Everything about Washington Irving totally explained
Washington Irving (
April 3,
1783 –
November 28,
1859) was an
American author,
essayist,
biographer and
historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his
short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and
Rip Van Winkle, both of which appear in his book
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.. His historical works include biographies of
George Washington,
Oliver Goldsmith and
Muhammad, and several histories of 15th century
Spain dealing with subjects such as
Columbus, the
Moors, and the
Alhambra. Irving also served as the
U.S. minister to Spain from 1842 to 1846.
He made his literary debut in
1802 with a series of observational letters to the
Morning Chronicle, written under the
pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in
1819. He continued to publish regularly — and almost always successfully — throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in
Tarrytown, New York.
Irving, along with
James Fenimore Cooper, was the first American writer to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and
Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including
Sir Walter Scott,
Lord Byron,
Thomas Campbell,
Francis Jeffrey, and
Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from
copyright infringement.
Biography
Early years
Washington Irving's parents were William Irving, Sr., originally of
Shapinsay,
Orkney, and Sarah (née Sanders), Scottish-English immigrants. They married in 1761 while William was serving as a petty officer in the British Navy. They had eleven children, eight of which survived to adulthood. Their first two sons, each named William, died in infancy, as did their fourth child, John. Their surviving children were: William, Jr. (1766), Ann (1770), Peter (1772), Catherine (1774), Ebenezer (1776), John Treat (1778), and Sarah (1780).
The Irving family was settled in
Manhattan,
New York City as part of the city's small vibrant merchant class when Washington Irving was born on
April 3,
1783 At age six, with the help of a nanny, Irving met his namesake, who was then living in New York after his inauguration as president in 1789. The president blessed young Irving, an encounter Irving later commemorated in a small watercolor painting, which still hangs in his home today. Several of Washington Irving's older brothers became active New York merchants, and they encouraged their younger brother's literary aspirations, often supporting him financially as he pursued his writing career.
An uninterested student, Irving preferred adventure stories and drama and, by age fourteen, was regularly sneaking out of class in the evenings to attend the theater. The 1798 outbreak of
yellow fever in Manhattan prompted his family to send him to healthier climes upriver, and Irving was dispatched to stay with his friend
James Kirke Paulding in
Tarrytown, New York. It was in Tarrytown that Irving became familiar with the nearby town of
Sleepy Hollow, with its quaint Dutch customs and local ghost stories. 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 mountain region, the setting for "
Rip Van Winkle". "[O]f all the scenery of the Hudson," Irving wrote later, "the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination."
The nineteen year old Irving began writing letters to
The Morning Chronicle in 1802, submitting commentaries on New York's social and theater scene under the name of
Jonathan Oldstyle. The name, which purposely evoked the writer's
Federalist leanings, was the first of many pseudonyms Irving would employ throughout his career. The letters brought Irving some early fame and moderate notoriety.
Aaron Burr, a co-publisher of the
Chronicle, was impressed enough to send clippings of the Oldstyle pieces to his daughter, Theodosia, while writer
Charles Brockden Brown made a trip to New York to recruit Oldstyle for a literary magazine he was editing in Philadelphia.
Concerned for his health, Irving's brothers financed an extended tour of Europe from 1804 to 1806. Irving bypassed most of the sites and locations considered essential for the development of an upwardly-mobile young man, to the dismay of his brother William. William wrote that, though he was pleased his brother's health was improving, he didn't like the choice to "
gallop through Italy... leaving Florence on your left and Venice on your right". Instead, Irving honed the social and conversational skills that would later make him one of the world's most in-demand guests. "I endeavor to take things as they come with cheerfulness," Irving wrote, "and when I can't get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner." While visiting
Rome in 1805, Irving struck up a friendship with the American painter
Washington Allston,
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 wasn't a good student, and barely passed the
bar in 1806. Irving began actively socializing with a group of literate young men he dubbed "The Lads of Kilkenny". Collaborating with his brother William and fellow Lad James Kirke Paulding, Irving created the literary magazine
Salmagundi in January 1807. Writing under various pseudonyms, such as William Wizard and Launcelot Langstaff, Irving lampooned New York culture and politics in a manner similar to today's
Mad magazine.
Salmagundi was a moderate success, spreading Irving's name and reputation beyond New York. In its seventeenth issue, dated
November 11,
1807, Irving affixed the nickname "
Gotham" — an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "Goat's Town" — to New York City.
In late 1809, while mourning the death of his seventeen year old fiancée Matilda Hoffman, Irving completed work on his first major book,
A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (
1809), a satire on self-important local history and contemporary politics. Prior to its publication, Irving started a
hoax akin to today's
viral marketing campaigns; he placed a series of missing person adverts in New York newspapers seeking information on Diedrich Knickerbocker, a crusty Dutch historian who had allegedly gone missing from his hotel in New York City.
With residents and city officials buzzing in anticipation, Irving's
A History of New York became an immediate bestseller after its publication on
December 6,
1809. "It took with the public," Irving remarked, "and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America." Today, the surname of Diedrich
Knickerbocker, the fictional narrator of this and other Irving works, has become a nickname for Manhattan residents in general.
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 like
James Lawrence and
Oliver Perry. He was also among the first magazine editors to reprint
Francis Scott Key's poem "Defense of
Fort McHenry", which would later be immortalized as "
The Star-Spangled Banner", the national anthem of the United States.
Like many merchants and New Yorkers, Irving originally opposed the
War of 1812, but the British attack on
Washington, D.C. in 1814 convinced him to enlist. He served on the staff of
Daniel Tompkins, governor of New York and commander of the New York State Militia. Apart from a reconnaissance mission in the
Great Lakes region, he saw no real action. The war was disastrous for many American merchants, including Irving's family, and in mid-1815 he left for England to attempt to salvage the family trading company. He remained in Europe for the next seventeen years.
Life in Europe
The Sketch Book
Irving spent the next two years trying to bail out the family firm financially but was eventually forced to declare
bankruptcy. With no job prospects, Irving continued writing throughout 1817 and 1818. In the summer of 1817, he visited the home of novelist
Walter Scott, marking the beginning of a lifelong personal and professional friendship for both men. Irving continued writing prolifically — the short story "
Rip Van Winkle" was written overnight while staying with his sister Sarah and her husband,
Henry van Wart in
Birmingham,
England, a place that also inspired some of his other works. 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, however, 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 essays 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, published in seven installments in the United States and England throughout 1819 and 1820 ("
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" would appear in the sixth issue), would be equally as successful.
Like many successful authors of this era, Irving struggled against literary bootleggers. While in England, his sketches were published in book form by British publishers without his permission, an entirely legal practice as there were no clear international copyright laws. Seeking an English publisher to protect his copyright, Irving appealed to Walter Scott for help. 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 England to protect his copyright, with Murray being his English publisher of choice.
Irving's reputation soared, and for the next two years, he led an active social life in Paris and England, where he was often feted as an anomaly of literature: an upstart American who dared to write English well.
Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller
Irving was anxious to follow up on the success of
The Sketch Book, and traveled to the continent in search of new material, reading widely in Dutch and German folk tales. His next book,
Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists, A Medley (the location was based loosely on
Aston Hall near his sister's home in Birmingham) was published in
1822, and was well-received by readers and critics.
Struggling with writer's block, Irving traveled to Germany, settling in Dresden in the winter of 1822. Here he dazzled the royal family and attached himself to Mrs. Amelia Foster, an American living in Dresden with her five children. Irving was particularly attracted to Mrs. Foster's 18-year-old daughter Emily, and vied in frustration for her hand. Emily finally refused his offer of marriage in the spring of 1823.
He returned to Paris and began collaborating with playwright
John Howard Payne on translations of French plays for the English stage, with little success. He also learned through Payne that the novelist
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was romantically interested in him, though Irving never pursued the relationship.
In August
1824, Irving published the collection of essays
Tales of a Traveller — including the short story "
The Devil and Tom Walker" — under his Geoffrey Crayon persona. While the book sold respectably,
Traveller bombed with critics. Hurt and depressed by the book's reception, Irving retreated to Paris where he spent the next year worrying about finances and scribbling down ideas for projects that never materialized.
Spanish books
While in Paris, Irving received a letter from
Alexander Hill Everett on
January 30,
1826. Everett, recently the American Minister to Spain, urged Irving to join him in Madrid, noting that a number of manuscripts dealing with the Spanish conquest of the Americas had recently been made public. Irving left for Madrid and enthusiastically began scouring the Spanish archives for colorful material.
With full access to the American consul's massive library of Spanish history, Irving began working on several books at once. The first offspring of this hard work,
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, was published in January
1828. The book was popular in the United States and in Europe and would have 175 editions published before the end of the century. It was also the first project of Irving's to be published with his own name, instead of a pseudonym, on the title page. The
Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada was published a year later, followed by
Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus in
1831.
Irving's writings on Columbus are a mixture of history and fiction, a genre now called romantic history. Irving based them on extensive research in the Spanish archives, but also added imaginative elements aimed at sharpening the story. The first of these works is the source of the durable myth that medieval Europeans believed the
Earth was flat.
In 1829, Irving moved into Granada's ancient palace
Alhambra, "determined to linger here," he said, "until I get some writings under way connected with the place." Before he could get any significant writing underway, however, he was notified of his appointment as Secretary to the American Legation in London. Worried he'd disappoint friends and family if he refused the position, Irving left Spain for England in July 1829.
Secretary to the American legation in London
Arriving in London, Irving joined the staff of American Minister
Louis McLane. McLane immediately assigned the daily secretary work to another man and tapped Irving to fill the role of aide-de-camp. The two worked over the next year to negotiate a trade agreement between the United States and the
British West Indies, finally reaching a deal in August 1830. That same year, Irving was awarded a medal by the Royal Society of Literature, followed by an honorary doctorate of civil law from
Oxford in 1831.
Following McLane's recall to the United States in 1831 to serve as Secretary of Treasury, Irving stayed on as the legation's chargé d'affaires until the arrival of
Martin Van Buren, President Jackson's nominee for British Minister. With Van Buren in place, Irving resigned his post to concentrate on writing, eventually completing
Tales of the Alhambra, which would be published concurrently in the United States and England in
1832.
Irving was still in London when Van Buren received word that the United States Senate had refused to confirm him as the new Minister. Consoling Van Buren, Irving predicted that the Senate's partisan move would backfire. "I shouldn't be surprised," Irving said, "if this vote of the Senate goes far toward elevating him to the presidential chair."
Return to America
Washington Irving arrived in New York, after seventeen years abroad on
May 21,
1832. That September, he accompanied the U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs,
Henry Ellsworth, along with companions
Charles La Trobe and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, on a surveying mission deep in
Indian Territory. At the completion of his western tour, Irving traveled through Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where he became acquainted with the politician and novelist
John Pendleton Kennedy.
Frustrated by bad investments, Irving turned to writing to generate additional income, beginning with
A Tour on the Prairies, a work 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 Irving to write a history of his
fur trading colony in the American Northwest, now known as
Astoria, Oregon. Irving made quick work of Astor's project, shipping the fawning biographical account titled
Astoria in February 1836.
During an extended stay at Astor's, Irving met the explorer
Benjamin Bonneville, who intrigued Irving with his maps and stories of the territories beyond the
Rocky Mountains. When the two met in Washington, D.C. several months later, Bonneville opted to sell 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. In the minds of some critics, especially James Fenimore Cooper, Irving had turned his back on his American heritage in favor of English aristocracy. Irving's western books, particularly
A Tour on the Prairies, were well-received in the United States, though British critics accused Irving of "book-making".
In 1835, Irving purchased a "neglected cottage" and its surrounding riverfront property in Tarrytown, New York. The house, which Irving named
Sunnyside in 1841, would require constant repair and renovation over the next twenty years. With costs of Sunnyside escalating, Irving reluctantly agreed in 1839 to become a regular contributor to
Knickerbocker magazine, writing new essays and short stories under the Knickerbocker and Crayon pseudonyms.
Irving 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". Irving also championed America's maturing literature, advocating for stronger copyright laws to protect writers from the kind of piracy that had initially plagued
The Sketch Book. Writing in the January 1840 issue of
Knickerbocker, he openly endorsed copyright legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. "We have a young literature", Irving wrote, "springing up and daily unfolding itself with wonderful energy and luxuriance, which... deserves all its fostering care." The legislation didn't pass.
Irving at this time also began a friendly correspondence with the English writer
Charles Dickens, and hosted the author and his wife at Sunnyside during Dickens's American tour in 1842.
Minister to Spain
In 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State
Daniel Webster, President
John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain. Irving was surprised and honored, writing, "It will be a severe trial to absent myself for a time from my dear little Sunnyside, but I'll return to it better enabled to carry it on comfortably."
While Irving hoped his position as Minister would allow him plenty of time to write, Spain was in a state of perpetual political upheaval during most of his tenure, with a number of warring factions vying for control of the twelve-year-old
Queen Isabella II. Irving maintained good relations with the various generals and politicians, as control of Spain rotated through
Espartero, Bravo, then
Narvaez. However, the politics and warfare were exhausting, and Irving — homesick and suffering from a crippling skin condition — grew quickly disheartened:
Court of St. James's in London,
Louis McLane, 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 and death
Returning from Spain in 1846, Irving took up permanent 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 that guaranteed him 12 percent of the retail price of all copies sold. Such an agreement was unprecedented at that time. On the death of John Jacob Astor in 1848, Irving was hired as an executor of Astor's estate and appointed, by Astor's will, as first chairman of the Astor library, a forerunner to the
New York Public Library.
As he revised his older works for Putnam, Irving continued to write regularly, publishing biographies of the writer and poet
Oliver Goldsmith in 1849 and the prophet Muhammad in 1850. In 1855, he produced
Wolfert's Roost, a collection of stories and essays he'd originally written for
Knickerbocker and other publications, and began publishing at intervals a biography of his namesake,
George Washington, a work 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.
On the evening of
November 28,
1859, only eight months after completing the final volume of his Washington biography, Washington Irving died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside at the age of 76. 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 headstone at Sleepy Hollow cemetery on
December 1,
1859.
Irving and his grave were commemorated by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1876 poem, "In The Churchyard at Tarrytown", which concludes with:
How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!
Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,
Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;
Dying, to leave a memory like the breath
Of summers full of sunshine and of showers,
A grief and gladness in the atmosphere.
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. Eulogizing Irving before the
Massachusetts Historical Society in December 1859, his friend, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, acknowledged Irving's role in promoting American literature: "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 perfected the American short story, and was the first American writer to place 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 both in the vernacular, and without an obligation to the moral or didactic in his short stories, writing stories simply to entertain rather to enlighten.
Some critics, however — including Edgar Allan Poe — felt that while Irving should be given credit for being an innovator, 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."
Other critics were inclined to be more forgiving of Irving's style. Henry Makepeace Thakeray 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's almost the first of the American writers," wrote critic H.R. Hawless in 1881, "yet belonging to the New World, there's 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 — but as years passed and Irving's celebrity personality faded into the background, critics often began to review his writings as all style, no substance. "The man had no message," said critic Barrett Wendell. Yet, critics conceded that despite Irving's lack of sophisticated themes — Irving biographer Stanley T. Williams could be scathing in his assessment of Irving's work — most agreed he wrote elegantly.
Impact on American culture
Irving popularized the nickname "
Gotham" for New York City, later used in
Batman comics and movies, and is credited with inventing the expression "the
almighty dollar".
The surname of his Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, is generally associated with New York and New Yorkers, and can still be seen across the jerseys of New York's professional basketball team, albeit in its more familiar, abbreviated form, reading simply
Knicks.
One of Irving's most lasting contributions to American culture is in the way Americans perceive and celebrate
Christmas. In his 1812 revisions to
A History of New York, Irving inserted a dream sequence featuring
St. Nicholas soaring over treetops in a flying wagon — a creation others would later dress up as
Santa Claus. Later, 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 directly contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States. Charles Dickens later credited Irving as a strong influence on his own Christmas writings, including the classic
A Christmas Carol.
Washington Irving's home —
Sunnyside — is still standing, just south of the
Tappan Zee Bridge in
Tarrytown, New York. The original house and the surrounding property were once owned by 18th-century colonialist
Wolfert Acker, about whom Irving wrote his sketch
Wolfert's Roost (the name of the house). The house is now owned and operated as an historic site by
Historic Hudson Valley and is open to the public for tours.
Commemoration
Irving became the namesake for towns, streets, schools, and districts across the United States. The village of
Irvington, New York, and the town of
Irvington, New Jersey, were named after the author, and also, it's believed, the city of
Irving, Texas. Irvington, a community in eastern Indianapolis, is named after Washington Irving, while Washington Street and Irving Street in
Birmingham, Alabama, also bear the author's name. His book
Bracebridge Hall was the inspiration for the naming of the town of
Bracebridge, Ontario. The Rip Van Winkle Bridge crosses the Hudson River at Catskill, NY, while
Washington Irving Memorial Park and Arboretum in
Bixby, Oklahoma also bears his name.
In Spain, the room at which he stayed in the Alhambra is labelled and referred to as his room. There is also a hotel named for him just outside the Alhambra.
The southernmost section of
Lexington Avenue in
New York City (between 14th and 20th Streets) is called
Irving Place, named so after Washington Irving in 1833. A house that stands on the corner of 17th Street and Irving Place is said to have been the one time home of Washington Irving, however that claim seems to have been only a myth .
Various schools and school districts are named after Irving, including those in
Massachusetts,
California,
West Virginia, New York and others. Additionally, the "literary district" in
Kansas City, Missouri features buildings named after famous literary figures, including Irving.
Works by Washington Irving
Further Information
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