Knickerbocker Writers

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KNICKERBOCKER WRITERS

For many literary historians early nineteenth-century American literature is synonymous with the outburst of creative thought and experimentation that F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950) called the "American Renaissance," reflected in groundbreaking works by Herman Melville (1819–1891), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Among the bold experiments of these writers were Whitman's challenge to traditional prosody, Melville's joining of metaphysical speculation to maritime narrative, and Thoreau's invention of a new genre of "poetic natural history." A set of more conservative impulses lay behind a group of nineteenth-century writers who celebrated New York's past and its local traditions. While businesspeople and entrepreneurs championed the commercial prospects of America's largest urban centers, Washington Irving (1783–1859) led a group of New York authors whose satires, histories, and sketches chronicled the city, its past, and its environs.

THE SCHOOL OF IRVING

When he was in his early twenties, Irving had already spent two years in Europe. An inveterate traveler, he stockpiled stories associated with sites in England and the Continent. As he developed his observations of Europe into a colorful form of descriptive writing, his perspective sharpened his attachment to continuity between Old World values and American culture. Irving's early works reflected the influence of the witty, gossipy style of the classic British essayists of the former century. His early literary efforts were also collaborative ventures, establishing the sociable and cordial tone of subsequent New York writers for whom Irving became a model. With his brother William Irving and the young James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860), Irving produced Salmagundi (1807–1808), an occasional periodical in which the collaborators posed as club members who discussed politics, manners, and the life of the town. Other works were similarly infused with the town spirit of Old New York: Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill's The Picture of New-York (1807) recalled the glory days of the burgher aristocracy, and The Croaker Papers (1819) of Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867) and Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820) constituted a Salmagundi in poetic form.

For his own burlesque A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), Irving chose the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, an amateur historian who delves into the past in a spirit of lighthearted celebration. Irving announced one of his central purposes in a preface that he eventually added to the volume: "to clothe home scenes and places and familiar names with those imaginative associations so seldom met with in our own countr y, but which live like charms and old spells about the cities of the old world" (p. 13). On the rare occasion that parts of this clever history are anthologized, Irving's later chapters on Peter Stuyvesant or his rather obvious satire on Thomas Jefferson are usually chosen, but the History pokes fun at the presumptuousness and pretenses of American and European historians alike. This volume, which has been overshadowed by The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), established the tone for the Knickerbocker group of writers, who would dominate New York's cultural scene until well after the Civil War.

In "The Author's Account of Himself " for The Sketch Book, Irving introduced Geoffrey Crayon, a roving bachelor who sought out the picturesque corners and grand monuments of Europe. The "author" Crayon used Diedrich Knickerbocker to frame his two most celebrated narratives, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Rip and the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow are overtaken by the inevitable progress and bustling commerce that was sweeping through New York, just as the saturnine Dutchmen in Knickerbocker's History are displaced by invading and acquisitive Yankees. As a young New Yorker, Irving had visited his friend Paulding at Tarrytown on the banks of the Hudson and absorbed legends and superstitions that he would incorporate into his most famous volume. Irving's travels to England had served to reinforce his attraction to gothic ruins and buildings, and his sojourn in Germany fortified his appetite for tales of ghosts, inexplicable happenings, and hidden mysteries. All these features influenced the mood of The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall (1822), set in an old manor house where customs and values forgotten in urban venues survived in the countryside. These early works established the central themes of much Knickerbocker literature that followed: the collision between tradition and progress in the new nation and the subtle interconnections between European and American culture.

Knickerbocker writers, steeped in the neoclassical traditions of wit and satire, were also attracted to figures who were leaders of the Romantic movement in Great Britain: Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Campbell. Several Knickerbocker writers were New Englanders by birth—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), Halleck, Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867), and Samuel Woodworth (1785–1842)—but their literary careers reached maturity in New York, as did that of Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879), who arrived in the city in 1821 to commence publication of The Idle Man, a periodical modeled after The Sketch Book. Among other writers sometimes associated with Knickerbocker culture—Charles Fenno Hoffman, William Leggett, and Park Benjamin—the shadow of Irving was all but inescapable, whether his narrative voice and strategies were exploited, burlesqued, or imitated outright.

CLUBS, THE THEATER, AND JOURNALISM

The Knickerbocker school of writers was loosely organized, but many of them socialized in private clubs. Throughout the early part of the nineteenth century, numerous private clubs and voluntary organizations had sprung up, and they helped to define and shape cultural activity. The "club-mania" of the era, as one periodical defined it, brought together individuals of similar intellectual interests and tastes. Perhaps the most famous literary organization in New York was the Bread and Cheese Club, founded by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) in 1822. Irving became an honorary member in 1826, and some of the club's members gravitated toward the Sketch Club, many participants in which were painters. The Literary Confederacy, founded in 1817 by Bryant and Gulian Verplanck, was a book club that encouraged its members to write for periodicals. Halleck became poet laureate of the Ugly Club, a social fraternity of the city's most handsome men. Others found fellowship in the Book Club or the Union Club, precursors either to emerging professional societies or to a host of organizations that imitated the urban sophistication of English clubs. Several Knickerbockers were merchants or businesspeople, and for respite from the commercial culture of New York, they sought out the relaxed atmosphere of taverns and cafés or the polite atmosphere of private literary salons, where musicians, artists, and poets gathered in a spirit of informal social exchange. The writer Anne Lynch presided as a hostess at many of these prominent literary soirees in the 1840s.

Many Knickerbockers were devotees of the theater, and William Dunlap (1766–1839), as manager of the Park Theatre, was instrumental in bringing serious drama to New York. Dunlap, an authority on scenic design, favored American plays, but he also introduced German and French plays to American audiences. "There is no place of public amusement of which I am so fond as the Theatre," wrote Irving, introducing a pseudonymous piece, in 1802 (Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, p. 10). By the early 1820s he was a silent partner in dramatic collaborations with John Howard Payne (1791–1852), an experienced dramatist and actor who had appeared on the London stage. In addition to Payne, Paulding, Willis, and Woodworth, New Yorkers who had plays produced before 1840 included Samuel Judah, Anna Mowatt Ritchie, Mordecai M. Noah, George Pope Morris, and Cornelius Mathews.

Just as the club atmosphere of the period stimulated informal literary and social interchange, the theater offered Knickerbocker writers access to the lively world of playwrights, actors, and artists. The vastly expanding newspaper and magazine trade offered further opportunities for writers who supported themselves by editing or contributing to periodicals. Irving's early education in and affection for the theater was formed in his Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1824), written for the Morning Chronicle, a daily paper edited by his brother Peter Irving. Payne's interest in theatrical matters was manifested in the Thespian Mirror, a weekly review that began in 1805. Woodworth wrote successfully for the theater, and after brief editorial stints with periodicals in New England, he and George Pope Morris began the New-York Mirror in 1823. This periodical, which was devoted to life in the city in all its cultural variety, survived changes of nearly two decades. Morris served as its primary editor until 1842.

Knickerbocker journalism was never impersonal, and Lewis Gaylord Clark (1808–1873) dominated the content and tone of the Knickerbocker when he became its editor in 1834. The magazine took its name from Irving's Knickerbocker History, and it served as the primary organ for the dissemination of the literary and cultural values among this group of writers. Infused with Irving's amiable or genial humor, contributors to the Knickerbocker stressed tone and atmosphere rather than the intricacies of plot. Prose works were highly descriptive, and many early stories were strongly influenced by Irving's framing devices and his tale-within-a-tale techniques. A typical issue might include fiction, sketches, verse, humor, and reviews. Travel writing was also a staple of the magazine: Irving's "Sketches in Paris in 1825," for example, appeared in the magazine in November and December 1840.

Wholesome subject matter was standard fare, reflecting the temperamental conservatism of the editor, who shunned any material that might be offensive to literary taste or his genteel sensibility. Any writing that smacked of foreign corruption was scorned—the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton seemed to Clark to convey a tone of decadence, and the Knickerbocker struck a generally patriotic tone in its early years. Despite this moderately nationalistic flavor, the English essay tradition of Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt was a strong stylistic influence on Clark and contributed an urbane and cosmopolitan quality to the magazine. If for clarity of style Clark preferred the transparency of the English essay tradition to the vagueness of the transcendentalists, a British counterpart to Irving was Charles Lamb (1775–1834), whose genial, playful, and compassionate tone was celebrated by Clark and other Knickerbocker contributors. In an essay on humor written for the magazine, Frederick S. Cozzens (1818–1869), reflecting the influence of Lamb, distinguished the intellectual appeal of wit from the warmth and pathos employed by the humorist. Cozzens, who wrote for the Knickerbocker throughout Clark's editorship, adapted these principles in The Sparrowgrass Papers (1856), sketches of New Yorkers who experiment with living in the country on the banks of the Hudson. The sketches of Cozzens and Frederick W. Shelton, whose Up the River (1853) had its origin in the Knickerbocker, offered the attraction of rural life to the growing urban readership of the magazine. The appeal was to New York suburbanites who might venture outside the city on tours or vacations.

LATTER-DAY KNICKERBOCKERS

The Knickerbocker Gallery (1855), a collection of stories, poems, and essays by friends of the editor, paid homage to Clark. The magazine survived until the 1860s, but even before that time much of its writing took on a predictably sentimental cast, infused with an Irving-esque afterglow. If the values championed by Irving and Clark survived, they surfaced in works like Cozzens's The Sayings of Dr. Bushwhacker, and Other Learned Men (1867) in which a bushy-headed old Knickerbocker offers strong opinions on inoffensive topics. Many Knickerbocker writers—Halleck, Cozzens, Richard Burleigh Kimball—divided their time between business and literary pursuits, and by the 1870s, their passion for the past, overtaken by New York's rampant commercialism, was reduced to pure nostalgia. Many of them wrote memoirs of English or American literary figures that were central to the fashioning of a Knickerbocker literary tradition. Others resorted to Irving's technique of burlesque, but many of these strategies appeared derivative or reliant on targets that had lost their currency. The jesting, genial tone of Knickerbocker writing—buoyed by the economic and social forces that shaped New York's emerging literary culture in the early part of the century—did not outlast the conditions that engendered it. After the Civil War a few Knickerbocker writers still won ready acceptance from reviewers and magazine editors even if pioneers such as Irving and Cooper had passed from the literary scene. A respectful but nostalgic tone colors such works as James Grant Wilson's Bryant, and His Friends: Some Reminiscences of the Knickerbocker Writers (1886); Abram C. Dayton's Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York (1882); and Hamilton Wright Mabie's The Writers of Knickerbocker New York (1912). In Edith Wharton's stories of Old New York, the Knickerbocker Club receives passing mention as a once-vital aspect of a vanished social scene.

Irving was the first American author to be hailed in England, and his Sketch Book did much to transform foreign attitudes toward American writing. Clark's editorial hand served to reinforce the Anglo-American lineage by welcoming British authors in the pages of the Knickerbocker. Although Knickerbocker writers were not pioneers in literary practice, they stand at the forefront of what Malcolm Bradbury calls a "transatlantic" dimension in American letters.

See alsoNew York; Young America