Here and there we are made aware of the increasing restlessness not only of nouveaux riches capitalists but of people in the lower orders as well.

Fundamentally, Irving all his life was a political moderate, variously a Democratic-Republican, Federalist, Democrat, and Whig. He obviously found appealing the sense of order, social harmony, and stability embodied in the trimly laid out English countryside and the survival of old customs and traditions. But Crayon’s gentle satire in the much revered Christmas sketches makes it quite clear that Squire Bracebridge—to say nothing of his parson—has somewhat lost himself in the English past and is out of touch with current reality. And Crayon obviously has fears of becoming an anachronism himself.

Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., is not just a fancy name for Washington Irving, even if, as middle-aged, bachelor Americans in England, as writers and avid readers, they have roughly similar temperaments. In Crayon the shy, pensive, slightly melancholy, and sentimental side of Irving exaggerates itself and becomes a fictional character, allowing the author to modify his own experiences or create entirely fictitious ones—as when Crayon’s interest in old things leads him through narrow gateways and dark passages to momentarily frightening encounters with personages who seem oddities from a forgotten world.

Crayon’s self-characterization begins with the title page epigraph taken from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. It encourages us to view him as solitary, a “mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures.” And there is self-mockery in his next epigraph, a few half-comic, half-pathetic lines from another old book, Euphues, by John Lyly, which precede “The Author’s Account of Himself” and compare the homeless traveler to a “snaile that crept out of her shel” and “was turned eftsoones into a Toad.” While Crayon in his traveling is not “transformed into so monstrous a shape,” fear that he might be is never quite laughed off.

His homesickness is a part of “The Voyage,” which ends with his exclamation upon disembarking at Liverpool, “I alone was solitary and idle. I had no friend to meet, no cheering to receive. I stepped upon the land of my forefathers—but felt I was a stranger in the land.” And what he shows us of Liverpool (in “Roscoe”), a banker-author’s struggle for artistic self-realization in “the very market place of trade,” does not altogether cheer him. We do not know whether the next sketch, “The Wife,” takes place in England or the United States, but again, as in “Roscoe,” financial disaster and bankruptcy have to be faced. Temporarily forsaking his spectatorial role, Crayon intervenes directly to keep the newlyweds together, revealing himself a man of feeling and Irving a literary descendant of Sterne, whose Sentimental Journey casts a shadow over Crayon’s tour.

Subsequently as he takes us through rural landscapes or out-of-the-way London neighborhoods, inspects ancient churches, castles, country houses, and libraries, we are almost always aware of Crayon’s presence. Generally he is alone. In the “nooks and corners and bye places” that he sketches, his contacts with human beings are fleeting. In “The Stage Coach,” before he is rescued for Christmas by Frank Bracebridge, he looks on wistfully as three boys, returning from school for the holidays, reach their destination, are reunited with their pet animals, and walk up the road “to a neat country seat, ” where their mother and sisters are waiting: “I leaned out of the coach window, in hopes of witnessing the happy meeting, but a grove of trees shut it from my sight.”

In the immediately preceding sketch, walking by himself among the tombs in Westminster Abbey as the dusk gathers, Crayon has become aware of the interior of the church as a formidable emptiness, from beyond which the sounds of the outside world can scarcely be heard. This image comes too close for comfort to epitomizing his experience in general: not sufficiently anchored in the living world, he finds himself alone contemplating the dead. His sense of the past doubles as a sensitivity to the passing of time. Why else does he so often join passing funeral processions? Mutability is the shadow that walks beside him.

The Sketch Book persistently hints at a story about Crayon that is never fully told. But we may perceive it in “the fluctuations of his own thoughts and feelings; sometimes treating of scenes before him; sometimes of others purely imaginary, and sometimes wandering back with his recollections to his native country.” These are Crayon’s own words about himself in his “Prospectus” for the original American edition of The Sketch Book (see Appendix A). In explaining what his “writings partake of,” he warns readers not to expect much coherence in the miscellany. Yet by presenting the apparently random sketches as reflective of the shifting “thoughts and feelings” of a particular personality, the warning ironically suggests underlying connections.

Irving omitted the “Prospectus” from the finished book. But what makes it “finished” is the reader’s sense that in the first London edition Irving’s seemingly aimless association of ideas and impulses may finally have gotten Crayon somewhere. The story all along has hinted that his “vagrant” wandering in a foreign country is a quest of sorts. Irving has rearranged the book so that after the morbidity of “Westminster Abbey,” the emotional nadir for Crayon, feelings become decidedly more positive. The English sketches on the whole are lighter now, more humorous, giving the impression that Crayon is feeling less a stranger in John Bull’s “family mansion.” True, there is pathos in “The Pride of the Village” and tragedy in “Philip of Pokanoket.” But the latter, with “Traits of Indian Character,” helps pull the book back toward America near the end, strengthening the image of the new world, which both contrasts with and complements the old.

If we take “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as instances of Crayon’s “wandering back with his recollections to his native country,” then these stories become part of his story. And positioning “Sleepy Hollow” at the end of that story (except for “L’Envoy”) adds to its poignancy. Not that “Sleepy Hollow” cannot stand completely on its own, a self-contained fiction, needing no connection with the rest of the book to be perfectly satisfying. It is the book that is enhanced by the connection, not the reverse. The same is true of “Rip Van Winkle.” There are many ways of looking at these two stories besides what is offered in the next few paragraphs.

Narrated by Diedrich Knickerbocker, though encountered in Crayon’s book, the stories suggest a kinship between the two personae. Knickerbocker is not the same writer in The Sketch Book as in A History of New York. His rambunctiousness has been laid aside; he is no longer primarily a parodist. Instead of exploding in words, he tells his stories in an easygoing, unpretentious, oddly humorous way. His diction is that of a well-educated person who feels no compulsion to prove it. Fond of colloquialisms, he tends to use elegant words and phrases ironically.