Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Irving went to visit his mother on Ann Street to say his goodbyes. “I had a hard parting with my poor old mother,” Irving remembered. “I was her favorite child & could not bear to leave her in her old days; but I trusted to return after a short absence, quite another being & then to settle down quietly beside her for the rest of her life.”56 He never saw her again.

  On May 25 Irving boarded the ship Mexico, bound for Liverpool from New York. He would not return to the United States for another seventeen years.

  6

  Desperation

  1815–1817

  I think… that nothing but a prospect of a very considerable and certain gain should tempt you in any wise to link your fortunes with others, or place your independence of life and action in any wise in their control.

  —Washington Irving to Henry Brevoort, August 23, 1815

  THE MAY WIND WAS CHILLY as it filled the sails of the Mexico. As the ship coursed past the lighthouse at Sandy Hook and headed out into the Atlantic, Irving's thoughts lingered on the friends to whom he had failed to say good-bye. He had rushed off so quickly that he scarcely had time to bid farewell to his housemates at Mrs. Bradish's. He scribbled a hasty line to Henry Brevoort, apologizing for leaving “without taking you by the hand.” He settled into his cramped quarters aboard the ship, and watched the Jersey shoreline recede below the horizon.

  Typically, it didn't take long before he was fully engaged with his fellow passengers. “I do not believe,” he wrote later, “that the same number of passengers were ever mewed up together for thirty days in dirty cabins and with equal deficiency of comforts, that maintained more unvarying harmony and good will toward each other.” Irving dreamed of the tour of Europe he was planning to make, of the friends he would visit in London, and the theater he planned to attend.1

  Politics was on his mind as well. That spring, Napoleon, who had spent the last year in exile, had marched on Paris and regained control of France. As Napoleon struggled with the political and constitutional issues of his government, European troops circled, ready to pounce. It was an international theater of the spectacular, and Irving—who had been fascinated by Napoleon since his first tour of Europe a decade before—could hardly wait to see how events would unfold. He couldn't reach Liverpool quickly enough.

  To his disappointment, by the time the Mexico pulled into port in late June, Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington. Descending the Mexico’s platform, Irving saw mail carriages decked with celebratory laurels rattling through the streets, carrying tales of Wellington's prowess and the bravery of the British soldiers in Belgium. Napoleon's Hundred Days were over; Irving had missed it.

  Napoleon's armies had been defeated, but the deposed emperor remained at large. “I can do nothing but look on in stupid amazement,” Irving sputtered to Brevoort, “—wondering with vacant conjecture—‘what will take place next?’”2

  He loitered for a week in Liverpool with his brother Peter, who he hadn't seen in seven years. While he reported back to the family that Peter lived comfortably and seemed “quite unaltered,” in truth, he was worried about his brother's mental and physical health; the business was wearing him out. Peter suffered from erysipelas, a painful, burning skin infection. Confined to bed rest, he left the bulk of the business affairs to the firm's one elderly clerk. Washington sat with Peter in his quarters on Bold Street, tending to his needs as they caught up on seven years of gossip, thumbed through newspapers, and waited for any reports from arriving ships of the missing Bonaparte.

  A week passed, and still the papers carried nothing new, so Irving departed on July 3 for Birmingham, where his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry Van Wart, resided. In the nine years since Irving had last seen her, she and her husband had filled their respectable house—“Castle Van Tromp,” Irving playfully dubbed it—with five children. Here the lethargy that had overwhelmed him in New York was washed away by the laughter of his nieces and nephews. “It seemed as if my whole nature had changed,” he told Brevoort, “—a thousand kind feelings and affections that had laid torpid, are aroused within me—my very blood seems to flow more warm and sprightly.”3

  In mid-July came news that Napoleon had surrendered. As the bells in Birmingham rang in celebration, Irving's heart went out to the fallen would-be conqueror. “In spite of all his misdeeds, he is a noble fellow,” Irving said, “and I am confident will eclipse, in the eyes of posterity, all the crowned wiseacres that have crushed him by their overwhelming confederacy.”4

  After surrendering, Bonaparte had asked for the protection of English law, and the thought of this “noble fellow” supplicating himself at the feet of those “crowned wiseacres”—especially George, the prince regent of England, whom Irving called an “inflation of sack and sugar”—was reprehensible to him. Relating the situation to Brevoort, he groaned in disgust that “nothing shows more completely the caprices of fortune… than that, of all the monarchs of Europe, Bonaparte should be brought to the feet of the Prince Regent.” It would have been far better, Irving thought, had Napoleon died in the field of battle than suffer such humiliations. “I am extremely sorry that his career has terminated so lamely,” he snorted. For Irving, it was a decidedly anticlimactic ending to an otherwise satisfactory story.5

  The British had cause to celebrate, but Irving thought they were too cocky. “English pride is inflated to its full distention by the idea of having Paris at the mercy of Wellington and his army,” he said disapprovingly. Even in church, one parson worked himself into such a metaphorical lather about the overthrow of tyranny by the angels of Waterloo that Irving's eyes rolled skyward. “Every country curate and parish clerk now lords it over Bonaparte,” he groaned.6

  Lest the British get too full of themselves, there were still plenty of Americans in Liverpool who delighted in reminding their British hosts of the losses their kingdom had sustained in America during the War of 1812. “Let an Englishman talk of the Battle of Waterloo,” Irving told Brevoort with some amused satisfaction, “and they will immediately bring up New Orleans and Plattsburgh—a thorough bred—thoroughly appointed [English] soldier, is nothing to a Kentucky Rifleman.”7

  Apart from the present English attitude, Irving was enthralled by England. “The country is enchanting,” he told his mother, “and I have experienced as yet nothing but kindness and civility.” Even the distinctly blue-collar Liverpool—where cockfighting, dog fighting, and bull baiting were the preferred forms of entertainment—didn't seem to irritate Irving, whose tastes were somewhat more refined. Walking the unpaved streets toward the warehouses of P. Irving and Company in Goree Dock, he easily made friends among the merchants, traders, hagglers, and shopkeepers.

  There was no shortage of Americans on Liverpool's streets and docks; the Irvings’ firm was only one of many that did business in the port town. Moving and storing goods was the city's primary source of revenue; it was practically one gigantic warehouse. With its docks on the western coast of England, Liverpool provided quicker and easier access to the Atlantic than London, making it a more desirable location for import or export. Besides the convenience, the city was also friendlier toward Americans than many other British cities—largely because it couldn't afford not to be.

  It was with good reason that the inscription on the statue of Columbus in Liverpool's Sefton Park proclaimed that “the discoverer of America was the maker of Liverpool,” for the economic strength of the city hinged on its relationship with the New World. Trade with the young United States was profitable enough that an American Chamber of Commerce had been established in the city in 1801; and despite the political pressures of the Napoleonic wars, trade with the United States only continued to increase. When George III issued Orders in Council in January 1807 to prevent trade with Napoleon and his allies—the same orders that had concerned William Irving—the chamber, correctly guessing such orders might lead to war with the United States, pressed unsuccessfully for their repeal.8

  As the chamber had ex
pected, the War of 1812 hit merchants in Liverpool hard. By the time of Irving's arrival in 1815, Liverpool was a city working to recover from an economic crisis. As he strolled among the warehouses and beneath the dome of the new city hall, Irving had every reason to believe the future would be bright. He had confidence in Peter, who had overseen the business these past years, and the firm's clerk had been working to keep the books in order and the business solvent even as one wartime trade agreement after another forced the Irvings and other businesses to constantly improvise. Let Peter and the clerk attend to the business; he had other matters to attend to—like visiting friends in London.

  Washington Allston, the painter Irving had admired in Rome in 1805, now lived in London's Fitzroy Square, near Regent's Park, which was fast becoming a fashionable address for artists. Irving quickly became a regular in Allston's quarters during the summer of 1815, where he also renewed his friendship with the American painter Charles Leslie. The three prowled London museums, theaters, and bookshops, where Irving was pleased to see that both Salmagundi and A History of New York could be found.

  He also took the time to pay his respects at the Sydenham home of Thomas Campbell, the poet whose work Irving had promoted and steered through the New York press in 1810. To Irving's disappointment, Campbell was out, but he fell into a long conversation with the poet's wife, who lamented that her husband was suffering from a lack of inspiration. Walter Scott and Lord Byron wrote so much and so well, she informed Irving, that it intimidated her husband into a stupor.9

  There were other friends visiting from America to keep Irving occupied. James Renwick had been traveling in England since spring. In late July the two met in Liverpool and set off on a whirlwind tour of Kenilworth, Warwick, and Stratford-on-Avon. Next was a short visit to Tintern Abbey, which Wordsworth had made famous in his 1798 poem. Irving was moderately impressed by the abbey, but less so by Wordsworth's poetic musings. Ever the sentimentalist, he never subscribed to the formal school of Romantic poetry led by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Byron was another matter, mainly because of his larger-than-life personality and the booming, confident poetic voice that told of love and adventure, but Wordsworth left Irving cold.

  He was more anxious to walk the same grounds as Henry IV’s Owen Glendower and to visit the ring of castles erected by Edward I during his conquest of Wales—this better suited Irving's idea of romance. He marveled at Conway Castle, a most “sublime ruin,” but was disappointed in the more famous castle at Caernavon. He and Renwick returned to Liverpool in mid-August, wrapping up what Irving regarded as a most successful and relaxing trip. Throughout, Irving had crammed his travel journals with observations of the countryside, the people, the inns, and the theaters they visited.

  Sorting through the letters that had piled up in his absence, he learned of Stephen Decatur's victory at Algiers. Had he opted to travel with the commodore back in May instead of boarding the Mexico, he would have been in Algiers to witness the victory. He regretted his own missed opportunity, but he was pleased for Decatur. “He may now repose on his Laurels and have wherewithal to solace himself under their shade,” he told Brevoort with satisfaction.10

  He had been in England for three months, and while he felt more rested in mind and body than he had for some time, he was no closer to deciding what he would do for a living. The pressure was mounting. His friends in America were settling into lives and occupations, and were wondering when their dreamy friend might do the same.

  In August Brevoort wrote that he had at last turned his on-again, off-again stint with Astor's Northwest Fur Company into a full-time job. Irving was pleased for his friend's opportunity—it was one that Brevoort used to increase his already sizable fortune—but warned him of the dangers of hitching his cart to another's horse unless he could be certain of his own success. “I think… that nothing but a prospect of a very considerable and certain gain should tempt you in any wise to link your fortunes with others,” he cautioned Brevoort, “or place your independence of life and action in any wise in their control.”11

  It was some of the best advice he ever gave—and as he wrote those words, he must have wondered if he himself hadn't already made such a mistake. For as long as he could remember, he had linked his own fortunes—as well as his “independence of life and action”—with those of others, whether it was his brothers, Judge Hoffman, or Moses Thomas. So far, none of those links had assured him of “very considerable and certain gain”—and he was now more dependent upon such attachments than ever.

  Still, he tried to remain optimistic about the fortunes of the family business. “Our business I trust will be very good,” he told Brevoort almost too enthusiastically in August, “—it certainly will be very great, this year, and will give us credit, if not profit.” Or so he had likely been convinced by Peter. “Notwithstanding that [P]eter has been an invalid and confined to the house almost continually since the Treaty of Ghent,” he informed Brevoort, with proper deference to Peter, “yet he has managed to get through an immensity of business.”12

  Irving was beginning to wonder. The firm's lone clerk had suddenly and unexpectedly died, and Peter was still too incapacitated to assume his duties, so the burdens of the Liverpool office were slowly shifting to Irving's shoulders. Dutifully sorting through the books in their offices and warehouse in late summer, even a financial novice like Irving could see that things were a mess.

  The War of 1812, with its diversion of capital from normal economic channels, had taken its toll on the merchant class, as had the increasing sense of American self-sufficiency, which had lowered the demand for imported goods from England. Winds blowing from the west had also stranded ships bound for America in their docks in Liverpool, their holds full of unsold goods. Times were tough, but during the relative economic calm of 1815, other shipping firms had recovered, or were beginning to. Something else was causing the firm of P. Irving and Company to flounder. As he turned over page after page in the business ledgers, Irving could see what the problem was. The problem was Peter.

  Like Washington, Peter was a dreamer, not a businessman. And like his youngest brother, Peter had bounced from vocation to vocation until the family business had provided him with a financial safety net. Unlike Washington, however, Peter never applied himself to pursuing a vocation better suited to his more natural inclinations—whatever those might be—and chose instead to chase one get-rich-quick scheme after another. William and Ebenezer, who had better heads for business than any of the Irving men, certainly recognized that Peter was not an ideal partner for the family firm; perhaps they knew that the best way to keep an eye on him and curb his profligate ways was to keep him close, and keep him occupied with a steady job and a source of income.

  It was a strategy that doomed their firm, as the business became another of Peter's speculative affairs. Hearing William testify before Congress in 1812 that there would continue to be a demand for English imports—a mistaken assumption, as it turned out—Peter smelled easy profit, and went on a buying spree, filling the cargo holds of ships in Liverpool with more goods than could possibly be moved, even under ideal economic conditions.

  In late August Washington reported to Ebenezer—perhaps in a preemptive attempt to spare Peter the wrath of the stateside partners in the firm—that he had found his brother “comfortably situated… but not indulging in any extravagance or dash.” He added a qualified defense that their brother was living like “a man of sense, who knows he can but enjoy his money while he is alive, and would not be a whit the better though he were buried under a mountain of it when dead.”13

  Watching Peter in their apartment on Bold Street, it was clear to Washington that his brother would be no help in getting things sorted out. Peter's skin condition was still raging, and he had developed rheumatism in both legs. In early September Irving sent his brother to soak in the medicinal baths at Harrogate, ninety miles away, while he began the long process of putting their business affairs in order.

  Throughout
September Irving calmly pored over the books and counted the crates stacked in the firm's waterfront warehouses. He found time to write letters, keeping Brevoort informed of the stream of mutual friends that filed through the port town, and following with interest the progress of Madame Bonaparte through England. Lest his mother worry, he wrote that he was “leading a solitary bachelor's life in Peter's lodgings and perhaps should feel a little lonesome were I not kept so busy.”14

  Busy was putting it mildly. Things piled up quickly, and as he dug ever deeper into the books, he realized he was in over his head. Neither his negligible skills as a lawyer nor his substantial aptitude for writing were of assistance; this was pure finance. In September he took a quick bookkeeping course to try to cope with the columns of numbers and accounts that swam before him. “Perfectly ignorant of every thing about business affairs, I came in and made them teach me,” Irving recalled later. “It was all wrong; I turned away first one and then another; every thing was in confusion. As I began to learn the business, I saw the difficulties, the breakers ahead.”15

  By October his head was spinning, and he wrote a quick letter to Brevoort: “I will most certainly write to you amply when I have time, but for several weeks past I have been more really busy than I ever was in my life.” One can only imagine. To Irving, who had barely escaped Benjamin Romaine's schoolhouse with a smattering of basic math, it must have been frustrating and exhausting. Indeed, his weariness was obvious in his letter to Brevoort:

  As I am a complete novice in business it of course takes up my whole time and completely occupies my mind, so that at present I am as dull commonplaced a fellow as ever figured upon Change. When I once more emerge from the mud of Liverpool, and shake off the sordid cares of the Counting House, you shall hear from me. Indeed the present life I lead is utterly destitute of anecdote, or anything that could furnish interest or embellishment to a letter—& my imagination is too much jaded by pounds shillings & pence to be able to invent facts or adorn realities.16