It was written, moreover, at a time when some Americans suspected British writers and critics of a concerted effort to denigrate the new republic and its literature.

Structurally the miscellany seems to aspire to be something more than its fragmented self. We continually notice Crayon’s consciousness of himself as a writer or, we might more appropriately say, maker of books. Not that this alleged author/editor matches the blatant ego(ec)centricity of an earlier Irving persona, the addlepated Diedrich Knickerbocker, who keeps interrupting his own narrative, The History of New York, with ludicrous complaints about how hard it is to make a great book out of very little material. But Crayon’s fantastic encounters with old texts in “The Art of Book Making” and “The Mutability of Literature” reveal a curious anxiety about authorship. Indeed we may ask ourselves what The Sketch Book would be without its quenchless flood of direct quotations from, and oblique allusions to, early authors (mostly British) great and small, to say nothing of the Bible (see the Notes to this edition), without its frequent comments on authors and texts, above all without Crayon’s pilgrimages to the Boar’s Head Tavern and Stratford-on-Avon, along with his need, in the face of the frequent reminders he has of the “mutability” of earthly things, to hold firm to the idea of Shakespeare’s universal appeal.

Irving had been living and traveling in England for almost five years when he brought the work out, but his actual experience of the country is filtered through the screen of Crayon’s obsessive bookishness. Surprisingly, contemporary readers in both the old world and the new responded positively to this nostalgic intertwining of imagination and reality, past and present, although being exposed to a past that republicanism had in theory discarded may have been disconcerting to some Americans of English descent.

Finally to all this oddity we must add the text’s publishing history. As Irving explains in the “Preface to the Revised Edition,” The Sketch Book appeared first in the United States in a series of seven installments or numbers, not all of which were in print before it was published complete in two volumes in London. The work was well received in both countries, but it was the British reviews, hailing The Sketch Book as the first genuinely distinguished specimen of imaginative writing by an American, that were decisive. British contempt for American literature had reached a climax in January, 1820, only two months before the first volume of The Sketch Book appeared in England, when the celebrated clergyman, reformer, and wit Sydney Smith asked in a great flourish in The Edinburgh Review, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Sensitive to British opinion in cultural matters, Americans had long been angered and embarrassed by such taunts. Yet at that very moment British reviews were already praising Irving’s work-in-progress. Only seven months later The Edinburgh Review itself was predicting that The Sketch Book would “form an era in the literature of the nation to which it belongs.”

And so it did. An international celebrity almost overnight, Irving now found himself fully in the business of writing books. Previously no American author had been able to earn a decent living by literary labor alone. But with Irving’s success, certain psychological barriers seemed to weaken. Having awarded high praise to one American author, British critics began to find other American books generally more acceptable, a development which encouraged American readers to take native authors more seriously. High literacy rates in the United States and a rapidly expanding economy gave magazine and book publishers a lucrative market. Before long other American writers were able to support themselves by the pen. Where they followed Irving’s lead and secured a separate English copyright for their works, they had a good chance of increasing their profits. His accomplishment thus established professional authorship as a real option for Americans.

Thirty-six years old when the book came out, Irving had been a writer on and off since he was nineteen, though he had published nothing in his own name. It was an open secret in New York City, his hometown, that he was the author or coauthor of letters by “Jonathan Oldstyle” (1802-03) in the New York Morning Chronicle, of the comic periodical (Salmagundi (1807-08), and of Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809). Richard H. Dana, Sr., reviewing the still incomplete Sketch Book in The North American Review in 1819, seemed to take it for granted that the quality and popularity of his earlier writings had made Irving an American literary “success” already. But he had not been able to make a living by writing. Indeed, he had not even made a serious attempt to become a professional writer until he began The Sketch Book. Few Americans at this point had. Prejudices in part derived from Puritanism still persisted in some quarters against the seeming frivolity of certain kinds of writing, fiction and drama especially. Those who wrote were expected to do so in their spare time, unless they happened to possess independent means.

Irving’s father, a Presbyterian immigrant from Scotland, had subjected his large family to a heavy regimen of church attendance, Bible reading, prayers, and psalm singing. In his five sons he had tried, with mixed success, to instill the Puritan ethic of hard work, frugality, and temperance. All five ultimately became involved in one way or another in the family importing businesses. Two, however, including Washington, went into law first, and a third became a doctor. For Washington, the legal profession was a way of avoiding business, which he hated.