Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

They were loving words, but William never read them. On November 9, 1821, William Irving Jr. died in New York. He was fifty-five years old.

  9

  Rut

  1822–1825

  No man in the Republic of Letters, has been more overrated than Mr. Washington Irving.

  —New-York Mirror, September 24, 1824

  THE DEATH OF WILLIAM IRVING in December 1821, Washington wrote, was “one of the dismallest events that ever happened to me.” Given their seventeen-year age difference—and Washington's own strained relationship with the Deacon—William was like a surrogate father to the youngest Irving. The Deacon's death in 1807, Washington dismissed without much comment; the death of his mother a decade later had been harder, but there had still been William to take care of him. With William gone, Washington felt parentless for the first time in his life. Worse, he felt partly responsible for William's deterioration. “He died of a rapid decline,” Washington said later, “brought on I am convinced by the acute anxiety and distress of mind he had suffered.”1

  Irving spent a difficult winter in Birmingham. His legs were so inflamed and swollen that he could no longer stand or walk, and lesions and blisters on his hands made writing impossible. Given his symptoms, it is likely that he suffered from the rare skin condition erythema multiforme. While the condition is generally more prevalent among neurotic or nervous types, erythema multiforme is also associated with certain forms of the herpes simplex virus. In most cases, the disease simply runs its course; until then, Irving's symptoms—and his physicians—were making him miserable. With their endless prescriptions, the doctors, he reported, “have made a complete job and I may say Job of me; excepting that I have not his patience.”2

  Apart from prodding physicians, he also had John Murray nagging him to complete his latest work. Glumly, Irving returned to London in late December, and worked steadily on his book for the next six weeks.

  “I forward you a parcel, containing the first volume of Brace-bridge Hall, or The Humourists, a Medley in two volumes,” Washington wrote Ebenezer on January 29, 1822. “I had hoped to have sent both volumes, but I have not been able to get the second volume ready.” Murray had pushed him to his limit, and he was exhausted. “I have fagged until the last moment,” he told Ebenezer. “My health is still unrestored. This work has kept me from getting well, and now my indisposition on the other hand has retarded the work.”3

  The manuscript he enclosed was a mess, but Washington was so eager to secure the copyright to Bracebridge on both sides of the Atlantic that he was willing to rush an unpolished American edition into print. Meanwhile, as the manuscript made its way across the ocean, he had time to refine the text for the British edition.

  Irving had recently been approached by American publisher Charles Wiley for help in securing the British copyright for a book he had just published, a Revolutionary War–era espionage novel called The Spy, written by a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker named James Fenimore Cooper. Irving limped over to Albemarle Street to confer with Murray on Cooper's behalf.4 It was the beginning of a professional relationship between Irving and Cooper that would swing between warm and frigid over the next four decades.

  Murray declined to publish The Spy, a decision that annoyed Irving. “[Murray] is precisely the worst man that an American work can be sent to,” he fumed to Wiley. “He is surrounded by literary advisers, who are prejudiced against any thing American.”5Undeterred by the bad news, Cooper sent Irving a note of thanks, and asked for Irving's help in securing the British copyright for a new manuscript he had completed. This time, Murray was more impressed, and at Irving's behest agreed to publish Cooper's novel The Pioneers, the first book of the Leatherstocking Tales.

  Despite his irritation with Murray over The Spy, Irving stayed loyal to the Prince of Booksellers, even as he was wooed by other publishers for the rights to his next book. Irving had shipped the second volume of Bracebridge Hall to Ebenezer in late February, and Henry Colburn—whom Irving regarded as one of the most fashionable publishers in London—offered him a thousand guineas for the British rights. But Irving didn't want to disappoint Murray. “He should have my second even at a less price than the one offered to me by [Colburn],”6 Irving declared—and Murray nearly did.

  On March 12 Irving brought his manuscript to Murray. With the American edition looming, Irving needed a commitment from the publisher quickly. As he skimmed the pages, Murray asked Irving his price for the British copyright. Without blinking, Irving requested 1,500 guineas.

  “Fifteen hundred?” Murray gasped. “If you had said a thousand guineas…”

  “You shall have it for a thousand,” Irving interjected, anxious to secure a deal. “My friends thought I ought to have had more for it,” he told Peter later, “but I am content.”7 In the United States, however, Irving insisted on retaining his American copyright, which prompted some grumbling from Moses Thomas, who hoped to purchase it outright on terms similar to Murray's.

  On May 21 the first volume of Bracebridge Hall was published in the United States; the British edition two days later. Irving's and Murray's copyrights were secure on both sides of the ocean, but at the cost of a muddied first American volume. Despite Ebenezer's efforts to clean up the manuscript, Bracebridge was so replete with garbled punctuation and misspellings that parts of the book were practically unreadable.

  Not that it mattered. Irving was rightly convinced his reputation was secure enough in the United States to risk a somewhat slapdash first volume. It was the English he was trying to impress. It was partly for this reason that the stories in Bracebridge have a decidedly English slant. Until Diedrich Knickerbocker's cameo appearance late in the second volume, there was no sign of Irving's less refined, and more natural, American voice. Bracebridge was Geoffrey Crayon's show.

  Despite efforts then and now to locate the “real” Bracebridge Hall, Irving based his portrayal on no single place, but built his manor house as an amalgam of different locations: Haddon Hall, which he had toured with Leslie; Aston Hall, an impressive home near the Van Warts; Brereton Hall in Cheshire; and, perhaps the most important influence, Walter Scott's Abbotsford. While Squire Bracebridge was no Walter Scott, there were hints of Scott in the eccentric Bracebridge. Bracebridge's advice to his sons “to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth” was the same advice Irving heard Scott give his own son at Abbotsford.8

  As Moore had suggested, Irving used Squire Bracebridge, his family, and his home as the framing device to tell more than fifty short stories. The result was a random, somewhat disorienting mix of styles and settings. It was The Sketch Book all over again, although a lesser incarnation. Despite its flaws, readers loved Bracebridge Hall. Murray easily recouped his investment, making about £980 (roughly $120,000 today) on the four thousand copies sold in Britain. Most critics were forgiving, even as they criticized Irving's tendency to be syrupy or, of all things, indecent, as he snickered at a character's underwear or fixated on women's breasts. As Irving feared, his own reputation had set expectations high, and some reviewers weren't sure he had lived up to them. “We took up the book predisposed to admire,” one said, “but a perusal, we are compelled to say, has in some measure shaken our faith.”9

  Fortunately, just as he had with The Sketch Book, Irving won over the feared Francis Jeffrey and his Edinburgh Review. “We have received so much pleasure from this book,” Jeffrey gushed, “that we think ourselves bound in gratitude… to make a public acknowledgement of it.” Yet Jeffrey was careful to put Irving on notice: “Though we, and other great lights of public judgment, have decided that his former level has been maintained in this work with the most marvelous precision, we must whisper in his ear that the millions are not exactly of that opinion; and that the common buz among the idle and impatient critics of the drawing room is that, in comparison with the Sketch Book, it is rather monotonous and languid.” Such humbugging aside, Irving was relieved. The strain of completing Bracebridge had worn down his health and his patience with Murray, but
the public reception made it all worth it. If Irving/Crayon had been considered en vogue after The Sketch Book, then Bracebridge Hall cemented his celebrity. “The success of my writings has given me ready access to all kinds of Society,” he told Brevoort. “And I have been the rounds of routs, dinners, operas, balls & blue stocking coteries. I have been much pleased with those parties in which rank & fashion and talent are blended.” Such a whirlwind schedule took its toll. The inflammation on his legs—his “cutaneous complaint,” he called it—still bothered him, and he announced to Brevoort his intent to visit Aachen, Germany, to soak in its hot sulfur springs.10

  Unfortunately, recovering his health took longer than anticipated, as Irving spent several weeks experimenting with various cures. The baths at Aachen did nothing. At Wiesbaden, the water was too hot, while in Mainz, the fumes of the dry vapor baths nearly caused him to pass out. Compounding his misery, he was suffering from a massive case of writer's block. Contemplating a Sketch Book–type project about Germany and its legends, he couldn't get in the proper mood to write. “I read considerably, but do not pretend to write,” he told Sarah from Mainz, “and my mind has complete holiday so that it will be some time before I get another work under way.”11

  By early September his legs had recovered sufficiently for him to travel to Heidelberg. The sixty-mile trek sent him down the scenic Bergstrasse at the foot of the Odenwald Mountains, and as he snacked on freshly picked grapes and drank newly pressed wine, he thought he had never enjoyed himself more. After only a few days in Heidelberg, he declared himself healthy enough to take long walks and scramble among the ruins of nearby castles. He felt so good, in fact, that he declined an invitation from Thomas Moore to join him in Paris for the winter. “I was so much delighted with what I had seen of Germany,” he told Moore later, “that on recovering sufficiently to venture again on long journeys, I set out in quest of adventures.”12

  Off he went, exploring the Rhine Valley, the Black Forest, Strasbourg—where he was pleased to see a French translation of The Sketch Book in a bookshop—and the fields of Blenheim before finally making his way to Munich. With its libraries, theaters, operas, and galleries, Munich held Irving's attention for nearly a week. “I do not know when I have enjoyed traveling more,” he told Moore. “The only drawback on all this pleasure is that I am burning the candle at both ends all the time. I am spending money, and my pen is idle—.”13

  It was also getting colder; it was time to choose a place to winter where he could relax, read, and, hopefully, find the motivation and imagination to get his idle pen moving again. Tracing his finger down the blue line of the Danube on his map, Irving decided either Salzburg or Vienna was worth a look.

  He was disappointed in both cities. Salzburg he abandoned after only two days, and it took only a month before he proclaimed Vienna “extensive, irregular, crowded, dusty, dissipated, magnifi-cent, and… disagreeable.”14 As a last resort, he turned toward Dresden. “It is a more quiet and intellectual city than this,” he told his sister, “a place of taste, intellect, and literary feeling; and it is the best place to acquire the German language.”

  While Dresden's reputation as the fashionable capital of the Kingdom of Saxony was secure well before Irving's arrival in 1822, the city was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars. King Frederic I had allied himself with Napoleon, and had suffered for it, watching his kingdom raided, sacked, torn in half, and eventually absorbed into Prussia. But Irving's instincts about its feasibility as winter quarters were justified. It was definitely a place of “taste, intellect, and literary feeling.” The city of 50,000 was on the rebound, with a thriving theater and opera district, numerous museums and libraries, picturesque scenery, and an active social element that revolved mainly around the activities of the court.15 Irving made himself at home in the Hotel de Saxe, overlooking Neumarkt Square, where he stayed for the next seven months. They were among the happiest—and most heartbreaking—of his life.

  His literary reputation had preceded him. “There are German translations of my works just appearing, and my writings and myself are topicks in the little literary papers which abound in Germany,” he reported. “This has made me an object of Blue stocking curiosity and instead of quietly taking a post of observer in society I have to talk—and to fight my way through tough conversations with the aid of bad French and worse German.” Fortunately, he had the help of John P. Morier, a friend from Washington, D.C., who was serving as the British envoy extraordinaire to the court of Saxony. Morier steered Irving into the inner circle of Dresden's diplomatic society, and in late December accompanied Irving on his first of many conversations with King Frederic and the royal family. “When the King entered… I was introduced & he spoke to me very flatteringly about my works,” Irving wrote in amazement.16

  Through Morier, he met Barham John Livius, a hack writer and dramatist who was attempting to do in Dresden what Payne was doing in Paris: translate and adapt foreign-language plays for the London stage. Livius was trying to acquire the rights to Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which had premiered to great success in Berlin in 1821. In the meantime, he spent much of his time with his cousin Mrs. Amelia Morgan Foster at her residence in Cour-land Palace, just two blocks from Irving's hotel. On December 19 Livius invited Irving to join him and the Fosters for dinner. Irving returned for dinner again on Christmas Eve, and soon became a regular in the household.

  The Foster household, as Irving soon discovered, was a hub for English society in Dresden. The wife of a wealthy and well-connected Englishman, Amelia Foster had arrived in Dresden in 1820 to provide a European education for her two daughters, Emily and Flora, and three younger sons. Fluent in German and Italian, the Foster women were well-read, charming, and beautiful. By the time of Irving's arrival in late 1822, eighteen-year-old Emily was being actively courted by various prominent Germans, Italians, and Englishmen—and now here was a famous American trying to catch her eye. Emily was intrigued; she confided in her diary that the thirty-nine-year-old Irving was “neither tall nor slight, but most interesting, dark, hair of a man of genius waving, silky, & black, grey eyes full of varying feeling, & an amiable smile.”17

  In a way, it was the Hoffman household all over again. Like Maria Hoffman, Amelia Foster was close to Irving's age, yet Irving's feelings for her bordered on matronly adulation. Just as he had in the Hoffman residence more than a decade before, he made himself at home among the family, amiably chatting up the mother while keeping an eye on one of the daughters. With so many young and aggressive suitors around, he had to find creative ways to earn Emily's favor.

  As luck would have it, he learned the Foster family was fond of putting on amateur theatricals, usually under the direction of aspiring director/producer Livius. For the theater-loving Irving, it was an ideal opportunity. In no time, Livius had them rehearsing an adaptation of his own opera, Maid or Wife, in which Irving was Emily's leading man. Irving also set to work adapting Three Weeks after Marriage, a comedy in which Emily took the role of Lady Rackett, and he played her husband—another convenient bit of casting.

  At this point, Livius finally acquired the rights to adapt Der Freischütz, and he asked Irving to help him prepare it for the London stage. Irving was still learning German, but he had seen the play performed several times, and thought he could help with the songs until he was more comfortable with the language. Between his work with Livius and the amateur theatricals, Irving had little interest in writing. Not that he was complaining. “Though I have done nothing with my pen, and have been tossed about on the stream of society,” he told Peter, “yet I console myself with the idea that I have lived into a great deal of amusing and characteristic information which, after all, is perhaps the best way of studying the world.”18

  Most of his living into was done at the Fosters’ Courland Palace residence, as Irving dined with the family almost daily and spent evenings “reading & gossiping, until near one oclock.” He was becoming increasingly interested in Emily Foste
r. Though Irving was always careful in his journals never to give away too much, his discreet entries nevertheless raised the eyebrows of a later reader—possibly Pierre Irving, or the author himself—who erased a number of entries involving Emily Foster. It was perhaps an attempt to preserve the image of Irving as too devoted to the memory of Matilda Hoffman to ever woo or love another woman, for the erasures, when comprehensible, are telling. “E… of heart—Dance with her,” reads one nearly invisible entry on February 11; the next day, a similarly effaced message can be seen: “Ask E to give me a subject for a poem.”19

  Emily was coy, though similarly reserved, in her journal. She was probably more curious than romantically interested, but she did, at times, neglect some of her other suitors in favor of this older, famous American who behaved like an elegant Englishman. Through his constant attention, entertaining conversation, and careful casting of their theatricals, Irving was convinced he was vanquishing all other suitors.

  He wasn't. It's likely Emily was being delicate with Irving's feelings, for she had clearly picked up on his need for praise and acceptance. “Mr. I. is in want of constant excitement & support, interest & admiration of his friends seem the very food he lives on,” she wrote in her journal. “He is easily discouraged & excited.”20 Even

  Flora recognized the insecurity beneath Irving's otherwise confident, gentlemanly demeanor, as well as his tendency to despair: “His countenance varies with his mood. His smile is one the sweetest I know; but he can look very, very sad…. He judges himself with the utmost severity, feeling a deep depression at what he fancies are his shortcomings, while he kindles into enthusiasm at what is kind or generous in those he loves.”21

  Irving didn't stray far from the Fosters; “Dine at Mrs. Fosters” was a regular entry in his journal throughout March. Writing was all but impossible; he was too preoccupied. “I am merely seeing and hearing, and my mind seems too crowded and confused a state to produce anything,” he told his sister. To Leslie, however, he was more animated on the subject: “I have done nothing with my pen since I have left you! Absolutely nothing!”22