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Washington Irving (1783-1859), traveller, short-story writer and biographer, was born in New York City. His father, William Irving, was a merchant from the Orkney Islands and his mother, Sarah, the granddaughter of a Cornish rector. Irving was named after his father's commander-in-chief during the Revolution, General George Washington. His parents' British background was an important factor in the development of Irving's respect for and love of English culture, which is clearly present in his early tales and stories.
Irving attended several schools before graduating to the seminary of Josiah Henderson, a preparatory school for university. He was an average student in most subjects, but encouraged by his brothers' taste in literature and the arts, he developed a love of reading. He particularly enjoyed Chaucer and Spenser as well as Shakespeare, and escaped to the theatre when he could. He also read Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, and was fascinated by travel literature. Between 1708 and 1802, Irving was apprenticed to three different attorneys to study law. He was not passionate about the profession, and spent most of his time in the offices of his elder brother Peter, who was the editor of the New York Morning Chronicle, and a supporter of the anti-federalist reformer, Aaron Burr. Under the pseudonym of 'Jonathan Oldstyle, an amateur', Irving wrote political lampoons and essays on the theatre. He also wrote on issues such as the abolition of slavery and duelling. In 1804 his brother sent him abroad because he was suffering the symptoms of tuberculosis. He sailed to southern Europe, touring through Bordeaux and most of Italy, and then visiting Switzerland, France, the Low Countries
and England. While in Rome, he became friends with Washington Allston, and considered becoming a painter. He returned to New York in 1806 and began to study law again. By the end of the year, he was admitted to the bar as an attorney-at-law.
Washington Irving's first serious effort as a professional writer was Salmagundi (1807). Written pseudonymously with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding, Salmagundi is a series of light satirical essays mocking New York's nouveau riche. American reviewers praised the work, comparing the writers to Rabelais, Swift and Addison. Irving fell in love with Matilda Hoffman, daughter of a judge, but she died of tuberculosis during their engagement. In 1809, Irving and his brother Peter began writing Knickerbocker's A History of New York, but Irving finished the workby himself as 'Diedrich Knickerbocker'. Building on the sharp satirical humour that had characterised Irving's earlier writing, the work presents itself as a historical account of the founding of New York by Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch settlers. In fact, although indeed a history, the work is a parody, and Diedrich Knickerbocker the first comic narrator in American fiction. In the eighteenth-century spirit of Henry Fielding's novels, Knickerbocker addresses the reader in asides and interjections that draw mocking comparisons between the past and contemporary political problems. In the last chapter, Irving criticises the ineffectual politicians who made up the Common Council of New York for their failure to defend New York from the British press gangs. The work also offers an early indication of Irving's flair for portraying historical characters such as Peter Stuyvesant and Henry Hudson, and for his ability to infuse history with a romantic, imaginative colouring. The following passage describes Hudson's first sight of New York, and demonstrates the blend of realistic detail and sentimental idealism that also characterised Irving's later writing:
The island of Mannahatta spread wide before them, like some sweet vision of fancy, or some fair creation of industrious magic. Its hills of smiling green swelled gently one above another, crowned with loft trees of luxuriant growth [.. .] On the gentle declivities of the hills were scattered in gay profusion, the dog-wood, the sumach, and
the wild brier, whose scarlet berries and white blossoms glowed brightly among the deep green of the surrounding foliage. The work was a great success in the New York literary and artistic community. In February 1810, an anonymous reviewer for the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review commented that: 'To examine it seriously in a historical point of view, would be ridiculous; though the few important events of the period to which it relates are, we presume, recorded with accuracy as to their dates and consequences.' However there were some dissenting voices among the old Dutch families of New York, who believed that Irving's accounts of the Dutch colonists were a sly attempt to ridicule them.
In 1811 Irving was admitted as a partner in his brothers' prosperous hardware mercantile firm P & E Irving and Company, a position that enabled him to finance a writing career. In return, Irving moved to Washington to monitor the unsteady political climate in Congress, which was affecting economic trade with Britain and Europe. Irving was invited by the President's wife Dolly Madison to one of her soirées, enjoying 'a constant round of banqueting, revelling and dancing'. Despite Irving's love for English literary culture and society, when the English entered Washington in 1812 and declared war, Irving was patriotic in the defence of America. Believing that each man should play a practical part in the war, he became aide-de-camp to Governor Daniel Tompkins.
From 1813 to 1814 Irving edited The Analectic Magazine in Philadelphia. He wrote several biographies of naval figures involved in the war, as well as a review of Byron. At this time he also edited the works of Thomas Campbell, which he bemoaned as 'uphill work', and wrote a biographical sketch of the poet. Irving eschewed the label of critic, claiming that: 'I do not profess the art and mystery of reviewing, and am not ambitious of being wise or facetious at the expense of others'. He became acquainted with Sir Walter Scott through Scott's letter to Irving's influential literary friend Henry Brevoort. Scott praised the second edition of A History of New York, declaring that: 'I have never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker.'
In 1815 Irving accepted the position as manager of part of his brothers' Liverpool business, and sailed for England. Upon arrival he travelled around the country, and described his impression of its manners and customs in his letters. He often visited
Birmingham, where his sister Sarah van Wart was living. Moses Thomas, the owner of The Analectic Magazine, employed Irving as an agent who would send him copies of new books that he could then pirate. In 1817, P & E Irving and Company was declared bankrupt and Irving represented the company in court. Mortified by his family's financial ruin and depressed by his father's death, Irving began to consider writing fiction for a living. Francis Jeffrey, editor of The Edinburgh Review, and William Blackwood, of Blackwood's Magazine, both asked him to contribute to their popular and respected Edinburgh journals. Irving sent Walter Scott's Rob Roy for publication in America. In 1817 he visited Scotland and stayed with Scott, writing to Brevoort: 'I cannot tell you how truly I have enjoyed the hours I have passed here.'
Irving had been sending to America essays on the places he had visited in England, and these had been favourably reviewed in the American periodicals. Pre-empting rumours that an unscrupulous publisher intended to publish the essays in book form in England, Irving approached John Murray who politely rejected his offer. Irving asked Sir Walter Scott to review his work, which the latter described as 'positively beautiful'. Graciously declining Scott's offer of an editorship of a new political periodical about to be launched
Katrina, the headless horseman Brom Bones, a 'burly, roaring, roystering blade' with 'a strong dash of waggish good humour at the bottom'. Crossing a bridge on his ineffectual horse Gunpowder, Ichabod is pursued by the avenging spectre:
Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavoured to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium with a terrible crash -- he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider, passed by like the whirlwind. In the morning only Ichabod's hat can be found, next to a shattered pumpkin. Despite the convincing evidence that Ichabod is alive and practising as a member of the 'Justice of the Ten Pound Court', the narrator affirms that: 'The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day, that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means.'
Describing his work as 'questionable stuff', Irving felt 'almost appalled' by the immediate success of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. William Godwin, praising his 'refinement' commented: 'The author powerfully conciliates himself to our kindness and affection. But the essay on Rural Life in England is incomparably the best.' Francis Jeffrey praised Irving's 'purity and beauty of diction' in The Edinburgh Review in 1820, comparing his evocative powers of description to 'the most elegant and polished of our native writers'. However, one critic noted that occasionally Irving becomes sentimental and bathetic, recalling the work of the eighteenth century graveyard poets Collins, Gray and Young in poems such as 'The Country Church' and 'The Widow and her Son'. Irving, he observed, 'writes, of late, in a less merry mood than in the days of Knickerbocker and the Salmagundi'. (This may well have been due to bouts of depression from which he periodically suffered.) Another critic suggested that he should write a novel, but Irving's correspondence with Henry Brevoort indicates that he felt that his wandering, desultory spirit would not sustain the discipline of novel writing: 'I have preferred adopting the mode of sketches & short tales rather than long works, because I chose to take a line of writing peculiar to myself.'
In 1821, buoyed by his success, he moved to Paris with his brother Peter. Here he met John Howard Payne, an actor from New York with whom he collaborated on dramatic adaptations and productions. Between 1822 and 1823 he made another tour of Europe, where he settled in Dresden and had a brief affair with a young aristocratic woman named Emily Foster. During 1821 and 1822, Irving wrote Bracebridge Hall; or The Humorists, which was published by John Murray in 1822. The publication of this work was delayed due to Irving's periodic 'indisposition' and 'depression'. Irving found that popularity in society distracted him from his writing. Writing to his sister Catherine in 1822, he observes, 'I have often felt distressed by the idea that I must be an object of censure among my friends.'
Irving describes Bracebridge Hall as 'a connected series of tales and sketches'. Set in the English manor house of Squire Bracebridge, the tales are introduced and framed by Geoffrey Crayon. The reader is introduced to a host of comic characters, each of whom
introduces a story after a post-dinner amusement. 'The Stout Gentleman' exemplifies Irving's comic ability to play with the conventions of supernatural literature. The story's narrator, while staying in an inn in Derby, tries to guess the character and personality of a mysterious gentleman who is lodging upstairs and who upsets the landlady and servants of the house. He speculates that the gentleman is either the Wandering Jew or the Man in the Iron Mask, but ultimately only catches a glimpse of the man's bottom as he gets into a stagecoach to leave. Other noteworthy stories in the collection gently
parody sentimental and supernatural conventions, and include 'The Student of Salamanca', 'Annette Delabre' and 'Dolph Heyliger'. In the opening story, entitled 'The Author', Irving denies being a political writer, commenting that 'My only aim is to paint characters and manners.' He observes that pastoral life in England inspires him with a degree of sensibility that approaches a nationalistic feeling for England. Four thousand copies, for which Irving received £1,000, sold very quickly in England but the work did not receive much critical attention.
Irving returned to live in London in 1824. His next collection of short stories, Tales of a Traveller, was published in 1824. Stranded in an English manor house by a snowstorm, members of a hunting party pass the time by telling each other ghost stories. In nearly every story Irving parodies the genre of Gothic fiction. For example in 'Adventure of the German Student', the hero Göttfried Wolfgang meets a young woman at a guillotining and falls in love with her. On discovering that she was guillotined and is a ghost he goes mad. Irving commented that some of the stories were 'transcripts of scenes that I have witnessed'. The stories referred to are in 'The Italian Banditti' section. In contrast with authors such as Ann Radcliffe, who romanticise bandits, Irving depicts the life and morals of the robbers with an unflinching realism. However Tales of A Traveller was unsuccessful and critics accused Irving of repeating himself. Moving back to Paris in 1825, he advised his nephew Pierre against a literary career, declaring that: ' I hope none of those who are dear to me will be induced to follow my footsteps, and wander into the seductive but treacherous paths of literature.' Accompanied by his
brother Peter he escaped Paris, travelling to Orleans, Tours and Touraine.
In 1826, Mr O. Rich, the American Consul at Madrid, suggested to Irving's friend Alexander H. Everett, the American minister to Spain, that Irving be appointed to the position of American ambassador in Madrid. Irving accepted the position on Rich's condition that he translate a work by the historian Fernández de Navarette. Falling in love with the culture of Iberia, Irving decided to write a biography and history, and stayed as Rich's guest. Rich was a respected bibliographer and historian, and Irving worked in his library which, he commented, was 'my main resource throughout the whole of my labours'. He wrote the first full-length biography of Christopher Columbus. Entitled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, it was published in 1828. Irving also consulted the archive of the last remaining descendant of Columbus, the Duke of Veraguas, later describing his working method as 'a minute and circumstantial narrative, omitting no particular that appeared characteristic of the persons, the events or the times'. He offers a highly detailed description of Columbus and of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the fifteenth-century monarchs who defeated the Moorish hold on Granada. The work was praised in the British periodicals for its realistic detail.
Despite the work's success, Irving keenly felt the earlier attacks on his critical reputation, asserting that: 'I can never regain that delightful confidence which The Crayon Miscellany, published in 1835. The work is an embellished account of the battles that led to the Christian conquest of Granada, and its narrator, Fray Antonio Agapida, is a fictitious scholarly friar who is 'deeply and accurately informed of the particulars of the wars between his countrymen and the Moors, a tract of history but too much overgrown with the weeds of fable'. The work earned Irving membership of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid in 1829, but the little critical notice it attracted outside of Spain was generally negative, critics objecting to Irving's blending of the genres of narrative and history.
Beyond the Rocky Mountains. Irving had met John Jacob Astor, a pioneering fur- trading merchant and America's first multi-millionaire, in Paris in 1821. Astor asked Irving to write an account of both the history of fur trading and of his own attempt to establish the first American trading outpost on the Pacific coast for trade with China. While staying at Astor's country estate on the Hudson, Irving interviewed those of his employees who had participated in the transcontinental expedition across the Wild West. He also read all of the company's documents. While making use of other explorers' narratives, Irving also drew on his own experiences of travelling up the Mississippi. His ambition was to present a comprehensive picture of 'the whole region beyond the Rocky Mountains'. Irving's account effectively records the dangers of crossing the wilderness, from the details of the superstitions of Native American tribes, to attacks by grizzly bears, to rafting down the Colorado River. As well as being exact in its topographical detail, Astoria also strikingly evokes the sublimity of the Wild West:
It is a land where no man permanently abides; for, in certain seasons of the year, there is no food either for the hunter or his steed [.. .]; the brooks and streams are dried up; the buffalo, the elk, the deer have wandered to distant parts [.. .] leaving behind them a vast uninhabited solitude, seamed by ravines, the beds of former torrents, but now only serving to tantalise and increase the thirst of the traveller [.. .] it is to be feared that a great part of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilised man. The work was a great success. The London Spectator observed that: 'The composition we are inclined to rate as the chef d'oeuvre of Washington Irving. It has all the minute fullness and enough of the polished and elaborate elegance of other works, with more pith and substance.' Astoria remains an important text, one of the first narratives of 'The American Dream', of the explorer's conquest of the wilderness in order to make his fortune.
Irving tried to capitalise on this success with The Adventures of Captain Bonneville in 1837, another account of a fur trader and explorer, but the work was poorly received and Irving was accused of verbosity. He wrote to Charles Dickens expressing his admiration for his novels; Dickens visited Irving in 1842 while on tour in New York, and responded that with everything Irving had written upon his shelves, there was no other writer whose praise he wished to be 'proud to earn'. In 1842 Irving was once more appointed ambassador to Spain, having turned down the mayoralty of New York, a secretaryship of the Navy and a place in Congress. He wrote a biography of the poet Margaret Davidson in 1843, but it was largely ignored by the critics. He resigned as ambassador in 1846 to practise law on Wall Street.
Between 1848 and 1851, Irving revised his work for the collected Works of Washington Irving, published by George P. Putnam, the first of its type in America. Its successful sales secured Irving's financial position. He continued to live at Sunnyside, where he was visited by a number of literary celebrities of the Victorian era. Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography was published in 1849. In a preface to the work, Irving describes his childhood love for the author. Unfortunately, neither this nor Irving's later biographical works, Mahomet and His Successors (1850) and the five-volume The Life of George Washington (1855-1859), attracted much critical attention. While he was well-respected for his polished elegant style and his own personal kindness, humour and sociability, Irving was accused of relying too heavily on the work of others in his later work. He died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six, probably due to overwork.
While he has been referred to as 'the grandfather of American literature', opinion varies as to Irving's literary merit. His humour was an influence on Nathaniel Hawthorne,
while Herman Melville praised 'Rip van Winkle'. His early satire foreshadows the work of satirist and Gothic writer Ambrose Bierce. However he was disliked by both James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In comparison with writers who dealt with large philosophical or social themes, Irving was not considered a 'serious' writer. Twentieth-century criticism has focused on Irving's interest in Spanish history and culture and its relation to America. In the field of post-colonial criticism, Irving's work is considered important due to his ambivalent attitudes towards and representation of Native Americans, the Dutch and Muslim culture. However it is Irving's role in the inception of the short story tradition in American fiction, and his parodic treatment of the conventions of Gothic literature ('the sportive Gothic') that have generated the most criticism of his work. Oliver Goldsmith's influence on Irving's comic and sentimental style has yet to be fully examined, while future critical work on Irving might also consider the submerged political messages of his work within the context of Anglo- American relations.
Bibliography The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, written by his nephew Pierre E. Irving (London: H.G. Bohn, 1863), is an indispensable reference work. The most recent full- length modern biography is Washington Irving by Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, edited by Lewis Leary (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981) although Bowden's focus is on Irving's works rather than his life. The standard edition of Washington Irving's works is the thirty volume Complete Works of Washington Irving, edited by Richard Dilworth
Rust et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press / Boston: Twayne, 1969-1988). These presses have also produced modern editions of Irving's complete journals, notebooks and letters. Irving's stories have been anthologised in many paperback collections: recommended editions include The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman (London: Penguin, 1999), The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman, edited by Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998) and The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Nedier (Da Capo Press, 1998). The latter contains Tales of the Alhambra. Several American editions of Irving's other works are also available.
Max Fincher, Literature Online Biography. Cambridge, 2002
