But his writing in turn distracted him from the law. Two of his brothers were also partially addicted to the questionable habit of writing. Subject to pangs of guilt over his “idleness,” the young Irving at times threw himself energetically into what bourgeois society considered real work. But he lived for years without a clear sense of purpose, unsettled, unproductive, and often dispirited. Recognizing his talent, his older brothers partially subsidized his literary labors, making him, after the publication of Knickerbocker, a business partner with only minimal responsibilities. But this arrangement did not work well. If the jobs he was asked to do—lobbying in Washington for the family enterprises, for instance—were not arduous, he somehow made them time-consuming; perhaps uneasiness at depending on his brothers stifled his muse.

In 1815, embarking on what was supposed to be an extended nonbusiness trip to Europe, he got only as far as Liverpool, where he found his brother Peter ill, and the family importing firm, under his charge in England, going bankrupt. Washington’s gentlemanly leisure was abruptly terminated. He worked strenuously in Liverpool for two and a half years in an effort to mitigate the family’s financial disgrace. Meanwhile, more appalled than ever at the prospect of a business career, he resolved to give professional authorship a try. The obstacles he faced were formidable, beginning with the low spirits and feelings of loneliness to which he was subject. He had never quite recovered from the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, in 1809. And in the middle of the bankruptcy he had learned of the death of his mother, to whom he was strongly attached. Living in a foreign country, he was cut off from what he knew best, the society he could write about as an insider. There were also the constraints attendant upon the need to produce a money-making work.

As an amateur, Irving had been a freewheeling, irreverent humorist. “Oldstyle,” Salmagundi (on which he collaborated with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding), and Knickerbocker thrive on caricature, satire, even flagrant self-contradiction. The writing often mocks the literary conventions it uses, the periodical essay, for instance, or the figure of the whimsical gentleman (usually a bachelor) of the old school, emblem of an outmoded, narrow, arbitrary, ultrarespectable gentility, who nonetheless simultaneously provides a viewpoint for mocking contemporary fads and follies. Parody so pervades Salmagundi and Knickerbocker (especially the original edition, 1809) that at times they seem to amount to little more than the ludicrously pretentious rhetoric of individuals blinded by illusions. One of the prime targets of such ridicule is the self-aggrandizing vision of itself that the United States was developing.

Seeking to win broad acceptance from a paying public for The Sketch Book, Irving substantially transformed himself as a writer, closely watching popular tastes and experimenting with some of the milder, less threatening forms of romanticism—pathos, sentimentality, and fantasies evoking the remote and the supernatural. He began to look into German folklore, which he discussed with Walter Scott on a visit to Abbottsford in 1817. He deliberately chose the format of the miscellany so as to appeal to a diversity of tastes. No longer trying to startle and unsettle, he saw to it that he was less persistently and boisterously humorous than in his early writings. His style grew smoother, more ingratiating. The prose of The Sketch Book seems quite consciously crafted, the language at times clearly striving for poetic effects. There is a studied avoidance of vulgarity.

The new manner won over the British critics. The Quarterly Review, seeing “the hand of the master” in The Sketch Book, called Irving the “best writer of English ... that America has produced since the era of her independence. He seems to have studied our language in all its strength and perfection—in the writings of our old sterling authors....” The Edinburgh Review noted with pleasure that Irving had modeled his “diction” on “the most elegant and polished of our native writers.” It hoped that other Americans would follow his example. Dana, however, in his essay in The North American Review noted above, voiced reservations about the new style. While he knew that The Sketch Book was going to be popular, his assessment of the new work was mixed.