Washington Irving

Biography

Early years

According to holograph notes by Pierre Munroe Irving, Washington Irving's nephew and literary assistant, the family's lineage goes back to Clan Irvine of Drum Castle in Scotland, UK. The notes include a traditional family story regarding the coat of arms, which features three holly leaves; it was reportedly granted by Robert the Bruce to his armor-bearer, William de Irwyn, as a mark of loyalty. Washington Irving was proud of his Scottish (British) heritage and used the holly leaf imagery as a personal emblem.

Washington Irving's parents were William Irving Sr., originally of Quholm, Shapinsay, Orkney, Scotland, and Sarah (née Saunders), originally of Falmouth, Cornwall, England. They married in 1761 while William was serving as a petty officer in the British Royal Navy. They had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Their first two sons died in infancy, both named William, as did their fourth child John. Their surviving children were William Jr. (1766), Ann (1770), Peter (1771), Catherine (1774), Ebenezer (1776), John Treat (1778), Sarah (1780), and Washington.

The Irving family settled in Manhattan, and were part of the city's merchant class. Washington was born on April 3, 1783, the same week that New York City residents learned of the Treaty of Paris which ended the American Revolutionary War. Irving's mother named him after George Washington. Irving met his namesake at age 6 when George Washington came to New York just before his inauguration as president in 1789. The first President blessed young Irving, an encounter that Irving had commemorated in a small watercolor painting which continues to hang in his home.

The Irvings lived at 131 William Street at the time of Washington's birth, but they later moved across the street to 128 William Street. Several of Irving's brothers became active New York merchants; they encouraged his literary aspirations, often supporting him financially as he pursued his writing career.

Irving was an uninterested student who preferred adventure stories and drama, and he regularly sneaked out of class in the evenings to attend the theater by the time he was 14. An outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan in 1798 prompted his family to send him upriver, where he stayed with his friend James Kirke Paulding in Tarrytown, New York. It was in Tarrytown where he became familiar with the bucolic beauty of the region, with its Dutch customs and local ghost stories. Though the village of Sleepy Hollow did not exist in Irving's time (North Tarrytown would change its name to Sleepy Hollow in 1996), the area which Irving would make famous in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" had been known as Slapershaven or "Sleeper's Haven" by the Dutch settlers. Irving made several other trips up the Hudson as a teenager, including an extended visit to Johnstown, New York, where he passed through the Catskill Mountains region, the setting for "Rip Van Winkle". "Of all the scenery of the Hudson", Irving wrote, "the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination".

First major writings

Irving returned from Europe to study law with his legal mentor Judge Josiah Ogden Hoffman in New York City. By his own admission, he was not a good student and barely passed the bar examination in 1806. He began socializing with a group of literate young men whom he dubbed "The Lads of Kilkenny", and he created the literary magazine Salmagundi in January 1807 with his brother William and his friend James Kirke Paulding, writing under various pseudonyms, such as William Wizard and Launcelot Langstaff. Irving lampooned New York culture and politics in a manner similar to the 20th century Mad magazine. Salmagundi was a moderate success, spreading Irving's name and reputation beyond New York. He gave New York City the nickname "Gotham" in its 17th issue dated November 11, 1807, an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "Goat's Town".

Irving completed A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) while mourning the death of his 17-year-old fiancée Matilda Hoffman. It was his first major book and a satire on self-important local history and contemporary politics. Before its publication, Irving started a hoax by placing a series of missing person advertisements in the New York Evening Post seeking information on Diedrich Knickerbocker, a crusty Dutch historian who had allegedly gone missing from his hotel in New York City. As part of the ruse, he placed a notice from the hotel's proprietor informing readers that, if Mr. Knickerbocker failed to return to the hotel to pay his bill, he would publish a manuscript that Knickerbocker had left behind.

Unsuspecting readers followed the story of Knickerbocker and his manuscript with interest, and some New York city officials were concerned enough about the missing historian to offer a reward for his safe return. Irving then published A History of New York on December 6, 1809, under the Knickerbocker pseudonym, with immediate critical and popular success. "It took with the public", Irving remarked, "and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America". The name Knickerbocker became a nickname for Manhattan residents in general and was adopted by the New York Knickerbockers basketball team.

After the success of A History of New York, Irving searched for a job and eventually became an editor of Analectic Magazine, where he wrote biographies of naval heroes such as James Lawrence and Oliver Hazard Perry. He was also among the first magazine editors to reprint Francis Scott Key's poem "Defense of Fort McHenry", which was immortalized as "The Star-Spangled Banner". Irving initially opposed the War of 1812 like many other merchants, but the British burning of Washington in 1814 convinced him to enlist. He served on the staff of Daniel D. Tompkins, governor of New York and commander of the New York State Militia, but he saw no real action apart from a reconnaissance mission in the Great Lakes region. The war was disastrous for many American merchants, including Irving's family, and he left for England in mid-1815 to salvage the family trading company. He remained in Europe for the next 17 years.

Life in Europe

Irving spent the next two years trying to bail out the family firm financially but eventually had to declare bankruptcy. With no job prospects, he continued writing throughout 1817 and 1818. In the summer of 1817, he visited Walter Scott, beginning a lifelong personal and professional friendship. Irving composed the short story "Rip Van Winkle" overnight while staying with his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry van Wart, in Birmingham, England, a place that inspired other works as well. In October 1818, Irving's brother William secured for Irving a post as chief clerk to the United States Navy and urged him to return home. Irving turned the offer down, opting to stay in England to pursue a writing career.

In the spring of 1819, Irving sent to his brother Ebenezer in New York a set of short prose pieces that he asked be published as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. The first installment, containing "Rip Van Winkle", was an enormous success, and the rest of the work was equally successful; it was issued in 1819–1820 in seven installments in New York and in two volumes in London ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" appeared in the sixth issue of the New York edition and the second volume of the London edition). Like many successful authors of this era, Irving struggled against literary bootleggers. In England, some of his sketches were reprinted in periodicals without his permission, a legal practice as there was no international copyright law at the time. To prevent further such reprints in Britain, Irving paid to have the first four American installments published as a single volume by John Miller in London.

Irving appealed to Walter Scott for help procuring a more reputable publisher for the remainder of the book. Scott referred Irving to his own publisher, London powerhouse John Murray, who agreed to take on The Sketch Book. From then on, Irving would publish concurrently in the United States and Britain to protect his copyright, with Murray as his English publisher of choice. Irving's reputation soared, and for the next two years, he led an active social life in Paris and Great Britain, where he was often feted as an anomaly of literature: an upstart American who dared to write English well.

With both Irving and publisher John Murray eager to follow up on the success of The Sketch Book, Irving spent much of 1821 traveling in Europe in search of new material, reading widely in Dutch and German folk tales. Hampered by writer's block—and depressed by the death of his brother William—Irving worked slowly, finally delivering a completed manuscript to Murray in March 1822. The book, Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists, A Medley (the location was based loosely on Aston Hall, occupied by members of the Bracebridge family, near his sister's home in Birmingham) was published in June 1822.

Return to the United States

Irving arrived in New York on May 21, 1832, after 17 years abroad. That September, he accompanied Commissioner on Indian Affairs Henry Leavitt Ellsworth on a surveying mission, along with companions Charles La Trobe and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, and they traveled deep into Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma). At the completion of his western tour, Irving traveled through Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, where he became acquainted with politician and novelist John Pendleton Kennedy.

Irving was frustrated by bad investments, so he turned to writing to generate additional income, beginning with A Tour on the Prairies which related his recent travels on the frontier. The book was another popular success and also the first book written and published by Irving in the United States since A History of New York in 1809. In 1834, he was approached by fur magnate John Jacob Astor, who convinced him to write a history of his fur trading colony in Astoria, Oregon. Irving made quick work of Astor's project, shipping the fawning biographical account Astoria in February 1836. In 1835, Irving, Astor, and a few others founded the Saint Nicholas Society in the City of New York.

During an extended stay at Astor's home, Irving met explorer Benjamin Bonneville and was intrigued with his maps and stories of the territories beyond the Rocky Mountains. The two men met in Washington, D.C., several months later, and Bonneville sold his maps and rough notes to Irving for $1,000. Irving used these materials as the basis for his 1837 book The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. These three works made up Irving's "western" series of books and were written partly as a response to criticism that his time in England and Spain had made him more European than American. Critics such as James Fenimore Cooper and Philip Freneau felt that he had turned his back on his American heritage in favor of English aristocracy. Irving's western books were well received in the United States, particularly A Tour on the Prairies, though British critics accused him of "book-making".

In 1835, Irving purchased a "neglected cottage" and its surrounding riverfront property in Tarrytown, New York, which he named Sunnyside in 1841. It required constant repair and renovation over the next 20 years, with costs continually escalating, so he reluctantly agreed to become a regular contributor to The Knickerbocker magazine in 1839, writing new essays and short stories under the Knickerbocker and Crayon pseudonyms. He was regularly approached by aspiring young authors for advice or endorsement, including Edgar Allan Poe, who sought Irving's comments on "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher".

Minister to Spain

President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain in February 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Irving wrote, "It will be a severe trial to absent myself for a time from my dear little Sunnyside, but I shall return to it better enabled to carry it on comfortably". He hoped that his position as Minister would allow him plenty of time to write, but Spain was in a state of political upheaval during most of his tenure, with a number of warring factions vying for control of the 12-year-old Queen Isabella II. Irving maintained good relations with the various generals and politicians, as control of Spain rotated through Espartero, Bravo, then Narváez. Espartero was then locked in a power struggle with the Spanish Cortes. Irving's official reports on the ensuing civil war and revolution expressed his romantic fascination with the regent as young Queen Isabella's knight protector. He wrote with an anti-republican, undiplomatic bias. Though Espartero, ousted in July 1843, remained a fallen hero in his eyes, Irving began to view Spanish affairs more realistically. However, the politics and warfare were exhausting, and Irving was both homesick and suffering from a crippling skin condition.

I am wearied and at times heartsick of the wretched politics of this country .... The last ten or twelve years of my life, passed among sordid speculators in the United States, and political adventurers in Spain, has shewn me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow man; and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be.

With the political situation relatively settled in Spain, Irving continued to closely monitor the development of the new government and the fate of Isabella. His official duties as Spanish Minister also involved negotiating American trade interests with Cuba and following the Spanish parliament's debates over the slave trade. He was also pressed into service by Louis McLane, the American Minister to the Court of St. James's in London, to assist in negotiating the Anglo-American disagreement over the Oregon border that newly elected president James K. Polk had vowed to resolve.

Final years

Irving returned from Spain in September 1846, took up residence at Sunnyside, and began work on an "Author's Revised Edition" of his works for publisher George Palmer Putnam. For its publication, Irving had made a deal which guaranteed him 12 percent of the retail price of all copies sold, an agreement that was unprecedented at that time. As he revised his older works for Putnam, he continued to write regularly, publishing biographies of Oliver Goldsmith in 1849 and Islamic prophet Muhammad in 1850. In 1855, he produced Wolfert's Roost, a collection of stories and essays that he had written for The Knickerbocker and other publications, and he began publishing a biography of his namesake George Washington which he expected to be his masterpiece. Five volumes of the biography were published between 1855 and 1859.

Irving traveled regularly to Mount Vernon and Washington, D.C., for his research, and struck up friendships with Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855. He was hired as an executor of John Jacob Astor's estate in 1848 and appointed by Astor's will as first chairman of the Astor Library, a forerunner to the New York Public Library.

Irving continued to socialize and keep up with his correspondence well into his seventies, and his fame and popularity continued to soar. "I don't believe that any man, in any country, has ever had a more affectionate admiration for him than that given to you in America", wrote Senator William C. Preston in a letter to Irving. "I believe that we have had but one man who is so much in the popular heart". By 1859, author Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. noted that Sunnyside had become "next to Mount Vernon, the best known and most cherished of all the dwellings in our land".

Death

Irving died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside on November 28, 1859, age 76—only eight months after completing the final volume of his Washington biography. Legend has it that his last words were: "Well, I must arrange my pillows for another night. When will this end?" He was buried under a simple gravestone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (then called Tarrytown Cemetery) on December 1, 1859. In 1865, the cemetery board of trustees would posthumously honor Irving's request that its name be changed to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Irving's funeral on December 1, 1859, was a massive national event. The crowd at Christ Episcopal Church in Tarrytown was so large that it was feared the floors would collapse and the church would have to be rebuilt. Thousands of people lined the streets to watch the procession. Across the nation, flags were held at half-mast at the news of his passing. Despite his immense fame, Irving chose a remarkably simple headstone with no epitaph, engraved only with his name and dates, located in the family plot. Irving and his grave were commemorated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1876 poem "In the Churchyard at Tarrytown", which concludes with:

Legacy

Literary reputation

Irving is largely credited as the first American Man of Letters and the first to earn his living solely by his pen. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow acknowledged Irving's role in promoting American literature in December 1859: "We feel a just pride in his renown as an author, not forgetting that, to his other claims upon our gratitude, he adds also that of having been the first to win for our country an honourable name and position in the History of Letters".

Irving is considered to have perfected the American short story and was the first American writer to set his stories firmly in the United States, even as he poached from German or Dutch folklore. He is also generally credited as one of the first to write in the vernacular and without an obligation to presenting morals or being didactic in his short stories, writing stories simply to entertain rather than to enlighten. He also encouraged many would-be writers. As George William Curtis noted, there "is not a young literary aspirant in the country, who, if he ever personally met Irving, did not hear from him the kindest words of sympathy, regard, and encouragement".

Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand, felt that Irving should be given credit for being an innovator but that the writing itself was often unsophisticated. "Irving is much over-rated", Poe wrote in 1838, "and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and his surreptitious and adventitious reputation—between what is due to the pioneer solely, and what to the writer". A critic for the New-York Mirror wrote: "No man in the Republic of Letters has been more overrated than Mr. Washington Irving". Some critics claimed that Irving catered to British sensibilities, and one critic charged that he wrote "of and for England, rather than his own country". For instance, American critic John Neal in his 1824–25 critical work American Writers dismissed Irving as a poor copy of Goldsmith.

Other critics were more supportive of Irving's style. William Makepeace Thackeray was the first to refer to Irving as the "ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old", a banner picked up by writers and critics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. "He is the first of the American humorists, as he is almost the first of the American writers", wrote critic H.R. Hawless in 1881, "yet belonging to the New World, there is a quaint Old World flavor about him". Early critics often had difficulty separating Irving the man from Irving the writer. "The life of Washington Irving was one of the brightest ever led by an author", wrote Richard Henry Stoddard, an early Irving biographer. Later critics, however, began to review his writings as all style with no substance. "The man had no message", said critic Barrett Wendell.

Impact on American culture

Irving popularized the nickname "Gotham" for New York City, and he is credited with inventing the expression "the almighty dollar". The surname of his fictional Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker is generally associated with New York and New Yorkers, as found in New York's professional basketball team the New York Knickerbockers.

One of Irving's most lasting contributions to American culture is in the way that Americans celebrate Christmas. In his 1812 revisions to A History of New York, he inserted a dream sequence featuring St. Nicholas soaring over treetops in a flying wagon, an invention which others dressed up as Santa Claus. In his five Christmas stories in The Sketch Book, Irving portrayed an idealized celebration of old-fashioned Christmas customs at a quaint English manor which depicted English Christmas festivities that he experienced while staying in England, which had largely been abandoned. He used text from The Vindication of Christmas (London 1652) of old English Christmas traditions, and the book contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States.

Irving introduced the erroneous idea that Europeans believed the world to be flat prior to the discovery of the New World in his biography of Christopher Columbus, yet the flat-Earth myth has been taught in schools as fact to many generations of Americans. American painter John Quidor based many of his paintings on scenes from the works of Irving about Dutch New York, including such paintings as Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (1828), The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849), and The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858).

Memorials

The village of Dearman, New York, changed its name to "Irvington" in 1854 to honor Washington Irving, who was living in nearby Sunnyside, which is preserved as a museum. Influential residents of the village prevailed upon the Hudson River Railroad, which had reached the village by 1849, to change the name of the train station to "Irvington", and the village incorporated as Irvington on April 16, 1872.

The town of Knickerbocker, Texas, was founded by two of Irving's nephews, who named it in honor of their uncle's literary pseudonym. The city of Irving, Texas, states that it is named for Washington Irving. Irvington, New Jersey is also named after Irving. It was incorporated on March 27, 1874, from parts of Clinton Township (Clinton Township is now part of Newark, New Jersey since 1902). Irving Street in San Francisco is named after him.

The Irving Park neighborhood in Chicago are named for him as well, though the original name of the subdivision was Irvington and then later Irving Park before annexation to Chicago. The major Chicago thoroughfare Illinois Route 19 is also named Irving Park Road. Gibbons Memorial Park, located in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, is located on Irving Cliff, which was named after him. The Irvington neighborhood in Indianapolis is also one of the many communities named after him.

Irving College (1838–1890) in Irving College, Tennessee, was named for Irving. There is also a statue of Irving in Granada, Spain. The Village of North Tarrytown, New York, changed its name to Sleepy Hollow in 1996 to honor Washington Irving and capitalize on the popularity of the story "The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow".

Washington Irving Memorial Park and Arboretum, located in Bixby, Oklahoma, is named in honor of Washington Irving and features an amphitheater stage with a replica façade of his Sunnyside home. The home includes a statue of Irving seated on the porch of the home. Among the tributes to Irving are memorials to the victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the World Trade Center attacks, with a steel beam from the towers on display. The park is also the site of local community events, including the annual Bixby BBQ and Blues festival.

In 1940, Washington Irving became the very first author to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. (The 1-cent stamp was the first in the "American Authors" series, which also featured James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Mark Twain.)