Irving, Washington

Irving, Washington (1783–1859),was born in New York City, the youngest of 11 children of a wealthy merchant who had sided with the rebels in the Revolution. Precocious and impressionable, the boy was early influenced by the literary interests of his brothers William and Peter, but in 1798 concluded his education at private schools and entered a law office. His legal studies soon lost their appeal, although he continued in various offices until 1804, varying his occupation by a frontier journey (1803) through upper New York state and into Canada, and by writing for the Morning Chronicle and The Corrector, newspapers edited by his brother Peter. For the Chronicle (1802–3) he wrote the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., a series of youthful satires on New York society, which won him recognition. To restore his failing health and to further his education, he traveled in Europe (1804–6), where he collected material later used in stories and essays.

Although he was admitted to the bar upon his return, he lost interest in the law and turned seriously to literature. Salmagundi; or, The Whim‐Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807–8) is a series of satirical miscellanies concerned with New York society. The leading essays were written by Irving, his brothers, and William Irving's brother‐in‐law, J.K. Paulding, all members of the group known as the “Nine Worthies” or “Lads of Kilkenny” of “Cockloft Hall.” Federalist in politics, conservative in social attitude, and humorous in intention, these early essays represent the position and manner to which Irving was to cling throughout his career. He was now famous as author, wit, and man of society, and, to further his reputation, turned to the creation of the comic Dutch‐American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker, on whose burlesque History of New York he was occupied until 1809. This work, called “the first great book of comic literature written by an American,” although ostensibly concerned with the history of the Dutch occupation was also a Federalist critique of Jeffersonian democracy and a whimsical satire on pedantry and literary classics.

Before its completion, Irving suffered a tragic loss in the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman. According to sentimental biographers, who disregard later love affairs, he remained a bachelor to be faithful to her memory. Certainly he was profoundly affected at the time. In spite of the success of the History, he deserted creative literature during the next six years, when he was occupied in business with his brothers, in collecting the poems of Thomas Campbell (1810), in editing the Analectic Magazine (1813–14), a popular miscellany of reprints from foreign periodicals, and in social and political activities in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Toward the end of the War of 1812, he served as an aide‐de‐camp to the governor, and in 1815 he planned a cruise to the Mediterranean with Decatur; but, when this became impossible, he sailed alone for Liverpool, to take charge of the family business there.

During the next two years, he tried desperately to maintain the failing business, but in 1818 it went into bankruptcy, and he was forced to write for a living. He had already been impressed by the beauties of the English countryside as interpreted by the romantic poets, and, encouraged by Scott, now returned to writing his most successful work, The Sketch Book (1819–20), containing familiar essays on English life, and Americanized versions of European folk tales in “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” As Geoffrey Crayon, the pseudonym by which the book was signed, Irving was now a celebrity, lionized in English and French society, and the intimate of such men as Scott, Byron, and Moore. In Paris (1820) he wrote plays with J.H. Payne, a collaboration to which he occasionally returned for several years. Bracebridge Hall (1822) is another book of romantic sketches, less important than The Sketch Book, but equally well received.

Continuing his search for fictional materials, Irving now traveled in Germany (1822–23), spending the winter at Dresden, where he fell in love with an English girl, Emily Foster, who seems to have refused his proposal of marriage. After a year in Paris, he returned to England and published Tales of a Traveller (1824), so adversely criticized that Irving was nearly discouraged from further literary activity. After two unproductive years in France, during which he is supposed to have vied with Payne for the affections of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, he became a diplomatic attaché in Spain (1826–29), living for a time in Madrid at the home of bibliographer Obadiah Rich, and engaged in research for his scholarly but popular History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), based principally on the work of the Spanish scholar Navarrete. This was followed by A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), and a “Spanish Sketch Book,” The Alhambra (1832), recounting Spanish legends and describing the famous monument.

Irving was secretary of the U.S. legation in London (1829–32), and then returned to New York, after an absence of 17 years, to be welcomed enthusiastically as the first American author to achieve international fame. Again seeking picturesque literary backgrounds, he made an adventurous trip to the Western frontier. This was described in A Tour on the Prairies, published as a part of The Crayon Miscellany⧫ (3 vols., 1835). The tour also resulted in Astoria (1836), an account of the fur‐trading empire of John Jacob Astor, written with Pierre Irving; and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). Irving's Western Journals were published in 1944.

After a few years at his home, Sunnyside, during which he declined the nomination for mayor of New York City and the secretaryship of the navy offered him by Van Buren, as well as giving up a plan to write a Conquest of Mexico in favor of Prescott, Irving returned to his favorite place of exile, becoming minister to Spain (1842–45). His position was made difficult by the Spanish insurrection (1843), and after his resignation two years later he spent a year in London on a diplomatic mission concerning the Oregon Question. Again at Sunnyside, he passed the remaining 13 years of his life in the company of his beloved nieces and innumerable friends, acknowledged as the leading American author, in spite of his waning powers, as evidenced in Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of his literary masters; A Book of the Hudson (1849) and Wolfert's Roost (1855), collections of sketches; Mahomet and His Successors (2 vols., 1849–50), conventional biographies; and the monumental Life of Washington (5 vols., 1855–59), planned as early as 1825, but completed in the last year of his life, just before his health finally failed. Bare of the graces of his early writing, this triumph of scholarship crowned an erratic career that seldom retained its literary focus for more than a few years at a time, but which served in many ways to consolidate the culture of the U.S. and Europe. Unlike his contemporary, Cooper, Irving saw the European past in an aura of romance, and, except for the gentle satire of his early works, consistently avoided coming to grips with modern democratic life. His graceful, humorous, stylistically careful writing is in the tradition of Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith. In subject and method he sought the traditional and the picturesque. A scholarly edition of his Complete Works began publication in 1969.