A History of New York (3 page)

Irving did leave his Tarrytown aerie in 1842 at the request of President Tyler, who appointed him minister to Spain, where he would begin the multivolume
Life of George Washington
that would turn out to be his final project. When he returned to Sunnyside in 1846, he found New York in the middle of a particularly fascinating romance: a passion for all things Knickerbocker. “Before the appearance of my work the popular traditions of our city were unrecorded” Irving marveled,

In the nearly forty years since he introduced his opinionated and ornery historian, he added, Knickerbocker had become a “household word... used to give the home stamp to Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice,” and claimed by “New Yorkers of Dutch descent” who called themselves “ ‘genuine Knickerbockers[.]' ” This expression of amazement and delight came from Irving's “Author's Apology,” which was appended to the revised 1848 edition of the
History
as part of a commitment with his publisher, G. P. Putnam and Sons, to publish all of his works in revised and deluxe editions. This revision was certainly not the first time Irving had amended the
History
since its initial publication, but it was the most drastic. In Putnam's 1848 edition, the racy humor and earthy language of Knickerbocker's original has been rendered parlor ready: but if it was less daring, the book was also decidedly less delightful.

Perhaps it was inevitable that America's first maverick writer should cede his place to other rebels: within a decade, Walt Whitman would mail
Leaves of Grass
to an unsuspecting Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Irving himself had already heard Herman Melville read aloud from his first novel,
Typee
(1846). But Irving's “Apology,” written partly to assuage the feelings of some prominent Dutch New Yorkers who felt misused by his satire and partly to contextualize his book and his narrator for a contemporary audience, suggests that even if Irving had been “crowded off the legendary ground,” his narrator would triumphantly remain. By the time of Irving's “Apology,” the name Knickerbocker had, as Irving notes with evident pleasure, evolved into recognizable shorthand for an authentic New Yorker: a cultivated, civic-minded native, preferably of Dutch descent. The Dutch customs and traditions described in the
History
were embraced by the cultural elite of nineteenth-century New York, and Irving's tale and its teller became the springboard for more than a century's worth of literature, iconography, and advertising—all designed to lend a product the same genteel, homely cachet that Knickerbocker ascribed to the Dutch “vrouws” and “mynheers” who peopled his book. In fact, a much wider range of high- and lowbrow cultural forms appropriated the Knickerbocker imagery than Irving acknowledges: even within his lifetime, there were stagecoach lines and spice companies named for the Dutchman; a literary magazine (which conscripted the historian to serve as its muse, and later Irving himself to serve as “permanent contributor”); and the first baseball team in the United States, the New York Knickerbockers.

Irving's historian also became the mascot of a collection of younger writers, poets, and editors who considered him their mentor, and dubbed themselves the “Knickerbocker School” in his creator's honor. This group, which often used the totems, quintessential images, and “authentic” rhetoric of Irving's New York themes in their own portraits of the city and its countryside, included Irving's early collaborator James Kirke Paulding, Giulian Verplanck (like Paulding, one of few “Knickerbocker” writers of genuine Dutch descent), Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of
Knickerbocker
magazine, and the poets William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck. Unfortunately, few of the disciples of Irving who wrote under the “Knickerbocker” umbrella inherited his feverish imagination or his talent for portraying local color, and their works seem dated and damp in comparison. Many of these writers were present at Irving's funeral in 1859, at which mourners packed the little Episcopal church in Tarrytown nearly to bursting and left a thousand more to gather outside, waiting for the chance to pay the author their last respects. Strangely, few of Irving's memorializers take note of the rambling, possibly deranged fictional historian who charmed the world and brought the author his early fame. “The genial products of his pure and graceful pen will forever continue to afford a solace to the sick and weary,” Daniel F. Tiemann, the mayor of New York, noted in a leaden public tribute, while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem “In the Churchyard at Tarrytown” mourned him as the “gentle humorist, who died in the bright Indian Summer of his fame!” But as Andrew B. Myers points out, Longfellow neglected to mention that Irving's “simple stone, with but a date and name” was actually a replacement head-stone: the first had been vandalized beyond repair by inconsolable readers, making Irving's grave the nineteenth-century equivalent of the tomb of Jim Morrison at Père-Lachaise. These shards had not been chipped off in memory of the biographer of Columbus or John Jacob Astor, but for the creator of Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, and for
their
biographer, Diedrich Knickerbocker. In a city with more stories than the Arabian Nights, a fictional Dutchman was its first and best Scheherazade.

 

New York is still imbued with Knickerbocker, even if most of its citizens no longer know who Diedrich Knickerbocker was. A consciousness of all things Knickerbocker hovers at the edges of the city's everyday life. In the last century, “Father Knickerbocker” supervised the consolidation of New York into five boroughs; promoted the New Deal; and, until recently, marketed Knickerbocker Beer: “New York's Famous Beer.” Today, New Yorkers routinely cheer teams, cross avenues, visit dry cleaners, frequent restaurants, and belong to clubs named Knickerbocker. Yet “Knickerbocker,” thus divorced from its context, has been reduced to a comical moniker, a Dutch-inflected sound. This may be the result of Irving's banishment from academe: by 1933 Carl Van Doren could assert that Irving's reputation had “shrunk and faded” without fear of contradiction, and few contemporary scholars and literary critics have bothered to investigate the proto-postmodern innovations of the
History,
or to grapple with the implications of his founding mythologies, even as they celebrate the same inventive qualities in such subsequent American writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. But this oversight in no way diminishes the larger, lasting significance of Irving's historian, whose “curious kind of a written book” marked the creation of a genre that persists to this day: the genre of the New York Story. The combination of delight and mockery that marked the
History
has become the vernacular of centuries of New York storytelling: regardless of the medium, all of its chroniclers share a belief in the singularity of the New York experience, and a mission to share this experience with the larger world. Readers everywhere take it for granted that New York City warrants all the encomiums, epithets, nicknames, and slogans that have been showered on it, and demand to be told more. What other city could at once be Walt Whitman's “Mighty Manhattan,” Kander and Ebb's “city that never sleeps,” and J. J. Hunsecker's “dirty town”? Knickerbocker was not only the first narrator to identify this market: he was the architect of the market itself. “A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,” Walt Whitman would write in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “others will see the islands, large and small” that made up his beloved New York. His hymn to the city, and those “a hundred years hence,” are made possible not by the ferry, but by the example of Washington Irving, who built New York's first literary bridge.

 

ELIZABETH L. BRADLEY

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Critical Essays on Washington Irving.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

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Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Bender, Thomas.
New York Intellect.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Blumin, Stuart.
The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace.
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Burstein, Andrew.
The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving.
New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Clark, Lewis Gaylord.
Knick-Knacks from an Editor's Table.
New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1853.

Cmiel, Kenneth.
Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth Century America.
Los Angeles: University of California-Los Angeles Press, 1990.

Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1809.
New York: I. Riley, 1811.

Duyckinck, Evert A.
Irvingiana: A Memorial of Washington Irving.
New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1860.

Hiller, Alice. “‘An Avenue to Some Degree of Profit and Reputation': The Sketchbook as Washington Irving's Entrée and Undoing.”
Journal of American Studies
31 (1997): 275-93.

Irving, Pierre.
Life and Letters of Washington Irving.
New York: G. P. Putnam, 1864.

Irving, Washington.
A History of New York.
Edwin T. Bowden, ed. 1848, Albany: 2nd ed. Twayne Publishers, 1964.

————.
Washington Irving: Tales, History and Sketches.
James W. Tuttleton, ed. New York: Library of America, 1983.

—————.
Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alahambra.
Andrew B. Myers, ed. New York: Library of America, 1991.

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed.
The Encyclopedia of New York City.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

James, Henry.
The American Scene. Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America.
Richard Howard, ed. New York: Library of America, 1993.

Jones, Brian Jay.
Washington Irving: An American Original.
New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008.

Knickerbocker
magazine

Kurlansky, Mark.
The Big Oyster.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

Mitchill, Samuel L.
The Picture of New York, or, The Traveller's Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States, by a Gentleman Residing in This City.
New York: L. Riley and Co., 1807.

Murray, Laura. “The Aesthetic of Dispossession: Washington Irving and Ideologies of (De)Colonization in the Early Republic.”
ALH
(1996): 205-31.

Myers, Andrew B., ed.
A Century of Commentary on Washington Irving: 1860-1974.
Tarrytown: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1976.

—————, ed.
The Knickerbocker Tradition: Washington Irving's New York.
Tarrytown: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1974.

———, ed.
The Worlds of Washington Irving, 1783-1859: From an Exhibition of Rare Book and Manuscript Materials in the Special Collections of the New York Public Library.
Tarrytown; Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1974.

Paulding, James Kirke.
Stories of Saint Nicholas.
Frank Bergmann, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Rockwell, Charles.
The Catskill Mountains and the Regions Around.
New York: Taintor Brothers & Co., 1873.

Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey.
Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Searling, A. P.
The Land of Rip Van Winkle: A Tour Through the Romantic Parts of the Catskills, its Legends and Traditions.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1884.

Sondey, Walter. “From Nations of Virtue to Virtual Nation: Washington Irving and American Nationalism.”
Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender and Nationalism.
Jean Pickering and Susan Kehde, eds. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.

Sweeting, Adam W. “‘A Very Pleasant Patriarchal Life': Professional Authors and Amateur Architects in the Hudson Valley, 1835-1870.”
Journal of American Studies
29 (1995): 33-53.

Taft, Kendall B.
Minor Knickerbockers.
New York: American Book Co., 1974.

Tompkins, Jane.
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860.
New York, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Tuttleton, James W., ed.
Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction.
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Van Zandt, Roland.
The Catskill Mountain House.
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Warner, Michael. “Irving's Posterity” ELH 67 (2000): 773-99.

——. The Letters of the Republic.
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Wells, Robert V. “While Rip Napped: Social Change in Late Eighteenth-Century New York.”
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71 (1990): 5-23.

TO THE
NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
This work is respectfully Dedicated,
as a humble and unworthy Testimony of the profound
veneration and exalted esteem of the Society's
Sincere Well wisher
and
Devoted Servant
DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER.