Washington Irving

(1783-1859)

Washington Irving was born in New York City on April 8 in the year the Revolutionary War ended. Irving was the last of eleven children born to a successful and very religious hardware importer and his amiable wife. A small, sickly, but bright child, Irving was the darling of the family.

He was indulgently allowed to slip away from the Irving home at 128 William Street to watch performances at the Little Theatre on John Street. And although his brothers attended college, he was kept at home and given a fragmentary education.

Still, the weight of his father's practical concerns forced Irving to study law. At sixteen, he was apprenticed to a law office, and at nineteen he began to work for a judge.

Irving's real interests, however, lay not in law offices but in the literary societies that were then popular among young men. From an early age, Irving showed a genius for creating comic, fictional "narrators." Using the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent, (an abbreviation for Gentleman), he began to write letters for a newspaper published by his brothers. Oldstyle was a broad caricature of British tradition who could not accept the simple values of the new nation.

The nineteenth century was the era of the Grand Tour, when fortunate young Americans were shipped off to visit European cathedrals and museums before settling down to a lifetime of moneymaking. At twenty-one, Irving visited France, Italy, Holland, and England. He filled notebooks with accounts of his travels, including one story of his capture by pirates on his way to Sicily.

Back from Europe, Irving joined with other young men to publish Salmagundi, a humor magazine that made fun of the manners of the day and that greatly amused New Yorkers in 1807 and 1808., Still, Irving felt an obligation to do "real work," and he had passed the bar exams. When he found he was in love with the judge's daughter, Matilda, he began to make plans to marry.

While he was dealing with this problem, Matilda died of tuberculosis. Irving's grief turned him further from the law and thrust him into a new literary project, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. Published in 1809, this comic and irreverent I "history" was a success and established Irving as the foremost young New York satirist.

In 1815, Irving was sent off to Liverpool, England, to look after the failing overseas branch of the family business. He found the business beyond repair, but he immersed himself in the British literary scene. He was particularly attracted to the Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott, who gave the younger writer advice that was to make Irving's reputation. Scott's recommendation was that Irving read the German Romantics and make use of folklore and legends.

Returning to the United States in 1817, Irving brought with him the first drafts of stories based on German folk tales. "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" became sketches in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820). "Geoffrey Crayon" was a self-prоclaimed American gentleman of "obscure origins"—another of Irving's comic voices. The Sketch Book carried Irving to the summit of international success.

In Irving, the young nation had at last found a writer who provided positive answers to some urgent questions: Was America slavishly attached to British and European culture, or did it have a culture of its own? Would an authentic American literature be able to stand on its own legs?

Even though Irving borrowed openly from a European past, he brought to his material a droll new voice, as inflated, as a preacher's or a politician's at one moment, self- mocking the next. It was a voice a new nation recognized as its own. Irving had also given his country its first international literary celebrity.

During the final years of his rich life, Irving lived as the "squire" of Sunnyside, his picturesque Dutch farmhouse in Tarry town, New York. Though he wrote a popular biography of Columbus and a sort of Spanish "sketch book" called The Alhambra, Irving never again wrote anything that matched the success of the two great comic tales in The Sketch Book. We remember him today for the tale of Rip Van Winkle who slept for twenty years, and the tale of the Headless Horseman who met the Yankee school-teacher in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Rip Van Winkle. A comment on the story. Analyses of folk tales from all over the world have revealed an astonishing number of common narrative elements Prominent among these elements are the following:

1. The perilous journey.

2. The use of the supernatural.

3. Disguise and recognition scenes.

Just as in Homer's Odyssey, the hero of "Rip Van Winkle" embarks on a journey which keeps him away from home for twenty years. The journey involves some supernatural adventures. When the hero returns, few people recognize him. The comic conclusion portrays an elaborate recognition scene and the hero's reintegration into society.

"Rip Van Winkle," of course, varies these thematic strands in what is essentially a light-hearted, comic narrative Rip's "journey" is hardly a heroic expedition, like that of Odysseus to the Trojan War. Instead of the faithful wife Penelope, we have the ill-tempered shrew, Mrs. Van Winkle, whose passing from the scene before Rip's return is a great relief to the hero. And the theme of the supernatural is limited to the mysterious appearance of Henry Hudson's Dutch crew, who themselves are presented as parodies of the silent, hard-working Dutch farmers who settled in New Amsterdam. When Rip returns, it is not as the master of disguises and tricks, the "wily" Odysseus, but as a fumbling, disoriented old man who must plead his case before the suspicious townspeople. If Irving consciously evokes some aspects of the Odyssey, it is only to deflate them with a lightly satirical touch.

Nevertheless, a symbolic level to the story's meaning is unmistakable Rip's enslavement to his wife parallels the country's colonial past, his awakening to a new life suggests the new condition of the United States after the Revolution. And the happy ending hints at Irving's optimism about the future. Irving's light touch does not insist on these parallels. But the roles of both history and setting in the story tend to reinforce them indirectly. The central incident of the plot is the supernatural vision of the early Dutch settlers. And the writer's pleasure and skill in his description of the natural landscape are evident in the story's leisurely exposition.

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