It wasn't. Six weeks later came the second volume in the collection, Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, Irving's fond tribute to the homes of Walter Scott and Lord Byron. After receiving the manuscript from Aspinwall in March, Murray had given the pages to his favorite elbow critic, John Lockhart, for review and comment. Abbotsford, the home of Lockhart's father-in-law, was a topic close to Lockhart's heart, and Irving's manuscript—a loving recollection of his first meeting with Walter Scott in 1817—met with the critic's enthusiastic approval. He told Murray that he absolutely had to publish it. With this ringing endorsement, Murray offered Irving £600—an arrangement Irving regarded as “perfectly satisfactory.”6
The second volume was well received by American readers and critics, who didn't seem to mind that Irving had returned to European topics. Edgar Allan Poe, now writing for the Southern Literary Messenger, thought this book even better than the first. “In Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, the author of the Sketch Book is at home,” enthused Poe. “By no one could this offering to the memories of Scott and Byron have been more appropriately made.”7
Irving was relieved. In the eyes of readers, he was not only back, he was just as good, if not better, than before. And he was well compensated for it; by summer 1835, The Crayon Miscellany had netted him nearly $4,000—about $90,000 today—and that didn't even include his British advance. Further, Ebenezer had negotiated an agreement to extend Carey, Lea & Blanchard's exclusive publishing rights for another seven years for an annual payment of $1,150. There had been some niggling over the details, but Washington was relieved to know he had a regular source of income for at least the next seven years. “I am content,” he told Peter in April, “and feel no further solicitude in money matters, excepting to acquire the means of benefiting others.”8
Irving spent the spring cloistered in the city, shuttling between Ebenezer's Bridge Street home and Astor's Hell Gate manor, where Pierre continued to sort the seemingly endless piles of journals, letters, and clippings. By mid-May Washington began his initial draft of Astoria, using Pierre's dense jumble of information to cross-reference resources and track down any quotes, stories, or other details he needed.
It wasn't all work, however. Brevoort returned to New York in May, settling permanently on Fifth Avenue while he continued to amass a fortune in land speculation. Such investments were fashionable—the nineteenth-century equivalent of dot-com ventures—and Irving found himself caught up in the fever. Approached in early June with the offer of a significant share in a waterside parcel of land in Baltimore, he wrote to John P. Kennedy for the inside line on the investment. “I see you think me infected by the fever of speculation, and this present request may confirm you in the opinion,” he explained almost apologetically. “I have no eagerness for wealth; but I have others dependent upon me for whom I have to provide.”9
Such gentlemanly protestations aside, he did need the money. On June 7 Irving formally acquired the two-room stone farmhouse on the Van Tassell property for $1,800—and he had big plans for it. He was determined to make it a proper home, with comfort and space enough to tempt his family not only to visit, but to stay. Already he had engaged his neighbor, the painter George Harvey, to help him rebuild and renovate the place. “My idea is to make a little nookery somewhat in the Dutch style, quaint, but unpretending,” Irving explained. “It will be of stone. The cost will not be much.” That was wishful thinking, as he soon discovered.10
In mid-July Irving shipped Aspinwall the finished pages of Legends of the Conquest of Spain, the third volume of The Crayon Miscellany. He was no longer concerned about the particulars of Aspinwall's negotiations with Murray. “I leave the arrangement entirely to you and wish every thing to be done to Mr Murrays satisfaction,” he told his agent. “It really gives me great pleasure to be again in business relations with him.”11
He should have been concerned. Irving had cobbled Legends together from the remains of several Spanish manuscripts he had dredged from his trunks, and Murray's elbow critic thought the effort was shabby. “I have looked over Irving's very rough proofs & am sorry to say I think the whole affair feeble and vapid,” Lockhart told Murray in disgust. Murray purchased the book anyway, though for a paltry £100, and had the last laugh, as public demand sent Legends of the Conquest of Spain into a second printing. In the United States, Carey, Lea & Blanchard was confident readers would buy the third installment from Crayon, paying Irving $1,500. It was enough. “I look forward now with confidence, of being able to keep up the series from time to time, with ease to myself, and with much advantage in every respect,” Irving said.12
If he hoped to get away with using the Miscellany as a repository for any vagrant manuscripts he might have lying around, critics had none of it. While the third volume of the Miscellany sold, even friendly critics were blasé in their assessment. “If any other person than Irving had written the book,” said Philip Hone, “the publishers would have sold fifty copies.”13 Such a lukewarm reception ensured that the third volume of The Crayon Miscellany would also be the last.
That was fine with Irving. He had exhausted the materials lying fallow in his trunks, and had been paid well for it. He could devote his attention to Astoria, and to his cottage, where George Harvey and his crew were turning the simple stone farmhouse into the “nookery” that had existed only in Irving's imagination. He opted to stay with Astor in Hell Gate until the work was completed. With its riverfront lawns and fragrant gardens, Astor's home was conducive to Irving's creative temperament. “The consequence is, that I have written more since I have been here than I have ever done in the same space of time,” he observed.14
It was at Hell Gate in early autumn that Irving met one of Astor's colorful acquaintances from the fur trade, army captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie du Bonneville. A French-born West Pointer, Bonneville had taken leave from the army in 1832 to lead one of the first American expeditions to survey the western territories beyond the Rocky Mountains. When Bonneville hadn't returned in the prescribed amount of time, however, the army had presumed him dead and struck him from their records. Bonneville came to Astor seeking career advice, but it was Irving who took most of the explorer's time, pressing him for tales of his adventures. “There was something in the whole appearance of the captain that prepossessed me in his favor,” he said.15
Irving returned to Tarrytown to oversee construction on his house. He put the spur to his masons to complete the exterior before the cold set in, but bogged Harvey down with minutiae that threatened further delays. Irving fussed about the best way to inscribe Harvey's name over the south door, and demanded to know how the windows would be glazed. He ordered one bedroom “finished in a different way from the others,” and for a sloped inner bedroom wall to be covered with striped paper “to resemble the curtain of a tent.” Old Dutch cottages, he told Harvey, had “crow steps” on their gabled ends, and so must his.
Irving knew his micromanagement was trying Harvey's patience—“I think I have given you explanations enough to perplex and confound you,” he told his renovator good-naturedly—but this was to be his home for the rest of his life, and he was leaving no detail to chance. Even in its unfinished state, he was enormously proud of his cottage. “It is a tenement in which a man of very moderate means may live,” he said, “and which yet may form an elegant little snuggery for a rich man.”16
The modest little farmhouse had quickly swollen beyond Irving's initial intentions. “Like all meddlings with stone and mortar, the plan has extended as I built,” he confessed to Peter.17 It was also more expensive than he had anticipated.
Unfortunately, Irving's already strained finances were hobbled further in December, when fire swept through fifty acres of the southern tip of Manhattan, burning down hundreds of businesses. Ebenezer's was unscorched, but he, John Treat, and Washington had each lost thousands of dollars invested in insurance companies. “The fire,” Washington told Peter glumly, “has singed almost everybody.”18
But there was some good news
: Peter would come home in the spring of 1836. Washington could barely contain his excitement, and promised his brother the cottage would be ready to receive him. “Here you shall have a room to yourself that shall be a sanctum sanctorum…you will have those at hand who love and honor you, and who will be ready to do anything that may contribute to your comfort.”19
But winter weather hindered its completion. Frustrated and impatient, Irving returned in earnest to working on Astoria, filling gaps in his narrative by interviewing Astor, his employees, and colleagues. Irving was amazed at the ease with which Astor seemed to make money; the man seemed to have a predisposition for choosing successful projects. It was typical of Irving's luck that the one scheme in which Astor convinced him to invest—shares in land in Green Bay, Wisconsin—promptly went bust.20 Astor bought Irving's shares back several years later, but at a loss to Irving of nearly $2,000.
Work on Astoria was interrupted in March by the reappearance at Hell Gate of Captain Bonneville, preparing to again make his way west. This time, it was Irving, not Astor, whom Bonneville had come to see. Over the winter, Bonneville had written a book about his adventures in the West, but had been unable to find a publisher. Spreading his maps, papers, and manuscript on a table, he asked Irving if they might be useful to him. “I glanced over the [papers],” Irving wrote later, “and observing there were materials on which I thought I could found a work that would be acceptable to the public, I purchased the [manuscript] of him”21 for $1,000.
By late spring Astoria was nearly finished, and work was progressing at his increasingly expensive Tarrytown home. The cottage, he told Pierre, “reminds me of those fairy changelings called Killcrops, which eat and eat and are never the fatter.” Until it was done, Peter—back in the United States after twenty-seven years abroad—was bunked in Ebenezer's home in New York City.
At last, in late September the cottage—the Roost, as Washington called it—was finished. Throughout the fall, he organized his study and prepared the upstairs bedrooms for Peter's arrival. Even with the help of several willing nieces, it was more work than he expected. “I have too many things to attend to in getting my little establishment under way,” he told Kemble somewhat frantically.
In late October 1836 Astoria was published simultaneously in the United States and London. Carey, Lea & Blanchard paid Irving a generous $4,000, which was just the sort of windfall he needed to cover the cost overruns at the Roost. In London, however, a skeptical John Murray had politely rejected the book, believing British readers would have little interest in American aristocrats. Richard Bentley, Irving's copublisher on The Alhambra, had gambled £500 that Irving's name and a fascination with the American West would resonate with the English.
Bentley was right; Astoria received glowing reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. “A more finished and exquisite narrative we have never read,” wrote the Westminster Review, “our critical labors have seldom brought us so much pleasure as that derived from the perusal of Astoria.” The American Quarterly Review agreed. “The narrative of all these adventures should be perused in Mr. Irving's words, no pen is so fit as his to exhibit all its various phases.” The most important critic of all, John Jacob Astor, was “greatly gratified.”22
Irving scarcely noticed his reviews; he was already moving ahead with his book on Captain Bonneville. He continued to ride the wave of land speculation, signing on with Kemble to pursue schemes in Michigan, and with Pierre and Ebenezer on lands in Toledo, Ohio. He still had no luck; indeed, the Toledo venture would prove to be particularly disastrous, losing the Irvings $20,000. At this point, his unbroken string of botched investments was almost funny. “I am so accustomed… to find swans turn out mere geese,” Washington told Pierre, “that I have made up my mind not to be grieved.”23
Such aplomb was typical. Home ownership was sitting well with Irving, and he was in high spirits. “Everything goes on cheerily in my little household, and I would not exchange the cottage for any chateau in Christendom,” he beamed. Even a harsh winter snowstorm didn't dampen his mood, “as there shall be good sleighing,” he told Pierre. Even better, he now had the company of Peter, who had arrived in December.24
In early January 1837 he reported to Pierre that he was “getting on briskly” with his Bonneville manuscript. He hoped the book would more than earn back the $1,000 he had paid for the captain's papers. A review of his finances convinced him that he was in no immediate danger of “running aground,” but if his investments didn't pan out, he would need to write regularly—and at the moment, he was fresh out of ideas.25
It was cold in Tarrytown that winter; the Tappan Zee had frozen to a sparkling sheet of ice. Peter was fine company, but Washington, as he had all his life, craved female companionship. Ebenezer's five daughters had returned to their father in New York at the beginning of the winter, but the niece he really missed was his sister Catharine's daughter, Sarah Sanders Paris, who had helped supervise construction of the cottage and laid out its grounds. “The house wants a head while you are gone,” he told her in one of his many lengthy, chatty letters to her.26
In late January came sad news; Judge Hoffman had died at the age of seventy. Irving made the snowy trip to New York for the funeral. While in the city, he came across one of the most blistering attacks ever leveled against him, his patriotism, or his work.
In the Plaindealer, editor William Leggett snidely charged Irving with “mutilating books” in a blatant attempt to curry favor with English readers. Leggett questioned Irving's motives in writing a patriotic introduction for the American edition of A Tour on the Prairies while conveniently eliminating it from the British version. “He has an undoubted right to do [so],” Leggett twitted haughtily, “whatever we may say of its spirit.” What hurt more was the assertion Leggett made regarding Irving's decision to alter “objectionable” lines contained in the collection of William Cullen Bryant's poems that Irving had edited in 1832: “Our respect for Washington Irving underwent a sensible diminution when we perceived that, in supervising the republication of Bryant's Poems in London, he changed a passage in the piece called Marion's Men… in order to substitute something that might be more soothing to [English] ears.”27
Irving was livid. “I have always made it a rule never to reply to attacks, to which I have of late years added another—never to read them,” he had once told Alexander Everett.28 But Leggett had gone too far. This was an attack on not only his work but his character and reputation. For the first time in his life, he put his pen to paper to refute one of his critics.
“Though I have generally abstained from noticing any attack upon myself in the public papers,” Irving railed to Leggett, “the present is one which I cannot suffer to pass in silence.” The change to the line in “Song of Marion's Men,” he pointed out, had been made only at the request of Bryant's English publisher. “I doubt whether these objections would have occurred to me,” he fumed, “had they not been thus set forth.”
Regarding Leggett's claim that he had modified A Tour on the Prairies to cater to two different audiences, Irving responded, “Your inference is that these professions [of patriotism] are hollow… and that they are omitted in the London edition through fear of offending English readers. Were I indeed chargeable with such baseness, I should well merit the contempt you invoke upon my head.” But “what had the British public to do with those home greetings[?]” he asked. “There was nothing in them at which the British reader could possibly take offence; the omitting of them, therefore, could not have argued ‘timidity’ but would merely have been a matter of good taste; for they would have been as much out of place… as would have been my greetings and salutations to my family circles, if repeated out of the window.”29
Leggett backed down, and allowed Irving's word to be the last.
With that unpleasantness behind him, Irving returned to his cottage—“Wolfert's Roost,” he now called it, a nod to Wolfert Acker, who had built the original two-room farmhouse—and continued his work on the Bonn
eville book. He was so preoccupied that he nearly forgot to write a letter of congratulations to Martin Van Buren, who had been elected president of the United States the previous November. Writing to Van Buren in February, Irving couldn't resist reminding his friend that he had predicted his rise all along. “I hope… to take a breakfast with you in commemoration of that memorable breakfast in London when you received news of your rejection, which I then considered the seal of your political advancement.” He wished Van Buren well and offered some unsolicited advice: “There is but one true rule for your conduct: act according to the sound dictates of your head and the kind feelings of your heart, without thinking how your temporary popularity is to be affected by it, and without caring about a re election.”30 It was wise counsel—and to Irving's later annoyance, Van Buren followed it.
As he closed in on the end of his manuscript, Irving was genuinely excited about his Bonneville book. “It is all true,” he gushed to Aspinwall. “It is full of adventure, description, and Stirring incident; with occasional passages of humor.” It was also, he thought, worth a thousand guineas, and he directed Aspinwall—who didn't even have the complete manuscript—to start negotiations with publishers. As he forwarded the last batch of pages to Aspinwall in late March, however, he had significantly reined in his expectations. “I hope you will be able to get a tolerable price for the work, but with whatever you do get I shall feel satisfied, knowing that you always make the best bargain in your power.”31 As usual, Aspinwall delivered, nudging £900 from publisher Richard Bentley, nearly twice what Bentley had paid for Astoria.
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