Father of the American Imagination
Why Washington Irving is Still Worth Your Time
Every year on Columbus Day, I’m reminded that as much as I love Washington Irving, his imagination sometimes got the better of him. Irving is, inadvertently, responsible for the myth that Columbus sailed West to prove that the earth wasn’t flat. This oddity manages to persist in popular culture despite many attempts to correct it over the last hundred years or so. Irving mentions this notion only in passing, and he no doubt added it to Columbus’s story to bring in some dramatic flair. I won’t rehash the whole episode, as plenty of capable scholars have shown that this is a weak reading of Irving and an historical falsehood. But the recent federal holiday got me thinking about the original Knickerbocker once again. Irving had a penchant for flourishes throughout all his non-fiction works, including The Alhambra and his biography of George Washington. Somewhere in his writing, the things which gave the fiction-written-as-history works such as The Sketchbook bled over into his non-fiction-written-as-fiction efforts. It makes his writings enjoyable for every reader, but also means having to parse some items out with care.
Of course, he wasn’t the first to do this kind of thing nor the last. But Irving does have some distinctions, particularly in his role in helping to shape the early American imagination. It helps that one of Irving’s most notable aspects is that of being the only American writer from the early 19th century who experienced financial success as a writer and is still remembered in the 21st century. Of course, Irving held other jobs which helped him along the way, including his rather famous ministerial position in Spain from 1842-1846. In many ways, Irving might have been the last of the gentlemen class in the United States, who traveled widely, wrote because they wanted to, and thought service to the polis was of the utmost importance. Other authors who immediately followed Irving held to one or two of these criteria, yet none of literary significance attempted all three. But more significantly than his role as a proper American gentleman, Irving has had a lingering effect on the American imagination that I think is easy to overlook.
When I taught the modern era of Humane Letters, I made sure that my students read as much of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon as we could. But if we couldn’t fit in more than a few stories, I ensured that we covered “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The Mutability of Literature,” and the Christmas essays. Each of these is important, I argued, to understanding the American imagination. And my students, who honestly didn’t know who Rip Van Winkle or Ichabod Crane were the vast majority of the time, found much to love and appreciate in Irving’s writings. The humor of Rip and Ichabod’s stories were not lost on them despite the more formal English. And other stories, such as “The Wife” and “The Spectre Bridegroom” inspired them in unexpected ways, surprising themselves and me.
Each of these early writings has immense merit and ought to be read by every American (and I hope to write pieces on each individual one at some point). But make no mistake: I am not saying Irving should be read by some Americans, but every single one. Part of my conviction on this point stems from my years as a teacher. I taught Irving for many years in the classical classroom and students responded well to him, regardless of their personal backgrounds. The imagery, the method of storytelling, and even the practice of historical embellishment, have become essential parts of the American imagination, even if very few seem to notice. This is part of why named my Substack after him, after all.
One way I tried to explore this with my students was by assigning an art project to accompany Irving’s Sketchbook. Students could pick any chapter that we had read, and then represent it some way in an artistic expression. I had students who chose to do drawings, sculpture, paintings, and a few other mixed media items such as Christmas ornaments and a set of Christmas plates. The projects were always a highlight for me, regardless of the student’s skill, largely because it provided a window for me into how the student imagined the world. Irving’s stories have this effect, of bringing out of the individual the way images are already at work and how we interpret our cultural heritage. The American imagination would be completely different without Irving and the writings he left behind.
In a kind of cosmic joke, Irving himself has been subject to historical imaginings similar to the one he imparted to the story of Columbus. Though it is common these days for people to claim that it was Charles Dickens who revived a love of Christmas in the Anglosphere, in fact, Irving was the one who had begun the preservation of the “old fashioned Christmas” as it was dying out in England and America. Add to that the fact that Irving is almost exclusively read around the end of October, as one of the many “spooky story writers” who find new life in reprints, collections, and podcasts, and Fortuna’s wheel seems to have run her course.
While I find the treatment of Irving as primarily an author to read on Halloween disappointing, I am glad that there are still obvious touchstones that connect Americans to an important figure in the development of our imagination. So, go pick up a copy of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” or take in one of the many adaptations, before the month is out. It will indeed be time well spent.
I am an Irving super fan as well! I enjoy guiding students to see his humor in "Bridegroom" "Hollow" and others. Plus, our American Christmas would not exist without him!