It is not difficult to understand why selections from The Sketch Book were used as models of style in nineteenth-century American schoolrooms. Irving prided himself on being a stylist. The modem editor of The Sketch Book, Haskell Springer, tells us that in revising the text for the first English edition, Irving reworded and rephrased numerous passages in response to criticism, including specifically several passages singled out by Dana as marred by mixed metaphor.

In addition he made several structural changes, the most important perhaps being to move “Westminster Abbey” from near the end to the middle of the book. He added three new selections to the second volume, including reworked versions of “Traits of English Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket,” originally written for The Analectic Magazine several years earlier. And he rearranged many of the other sketches and stories in the second volume. Thus, except for the brief “L’Envoy,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” now concludes the book. The first English edition is basically The Sketch Book we know today, even though Irving made a final revision in 1848, inserting two more sketches, “A Sunday in London” and “London Antiques,” both apparently at least partially drafted thirty years earlier.

What Irving had when he was finished was a book with broad popular appeal that could also claim the attention of more serious readers. He had discovered popular culture for American (and perhaps English) literature and brought the two together in the uneasy relationship that has existed between them ever since. That is, he discovered a growing middle-class audience, able to read, curious about art and fashion, eager for information and entertainment, craving novelty and emotional stimulation, prepared to pay good money for an attractive product. What it did not want was an undue taxing of its intellectual faculties or an open challenge to its basic values. It was in this market that American writers would henceforth chiefly support themselves—the alternative, in the absence of patronage, being literature as an avocation. American printers, publishers, and booksellers, including some who doubled as hack writers, had made sizable profits from this trade earlier, but not writers with serious literary pretensions. The larger meaning of Irving’s success was that it blurred for good the distinction between the fine art and the business of literature in the United States.

That he was in England when he wrote The Sketch Book, that a good deal of it is about England, and that it was highly praised by British critics helped enormously to sell it. For although his American readers increasingly defined their society as new, democratic, liberated from an oppressive past, they were nonetheless curious about the theoretically repudiated old world. As Crayon says, speaking in “The Author’s Account of Himself” of his own early desire to go abroad,

... Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement—to tread as it were in the footsteps of antiquity—to loiter about the ruined castle—to meditate on the falling tower—to escape in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.

Here one touches America’s half-secret longing for knowledge of its counterself, of exactly what it professes not to be. Crayon will in due course offer much that is calculated to satisfy that longing. But readers may note a certain irony in the latter part of the passage just quoted. One suspects that in the heightened rhetoric of the long final sentence Crayon is slightly mocking his own interest in the past as a bit lugubrious, a not entirely healthy appetite for an up-to-date American.

As he goes on in the next paragraph to speak of his “earnest desire to see the great men of the earth,” his facetiousness becomes fully obvious:

... I had read in the works of various philosophers, that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travellers among us; who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country.—I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.

Crayon’s sly wit thus asserts itself at the very beginning; he is not going overboard in adulation of the old world. It is in such irony as this that he keeps his balance, retains his good sense while catering to popular tastes. And as easily as he mocks the affectations of others, Americans or Europeans, he makes fun of excesses to which he himself is prone—antiquarianism, for instance, or (see “The Spectre Bridegroom”) the sentimentalism which, as journals Irving kept while struggling with The Sketch Book show, plagued him in periods of depression and self-doubt.

To reduce The Sketch Book to the testament of a crypto-aristocratic anglophile and political conservative, as is sometimes done, is to miss its finer points and misunderstand Crayon. His England is admittedly only touristic, the product of “idle humour” and “vagrant imagination,” something he half-laughs at himself for offering the reader. Fighting for his literary life, and fearful of British critics, Irving had no incentive to go far in exhibiting the harsh realities of contemporary English life, the hardships, social dislocations, and class conflicts being generated by the industrial revolution. But both he and Crayon know that their England is somewhat obsolete and idealized.