch Book, but they adored its author. Geoffrey Crayon was well-read, well traveled, and clever—the kind of person you longed to chat with, dine with, or sit with at the theater. Elegant, self-deprecating, and never one to make himself more interesting than his stories, Crayon, readers were convinced, was Washington Irving. Cray
on represented everything Irving would have liked to have been. In fact, Irving so successfully blurred the line between author and pseudonym that the polished, erudite, confident Geoffrey Crayon became the public persona of the nervous, unfocused, insecure Washington Irving—one Irving would cultivate and protect for the next forty years.

  Knickerbocker's rough-and-tumble baritone was probably closer to Irving's real voice than the more measured tenor of Crayon. It wasn't a coincidence that the sketches Irving had written as Knickerbocker—“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—were the best and most memorable of The Sketch Book. Stepping back into Knickerbocker's black suit always seemed to bring out the finest—and the most fun—in Irving's writing. Yet Brevoort was right when he pointed out that “Sleepy Hollow” had seemed to unite Irving's old and new styles of writing. It had Knickerbocker's verve and Crayon's elegance. The real Washington Irving was neither Geoffrey Crayon nor Diedrich Knickerbocker; he was both—gruff yet graceful, blustering yet charming, crass but classy. And where Crayon made it all look easy, Knickerbocker knew it was hard work. The cultivated Crayon may have become the public personality, and Knickerbocker the private workhorse, but it was Irving alone who had earned the success and reputation. With The Sketch Book, he had guaranteed his legacy.

  And still The Sketch Book sold. Murray was so astounded by its success that he offered to work with Irving on a comprehensive two-volume collected works that he would pay for himself. Incredibly, Irving—who was in a hurry to leave for Paris with Peter and no longer interested in managing his British business affairs—simply offered to sell Murray the British copyright outright. Like Dusky Davey before him, Murray knew a good deal when he saw one, and purchased the copyright for 250 guineas, about $20,000 today. A pirated version of A History of New York had appeared—at this point, almost anything with Irving's name sold—and as the Irving brothers sprinted to Southampton to catch their ship for France, Murray promised to bring out an elegant edition of Knickerbocker to drive the pirated volume underground.