“I have,” confided Washington Irving to his friend and effective literary agent Henry Brevoort, “by patient & persevering labour of my most uncertain pen, & by catching the gleams of sunshine in my cloudy mind, managed to open to myself an avenue to 1 The “avenue” in question was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.—America's first internationally acclaimed work of literature—which, by March 1821, had become a direct route to respectability and the British establishment, opening to Irving the world of stately homes and their real-life avenues, previously only glimpsed from afar. Pieced together after the collapse of his family business, the collection of sketches may have been a carefully engineered career move, but Irving avoided any suggestion of personal cost in catching only those “gleams of sunshine,” and apparently censoring his cloudier, less amenable self. He continued: “I value it the more highly because it is entirely independent and self created; and I must use my best endeavours to turn it to account” (LI.614). In the context, “independent”—a charged word for his generation—is striking, given that The Sketch Book was anything but. While writing, Irving had appealed to Brevoort to let him know “what themes &c would be popular and striking in America” (LI.546), and his private papers reveal that the book's deferential, nostalgic, pastoralized view of Britain was in fact carefully tailored to what Irving believed were the tastes of his two markets, although not perhaps to those of the critics championing America's new spirit of literary nationalism and cultural independence.

Inspired by the successes of the war of 1812, their challenges and exhortations can be found in periodicals such as the newly founded North American Review, which, in 1815, attacked America's “literary delinquency,” and her undue “dependence on English literature.”² Meanwhile, The Portico, another new periodical, argued in the Advertisement to its first issue in 1816: “Dependence, whether literary or political, is a state of degradation fraught with disgrace; and to be dependent on a foreign mind for what we can ourselves produce, is to add to the crime of indolence, the weakness of stupidity.”³ Irving's earlier History of New York became a founding text for this movement, and his defection abroad and adoption of a more anodyne style of writing prompted accusations of betrayal, so that, after defining his avenue, Irving was obliged to respond to Brevoort's allegations that back home “many ask whether I mean to renounce my country” (LI.614). The charge was angrily denied—Irving claiming “Whatever I have written has been written with the feelings and published as the writing of an American,” (LI.614). Yet a letter written the previous year to Sir Walter Scott reveals the complexity of his position, underlining both the pull of the Old World and the awe in which Irving apparently held its readers. Disdaining Knickerbocker's exuberant, experimental History as “local, crude and juvenile,” (LI.590), Irving revealed of its successor: “I think I could have made it better, but I have been so new to the ground which I was treading, and so daunted by the idea of writing absolutely for a British public, that my powers, such as they are, have been almost paralyzed” (LI.590). If the insight intimates that the sketches were pitched deliberately at the British market, the reference to feelings of paralysis admits the cost of this manœuvre, and anticipates difficulties of the sort which, I will argue, blocked Irving's subsequent writing and caused him to lose his way as an author thereafter. These problems were first intuited by the Massachusetts poet and essayist Richard Henry Dana in the North American Review of September 1819.

While generally admiring, when he reviewed The Sketch Book, after publication of the first numbers in America, Dana was forthright about his perception of its deficiencies, compared to Irving's earlier works: “He appears to have lost a little of that natural run of style, for which his lighter writings were so remarkable. He has given up something of his direct, simple manner, and plain phraseology for a more studied, periphrastical mode of expression” (NAR.7.348). In his epigraph, Irving had presented himself—citing Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy—as a deracinated observer and “mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures.”⁴ Dana takes up this point, implying that Irving had lost touch with his instinctive, “native” voice, but also reflects how complex an issue this remained for an American writing in 1819, particularly one born of a Scottish father and English mother: “He seems to have exchanged words and phrases, which were strong, distinct and definite, for a genteel sort of language, cool, less definite, and general. It is as if his mother English had been sent abroad to be improved, and in attempting to become accomplished, had lost too many of her home qualities” (NAR.7.348). The wording of Dana's review effectively challenges Britain's cultural supremacy—deploying “mother English” to denote Irving's native American—but also implicitly registers the novelty of this enterprise, for which a vocabulary barely exists.

While agreeing with Dana's central contention—he argued “the manner perhaps throughout is more attended to than the matter”⁵—Francis Jeffrey interpreted Irving's approach very differently in the Edinburgh Review the following year, however. That January, Sydney Smith had famously used its pages to query “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or stature?” (ER.33.79). Jeffrey then implied that it was partly Irving's “de-naturing” of his œuvre that had allowed it to slip through the cultural barriers and appeal to more than just his fellow “natives,” arguing: “Now, the most remarkable thing in a work so circumstanced certainly is, that it should be written throughout with the greatest care and accuracy, and worked up to great purity and beauty of diction, on the model of the most elegant and polished of our native writers.” Hoping that “we may hail it as the harbinger of a purer and juster taste—the foundation of a chaster and better school, for the writers of that great and intelligent country” (ER.34.160), Jeffrey went on to compliment Irving's courtesy and conciliatoriness, though these were by no means always characteristic of his approach to Britain, as his private papers reveal.

Friendless and fearful, on his first visit in 1805, Irving had felt himself to be like “one of our savages when visiting a strange tribe. He courts their friendship tho he 6 Returning to Britain a decade later in 1815 on the visit which would result in The Sketch Book, and immediately after the end of the 1812-14 War (in which he had served although not seen action), Irving initially appeared less troubled. This may have been partly owing to the proximity of his brother, Peter, in Liverpool overseeing the British end of the family's import business, and his married sister, Sarah Van Wart. Irving himself disembarked in Liverpool on 1 July and three days later wrote to his mother from Sarah's house in Birmingham that the weather had been “uncommonly fine since my arrival, and the country is in all its verdure and beauty” (LI.395), adding “the journey from Liverpool to this place is through a perfect garden, so highly is the whole country cultivated” (LI.395). The letter makes no acknowledgement of the significance of the date—4 July—as if Irving wished to ignore any considerations which might separate him from the subjects of this “enchanting” (LI.398) country, where he told Henry Brevoort on 5 July that he had “experienced as yet nothing but kindness and civility” (LI.398).

Implicit in “as yet” is the inference that Irving somehow doubted this good will, or at least regarded it with a residual wariness, which would seem to have stemmed as much from his own complex feelings about Britain, as any overt British hostility. These feelings perhaps lie behind his sympathetic comments on Napoleon's plight following his defeat at Waterloo on 18 June, and subsequent surrender to the British at Plymouth on 24 July. The citizen of a nation undefeated by Britain, Irving wrote to Brevoort again on 16 July 1815 and, remembering Macbeth,⁷ he compared Napoleon to an “eagle towering in his pride of place” beside the Prince Regent's “mousing owl” (LI.401). After Napoleon's capture, the resentment, longing, scorn, and excitement fermenting in his American breast were decanted into another letter of 27 July. Addressed to Jean Renwick, sister of Francis Jeffrey and mother of Irving's travelling companion that summer, it satirized the excesses of rampant John Bullism as they manifested themselves in a Birmingham church, with a reference to James Thomson's The Castle of Indolence—

Here we found a “round sleek oily man of God” with a face that shone resplendent with roast beef & plumb pudding, holding forth on the late glorious battle of Waterloo & the surrender of Bonaparte. I was exceedingly amused with the awkward, goose like attempts of this full fed divine to get his imagination upon the wing. If you ever saw a gander, in a sudden fit of untoward volatility, endeavour to fly across a mill pond,

(LI.404)

Thomson had placed a “little, round, fat, oily man of God”⁸ in amongst the pleasure seekers of the wizard's castle in Canto I of his poem, noting how he “shone all glittering with ungodly dew / If a tight damsel chanced to trippen by,” (CI.lxix). Irving's use of the citation and allusion to the type of corrupt cleric which it involves recalls Dana's appropriation of the term “mother English,” while also reflecting the extent to which this culture had indeed nurtured Irving, whose depiction of the war-like priest also seems to remember and subvert Chaucer's corrupt and slightly sinister Monk in the Canterbury Tales. The latter—“a lord ful fat and in good poynt”⁹—embodies the collusion between church and state which Irving satirizes, and also has a bald head “that shoon as any glas / And eek his face, as he hadde been enoynt” (GP.198-99), like Irving's gleaming cleric.

The echoing illustrates the necessity of the shared culture for deeper and more resonant writing, which was also admitted half involuntarily by Edward Tyrell Channing in his article “On Models in Literature,” published in the North American Review the following July. Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Channing prefaced his piece with a citation from Wordsworth's poem The Excursion, but went on to assert that a country must be “the former and finisher of its own genius” (NAR.3.207) before continuing in a way which underlined the near impossibility of creative and cultural independence for his generation of Americans. Confusingly, that self-same genius “has, or should have, nothing to do with strangers. They are not expected to feel the beauty of your old poetical language, depending as it does on early and tender associations; connecting the softer and ruder ages of the country, and inspiring an inward and inexplicable joy, like a tale of childhood” (NAR.3.207).

Channing's phrasing betrays the depth of his involvement with what can only be Britain's “old poetical language,” in a year which also saw the North American Review featuring fifty pages of excerpts from the anonymous Journal of a tour and residence in Great Britain during the years 1810 and 1811. Originally published in England, it is considerably less artful than The Sketch Book, offering more of a survey, albeit a well written one, but reflects the hearty American appetite for details of the Old World. Irving would also cater to this curiosity, of course, although the same letter to Mrs Renwick also reveals the very real difficulties he had to overcome in order to find an acceptable way of conveying his experiences. If the writing manifests the force and nature of his attraction to this “loyal little Kingdom,” it equally expresses his intermittent exasperated contempt for the “honest fat headed” subjects with their velvet cushions and droning preacher, even as the succulent, elaborately conceived imagery witnesses to the fertility and potential richness of British culture for his imagination. Though we see why, as a writer, Irving needed to return to Europe, we also feel the impossibility of his position once arrived. Much of what he had to say—at least continuing in the mode of inspired, demented satire pioneered in Salmagundi and The History of New York—would not, presumably, advance his career or win the acclaim he so ardently desired. How to find something else, without completely betraying his own voice, was in many ways the challenge of these early years in Britain.

Even on his first tour to Warwick, Kenilworth, and Stratford, on which he embarked immediately after writing, when he had been in England less than a month, Irving began casting around for a way of opening what he would later term his “avenue.” Inspiration seems to have struck in the grounds of Charlecote Hall, which Irving visited “to see a old family mansion of the rign [sic] of Q Elzabet in fine preservation & certainly one which Shakspear in his boyhood must often have rambled about.”¹⁰ Remarkably, though his visit took place on 25 July, and he had previously only experienced England during the autumn and winter, Irving chose to describe the pleasure grounds amid the first stirrings of spring, writing in his journal: “The day was soft and balmy—The buds which had been retarded by lingering frosts were beginning to put forth—the snow drop the [ ] & other firstlings of the spring were seen under Lucy's Park Vast oak avenues deer fawns—rooks cawing—wind sounding among the branches—larks soaring up into the heaven” (JII.61-2). Henry James would document his own warm appreciation of Charlecote's “venerable verdure” in English Hours,¹¹ and the tone of Irving's entry suggests an awakening, or a belated thaw or coming to life. Whether he actually felt this sort of stirring within himself during his visit, or believed that the park ought to represent some sort of extraordinary experience, and was seeking a way of making this apparent, is not certain. Charlecote was undoubtedly a world apart, with the attractively decrepit Elizabethan hall rising out of an Arcadian landscape moulded by Capability Brown in the 1760s,¹² as numerous illustrations of the period testify.¹³ Harping on “the majestic solemnity of these great JII.62), Irving's reverential approach to this idyll of the past could hardly be more different from his affectionately contemptuous satire of the preacher-goose and his middle-class parishioners' celebrations of contemporary British power.

This determinedly escapist vision of Britain was one which Irving would both promote in The Sketch Book and pursue again the following summer, after a winter largely spent struggling with the difficulties of the post-war economic climate, particularly as they affected his family business. Following Peter's over-purchasing, P. & E. Irving & Co. had embarked on the steady slide towards the bankruptcy which put them out of business on 4 March 1818. The experience was deeply distressing to Irving. But, rather than becoming more politicized or radical after seeing at first hand the harshness of the British system in this time of appalling hardship and suffering, like Mrs Trollope after her American tribulations, Irving sought only the more obstinately to deny its traumas, or at least to exclude them from his writing and correspondence, into which they almost never creep. The price of this repression was frequent silences. Writing to Brevoort in July 1816, he complained “my mind is in a sickly state and my imagination so blighted that it cannot put forth a blossom nor even a green leaf” (LI.449), although Irving then waxed eloquent about meeting a “Veteran angler of old Isaac Waltons school” (LI.450) by the River Dee, who had visited America in his youth. Subsequently immortalized in The Sketch Book, this story-book character restored Irving's faith in human nature, and developed his vision of the Old World as the natural habitat of picturesque and unthreatening characters, who felt only goodwill towards America, unlike the bankers and merchants reluctant to help out the struggling Irving firm.¹⁴ Or so Irving reassured Brevoort: “His whole conversation and deportment illustrated old Isaacs maxims as to the benign influences of angling over the human heart—I wished continually that you had been present, as I know you would have enjoyed with exquisite relish, this genuine Angler, & the characteristic scenes through which we rambled with him” (LI.451).

The same “amusing rencontre” (LI.451) inspired Irving and his brother Peter to spend their ten-day summer holiday that year in Izaak Walton's native Derbyshire. Interestingly, though, given what Irving had said about his depression and difficulties in writing, he did not write letters home about the excursion for several months, with the exception of two brief and factual notes to his mother, the first of which is dated 6 November. Addressed to Brevoort, it all but spells out the connections between Irving's material and creative lives, as he apologizes rather movingly:

I am sensible my silence exposes me to many hard imputations, but I cannot help it—I can only say it is not for want of having you continually in my thoughts and near my heart, nor for want of the constant desire and frequent resolve to write. But some how or other there has been such a throng of worldly cares hurrying backward & forward through my mind for a long time past, that it is even as bare as a market place: and when I do take hold of my pen, I feel so poverty struck, such mental sterility, that I throw it down again in despair of writing any thing that should give you gratification.

(LI.457)

Likening his mind to a bare “market place,” overrun by anxieties, apparently triggers Irving's consciousness of its potential for productivity, however, he then goes on to recall his time in Buxton, caricaturing “the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities” (LI.459) that he observed among those taking the waters. Singled out in particular is one General Trotter, whom, in an extension of Irving's satire on the preacher-goose, he terms a “toast & butter” soldier, left behind by “the hurry, the fierceness and dashing of the new system” (LI.460). No longer a threat, with his “broad hazy muffin face,” “sleepy eye,” and “full double chin,” the general becomes grotesquely picturesque, a mutation on the theme of Bullish British overfeeding, and is seen as a degenerated, eroded landscape: “He had a deep ravine from each corner of his mouth, not occasioned by an irascible contraction of the muscles, but apparently the deep worn channels of two rivulets of gravy that oozed out from the huge mouthfuls that he masticated” (LI.460).

Toned down and rendered more tasteful, the general was the type of reassuring English man whom Irving would feature in The Sketch Book, something like his characterization of John Bull. That the obsessive description of his eating addressed obliquely Irving's anxieties about the inequities of the British class system, and the suffering which it occasioned, emerges from another letter to Brevoort dated 9 December 1816. In what is his only explicit condemnation of the bitter suffering occasioned by the post-war slump, he laments:

You have no idea of the distress and misery that prevails in this country: it is beyond the power of description: In America you have financial difficulties, the embarrassments of trade & the distress of merchants but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the poor—not merely mental sufferings—but the absolute miseries of nature—Hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the labouring people in this country are liable to. In the best of times they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve.

(LI.464)

Concluding abruptly “but I have some how or other rambled away into a theme which would neither edify nor amuse you, so we will not pursue it” (LI.465), however, Irving anticipates the almost total exclusion of such perspectives from The Sketch Book, unlike the Journal of a tour and residence in Great Britain in which he notes bitterly how “the poor are swept out of the way, as dust of the walks of the rich, in a heap out of their sight” (NAR.3.260). Characterizing his deviation as a “ramble,” Irving associates it with Romantic notions of the involuntariness of thought and inspiration, from which he will subsequently endeavour to distance himself, as his writing becomes progressively more self-conscious and commercial.

The last letter relating to the Derbyshire excursion, dated 29 January 1819, seems to be a transitional one in this respect, dealing with a “ramble of curiosity” undertaken by the Irving brothers along Dovedale. A deep, narrow, craggy, wooded limestone valley, down which Walton's river cascaded spectacularly for two miles, skirted by a narrow footpath, Dovedale was deemed by Gilpin “one of the most pleasing pieces of scenery of the kind we any where met with.”¹⁵ Irving was keenly appreciative of these “scenes hallowed by the honest Walton's simple Muse” (LI.469), as he told Brevoort in a letter which reflects his ongoing interest in finding a way of covering British material from an American perspective, and indeed shaping his life experiences into commercial art. Venturing out, back in August, the brothers had met up by chance with their fellow hotel guests from Matlock—among them the three Miss Bathursts, whose presence prompted Irving to rechristen the gorge “Dove Dale” (LI.469). The Irvings were invited to tag along with the other party (complete with picnic and attendants)—and duly did. When he came to retell the story for Brevoort months later, Irving chose to focus on the company as much as the scenery, implying both were so delightful as barely to be credible, but leaving in his revisions as evidence of the difficulties he encountered in writing up his passage:

If a man could not be happy with such a party in such a place, he may give up all hope of sublunary felicity. For my part I was in Elysium Nothing so soon banishes reserve and produces intimacy as a participation in difficulties. The path through the Dale was rugged and beset with petty hazards. We had to toil through thickets & Brambles—Sometimes to step cautiously from stone to stone in the margin of the little river where the precipitous hills over hung its current—We had to scramble up into caverns and to climb rocks—all these were calculated to place both parties in those relative situations which endear the Sexes. I had a

But all these dangers past—when we had descended from the last precipice, and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant meadow—then—fancy me—oh thou “Sweetest of Poets” wandering by the course of this romantic stream—a lovely <“object”=girl

(LI.468)

While the elaborate burlesquing, with its brambles, scratched hands, and wet feet, suggests Irving's inherent scepticism about something which he very obviously and simultaneously delights in; the extensive revisions attest to the self-consciousness of his reportage. Changing the phrasing of “lovely woman” to “woman, lovely woman,” or substituting the more literary “peril” for plain “danger,” or the more tender “girl” for “object,” are the actions of a writer acutely alert to the tone of his text. In this context, to proclaim oneself “in Elysium” is no mean thing, but Irving substantiates his otherwise potentially bold claim by alluding to the physical pleasures of “those relative situations which endear the Sexes.” Possibly punning on “relative,” the phrase suggests closeness and intimacy—the reverse of the more habitual distance and reserve between England and America—although its emotional charge is complicated and undercut by the theatricality and seemingly staged nature of the description as a whole. Likewise, Irving's relentless and joyously savage mockery of romantic conventions—naming her “beseeching weakness,” his “swelling pride,” the “verdant meadow,” and “musically” flowing Dove—suggests a resistance to buying into the sorts of values traditionally associated with these terms, assiduously promoted in sketches like “The Wife” or “The Broken Heart.”

Moreover, alluding to his companion as a “woman, lovely woman,” develops the intimations of illicit intimacy with reference to the somewhat less pure heroines of The Vicar of Wakefield and The Story of Rimini. In Goldsmith's novel, Olivia, the Vicar's daughter, sings, “When lovely woman stoops to folly / And finds too late that men betray,” to her family as they breakfast together on the honeysuckle bank, after she has been seduced and abandoned by the dashing but dastardly Squire Thornhill.¹⁶ In Leigh Hunt's poem, published on 19 January 1816 following his release from gaol, Paolo (originally from Dante's Inferno) finds “The two dearest things the world has got / A lovely woman in a rural spot”¹⁷ when he is falling in love with his brother's wife Francesca. Like the “round sleek oily man of God” earlier, this phrase reflects how Irving saw Britain through a web of literature, but also shows that he wanted to write himself into the scenario, even at the expense of all but stifling his own voice in a welter of second-hand expressions.

The complexity of Irving's position during this “repast champêtre” seems to be registered in his closing comparison of himself to a “Strawberry Smotherd in cream.” The image—which he had previously used in a letter written in America¹⁸—is misremembered from George Peele's The Old Wives' Tale where “Strawberries swimming in the cream / And schoolboys playing in the stream”¹⁹ feature in a song about courtship and the pleasures of summer. Irving's switching of the verb from the active swimming to the passive smothering intensifies the image, but also adds a note of ambivalence, in that his strawberry is portrayed as immobilized and impotent—smothering leading to death—almost undone by the viscous extremes of pleasure to which it is subjected. Such an analysis chimes with Irving's subsequent admission to Scott of his “powers” having been “almost paralyzed” (LI.590) in Britain, and helps perhaps to explain his defensive use of burlesquing to defuse what would seem to be the powerful emotional charge of the memory.

Inevitably, very little, if any, of the writing in The Sketch Book would be so unguarded, experimental, or personally autobiographical, though. After returning from Dovedale, Irving had spent much of the autumn and winter of 1816-17 with his sister in Birmingham trying to write, and a letter to Washington Allston reflects clearly both his ambitions and his anxieties at the time: “It is infinitely preferable to stand foremost as one of the founders of a school of painting in an immense & growing country like America, in fact to be an object of national pride and affection, than to fall into the ranks in the crowded galleries of Europe; or perhaps be regarded with an eye of national prejudice, as the production of an American pencil is likely to be in England” (LI.478). Irving, however, was aiming to make it in Europe too. Having started work on his own sketches in early summer, by 11 July 1817 he was able to report somewhat pragmatically to Brevoort that he had “a plan which, with very little trouble, will yield me for the present a scanty but sufficient means of support, and leave me leisure to look round for something better” (LI.486). This was, of course, The Sketch Book. Although he was a little coy, Irving stressed the spirit of neediness in which he wrote: “I cannot at present explain to you what it is—you would probably consider it precarious, & inadequate to my subsistence—but a small matter will float a drowning man and I have dwelt so much of late on the prospect of being cast homeless & pennyless upon the world; that I feel relieved in having even a straw to catch at” (LI.486).

Motivated by desperation, Irving seems to have grasped his straw very adeptly. Later that summer he was assiduously cultivating literary contracts first in London, where he spent time with Campbell and Murray, then north of the border during a month-long tour of Scotland. Having met Francis Jeffrey and other Edinburgh luminaries, Irving moved on to Abbotsford. What started out as a courtesy call on Walter Scott became a three-day visit running from August 30 to September 3. Brevoort had earlier given Scott a copy of the History of New York, while Irving had reprinted Scott's poetry in the Analectic Magazine.²⁰ There would, however, seem to have been a measure of genuine affection on Scott's part for the younger writer, whom he would later help to launch The Sketch Book in England. To his brother Peter, Irving portrayed himself as being in heaven: “I have rambled about the hills with Scott; visited the haunts of Thomas the Rhymer—and other spots rendered classic by border tale and witching song—and have been in a kind of dream or delirium” (LI.501). This impression of a country rich in associations was something which Irving would endeavour to create in The Sketch Book, and he enthused further to Peter about his host in terms which would seem to value his professional attributes and the successes accruing from them alongside his personal qualities, reinforcing the feeling that he viewed Scott as a professional role model as well as exemplary friend and father figure—“As to Scott, I cannot express my delight at his character & manners—He is a sterling golden hearted old worthy—Full of the joyousness of youth, with an imagination continually furnishing forth picture—and a charming simplicity of manner that puts you at ease with him in a moment” (LI.501). Irving's feeling for Scott was undoubtedly very real—and yet his Scott is also a stock character, something like the Angler, to be wheeled out on future occasions and exploited. In this market-oriented vein, Irving would subsequently plan for his own “softly tinted style” of prose to possess “golden thread of thought camelion shades of beautiful imagination, Gems of thought” (JII.258). These ambitions tie in with describing Scott as a “sterling golden hearted old worthy,” with a seeming pun on sterling, a phrase which at once sets him back in a tried and tested glorious historic past, but also connects him with the idea of something immensely lucrative.

Perhaps motivated by financial considerations, Irving took quite another view of what he saw as the less commendable interest in simplicity cultivated by Wordsworth and his followers, whose writing apparently manifested rather too much of that “natural run of style” admired by Dana. In his same Scottish journal, he deplored their “endeavour” (he had originally written “disposition”) to introduce into poetry “all the common colloquial phrazes and vulgar idioms.” Irving maintained “in their rage for Simplicity they would be coarse and commonplace” (JII.104). Whilst “rage” may hint at a measure of unacknowledged sympathy for the energy and spirit of the Romantic project, Irving's disapproving allusion to less eloquent forms of expression reminds us of his new self-consciousness. Despite having previously played on Hunt's Story of Rimini in his Dovedale letter—whose “glittering and rancid obscenities” Blackwoods attacked—Irving also turned on his “heterogeneous taste” in the same poem. He claimed “a fondness for gorgeous material is mingled with an occasional proneness to the most grotesque—we fancy him a common stone mason with dirty apron & trowel in hand sometimes building with marble & sometimes with rubbish” (JII.104). Irving's conclusion indicated the way ahead: “Now the Language of poetry cannot be too pure and choice. Poems are like classical edifices, for which we seek the noblest materials—What should we think of the Arts of the architect who would build a Grecian temple of brick when he could get marble” (JII.104).

In contrast to Irving's earlier letter, when he wrote of his imagination being unable to put forth greenery, this comparison of writing to “classical edifices” is strikingly inorganic—as far away from Romantic nature poetry as possible. Additionally, the connections with planning and building emphasises those aspects of writing which are willed and deliberately constructed—against the spontaneous or haphazard movements of inspiration. That Irving should compare words with buildings, and particularly with buildings so explicitly associated with tradition and the ruling elite, would seem to reflect the determinedly pro-establishment nature of his literary undertaking. This ambition is evident in a further undated musing from the autumn of 1817, whose stiltedness and sense of an imposed agenda betrays the difficulty of this approach for Irving's writing, which more naturally turns towards American subjects. He notes, “England so richly dight with palaces—earth so studded & gemmed with castles & palaces—so embroiderd with parks & gardens So storied—so wrought up with pictures.—Let me wander along the streams of beautiful England & dream of my native rivers of my beautiful native country” (JII.182).

That Irving found Britain's accumulation of history—which had “studded & gemmed” its seemingly impenetrable surface—threatening emerges from a subsequent undated journal entry from the period. It presents the past as poised to crush those obliged to reside beneath it, while suggesting that the overwhelming weight is what gives it its value: “England the deposits of all English Antiquity, Usage &c. I should dread any revolution—I consider it as an old picturesque gothic building what may be very inconvenient to its inhabitants but I should dread to see it pulled down or even repaired—even a turret pulled down tho it threatened to fall on the heads of the inhabitants” (JII.287). In the context, “deposits” seems to have connotations both of banking and the accretions of time. Perhaps reflecting his own intentions of “trading” in this Old World merchandise, and in some manner confusing them with the difficulties experienced both by his brothers and American merchants since Independence, Irving continued “That it may not Eliminate the laws of fair & open commerce” (JII.287). This line of thought was developed in the letter he sent to Ebenezer Irving on 3 March 1819, accompanying the first number of The Sketch Book, which also looked forward to future issues. Deploying a term signifying both a piece of writing and an object for trade, he confided to his merchant brother his hopes of producing “articles from time to time that will be sufficient for my present support, and form a stock of copyright property, that may be a little capital for me hereafter” (LI.540).

Ebenezer had been encouraging his younger brother to return to America and take up regular employment. Irving concluded by indicating that he saw this as a last chance to establish himself as a writer, and make good his earlier career, saying “I feel myself completely committed in literary reputation by what I have already written; and I feel by no means satisfied to rest my reputation on my preceding writings” (LI.540). As if in some way denying his considerable American success to date, he presented The Sketch Book as a means of validating himself at home, telling Ebenezer that “it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among the established authors of my country and to win the affections of my countrymen” (LI.541). Notwithstanding these hopes, in another letter, written on the same day to Henry Brevoort, Irving appeared to distance himself emotionally, as he had physically, from American culture and values, envisaging a role at once potentially independent of, and yet integral to, his nation's emerging cultural synthesis: “I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle & frenchhorn” (LI.543).

In this delicately ambitious spirit, Irving wrote to Brevoort again, on 12 August 1819, that he wanted to cancel a sentence in the “John Bull” sketch which would have read: “He is like the man who would not have a wart taken off his nose because it had always been there & c & c” (LI.554). Witnessing his retreat from the gravy-drooling General Trotter, Irving decreed “I do not like the simile & question whether it is a good & pleasant one you had better run a pen through it and let the paragraph end with the word ‘family abuses’” (LI.554). This sensitivity to market values is reflected again in the same letter in his comment that their mutual friend James Paulding should not “write himself below his real value by hasty effusions” (LI.555). Irving's own position was spelt out that October, when he told Scott “the reverses of fortune I have experienced since I had the pleasure of Seeing You, make my literary success a matter of Serious importance to me” (LI.568), and asked him to sound out Constable regarding an English edition after Murray had turned The Sketch Book down. Scott responded very sympathetically, offering Irving the editorship of an anti-Jacobin magazine in Edinburgh with a salary of £500 a year, which he declined gratefully. He then asked Scott to press Constable for a decision, ending in a way that underscored the extent to which his mind turned to material considerations: “And now my dear Sir I will finish this egotistical scrawl by again expressing my heartfelt gratification at the interest you have taken in my concerns—and believe me I feel more joy and rejoicing in your good opinion than I should in all the Gold & Silver in friend Constables breeches pockets—albeit his pockets are none of the shallowest” (LI.570).

The construction of the sentence—reflecting an almost compulsive preoccupation with money—is a measure of the distance Irving had travelled during the gestation and composition of The Sketch Book. Together with his revision of the “John Bull” sketch, and desire only to play the flute in the national orchestra, it suggests the extent to which a conjunction of material and cultural pressures caused him to surrender or compromise both his creative autonomy and sense of national identity, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary. Fenimore Cooper's first novel, Precaution, a genteel, English, comedy of manners published in 1820, was apparently similarly intimidated, but his second, The Spy, set during the War of Independence and published in 1821, embraced the American subject and was enthusiastically received. Indeed, after Irving had been recognized in England, no major American author would seem to have felt obliged to pander to the European market as he had done. While The Sketch Book probably gained as much as it lost from the compromises Irving forced upon himself—resulting as they did in the unique blend of European and American materials and perspectives—the same cannot be said of his subsequent output. None of the books which followed—Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, his biography of Columbus, his Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, or The Alhambra—lived up to his early promise or sparkle. By the early 1830s, John Murray would come to feel that Irving had written himself out, although he did subsequently find a new American lease of life in A Tour on the Prairies. While the tangle of reasons behind the change in his literary fortunes cannot fully be unravelled, in opening to himself his “avenue to some degree of profit and reputation,” with all the compromises this entailed, Irving could of necessity have had little inkling where it might lead.

Notes

1. Washington Irving Letters Volume I 1802-23 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 614. Hereafter LI. Angled brackets are used in quotations in order to identify revisions made by Irving.

2. North American Review, I (Nov. 1815), 35. Hereafter NAR.

3. Cited in Benjamin Lease, Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 0000), 3.

4. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 1. Hereafter SB.

5. Edinburgh Review, 34 (Aug. 1820), 162. Hereafter ER.34.

6. Washington Irving Journals and Notebooks, Vol. 1 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 456. Hereafter JI.

7. Macbeth II.iv.12.

8. The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) Canto 1, stanza LXIX. Hereafter CI.

9. The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford University Press, 1987), The General Prologue, Line 200. Hereafter GP.

10. Washington Irving Journals and Notebooks, Vol. II 1807-22 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 61. Hereafter JII.

11. English Hours (London: William Heinemann, 1905), 201.

12. Charlecote and the Lucys, Alice Fairfax-Lucy (London, 1958), 224-27.

13. See illustrations.

14. LI.432.

15. Observations Relating Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1772), 232.

16. The Vicar of Wakefield (London: Heron Books), 158.

17. The Story of Rimini, Canto III.257-58.

18. LI.353.

19. The Old Wives' Tale, 1595, George Peele (Manchester University Press 1980) lines 80-81.

20. This was a monthly collection of European periodical literature which Irving edited during the 1812-14 war.