A History of New York (51 page)

I have too high an opinion of the understanding of my fellow citizens, to think of yielding them any instruction, and I covet too much their good will, to forfeit it by giving them good advice. I am none of those cynics who despise the world, because it despises them—on the contrary, though but low in its regard I look up to it with the most perfect good nature, and my only sorrow is, that it does not prove itself worthy of the unbounded love I bear it.

If however in this my historic production—the scanty fruit of a long and laborious life—I have failed to gratify the dainty palate of the age, I can only lament my misfortune—for it is too late in the season for me even to hope to repair it. Already has withering age showered his sterile snows upon my brow; in a little while, and this genial warmth which still lingers around my heart, and throbs—worthy reader—throbs kindly towards thyself, shall be chilled forever. Haply this frail compound of dust, which while alive may have given birth to naught but unprofitable weeds, may form a humble sod of the valley, from whence shall spring many a sweet wild flower, to adorn my beloved island of Manna-hata!

 

 

The following work, in which at the outset nothing more was contemplated than a temporary jeu d'esprit, was commenced in company with my brother, the late Peter Irving, Esq. Our idea was to parody a small handbook which had recently appeared, entitled “A Picture of New York.” Like that, our work was to begin with an historical sketch; to be followed by notices of the customs, manners, and institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local errors, follies, and abuses with good-humored satire.

To burlesque the pedantic lore displayed in certain American works, our historical sketch was to commence with the creation of the world; and we laid all kinds of works under contribution for trite citations, relevant or irrelevant, to give it the proper air of learned research. Before this crude mass of mock erudition could be digested into form, my brother departed for Europe, and I was left to prosecute the enterprise alone.

I now altered the plan of the work. Discarding all idea of a parody on the “Picture of New York,” I determined that what had been originally intended as an introductory sketch should comprise the whole work, and form a comic history of the city. I accordingly moulded the mass of citations and disquisitions into introductory chapters forming the first book; but it soon became evident to me that, like Robinson Crusoe with his boat, I had begun on too large a scale, and that to launch my history successfully I must reduce its proportions. I accordingly resolved to confine it to the period of the Dutch domination, which in its rise, progress, and decline presented that unity of subject required by classic rule. It was a period, also, at that time almost a terra incognita in history. In fact, I was surprised to find how few of my fellow-citizens were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, or had heard of the names of its early Dutch governors, or cared a straw about their ancient Dutch progenitors.

This, then, broke upon me as the poetic age of our city; poetic from its very obscurity; and open, like the early and obscure days of ancient Rome, to all the embellishments of heroic fiction. I hailed my native city as fortunate above all other American cities in having an antiquity thus extending back into the regions of doubt and fable; neither did I conceive I was committing any grievous historical sin in helping out the few facts I could collect in this remote and forgotten region with figments of my own brain, or in giving characteristic attributes to the few names connected with it which I might dig up from oblivion.

In this, doubtless, I reasoned like a young and inexperienced writer besotted with his own fancies; and my presumptuous trespasses into this sacred, though neglected, region of history have met with deserved rebuke from men of soberer minds. It is too late, however, to recall the shaft thus rashly launched. To any one whose sense of fitness it may wound, I can only say with Hamlet,

 

I will say this in further apology for my work: that if it has taken an unwarrantable liberty with our early provincial history, it has at least turned attention to that history and provoked research. It is only since this work appeared that the forgotten archives of the province have been rummaged, and the facts and personages of the olden time rescued from the dust of oblivion and elevated into whatever importance they may actually possess.

The main object of my work, in fact, had a bearing wide from the sober aim of history, but one which I trust will meet with some indulgence from poetic minds. It was to embody the traditions of our city in an amusing form; to illustrate its local humors, customs, and peculiarities; to clothe home scenes and places and familiar names with those imaginative and whimsical associations so seldom met with in our new country, but which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world, binding the heart of the native inhabitant to his home.

In this I have reason to believe I have in some measure succeeded. Before the appearance of my work the popular traditions of our city were unrecorded; the peculiar and racy customs and usages derived from our Dutch progenitors were unnoticed or regarded with indifference or adverted to with a sneer. Now they form a convivial currency and are brought forward on all occasions; they link our whole community together in good humor and good fellowship; they are the rallying points of home feeling; the seasoning of our civic festivities; the staple of local tales and local pleasantries; and are so harped upon by our writers of popular fiction that I find myself almost crowded off the legendary ground which I was the first to explore, by the host who have followed in my footsteps.

I dwell on this head because, at the first appearance of my work, its aim and drift were misapprehended by some of the descendants of the Dutch worthies; and because I understand that now and then one may still be found to regard it with a captious eye. The far greater part, however, I have reason to flatter myself, receive my good humored picturings in the same temper with which they were executed; and when I find, after a lapse of nearly forty years, this haphazard production of my youth still cherished among them; when I find its very name become a “household word,” and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptation, such as Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice; and when I find New Yorkers of Dutch descent priding themselves upon being “genuine Knickerbockers,” I please myself with the persuasion that I have struck the right chord; that my dealings with the good old Dutch times, and the customs and usages derived from them, are in harmony with the feelings and humors of my townsmen; that I have opened a vein of pleasant associations and quaint characteristics peculiar to my native place, and which its inhabitants will not willingly suffer to pass away; and that, though other histories of New York may appear of higher claims to learned acceptation, and may take their dignified and appropriate rank in the family library, Knickerbocker's history will still be received with good-humored indulgence and be thumbed and chuckled over by the family fireside.

 

W. I.

 

Sunnyside,
1848.

p. xxxi
Dedication:
The New-York Historical Society had been founded in 1804 with a mission to collect and preserve “whatever may relate to the natural, civic, or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general, and of this State in particular.” As the introduction notes, the Society was famously unsuccessful in its early years at recovering documents and artifacts related to New Amsterdam, a lacuna the group tried to remedy by issuing an “Address to the Public” in 1807 that contained a minutely detailed request for information “respecting the first settlement of new-York by the Dutch,” including “the number of the settlers;

Taken all together, Knickerbocker's “eyewitness” accounts of Dutch battles and Dutch lawmaking, his detailed cultural litanies, geographical reasoning and etymological explanations, confident historiography and erudite-sounding footnotes offer a thorough (and thoroughly satirical) reproach to the Society's utter failure to provide any of the above, as well as a tantalizingly complete response to its many questions.

 

p. I
Account of the Author:
The “Account of the Author” builds on the
New York Evening
Post advertisements for a missing “Knickerbocker” that are discussed in the introduction to this volume. In addition to giving further biographical information about Diedrich Knickerbocker, the “Account” also provides a brief physical description of the historian, and mentions his “few grey hairs plaited and clubbed behind,” “olive velvet breeches and ... small cocked hat,” and “bright pair of silver shoe-buckles[.]” Significantly, it is the only time in the
History
that a picture of Knickerbocker is rendered for the reader, and the details of his dress and person as described in the “Account” became the springboard for more than a century's worth of artistic and commercial representations of the narrator. These would include serving as “Father Knickerbocker,” the literal embodiment of the consolidation of the five boroughs of New York City in 1898; as the spokesman for Knickerbocker Beer; and as the first mascot of the New York Knickerbockers basketball team.

 

p. 9
Gibbon's Rome: The works to which Knickerbocker here ambitiously compares his
History
are indeed “voluminous.”
The Decline and Fall of Rome
was published by the English historian Edward Gibbon in six volumes (1776-88), as was the eminent Scottish philosopher David Hume's
History of England
(1754-62). Tobias Smollett, better known for satirical novels such as
Humphrey Clinker,
wrote a rival
Compleat History of England
in 1757, which was subsequently revised, updated, and marketed “as a Continuation of Mr. Hume's History.” By the early nineteenth century a combination
History of England
(sometimes abridged and sometimes as many as thirteen volumes) was being sold by British booksellers with both authors' names on the title page, a development that would not have pleased Hume. Irving does not mention the English writer Oliver Goldsmith's
History of England
(1771), despite his affinity for Goldsmith, with whom he would later be compared, and whose biography he would publish in 1849. Perhaps this is because Goldsmith prefaced his own history by noting that the goal of his book was not to “add to our historical knowledge, but to contract it,” a plan not in keeping with Knickerbocker's “swelling” plans for a “noble superstructure” of New York history.

 

p. 26
seeks for it in its proper place:
This is the first of several jibes at the expense of explorers such as Henry Hudson, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and others, who mistook the East Coast of North America and New York in particular for a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean.

 

p. 26
our theatre:
The reference by Knickerbocker to “our theatre” is a puzzling one. It may be understood as a “tell,” signaling to those in the know that this mysterious “Diedrich Knickerbocker” is related to “Jonathan Oldstyle,” Irving's early nom de plume as theater critic and social commentator for his brother Peter Irving's paper, the
Morning Chronicle,
in 1802. and 1803. But New York City's Park Theatre, where Irving saw the plays he described (and which was the city's pre-eminent theater from its construction in the 1790s through the 1820s), did not have the cupola on which the historian so strenuously insists. Illustrations show the original theater to have had a simple, Federal-style exterior (in his first letter, Oldstyle criticized the
“heavyishness”
of the architecture), although by the time of Irving's
History,
the interior had been remodeled: the three tiers of boxes of the original theater were now lit with gas lamps and the domed ceiling, whose “little perriwig'd cupids, tumbling head over heel,” had attracted Oldstyle's notice in 1802, had been completely repainted.

 

p. 31
Christovallo Colon ... clumsily nick-named Columbus:
Irving would return to the adventures of Christopher Columbus during his first visit to Spain in 1826, an appointment to the American Legation in Madrid. He would publish
Life and Voyages of Columbus
in 1828 and
Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus
in 1831.

 

p. 32
Think you ... savages to exterminate:
Throughout the History, Irving describes Manhattan before its discovery in prelapsarian terms. His surprisingly contemporary sensitivity to the original state of the island and his grave comments on the subsequent treatment by the Dutch of both its aboriginal inhabitants and its natural resources (see: “the RIGHT BY EXTERMINATION, or, in Other words, the RIGHT BY GUNPOWDER,” p. 47) provide a valuable and instructive counterpoint to the book's broad satire that is often overlooked by contemporary readers.