Abstracts by speaker (in alphabetical order)
Curtis Armstrong
“An Actor Relives an Irving Tale or Two: Curtis Armstrong Enters the Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap”
Washington Irving’s love of the theater is no secret. Some of his earliest writing centers on theatergoing. He indulged the same passion when he subsequently collaborated with playwright John Howard Payne. In the Sketch Book, Irving shared with readers his love of theater––and of Shakespeare. Despite the passage of time, two such pieces, “Stratford-on-Avon” and “The Boars Head Tavern, East Cheap: A Shakespearean Research,” afford a 21st-century pilgrim every opportunity for a revisit. I recently embarked upon a “bicentennial” investigation, treading in the footsteps of Washington Irving, only the learn I was not the first to attempt it.
Thomas Augst
“Bookishness, Then and Now”
I ask what Irving’s sketch, “The Art Of Book-Making,” can teach us about the historical meaning of texts in relation to the material and social forms of their making. If the Sketch Book was an American milestone in the emergence of a professional literary culture in the Atlantic world, it also represented a critique of the “bookishness” of European romanticism. Although the printed word was maturing as an industrial medium of mass communication, Irving depicted the act of writing as an artisanal craft, and compared the process of publication with a gypsy’s trade in random goods. In such anachronistic images of literary enterprise, Irving sought to transcend his era’s interest in the originality of authors, and contrasted the endurance promised by the form of the books with the ephemerality of their content. As he describes the authors at work in the British Library, Geoffrey Crayon reminds us of the debts that every writer owes to other writers, as well as the seemingly organic process by which writers pick apart and remix the matter of their reading. In a library promising to shelter books from the ravages of time, Irving imagines their perpetual un-making, a kind of authorship appropriate to the digital age—cutting, pasting, scrolling, and publishing at the scale of the human eye and hand.
Matthew Dennis
“Irving’s Relicts”
From the 15th century, relict (a variation of relic) indicated a widow, though by the 17th century it applied to both sexes, designating a surviving partner. In 1824, while Irving was abroad, basking in the success of the Sketch Book on two continents, the Revolutionary hero Marquis de Lafayette sailed into New York Harbor, four decades after having last seen the U.S. He arrived to acclaim and veneration not seen since George Washington rode into the same city. Irving effectively anticipated the Lafayette phenomenon in “Rip Van Winkle”––Rip is an object of wonder upon his return to the village. Whereas Lafayette was an animate, material embodiment of the country’s mythic founding, Rip has a humble stature, and his reception is suitably humble; thus in most ways he is the perfect opposite of the Frenchman. Except that both were relicts––revered survivors, the living incarnation of the past in the present. Beyond Rip, there’s Diedrich Knickerbocker’s imagined manuscript, the spectral and corporeal remains of Sleepy Hollow’s slain Hessian soldier, and the haunting corpse of Major André, who had slept for decades only to be resurrected in 1821 (not to life but for honorific re-interment at Westminster Abby). Dreamy, imagined materiality was key in the consolidation of American public memory and identity, giving it form and an odd authenticity.
Amy S. Greenberg
“Irving’s Tales in Political Relief”
As President-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) and the author of five books on nineteenth-century America, Professor Greenberg offers an overview of the political scene.
Catalina Hannan
“The Curious Family Man: Four Generations of Washington Irving’s Family”
The author, a lifelong bachelor, was the youngest in a large family. Most of his siblings produced large families in turn. The Library Collections of Historic Hudson Valley hold correspondence, journal materials, legal documents, and photographs of generations of these people. We learn from them how the author––as a brother, as an uncle, and as a tireless networker––benefited his family. He saw to it that his home, Sunnyside, continued as a family haven. The Library’s collections include unpublished materials that contain insights into that intimate world in the shadow of celebrity.
Tracy Hoffman
“Listening to the Voices of the Sketch Book”
Because of its universal themes, The Sketch Book provides an outlet for deep, philosophical discussions relevant to the twenty-first century. Rip Van Winkle’s twenty-year nap through the American Revolution gives us opportunity to consider issues such as the effects of war, disengagement from politics, and individual freedom. The Sketch Book opens up history in other unexpected ways––Ichabod Crane, for example, epitomizes the Connecticut Yankee of the early nineteenth century. The book also invites contemporary race-based criticism, a gender critique, disability considerations, and more. It works well in the classroom when read in conjunction with other texts: Irving’s “Philip of Pokanoket” alongside Mary Rowlandson’s King Philip; Ichabod Crane paired with Hank Morgan, Mark Twain’s “Connecticut Yankee”; Katrina Van Tassel and Hannah Webster Foster’s coquette, Eliza Wharton; and Phillis Wheatley’s heroic George Washington contrasts with Irving’s “metamorphosed” General Washington.
Nancy Isenberg
“A Natural Aristocracy or a Nagging Wife? The Class Politics of Washington Irving”
To a significant degree, the Sketch Book is a study of British and American manners. Like Addison and Steele’s famed Spectator sketches, a century old when he wrote, Irving sought to capture the customs, superstitions, and habits of everyday life. Class relations are at the center of several tales, inevitably focusing on importance of the right marriage and proper breeding. In “Rural Funerals,” Irving admiringly depicts the old English country elite, comfortable in their skin, as they avoid the vulgarity and snobbery of the nouveau riche. A similar tension emerges in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” wherein Ichabod Crane dreams of marrying a wealthy landowner’s daughter. The schoolmaster doesn’t hope to be lord of the manor, but only fantasizes carrying his new wife to a farm in the backwoods of Kentucky or Tennessee. Because he is a man without grace or style, Ichabod fails to win the hand of Katrina Van Tassel. And he lacks the gentlemanly skill of horsemanship, plodding along on a borrowed plow-horse, while his tormentor, Brom Van Brunt, is an agile rider. And what of the failed marriage of Rip Van Winkle? A lazy lubber with a nagging wife, Rip falls asleep (a classic sign of low-class idleness), awakening to a future where a spent man needs his doting daughter to care for him. Men may dream, but few obtained fame, riches, or the perfect wife.
Alexis McCrossen
“Melancholy Measures of the Passage of Time: Irving’s Rendering of Christmases and Sundays”
Deploying the two most important timekeeping devices of his age, the clock and the calendar, Irving constructed a “temporal sensorium” that conjured past times and lost time. Foregrounding Sundays and Christmas, he built for readers a sense of how holy days and holidays looked, smelled, and tasted. In the romanticized past of London Sundays, country Christmases, and Stratford-On-Avon, Irving masterfully appropriates clock time. None of the seven clocks in Irving’s sketches convey clock time, but (in his words) “gave token to the slowly waning day,” or were “like a billow” rolling “us onward toward the grave.” Curiously, not one of Irving’s characters carries a pocket watch, the most prevalent timekeeping device in Anglo-America in his time. In Irving’s sketches, the sound rather than the look of time draws attention to the melancholy of time’s passage.
Aaron Ritzenberg
“Irving and the Moral Sense”
The Sketch Book has been delighting readers with its energy, its good cheer, and its humor, all in the face of social upheaval, dark mystery, and even trauma. Yet some critics dismiss it as if it lacks seriousness or philosophical rigor. I take up the question by concentrating on its moments of sentiment—on the language Irving used to describe and evoke feeling. At instants when the author seems to be least philosophically inclined—when he concentrates on the heart rather than the head—he may have been engaged with some of the most influential philosophical ideas of the 18th century. The moral sense philosophers of the time regarded sentiment not as antithetical to philosophy but as central to a complex set of ideas about sympathy and social cohesion. What happens when we take Irving’s sentimental language seriously? Perhaps the language of feeling actually takes up some of the very ideas most central to American democracy.
Richard Robinson
“Teaching the Sketch Book”
I shall approach Irving by exploring what twenty-first-century pedagogies can do not only to make Irving culturally accessible and applicable to students’ own experiences in our time, but also to help those students to feel empowered to make meaning of Irving’s writing for themselves. Working from the conceit that we know best what we teach, I shall re-examine my own convictions about the relative depth or quaintness of Irving’s Sketch Book, and come to some conclusions about Irving’s “teachability” in 2020.
Shirley Samuels
“The Tourist Who Gets Bored Easily: The Sketch as a Genre”
The reputation of many American authors in the early nineteenth century rested on the production of a sketch or a travelogue, genres that no longer have the same standing in literary circles. The persona produced in each refers to a sort of flaneur, a collector of tales, involving a lightness of touch that is also a lighting upon the landscape in the mode of a tourist. In the Sketch Book, Irving is an attentive tourist, yet one who easily becomes bored. In the episode where he wanders into the Reading Room at the British Museum, he recounts a fantasy whereby he falls asleep and all the portraits come alive. The underlying resentment about appropriations from the past that resemble plagiarism and the lack of an international copyright law to protect American authors seems to haunt his fantasy, a fantasy that abruptly ends when his laughter causes the room to come to a shocked halt and a guard to chase him away for lack of papers. I investigate the genre of the sketch as a mode that attracted writers from Irving to Hawthorne, examining the problematic stance of a narrator who cannot settle down, and who, like Rip Van Winkle, often sleeps through history.
Michelle Sizemore
“The Rites and Times of the Grand Tour”
In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were still powerfully attached to the pan-Atlantic identity forged by the British Empire. They faced a problem at once political and cultural: how to claim a relationship with Britain while extracting themselves from the comparative framework that always situated them as inferiors. This very question weighed on Irving’s mind as he sailed to England in 1815. A work of American travel writing, the Sketch Book showcases the rites of the Grand Tour, particularly literary pilgrimage, as means to demonstrate U.S. competence for political sovereignty and to explore the mystical communion between the Old and New World. Examining the little-known sketches, “Stratford-Upon-Avon” and “A Royal Poet,” we glean an alternate understanding of the American people. They are not a group of individuals in the here and now but a constellation of changing relations reaching backward and forward in time.
Steven Carl Smith
“Cornelius Van Winkle and His Ilk: the Printers and Publishers of New York ”
I focus on the dramatic growth of New York’s publishing trade from the onset of the American Revolution to 1820. I depict the world in which Irving published the first American edition of the Sketch Book and show how Cornelius Van Winkle, Charles Wiley, and their contemporaries helped transform the city’s trade from a handful of printers and booksellers huddled near Hanover Square in 1775 to a thriving print marketplace that began to rival that of Boston and Philadelphia. The dozens of printers, booksellers, and publishers who walked the streets of Manhattan in 1820 imagined––and indeed created––a robust trade that helped satisfy the new nation’s desire for print, building important trade and distribution networks across regional boundaries that made texts like the Sketch Book available to the masses.
David Waldstreicher
“Irving’s American Revolution and the Signs of a New Era”
Rip Van Winkle famously sleeps through the Revolution, only to awaken and discover how much has changed. For two hundred years readers have mulled what Irving meant to say: that the Revolution was revolutionizing, modern? That life went on as before in rural towns, and that some things, like the dreams of henpecked husbands, never change? I will compare the actual depiction and implications of the Revolution in the Sketch Book to the writings of Irving’s contemporaries. Did Irving somehow blur the distinctions between the Revolution and the War of 1812 (sometimes referred to as a second American Revolution)? Had a new era arrived that altered the way the Revolution was understood? And was its result now seen as worrisome or ambiguous, no longer as an outright victory?
Erik Weiselberg
“Independence Day and Halloween in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’”
Irving incorporated into his enduring tale of the headless horseman significant people, locations and themes drawn from the history of the Revolutionary War in Tarrytown and Westchester County. How did this region become associated in the American calendar with Halloween, and not with Independence Day? The answer involves, at least in part, Major John André, once the personification of a struggle between patriotism and betrayal; as well as the 20th century’s twin obsessions with entertainment and consumerism. What is lost, what is gained, in the process of appropriation? What would Irving think about later amendments to the legend he’d spun? How can an appreciation of the original text inform our future celebrations of Halloween?
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
“Beyond Fezziwig’s Ball and Bracebridge Hall: Dickens and Irving”
Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol owes a large debt to Washington Irving’s Sketchbook. Scholars rightly note that Dickens admired Irving enormously, writing fan mail from England and making a pilgrimage to visit the older author when he came to the United States. Dickens’s depiction of an old-fashioned Christmas with merry-making and mistletoe in A Christmas Carol and in The Pickwick Papers draws heavily from Irving’s descriptions, so much so that we can say that the man who invented Christmas may really have just borrowed it. But there are many more interesting points of connection between Dickens and Irving to explore beyond the question of direct influence of one great writer on another. How does Dickens’s changing the location of Irving’s nostalgic Christmas from a country manor to a London warehouse alter its significance? What does Dickens’s homage/appropriation of Irving reveal about both authors’ work? In what ways does their shared interest in the supernatural matter? Nineteenth-century theaters adapted the two authors’ stories often and occasionally in tandem: So, how do these dramatizations (on both sides of the Atlantic) comment on connections between the authors’ fiction?
