This group, which often used the totems, quintessential images, and “authentic” rhetoric of Irving’s New York themes in their own portraits of the city and its countryside, included Irving’s early collaborator James Kirke Paulding, Giulian Verplanck (like Paulding, one of few “Knickerbocker” writers of genuine Dutch descent), Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of Knickerbocker magazine, and the poets William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck. Unfortunately, few of the disciples of Irving who wrote under the “Knickerbocker” umbrella inherited his feverish imagination or his talent for portraying local color, and their works seem dated and damp in comparison. Many of these writers were present at Irving’s funeral in 1859, at which mourners packed the little Episcopal church in Tarrytown nearly to bursting and left a thousand more to gather outside, waiting for the chance to pay the author their last respects. Strangely, few of Irving’s memorializers take note of the rambling, possibly deranged fictional historian who charmed the world and brought the author his early fame. “The genial products of his pure and graceful pen will forever continue to afford a solace to the sick and weary,” Daniel F. Tiemann, the mayor of New York, noted in a leaden public tribute, while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “In the Churchyard at Tarrytown” mourned him as the “gentle humorist, who died in the bright Indian Summer of his fame!” But as Andrew B. Myers points out, Longfellow neglected to mention that Irving’s “simple stone, with but a date and name” was actually a replacement head-stone: the first had been vandalized beyond repair by inconsolable readers, making Irving’s grave the nineteenth-century equivalent of the tomb of Jim Morrison at Père-Lachaise. These shards had not been chipped off in memory of the biographer of Columbus or John Jacob Astor, but for the creator of Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, and for their biographer, Diedrich Knickerbocker. In a city with more stories than the Arabian Nights, a fictional Dutchman was its first and best Scheherazade.

 

New York is still imbued with Knickerbocker, even if most of its citizens no longer know who Diedrich Knickerbocker was. A consciousness of all things Knickerbocker hovers at the edges of the city’s everyday life. In the last century, “Father Knickerbocker” supervised the consolidation of New York into five boroughs; promoted the New Deal; and, until recently, marketed Knickerbocker Beer: “New York’s Famous Beer.” Today, New Yorkers routinely cheer teams, cross avenues, visit dry cleaners, frequent restaurants, and belong to clubs named Knickerbocker. Yet “Knickerbocker,” thus divorced from its context, has been reduced to a comical moniker, a Dutch-inflected sound. This may be the result of Irving’s banishment from academe: by 1933 Carl Van Doren could assert that Irving’s reputation had “shrunk and faded” without fear of contradiction, and few contemporary scholars and literary critics have bothered to investigate the proto-postmodern innovations of the History, or to grapple with the implications of his founding mythologies, even as they celebrate the same inventive qualities in such subsequent American writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. But this oversight in no way diminishes the larger, lasting significance of Irving’s historian, whose “curious kind of a written book” marked the creation of a genre that persists to this day: the genre of the New York Story. The combination of delight and mockery that marked the History has become the vernacular of centuries of New York storytelling: regardless of the medium, all of its chroniclers share a belief in the singularity of the New York experience, and a mission to share this experience with the larger world. Readers everywhere take it for granted that New York City warrants all the encomiums, epithets, nicknames, and slogans that have been showered on it, and demand to be told more. What other city could at once be Walt Whitman’s “Mighty Manhattan,” Kander and Ebb’s “city that never sleeps,” and J. J. Hunsecker’s “dirty town”? Knickerbocker was not only the first narrator to identify this market: he was the architect of the market itself. “A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,” Walt Whitman would write in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “others will see the islands, large and small” that made up his beloved New York. His hymn to the city, and those “a hundred years hence,” are made possible not by the ferry, but by the example of Washington Irving, who built New York’s first literary bridge.

 

ELIZABETH L. BRADLEY

Suggestions for Further Reading

Aderman, Ralph M., ed. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Avery, Kevin J. “Selling the Sublime and Beautiful: Landscape and Tourism.” Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Burstein, Andrew.