The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read online

  WASHINGTON IRVING

  Washington Irving, America’s first internationally acclaimed man of letters and the father of the American short story, was born in New York City on April 3, 1783. He was the eleventh and youngest child of a prosperous merchant who had emigrated to the United States from Scotland. Though he grew up in a strict Presbyterian household that valued the Puritan ethic of hard work, Irving experienced a pampered childhood and received but a fragmentary education. As a teenager he delighted in exploring the lower Hudson Valley, an area that would later figure prominently in his writing. Instead of following his older brothers to Columbia College, Irving read books on history and travel, and was especially drawn to the social satire of Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais. In 1802, while clerking in a Manhattan law office, he wrote a series of comic reports on theater, fashion, and society that appeared in the New York Morning Chronicle under the signature of “Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent,” the first of many pseudonyms. Upon returning from a two-year tour of Europe, he collaborated on Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807-1808), a gossipy, irreverent potpourri which displayed a roguish style of satire and burlesque that invited comparison with the essays Addison and Steele had written for the Tatler and the Spectator.

  Irving’s reputation as a writer was greatly enhanced by A History of New York (1809), his first full-length book. Posing as Diedrich Knickerbocker, an absentminded professor of Dutch-American history, he offered up a boisterous spoof that lampooned the Dutch colonization of New York. After a brief period as editor of the Analectic Magazine, he moved to England in 1815 to work in a branch of his family’s import-export business. When the company declared bankruptcy three years later, Irving turned full-time to writing. The serial publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819 and 1820 made him a literary celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. He was lionized by English society and hailed by William Thackeray as “the first ambassador whom the New World of letters sent to the Old” Generally considered the finest example of Irving’s artistry, the collection of lightly humorous sketches, tales, and travel reminiscences contains his two best-known short stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” He subsequently capitalized on the popularity of The Sketch Book with several Geoffrey Crayon sequels, most of them evocative of European scenes and the European past, including Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824), The Alhambra (1832), and The Crayon Miscellany (1835). Irving’s career took a new direction with his appointment in 1826 as attaché to the American legation in Madrid. Turning his attention to nonfiction he soon completed A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and went on to write several other works based on Spanish themes, namely A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831), and Legends of the Conquest of Spain (1835).

  Irving returned to the United States in 1832 after an absence of seventeen years. A journey to the West exposed him to life on the frontier and inspired A Tour on the Prairies (1835) as well as two accounts of the western fur trade, Astoria (1836) and Adventures of Captain Bonneville(1837). From 1842 to 1846 he served as minister to Spain at the court of Isabella II. Afterwards he retired to Sunnyside, his home on the banks of the Hudson River near Tarrytown, New York. During the final decade of his life he turned out Oliver Goldsmith (1849), a biography of the English novelist and playwright; Mahomet and His Successors(1850), a chronicle of the Moslem empire; Wolfert’s Roost (1855), a collection of sketches and stories originally published in the Knickerbocker Magazine; and The Life of George Washington (1855-1859), a five-volume popular biography of his presidential namesake. Washington Irving died at Sunnyside on November 28, 1859, and was buried three days later at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown.

  In considering the enduring appeal of Irving’s most popular stories, Clifton Fadiman observed: “We find it hard to think of ‘Rip Van Winkle’ as a tale actually written by a real man named Washington Irving. We think of it instead as a folk tale that we seem to have known all our lives…. Irving made a work of art out of a simple and rather dull legend. Into it he put his feeling for an older, quieter, more innocent America which, even in his time, he knew would never come again. Into it he put his love for the mysterious mountains near his home, for the lordly Hudson that for many of us has some of the magic of the Mississippi. I think it’s the feeling for the past that makes this simple story cast such a spell. It seems to be about the childhood of our country, which we can never relive, except in fancy….’ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ has some of the same charm, but more humor and action, together with the attraction of a good ghost story…. [Both] should be read as Irving wrote them—in a relaxed, almost dreamy mood. They come out of the mists of far away and long ago, out of an era in our history when time seemed to stand still, when America drowsed peacefully, unaware of its great and stirring future” Richard Ellmann stated: “The first American short story, [‘Rip Van Winkle’] has become standard reading outside as well as inside the English-speaking world…. The subterranean power of this work made Rip Van Winkle… one of the great figures of the nineteenth-century imagination.”

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Note

  Introduction by Alice Hoffman

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  The Author’s Account of Himself

  The Voyage

  Roscoe

  The Wife

  Rip Van Winkle

  English Writers on America

  Rural Life in England

  The Broken Heart

  The Art of Book Making

  A Royal Poet

  The Country Church

  The Widow and Her Son

  A Sunday in London

  The Boar’s Head Tavern, East Cheap

  The Mutability of Literature

  Rural Funerals

  The Inn Kitchen

  The Spectre Bridegroom

  Westminster Abbey

  Christmas

  The Stage Coach

  Christmas Eve

  Christmas Day

  The Christmas Dinner

  London Antiques

  Little Britain

  Stratford-on-Avon

  Traits of Indian Character

  Philip of Pokanoket

  John Bull

  The Pride of the Village

  The Angler

  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

  L’Envoy

  Appendix: Sleepy Hollow

  Notes

  Reading Group Guide

  INTRODUCTION

  Alice Hoffman

  With the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1829), Washington Irving is believed by many to have created the genre of the short story in America, mixing superstition and history, the European tradition of fairy tales and folktales, and local Indian legends. The often humorous and ironic, but also matter-of-fact, tone in these stories, which is the familiar form of legend, is woven into a tapestry with the very real corporeal world. In Irving’s rural America, farmyards are filled with gobbling turkeys and guinea fowl, yet ghostly tales rule the imagination.

  The glorious heart of this collection of stories within stories, tales within tales, is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” This fable about a gullible schoolteacher who thinks quite highly of himself is also a lesson in the power of the imagination and of the potent influences of storytelling. And so it begins that Ichabod Crane journeys to one of the dreamy, bewitched villages in New York State’s Hudson Valley, adrowsy, enchanted region where even “good people… are given to all kinds of
marvellous beliefs; subject to trances and visions…. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land.”

  Ichabod Crane has both a runaway steed and a runaway imagination, but even his hunger for the marvelous is more than matched when he comes to this rural village where people have an enormous appetite for stories, particularly for those concerning the miraculous—whether they be “the twilight superstitions” that surround natural phenomena such as shooting stars and meteors, or stories of haunted bridges and haunted houses, and of a haunted horseman who long ago lost his head but not his fury.

  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” begins in the very real geography of upstate New York, a rich landscape of farms and fields that look down upon “the mighty Hudson,” an area peppered with towns whose names we can still find on the map. Irving is a master at depicting rustic life, and it is with a firm foothold in the natural world that the element of the supernatural is rooted. Nature itself, in Irving’s hands, has stupendous effects: “… to inhale the witching influences of the air and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions,” such are the results of living in a “spellbound” region so marvelous, anything seems conceivable within its confines.

  The inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow find their way to the dim and dusky world of the fantastic on very real roads, over very real bridges. Yet there is magic in the very air, especially for those who look beneath the surface of everyday life, beneath the brambles and alders, and for those who listen to what music echoes beyond the songs of crickets and bullfrogs. The mesmerizing effect this world of beast and bloom have upon the hapless Ichabod Crane is evident from the start:

  Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill side; the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech owl; or the sudden rustling in the thicket, of birds frightened from their roost. The fire flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’s token.

  In Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, the real and imagined collide, conspire, and become interchangeable. It is a land of contradiction that has an undercurrent of hellfire and mischief at its core. Perhaps it is human nature, however, rather than the doings of goblins and ghouls, that is most dangerous: For love can transform men into demons, and gluttony and greed can bring down even the most good-natured and foolish of men. What begins as a rivalry between Ichabod Crane and the local hero and practical joker, Brom Bones, as they vie for the hand of the lovely and wealthy Katrina Van Tassel, ends as a contest of the imagination. It is a brilliant, funny, and brutal battle, one which takes place in the characters’ minds as well as in the dark, unexplored woods.

  The books Irving’s schoolmaster carries with him on his journey—“Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanack, and a book of dreams and fortune telling”—stand together as a guidepost for all American literature to follow, from Hawthorne to Updike to Stephen King, plaiting images of our beloved landscape to our darkest dreams, and joining the reaches of our imaginations to the rugged roads we travel, the fields we walk upon, and the possibilities we find at every stony turn, especially when the hour reaches midnight in the village of Sleepy Hollow.

  ALICE HOFFMAN is the author of fourteen novels, including Practical Magic, Turtle Moon, Local Girls, Here on Earth, The River King, and Blue Diary. She lives in Massachusetts.

  PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

  The following papers, with two exceptions, were written in England, and formed but part of an intended series for which I had made notes and memorandums. Before I could mature a plan, however, circumstances compelled me to send them piecemeal to the United States, where they were published from time to time in portions or numbers. It was not my intention to publish them in England, being conscious that much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press.

  By the time the contents of the first volume had appeared in this occasional manner, they began to find their way across the Atlantic, and to be inserted, with many kind encomiums, in the London Literary Gazette. It was said, also, that a London bookseller intended to publish them in a collective form. I determined, therefore, to bring them forward myself, that they might at least have the benefit of my superintendence and revision. I accordingly took the printed numbers which I had received from the United States, to Mr. John Murray, the eminent publisher, from whom I had already received friendly attentions, and left them with him for examination, informing him that should he be inclined to bring them before the public, I had materials enough on hand for a second volume. Several days having elapsed without any communication from Mr. Murray, I addressed a note to him, in which I construed his silence into a tacit rejection of my work, and begged that the numbers I had left with him might be returned to me. The following was his reply.

  MY DEAR SIR,

  I entreat you to believe that I feel truly obliged by your kind intentions towards me, and that I entertain the most unfeigned respect for your most tasteful talents. My house is completely filled with workpeople at this time, and I have only an office to transact business in; and yesterday I was wholly occupied, or I should have done myself the pleasure of seeing you.

  If it would not suit me to engage in the publication of your present work, it is only because I do not see that scope in the nature of it which would enable me to make those satisfactory accounts between us, without which I really feel no satisfaction in engaging—but I will do all I can to promote their circulation, and shall be most ready to attend to any future plan of yours.

  With much regard, I remain, dear sir,

  Your faithful servant,

  JOHN MURRAY.

  This was disheartening, and might have deterred me from any further prosecution of the matter, had the question of republication in Great Britain rested entirely with me; but I apprehended the appearance of a spurious edition. I now thought of Mr. Archibald Constable as publisher, having been treated by him with much hospitality during a visit to Edinburgh; but first I determined to submit my work to Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott,1 being encouraged to do so by the cordial reception I had experienced from him at Abbotsford a few years previously, and by the favourable opinion he had expressed to others of my earlier writings. I accordingly sent him the printed numbers of the Sketch Book in a parcel by coach, and at the same time wrote to him, hinting that since I had had the pleasure of partaking of his hospitality, a reverse had taken place in my affairs which made the successful exercise of my pen all important to me; I begged him, therefore, to look over the literary articles I had forwarded to him, and, if he thought they would bear European republication, to ascertain whether Mr. Constable would be inclined to be the publisher.

  The parcel containing my work went by coach to Scott’s address in Edinburgh; the letter went by mail to his residence in the country. By the very first post I received a reply, before he had seen my work. “I was down at Kelso,” said he, “when your letter reached Abbotsford. I am now on my way to town, and will converse with Constable, and do all in my power to forward your views—I assure you nothing will give me more pleasure.”

  The hint, however, about a reverse of fortune had struck the quick apprehension of Scott, and, with that practical and efficient good will which belonged to his nature, he had already devised a way of aiding me. A weekly periodical, he went on to inform me, was about to be set up in Edinburgh, supported by the most respectable tale
nts, and amply furnished with all the necessary information. The appointment of the editor, for which ample funds were provided, would be five hundred pounds sterling a year, with the reasonable prospect of further advantages. This situation, being apparently at his disposal, he frankly offered to me. The work, however, he intimated, was to have somewhat of a political bearing, and he expressed an apprehension that the tone it was desired to adopt might not suit me. “Yet I risk the question,” added he, “because I know no man so well qualified for this important task, and perhaps because it will necessarily bring you to Edinburgh. If my proposal does not suit, you need only keep the matter secret and there is no harm done. ‘And for my love I pray you wrong me not.’ If on the contrary you think it could be made to suit you, let me know as soon as possible, addressing Castle street, Edinburgh.”

  In a postscript, written from Edinburgh, he adds, “I am just come here, and have glanced over the Sketch Book. It is positively beautiful, and increases my desire to crimp2 you, if it be possible. Some difficulties there always are in managing such a matter, especially at the outset; but we will obviate them as much as we possibly can.”

  The following is from an imperfect draught of my reply, which underwent some modifications in the copy sent.

  “I cannot express how much I am gratified by your letter. I had begun to feel as if I had taken an unwarrantable liberty; but, somehow or other, there is a genial sunshine about you that warms every creeping thing into heart and confidence. Your literary proposal both surprises and flatters me, as it evinces a much higher opinion of my talents than I have myself.”

  I then went on to explain that I found myself peculiarly unfitted for the situation offered to me, not merely by my political opinions, but by the very constitution and habits of my mind. “My whole course of life,” I observed, “has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weather cock. Practice and training may bring me more into rule; but at present I am as useless for regular service as one of my own country Indians, or a Don Cossack.3