Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Rains in Liverpool flooded the Mersey, turning the streets into muddy canals that required boats to move from house to house.37 Irving's moods swung from one extreme to the other. The debts continued to pile up, and he wandered zombielike through the firm's warehouses, dutifully counting crates and goods, penciling in the ledgers, watching the winds, and tending to Peter. Liverpool had become his prison, and the business—and Peter—remained his burden.

  As he had done in 1809 when weighed down with grief over the death of Matilda Hoffman, Irving searched for solace in his pen. For the sake of his own sanity, he needed to write. Inspiration was difficult. He was exhausted, worn down by the troubles of business. Things were worse, he told Brevoort, not better. “The cares and sorrows of the world seem thickening upon me,” he wrote in anguish, “and though I battle with them to the utmost and keep up a steady front, yet they will sometimes drag me down.”38

  His spirits lifted slightly in June when he met another young American, a South Carolinian named William C. Preston, who was on his way to study law at the University of Edinburgh. Their meeting was accidental; while passing through Liverpool, Preston fell ill, and Irving—who likely had a reputation as a nurse because of the constant care he provided for Peter—was asked by the American consul at Liverpool to tend to the young man.39

  Irving agreed to the charge, and was taken to the rooms of the twenty-three-year-old Preston, who drifted in and out of consciousness with a high fever. Irving cared for the young man for days, and when Preston's fever broke, he saw at his bedside “a small gentleman dressed in black.” “I am your countryman Washington Irving,” the gentleman told the groggy Preston matter-of-factly.40

  Preston proved to be an agreeable companion—so agreeable that Irving later asked him to accompany him on a trip to Wales and a long tour of Scotland. He appreciated Preston's sense of humor, his devoted patriotism, and the long stories he told of the Carolina frontier. For Preston's part, he was in awe of Irving, whom he admired for his quick wit and strong opinions. He admitted later that he looked up to his countryman, eleven years his senior, who seemed “to exercise a large influence over me, especially in restraining the exuberance of my national and natural temper.”41

  It is through Preston that we have one of the most personal looks at Irving at this moment in his life, worn down by the burdens of tending to a failing business and an invalid brother. Looking back on his time with Irving in Liverpool years later, Preston described Irving as a “man of grave, indeed a melancholy aspect, of very staid manners, his kindness rather the offspring of principle and cultivated taste than of emotion. There was an unfailing air of moderation about him, his dress was punctilious, his tone of talking, soft and firm, and in general over subdued, until a natural turn would occasionally run into humour, and laughable delineation of character or events.” It was likely a fair description, for Irving had at this time almost completely removed himself from society, which to him was the worst kind of agony. “I am living like a hermit,” he told Brevoort, “passing my time entirely at home, excepting now and then I take a walk out of town for exercise…. This is a singular contrast to the life I once led, but one gets accustomed to every thing, and I feel perfectly contented to keep out of sight of the world and indeed have at present no relish for society.”42

  Irving may have thought he was the only one who felt the pressure and embarrassment of a failing business, but he wasn't the only member of the family courting bankruptcy. While Irving regarded the Van Wart home an untouchable sanctuary, Henry Van Wart was, in truth, working hard to hold on to Castle Van Tromp. He had made the same mistake that Irving had advised Brevoort against in 1815, and had linked his fortune to that of another—in this case, the firm of P. Irving and Company. Peter's overspending had serious consequences; Van Wart was facing financial ruin.

  In late June 1817, Van Wart met with creditors to see if he could settle his debts. The meeting must have been rather heated, for immediately afterward, one particularly irritated creditor, a William Wallis, issued a circular denying he had called Van Wart a swindler in the meeting—and added for good measure that when he had met Van Wart in the streets of Birmingham, Van Wart had threatened to pull his nose. A third circular issued in late July described Wallis's son going to Castle Van Tromp and horsewhip-ping Van Wart!43

  Irving was homesick in Liverpool, and Brevoort's letters, updating him on all the local gossip, only made him lonelier. He begged Brevoort to put off a trip to Canada and cross the Atlantic instead. “The obstacles are merely ideal—,” he pleaded, “Three weeks would land you in England—Profit might be combined with the visit.” Brevoort resisted, and continued to pressure Irving to come home. Irving finally told him in July that he had no intention of returning “for a year at least,” as he remained Peter's sole means of assistance and company. He did, however, indicate that he was looking at a means of supporting himself. “I have a plan which, with very little trouble, will yield me for the present a scanty but sufficient means of support, and leave me leisure to look round for something better.”44

  Irving was nervous about his plan—so much so that he kept it secret from Brevoort. “You would probably consider it precarious and inadequate to my subsistence,” he wrote cryptically, “—but a small matter will float a drowning man and I have dwelt so much of late on the prospect of being cast homeless and penniless upon the world; that I feel relieved in having even a straw to catch at.”45

  The “straw” was a rather ambitious plan to use the loopholes of the vague and nearly nonexistent international copyright law to his advantage. Irving wanted to establish himself as the middleman between American and British publishers; by providing American publishers with a prepublication copy of a British publisher's work—and vice versa—he would help both secure a nearly simultaneous copyright of their works on both sides of the Atlantic. This would prevent unauthorized reprints of British works in America, and American works in Britain—something writers and publishers desperately wanted. Irving knew his way around the delicacies of copyright law. He had poached many British works in the pages of the Analectic and regularly shipped key British titles off to Moses Thomas in Philadelphia so the publisher could print pirated editions in the United States. According to his plan, Irving would put pirates out of business—and have publishers pay him to do it. Thomas had already agreed to pay him an annual salary of $1,000 for his services.

  As tenuous as the scheme may have sounded, it seemed more stable than either the family business or living by his pen. Writing was something to be done only after he had a real job to pay the bills. As he had said to Brevoort in a recent letter, “I have a plan for immediate support—it may lead to something better.”

  What that “something better” might be he wasn't sure, though he hoped it might involve writing. He had picked up the pen again, and during a stay in London in the summer of 1817, he was feeling his way once more, writing out rough notes for essays on scenes of British life. The June heat meant the well-to-do had departed the city for summer estates and cooler climates, and Irving strolled the deserted streets, filling the pages of his journals with random observations of London's citizens and sights.

  His journals from the time are a mess of incomplete phrases, short paragraphs, and brief notes on topics he thought deserved further exploration—but every once in a while, the real Irving winks out from between the rougher lines. “A meer scholar,” he wrote in one journal as he watched university students coming and going, “is an intelligible ass, or a silly fellow in black, that speaks sentences more familiarly than sense… he speaks latin better than his mother tongue, and is a stranger in no part of the world but his own country.”46

  Irving made a trip to Sydenham to present his copyright proposal to Campbell. He found the poet at home, revising the Specimens of British Poets that Brevoort had failed to find a publisher for in America. Campbell listened carefully, then suggested that Irving discuss the proposition with his own London publisher, John Murray. C
ampbell provided Irving with two letters of introduction that proved to be among the most valuable he would ever receive. One was to Campbell's friend Walter Scott in Scotland; the other was the formal letter of introduction he needed to enter the illustrious drawing room of publisher John Murray in London.47

  On the afternoon of August 16, 1817, Irving stood nervously outside Murray's door on Albemarle Street, Campbell's letter in hand. Meeting Murray marked the beginning of one of the most important relationships in Irving's professional life, though not for reasons he was there to discuss that evening. As he stood looking at the brass plate with Murray's name and house number, he was slightly intimidated by the thought of approaching the man—this was essentially a job interview, and he didn't want to blow it.

  Irving had good reason to be intimidated. In 1817 John Murray—born John Murray II in 1778—was one of the most powerful and respected publishers in Great Britain. Printer's ink ran through his veins. His father, the first John Murray, had founded the publishing house in 1768 to moderate success, but died in 1782 at the age of forty-eight. When the younger Murray entered the firm at seventeen, it was as a full partner. Murray learned the trade from his father's principal assistant, Samuel Highley, who changed the thrust of the business from publishing to bookselling. Murray dissolved their partnership in 1804, turning the House of Murray into both a bookseller and a publishing house.

  Murray's tastes ran largely toward travel, medicine, and philosophy, but he recognized quality in other genres when he saw it, and in 1808 he had secured the copyright to the fourth part of Walter Scott's poem Marmion, marking the beginning of a long and mutually profitable friendship with Scott. He also published the poetry of Isaac D'Israeli, a lifelong family friend whose son Benjamin eventually became prime minister.

  Murray was a shrewd businessman, and in 1803 he had entered into a partnership with Constable & Company in Edinburgh to copublish titles. The partnership with Constable resulted in coownership of the Edinburgh Review, a publication of literary criticism that could be not only brutally abusive in its reviews but equally abusive in its pro-Whig/anti-Tory rhetoric. In 1808 the Tory Murray severed his ties to Constable, and sold his shares in the Edinburgh Review. In 1809 Murray teamed with Scott to launch the Quarterly Review, a competing literary magazine that also served as the “voice of Constitutional Toryism.”

  Murray's ear for poetry resulted in an enormous coup in 1812, when the House of Murray became the first publisher of Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Its success took both Byron and Murray by surprise; at one trade dinner, Murray presold 7,000 copies of the third canto in one day. Murray wisely catered to the eccentric Byron, shopping for Byron's favorite tooth powders in London, introducing him to Walter Scott, and providing him with all the latest literary gossip. The House of Murray continued to build a regular stable of writers; besides Byron and Scott, Murray published Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, and Jane Austen.

  In 1812 Murray moved his offices from Fleet Street to London's chic Mayfair District, purchasing outright the lease, copyrights, and stock of a retiring bookseller at 50 Albemarle Street. It quickly became one of the most fashionable addresses for literary men and women in London. Every afternoon, from 2:00 until 5:00, Murray presided over a drawing room that could be filled on any given day with writers, publishers, editors, politicians, or actors. In the evenings he hosted smaller, intimate dinners that often lasted well into the night.48

  One attendee once remarked that there were three unwritten criteria to gain admittance to Murray's parlor: one had to be an author, a Tory, and patronized by the aristocracy. Irving was definitely the first, but neither of the remaining two. He was, however, an American, and to Murray, that was enough to compensate for the other shortcomings.

  Irving knocked on the door, and presented Campbell's letter of introduction to the servant who answered. The letter was a good one, and within moments he was ushered to the first floor, and into the presence of John Murray II. At thirty-nine years old, Murray had thinning hair, brushed forward as was the fashion, a fine nose, and full, pursed lips. He was blind in his right eye—when he was a child, a writing instructor had accidentally run a penknife through it. The Prince of Booksellers smiled and offered Irving his hand.

  Irving was led into the famous drawing room, where portraits of Byron, Campbell, and Scott stared down from the walls. Murray showed off his library, which the bibliophile in Irving itched to touch, and talked to him of Thomas Moore's poetry. They settled into a discussion with the guests in the drawing room that afternoon, among them George Canning, a former secretary of foreign affairs under William Pitt and a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review, and John Barrow, secretary to the admiralty, who promoted British exploration of both the Arctic and the Northwest Passage. By 5:00 it was clear Irving had met with Murray's approval. The drawing room patter he had learned and honed in Europe—as well as his own considerable charm and interests—had served him well. He had passed the first test. He was invited to dinner that evening.

  The dinner guests included Isaac D'Israeli, who spoke of his latest researches in the British Museum; William Brockedon, a young artist just returned from Italy; John Miller, an English publisher with a specialty in American authors; and Walter Hamilton, author of The East India Gazeteer and several other Asiatic studies. Irving spoke easily with D'Israeli, whose poetry was familiar to him, and was particularly taken with Hamilton, who chattered amiably.

  After dinner, the party retired with glasses of port to the upstairs sitting room, where Murray showed Irving one of his letters from Byron—“written with some flippancy,” Irving told Brevoort later—in which the poet promised to deliver the fourth canto of Childe Harold as quickly as possible. Murray sometimes talked too much, especially when he'd been drinking—one correspondent wrote of “Murray's leaky lips”—and as he discussed Byron with Irving, he complained about lost profits due to the pirating of Byron's work in America.49 That was the opening Irving needed, and he quickly explained his antipiracy scheme to Murray. The publisher agreed that such an idea had merit and agreed to discuss it at greater length with Irving later.

  The party broke up close to midnight, and Irving lingered in the rain on Murray's steps, anxious to discuss his project. Murray waved him away with a smile, telling him to “keep an eye out for my advertisements in the papers and write to me whenever I have anything that might be of interest for republication in America.”50 It was enough. Irving left encouraged.

  “I made the acquaintance of Murray the Bookseller, who you know is a most valuable acquaintance to a stranger, as by his means considerable access is gained to the literary world,”51 Irving wrote excitedly to Brevoort. His future, he thought, was looking brighter. Ideally, his arrangements with Murray and Thomas would provide him with a steady flow of income.

  That summer, Allston took Irving to visit his friend and mentor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Irving was unimpressed and slightly confused by the great poet. “I was surprised by his volubility,” he later wrote of Coleridge. “He walked about, in his gray hair, with his right hand over his head, moving the thumb and finger of his right hand… over his head, as if sprinkling snuff upon his crown.”52 Coleridge's Biographia Literaria had been published recently, and Irving was as uninspired by Coleridge's poetry as he was by Words-worth's. He found it too vulgar, too coarse, too full of colloquialisms.

  Irving spent most of August 1817 in London. The city was nearly deserted, the theaters closed for the season. He had scribbled the beginnings of a number of short stories in his journals, which he had every intention of working on—but after his self-imposed hiatus from society in Liverpool throughout the spring, the invitations he received to dinner and parties proved irresistible. He befriended actor John Kemble, who owned the Covent Garden Theatre, and spent more time with Allston and Leslie.

  They were pleasant enough diversions, but the best was yet to come. A pilgrimage to Scotland—the land of his forefathers and of his literary father, Walter S
cott—was, he thought, just what he needed for both inspiration and relaxation. Campbell's letter of introduction to Scott was safely stowed away in his rooms on Cock-spur Lane. It was time to use it.

  7

  Determination

  1817–1818

  Man must be aspiring; ambition belongs to his nature. He cannot rest content but is continually reaching after higher attainments and more felicitous conditions. To rest satisfied with the present is a sign of an abject spirit.

  —Washington Irving, Journals, 1817

  I HAD A LETTER of introduction to him from Thomas Campbell, the poet,” Irving recalled of his visit to Walter Scott, “and had reason to think, from the interest he had taken in some of my earlier scribblings, that a visit from me would not be deemed an intrusion.”1

  Irving could thank Henry Brevoort for Scott's earlier interest. In 1813, while traveling in Scotland, Brevoort had passed a copy of A History of New York to Scott, who had enjoyed the book enough to write Irving an appreciative letter. Since then, it had been Irving's dream to meet his idol.

  On August 21, 1817, Irving boarded the smack Lively in London, and sailed up the eastern British coastline bound for Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumbria. With the ship barely out of port, he began writing in his journals, filling pages with colorful descriptions of the ship, the shoreline, and his fellow passengers. The notes were more polished now, the observations of a writer, not of a mere tourist. Four days later, the Lively docked in Berwick, where Irving discovered the next coach leaving for Edinburgh wouldn't depart for another two days. Too excited to wait, he leaped into the nearest available carriage, and arrived in Edinburgh eight hours later.

  He had asked William Preston, who was attending law school at the University of Edinburgh, to meet him in town, but was unable to locate his friend upon his arrival. Undaunted, Irving dove eagerly into the sights of Edinburgh by himself. With smoke rising from the chimneys of the houses between the old and new parts of town, and the shadows playing on the nearby castles, he found the town charming—“It far surpasses all my expectation; and, except Naples, is, I think, the most picturesque place I have ever seen.”2 Scott's Abbotsford home was in Melrose, near Selkirk, about forty miles southeast of Edinburgh. Irving longed to be on his way, but a stretch of bad weather detained him in Edinburgh for several days.