Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (68 page)

6
(p. 58)
Roscoe:
William Roscoe (1753-1831) was an English historian and author whose principal historical work was
The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici
(1795). In this sketch Irving presents Roscoe as an exemplary model for American writers because of how he “effected [in his life a] union of commerce and the intellectual pursuits, [and] ... practically proved how beautifully they may be brought to harmonize, and to benefit each other” (pp. 60-61).

7
(p. 65)
The Wife:
In this sketch Irving presents marriage as a romantic ideal. Crayon characterizes a wife as “a ministering angel” in the “dark hour of adversity” (p. 68), a stark contrast with the “terrible virago” Dame Van Winkle, in the subsequent sketch (p. 78).

8
(p. 72)
Rip Van Winkle:
One of Irving’s best known stories, “Rip Van Winkle” marks the first time Irving reintroduced Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional compiler of A
History of New York
(1809). “Rip Van Winkle” can be read as an historical allegory that prepares the way for American literature by lengthening a reader’s sense of history through a deliberate forgetting of the American Revolution (see the Introduction, pp. xviii-xx).

9
(p. 87)
Hendrick Hudson
: English explorer Henry Hudson (1565?-1611?) discovered the Hudson River while searching for a Northwest Passage to India. In 1610 he led an expedition into Hudson Bay, Canada; the voyage ended in mutiny in 1611, when Hudson, his son, and seven crew members were set adrift in an open boat and never seen again.

10
(p. 89)
a little German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der
Rothbart,
and the Kypphaüser mountain:
The Kyffhäuser is a mountain located in central Germany. According to German legend, Frederick I—German king (1152-1190) and Holy Roman Emperor (1155-1190), also known as Frederick Barbarossa or Rothbart (respectively, Italian and German for “Redbeard”)—sleeps in a cave there, awakening every hundred years to see if his country needs his leadership. In “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving creates a similar legend for Henry Hudson (see p. 87).

11
(p. 91)
English Writers on America:
In this sketch, Irving responds to condemnations of American culture in the British press, dismissing such criticism as little more than “cobwebs woven round the limbs of an infant giant” (p. 94). But while he proclaims the “national power and glory” of America (p. 94), Irving also writes to appease his British readers, insisting that there is still a “kindred tie” between the nations (p. 97). He concludes by instructing his American readers to view English cultural history as “a perpetual volume of reference” because “the spirit of her constitution [and] ... the manners of her people are ... all congenial to the American character” (p. 99).

12
(p. 100)
The Art of Book-Making:
This sketch continues the theme introduced in “English Writers on America” insofar as it suggests that all authors possess a “pilfering disposition” that leads them to borrow their ideas and even their style from earlier writers (p. 102). Irving is casting a sly wink here at his own method of borrowing: Because he does not have “a card of admission” to the library, he is “convicted of being an arrant poacher” (p. 106). This is also a veiled allusion that associates Irving with William Shakespeare, who, according to legend, was arrested for poaching deer from the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare was also known to have borrowed extensively from sources such as
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
(1577), by English chronicler Raphael Holinshed.

13
(p. 107)
The Mutability of Literature:
In “The Mutability of Literature” Irving continues to engage the problem that the English literary tradition poses for American writers. Crayon’s conversation with a dusty old quarto shows the vast majority of English books to be lost in obscurity. The only way to stave off such neglect is to “root [oneself] in the unchanging principles of human nature,” as Shakespeare did (p. 115). American writers can achieve the greatness of a Shakespeare so long as they “write from the heart” (p. 116). Herman Melville took up this idea of an American Shakespeare in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1846 collection of short stories
Mosses from an Old Manse.
(The review, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” appeared in
The Literary World
in August 1850.)

14
(p. 112)
“afterwards, also, by deligent travell of Geffry Chaucer and of John Gowre ... their great praise and immortal commendation” [Irving’s note]:
This is a quotation from Holinshed’s
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
(see note 12, above), which Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists used as a source for several of their works. In this passage, Holinshed traces the development of the literary style of Elizabethan England. He lists: Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400), English poet and author of
The Canterbury Tales;
John Gower (1330?-1408), English poet and a friend of Chaucer; Richard II (1367-1400), king of England; John Scogan (c.1480), court jester to Edward IV, although there may be some confusion here with Henry Scogan (1361-1407), a poet and a friend of Chaucer; John Lydgate (1370?-1449?), English author and translator who is credited with keeping the Chaucerian poetic tradition alive; Elizabeth I (1533-1603), queen of England during the height of the Renaissance; John Jewel ( 1522-1571 ), bishop of Sarum (Salisbury) and author of
Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae
(1562;
An Apology of the Church of England);
and John Foxe (1516-1587), English clergyman and author
of Book of Martyrs
(1559).

15
(p. 118)
The Inn Kitchen:
“The Inn Kitchen” provides the frame-narrative for the subsequent story, “The Spectre Bridegroom”; this is a narrative technique Irving used extensively in
Bracebridge Hall
(1822) and
Tales of a Traveller
(1824).

16
(p. 120)
The Spectre Bridegroom:
“The Spectre Bridegroom” shows the influence of German folklore and Gothic romanticism on Irving’s stories, subjects he studied with the encouragement of Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), whom he met during the summer of 1817 (see the Introduction, p. xxiv).

17
(p. 135)
Traits of Indian Character:
In “Traits of Indian Character,” Irving participates in the construction of the myth of “the noble savage,” a figure to be used in the development of a uniquely American literary culture. He presents the Native American warriors as figures comparable to the “knights-errant” of Arthurian legend (p. 142), and predicts that “if ... some dubious memorial of them should survive, it may be in the romantic dreams of the poet, to people in imagination his glades and groves, like the fauns and satyrs and sylvan deities of antiquity” (p. 145). Although Irving may have had in mind poetry such as “Gertrude of Wyoming” (1809), by British poet Thomas Campbell, the heroic type he describes (p. 142) was perhaps most fully realized by James Fenimore Cooper in his depiction of Chingachgook, the Mohican warrior and companion of Natty Bumppo in
The Leatherstocking Tales
(1823-1841).

18
(p. 146)
Philip of Pokanoket:
Philip of Pokanoket (1639?-1676), also known as King Philip, was chief of the Wampanoag tribe and the son of Massasoit, who signed a treaty with the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. In this sketch, Irving continues the theme of “Traits of Indian Character,” presenting Philip as a figure representative of the classical ideal of heroic virtue. The character traits Irving attributes to Philip are those of American individualism as represented in the mythic figure of the frontiersman inspired by the likes of Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket. That Irving imagines these character traits to be attributes of American national identity is suggested in his conclusion to the sketch, which presents King Philip as “a patriot attached to his native soil” with “an untamable love of natural liberty” (p. 161).

19
(p. 162)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:
Along with “Rip Van Winkle,” this is one of Irving’s best-known stories. However, it is the setting, rather than the competition between Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, that makes this story important. Irving describes Sleepy Hollow as a timeless space for romantic fiction, “a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life” (p. 163).

1
(p. 197)
Bracebridge Hall:
Published in 1822,
Bracebridge Hall
is the immediate successor of The
Sketch-Book
and in some ways a continuation of it.
The Sketch-Book
contains a series of sketches (not included in this edition) describing the Christmas festivities at Bracebridge Hall, a fictional English manor based on Irving’s visit to Aston Hall in Birmingham and on the hospitality he enjoyed at Abbotsford, in Scotland, while staying with Sir Walter Scott. This section of
The Sketch-Book
was popular with his English audience, and in a conscious effort to appeal to that readership, Irving took Bracebridge Hall as the setting for his second book of sketches and stories.

2
(p. 202)
Story-Telling:
This sketch serves as the frame-narrative (see note 15 above) for “The Stout Gentleman,” which follows. The narrator Irving introduces here, “a thin, pale, weazen-faced man, extremely nervous” (p. 202), is one he later uses to narrate the first part of
Tales of a Traveller
(1824), “Strange Stories By a Nervous Gentleman ”

3
(p. 202)
the current of anecdotes and stories ... that have ... filled the world with doubts and conjecture; such as the Wandering Jew, the Man with the Iron Mask, ... the Invisible Girl, and ... the Pig-faced Lady:
This is a list of legendary stories. In medieval myth, the Wandering Jew is an Israelite who mocks Christ at the crucifixion and is cursed to wander the earth alone until the Day of Judgment. The mysterious, unidentified French prisoner known as the “Man with the Iron Mask” was imprisoned from 1679 until his death in 1707, some of that time in the Bastille. The Invisible Girl probably refers to the poem “To the Invisible Girl,” by English poet Thomas Hood (1799-1845), which is included in
English Minstrelsy
(vol. 2, 1810), edited by Sir Walter Scott. The Pig-faced Lady is a folk story, popular in Europe during the Middle Ages, in which a wealthy woman insults the child of a beggar by saying, “Take away your nasty pig; I shall not give you anything,” and is cursed to bear a daughter with the face of a pig.

4
(p. 203)
The Stout Gentleman:
The title character of this story is said to be Sir Walter Scott, who had become a literary celebrity despite the fact that he published his novels anonymously until 1827. The story is significant, however, because it offers a glimpse of the development of a modern readership for commercial fiction. Stuck in the “travellers’-room” of an inn and surrounded by salesmen whom he ironically describes as “commercial knights-errant” (p. 204), the narrator strives to catch a glimpse of the patron he assumes is a celebrity only after he has exhausted all of the light reading at his disposal—“Old newspapers, ... Good-for-nothing books, ... [and] an old volume of the Lady’s Magazine” (p. 205)—in other words, reading material exactly like the story of “The Stout Gentleman.”

5
(p. 213)
The Historian:
“The Historian” is a frame-narrative designed to introduce “a manuscript tale from the pen of my fellow-countryman, the late Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker” (p. 214), which includes the sequence of stories that follows: “The Haunted House,” “Dolph Heyliger,” and “The Storm-Ship.”

6
(p. 213)
the “Arabian Nights”:
Available to Irving in a number of translations,
The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights
is a collection of Oriental stories that influenced Irving’s use of embedded narratives. In the following story sequence the narration of Geoffrey Crayon is turned over to Diedrich Knickerbocker, who in turn relates Antony Vander Heyden’s telling of “The Storm-Ship,” which Vander Heyden claims to give “in the very words in which it had been written out by Mynheer Selyne, an early poet of New Netherlandts” (pp. 253-254).

7
(p. 216)
The Haunted House:
“The Haunted House” introduces the succeeding story, “Dolph Heyliger,” the only story in
Bracebridge Hall
that is set in America. “Dolph Heyliger” is notable for its descriptions of the Hudson River valley. Along with “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” it contributed to the formation of a regional cultural heritage for New York comparable to that provided for New England in the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

8
(p. 279)
The Author’s Farewell:
“The Author’s Farewell” to
Bracebridge Hall
is significant because of the way Irving returns to the cultural conflict between England and America he described in “English Writers on America.” Despite Irving’s effort to “[awaken] a chord of sympathy between the land of my fathers and the dear land which gave me birth,” some American critics condemned him as an Anglophile and an imitator of British and European literary models (p. 283).

1
(p. 287)
To The Reader. Tales of a Traveller
was published in 1824, two years after
Bracebridge Hall.
Irving thought it contained “some of the best things I have ever written,” but it was not well received by critics in England and America, partly because it was made up wholly of stories and lacked the familiar essays and sketches readers had come to expect from Irving. The selections in this edition are meant to illustrate the Gothic influence on Irving’s writing; also included are two of the tales attributed to Diedrich Knickerbocker, “Kidd the Pirate” and “The Devil and Tom Walker.”

2
(p. 293)
The Hunting-Dinner:
“The Hunting-Dinner” is the frame-narrative Irving designed to introduce the sequence of stories that comprise the first part of
Tales of a
Traveller. The last four tales of that sequence are included in this edition: “Adventure of the German Student,” “Adventure of the Mysterious Picture,” “Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Story of the Young Italian.”