A History of New York Read Free Page B

the source and the scourge of Irving’s quest for privacy: the payment he received for allowing the tracks to be laid on his property helped defray the cost of an addition on the famous house. Sunnyside, which Henry James would later describe as a “shy ... retreat of anchorites,” became, in Irving’s lifetime, a metonym for the writer himself, and bore as many “compliments in silence” as the man who lived there. The house was hymned in Andrew Jackson Downing’s seminal Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1849), which suggested that “there is scarcely a building or place in America more replete with interest than the cottage of Washington Irving, near Tarrytown,” and was subsequently a prominent feature of The Homes of American Authors (1853) and the subject of a profile in Harper’s magazine (1856). From that riverside perch Irving wrote The Crayon Miscellany, a collection of travel sketches and histories; Astoria; and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. Despite (or perhaps because of) his retreat, New York City did not abandon its first literary champion: in 1838 Irving was nominated for mayor of Manhattan by Tammany Hall, an honor he graciously refused.
    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,
    the peculiar and racy customs and usages derived from our Dutch progenitors were unnoticed, or regarded with indifference, or adverted to with a sneer. Now they form a convivial currency... they are the rallying points of home feeling; the seasoning of our civic festivities; the staple of local tales and local pleasantries; and are so harped upon by our writers of popular fiction, that I find myself almost crowded off the legendary ground which I was the first to explore, by the host who have followed in my footsteps.
    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