Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

Table of Contents

 

 

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859), America's first successful professional writer, was born and raised in New York City. His literary talent manifesting itself early, he broke into print before he was twenty years old. In 1809, under the pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker, he published the rollicking burlesque A
History of New York,
the first work in belles lettres by an American to catch the public imagination and endure. Although he had trained to be a lawyer, the urge for authorship long distracted him from a serious career in law or business. Yet not until he was approaching forty did he attempt to support himself exclusively by writing.
The Sketch Book
(1819-20), published almost simultaneously in England (where he was then living) and the United States, won him immediate acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and established a demand for his work. Foreign travel inspired much of his writing. Between 1822 and 1832 he issued three more collections of humorous and lightly romantic sketches and tales, most of them evocative of European scenes and the European past:
Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller,
and
The Alhambra
In 1828 a biography of Columbus appeared, the first of several historical works by Irving notable for their romantic coloring. After seventeen years in Europe, he returned home in 1832 a national celebrity. His later writings include
A Tour on the Prairies
(1835),
Astoria
(1836),
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville
(1837), biographies of Goldsmith (1849) and Mahomet (1850), and a five-volume
Life of Washington
(1855-59). Irving's sprightly and often half-mocking prose style, together with the felicitous blend of humor, pathos, and the picturesque in his fiction, made a major impact on the popular literature of his age.

 

WILLIAM L. HEDGES was the author of
Washington Irving. An American Study, 1802—1832
(1965) and numerous essays on Washington Irving, and coauthor-editor of
Land and Imagination: The American Rural Dream
(1980). He taught English and history at Goucher College, where he chaired the program in American Studies.

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This collection under the title
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
edited by Haskell S. Springer first published in the United States of
America by Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall & Co. 1978
Published with an introduction and notes by
William L. Hedges in Penguin Books 1988
This edition with the title
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and
Other Stories
published in Penguin Books 1999

 

Copyright © G. K. Hall & Co., 1978

Introduction copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1988
All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-17378-7

(CIP data available)

 

 

 

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The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
is a literary anomaly that keeps eluding strict classification and analysis. Seldom, if ever, out of print in the nearly 170 years since its highly acclaimed initial publication (1819-20), Washington Irving's loose assortment of essays, sketches, and tales has delighted large popular audiences in the United States and Great Britain and traveled worldwide in translation. Its critical reputation diminished as the nineteenth century waned: modern taste at times finds parts of the potpourri insufficiently seasoned, a bit thin and derivative, overly sentimental. Nonetheless “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” on the basis of which Irving is generally credited with inventing the short story as a distinct genre, still stand as undoubted American classics. And for readers who relish irony and burlesque humor, the wry, self-mocking imagination of Irving's persona, Geoffrey Crayon, has a way of redeeming most of
The Sketch Book
from its apparent weaknesses.

Turning to the text, we find everywhere anomaly, irony, ambiguity. The book is Janus-faced, looking almost simultaneously back and forth across the Atlantic, fondly viewing selected English scenes, characters, and institutions, while voicing Crayon's loneliness and homesickness for America. Although addressed primarily to an American audience, it has English readers also in mind before it is finished. It was written, moreover, at a time when some Americans suspected British writers and critics of a concerted effort to denigrate the new republic and its literature.

Structurally the miscellany seems to aspire to be something more than its fragmented self. We continually notice Crayon's consciousness of himself as a writer or, we might more appropriately say, maker of books. Not that this alleged author/editor matches the blatant ego(ec)centricity of an earlier Irving persona, the addlepated Diedrich Knickerbocker, who keeps interrupting his own narrative,
The History of New York,
with ludicrous complaints about how hard it is to make a great book out of very little material. But Crayon's fantastic encounters with old texts in “The Art of Book Making” and “The Mutability of Literature” reveal a curious anxiety about authorship. Indeed we may ask ourselves what The Sketch Book would be without its quenchless flood of direct quotations from, and oblique allusions to, early authors (mostly British) great and small, to say nothing of the Bible (see the Notes to this edition), without its frequent comments on authors and texts, above all without Crayon's pilgrimages to the Boar's Head Tavern and Stratford-on-Avon, along with his need, in the face of the frequent reminders he has of the “mutability” of earthly things, to hold firm to the idea of Shakespeare's universal appeal.

Irving had been living and traveling in England for almost five years when he brought the work out, but his actual experience of the country is filtered through the screen of Crayon's obsessive bookishness. Surprisingly, contemporary readers in both the old world and the new responded positively to this nostalgic intertwining of imagination and reality, past and present, although being exposed to a past that republicanism had in theory discarded may have been disconcerting to some Americans of English descent.

Finally to all this oddity we must add the text's publishing history. As Irving explains in the “Preface to the Revised Edition,”
The Sketch Book
appeared first in the United States in a series of seven installments or numbers, not all of which were in print before it was published complete in two volumes in London. The work was well received in both countries, but it was the British reviews, hailing
The Sketch Book
as the first genuinely distinguished specimen of imaginative writing by an American, that were decisive. British contempt for American literature had reached a climax in January, 1820, only two months before the first volume of
The Sketch Book
appeared in England, when the celebrated clergyman, reformer, and wit Sydney Smith asked in a great flourish in
The Edinburgh Review,
“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Sensitive to British opinion in cultural matters, Americans had long been angered and embarrassed by such taunts. Yet at that very moment British reviews were already praising Irving's work-in-progress. Only seven months later
The Edinburgh Review
itself was predicting that
The Sketch Book
would “form an era in the literature of the nation to which it belongs.”

And so it did. An international celebrity almost overnight, Irving now found himself fully in the business of writing books. Previously no American author had been able to earn a decent living by literary labor alone. But with Irving's success, certain psychological barriers seemed to weaken. Having awarded high praise to one American author, British critics began to find other American books generally more acceptable, a development which encouraged American readers to take native authors more seriously. High literacy rates in the United States and a rapidly expanding economy gave magazine and book publishers a lucrative market. Before long other American writers were able to support themselves by the pen. Where they followed Irving's lead and secured a separate English copyright for their works, they had a good chance of increasing their profits. His accomplishment thus established professional authorship as a real option for Americans.