A History of New York Read Free

York’s Dutch past, and reiterates the “extreme difficulty of procuring such as relate to the first settlement and colonial transactions of this State.” In an appeal to their fellow New Yorkers’ sense of history and responsibility, the Society solicited documents of just about any kind or quality, including “Manuscripts, Records, Pamphlets and Books relative to the History of this Country ... narratives of Indian Wars, Battles and Exploits; of the Adventures and Sufferings of Captives, Voyagers and Travellers... Statistical Tables, Tables of Diseases, Births and Deaths, and of Population,” and just about anything else that might shed light on New Amsterdam. In an effort to remedy this archivist’s nightmare, one of the Society’s most revered members, the physician and naturalist Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, compiled and published The Picture of New-York: Or, The Traveller’s Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States in 1807. The Picture was designed to enrich the meager holdings of the Historical Society while offering readers “ample and genuine information” about the historical, geographical, civic, and social circumstances of the contemporary city. Despite its panoramic title, Mitchill’s book is little more than an encyclopedia of dry geographical and municipal facts, curtly expressed. An incomplete encyclopedia, unfortunately: while The Picture touches on everything from the city’s tidal patterns to its prison system, Mitchill disposes of fifty years of Dutch rule in a few swift sentences, without apology. It was this oversight that inspired Irving (and his brother William, with whom he had originally conceived of the History) —he later confessed that their original “serio-comic” intent was just to “burlesque the pedantic lore” of The Picture and other books of its kind. In a reversal that its author would not have appreciated, today The Picture is an essential artifact of New York only because it gave rise to the creation of its opposite: the voice of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Mitchill’s attempt to build an “ample” ontological framework for the nascent city instead created the vacuum into which Irving and his revisionist historian could merrily rush.
    On the heels of his History, Irving briefly took a position as the editor of the Analectic Review, a literary journal based in Philadelphia, but the needs of a family business venture in England was incentive enough to lure him to England in 1815. The venture failed, but Irving stayed on, traveling through England, Germany, and France with a letter of introduction to the celebrated Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (who had reported “sides ... sore from laughing” while reading Irving’s “excellent jocose history of New York”) and a fistful of glowing reviews for the History (and for Salmagundi, which had been published in book form in England in 1810). It would be sixteen years before Irving returned to the United States, and his stay abroad also marked a turning away from the long format of the History to the genre of the “sketch,” a picturesque and often sentimental vignette whose gentle humor and brevity made it the ideal format for the observations of a curious and romantic American. Irving would publish three collections of sketches in very quick succession, including The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824), as well as several historical works inspired by an extended stay in Spain: The Conquest of Granada, Life and Voyages of Columbus, Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, and The Alhambra. Diedrich Knickerbocker reappears only rarely in Irving’s sketch collections, to narrate “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ) as well as other tales of the Hudson