Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Between regular walks in the woods near his cottage and his obligations to Knickerbocker, Irving spent most of his summer and autumn trying to secure a placement for Ebenezer. Van Buren, however, appeared to have taken Washington's earlier advice to put principles ahead of popularity. By October it was obvious the president was not inclined to provide the requested appointment for Ebenezer, no matter how much Washington prostrated himself on his brother's behalf.

  That was it. Washington Irving was through with Martin Van Buren. Van Buren's conduct, he seethed, “betrayed heartlessness in friendship and low mindedness in politics…. Concluding him, therefore, unfit for his high station, I determined to abstain from voting for him.”58 To Irving, family was immeasurably more important than friendship, even when that friend happened to be president of the United States. He publicly threw his weight, and considerable clout, behind William Henry Harrison and his new Whig party in the 1840 election—one Van Buren lost.

  The whole incident was distasteful to Irving, and it hadn't resolved any of his problems. He still had family to care for and a cottage to maintain, and the thought of having to continue writing for a living irritated him. He wanted an income independent of the “irksome fagging” of his pen. Worse, his favorite niece Sarah was engaged to marry Thomas Wentworth Storrow's son and would be moving to France. It was an ideal marriage that would unite Irving's family with that of one of his dearest friends, but the thought of losing Sarah, whom he had come to regard as a daughter, was “a bereavement.” “How I shall do without her I cannot imagine,” he told his sister. “Thus you see, though a bachelor, I am doomed to experience what parents feel, when their children are widely separated from them by marriage.”59

  To supplement his income, Irving published a biography of the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith for Harper's Family Library series. Irving had taken on the project to pay the bills, and simply revised and expanded the short essay he had written for Galignani's 1825 collection of Goldsmith's work. “He who has to fag his pen for a livelihood has very little inclination to take it up when he is not driven thereto by sheer necessity,” Irving said.60

  He was also at work on a biography of Margaret Miller Davidson, a precocious poetess who had died of tuberculois in 1838 at the age of sixteen. Irving had been casually acquainted with the Davidson family for several years, and after Margaret's death, her mother bundled together various manuscripts and a rough biographical outline of her daughter's life, which she gave Irving in the hope he could shape it into a book. Irving, whose own life had been forever changed by the death of another consumptive young woman, agreed to be her biographer, on condition that any profits from the book reverted to her family. He worked quickly, and in February 1841 he sent the finished manuscript to Lea & Blanchard (now sans Carey), declaring it “deeply interesting and affecting.”61

  In March the short story “Don Juan: A Spectral Research” appeared in Knickerbocker. Irving had written thirty pieces in thirty-two months, and with this contribution, his stint at the magazine was over. “I find these monthly obligations to write extremely irksome,” he said, but he would miss its regular pay. “I must cast about for some other mode of exercising my pen and making out the expenses of the year,” he sighed. “Would that I could throw it by altogether, or at least only exercise it for my amusement.”62

  On March 31 Sarah Sanders Paris—now Sarah Storrow—left with her new husband for France. As Washington feared, her absence devastated him. “I cannot but feel the loss of her constant companionship as a great bereavement, and hardly know how I shall get reconciled to it.” For months afterward, he didn't. “Every object,” he wrote her sadly, “brings you to mind.”63

  His latest book, Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson, appeared in June. “I think you will find her biography one of the most affecting things you have ever read,” he wrote to his sister. With its sentimental subject and Irving's elegant, sympathetic treatment, it was no wonder the public devoured it. “Did you ever meet with any novel half so touching?” William Prescott asked one correspondent. “How fitting that her beautiful character should be embalmed in the delicate composition of Irving!” Such enthusiasm was welcome, but Irving credited the public's embrace to the subject matter, not his talent. “I do not attribute [its success] to any merit of mine,” he wrote, “but to the extreme interest and pathos of the materials placed in my hands.”64

  With Davidson done, Irving was without a project. While he continued to draw a regular income from Lea & Blanchard for their exclusive rights to his work, most of his money was still tied up in shaky land speculation. He spurred his pen to write only letters now, exchanging correspondence with long-forgotten friends and sending gossipy missives to Sarah, whom he was encouraging to become a bluestocking. “Do not be careless about your intellectual powers as if not worth cultivating,” he told her. “Believe in yourself.” In May he sent a warm letter to his old crony Joseph C. Cabell, whom William Irving Jr. had dismissed as a rogue in 1805, and who had since become a cofounder with Thomas Jefferson of the University of Virginia. The letter's most significant detail, however, was in the dateline at the top. Instead of “Wolfert's Roost,” Irving had written “Sunnyside Cottage, near Tarrytown.” Within two weeks, he simply wrote “Sunnyside.”65

  In his study, Irving regularly read European newspapers and periodicals, among them the weekly Master Humphrey's Clock, in which editor and lone contributor Charles Dickens was serializing his lengthy story The Old Curiosity Shop. Irving wrote the twenty-nine-year-old Dickens a complimentary letter, expressing his delight with Little Nell (whose unpleasant fate Dickens had yet to reveal) and his overall admiration for Dickens's writing.

  Dickens was so flattered, he was nearly speechless. A lifelong reader and admirer of Irving, he had made his first excursion into print with the Irvingesque Sketches by Boz, a series of short stories published under a pseudonym. An appreciative letter from Irving was, in the Englishman's opinion, the master blessing the protégé. “There is no living writer, and there are very few among the dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn,” Dickens replied. He invited Irving to visit him in London, where the two could stroll the locations Irving had made famous, and described Irving's work in such detail that it was clear Boz was no mere casual fan. “Diedrich Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my pocket,” Dickens exclaimed as he concluded his letter. “I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts, and with my leisure hours, that I rush at once into full confidence with you, and fall—as it were naturally, and by the very laws of gravity—into your open arms.”66

  Irving was so taken with Dickens that he did something out of the ordinary with literary correspondents: he wrote back. “In general I seek no acquaintances and keep up no correspondence,” he told Dickens, “but towards you there was a strong impulse, which for some time I resisted, but which at length overpowered me.” Irving praised Dickens's Pickwick Papers, but shrewdly detected that Dickens was already doing something more relevant in his work. “You have proved yourself equally the master of the dark and terrible of real life,” Irving wrote. “Not the robbers, and tyrants and villains of high strained romance and feudal times and castellated scenes; but the dangerous and desperate villainy that lurks in the midst of the busy world and besets the every day haunts of society; and starts up the path of the plodding citizen, and among the brick walls of the metropolis.”67 It was an astute assessment of Dickens's work from the writer Poe had derisively tagged as an inoffensive, irrelevant “quietist.”

  Despite his earlier pronouncements about remaining in his native country for the rest of his life, Irving began to feel restless in his own backyard. Increasingly, he considered traveling to Europe—and with Dickens beckoning and Sarah living abroad, the pull was especially strong.

  Obligations, however, kept him rooted at Sunnyside. By September he had the company of Ebenezer, who made the cottage his permanent residence after the col
lapse of his business. The financial yoke was firmly around Washington's neck now. “These cares and troubles bear hard upon the capability of a literary man,” he fretted. His moods became erratic; his letters self-pitying one week, apologetic the next. But suddenly, he was writing again, dabbing at his long-forgotten biography of George Washington. The work was in no condition to show anyone, but “the manner in which I have executed it,” Irving said, “satisfies me that I have ‘good work in me yet.’”68

  In late October came some good news. “Dickens is actually coming to America,” Irving informed his family, practically bouncing on his seat in anticipation. Dickens, too, was excited about the prospect of meeting Irving in person. “I look forward to shaking hands with you with an interest I cannot (and I would not if I could) describe,” Dickens wrote elatedly.69

  Dickens and his wife, Catherine, arrived in Boston on January 22, their first stop on a tour of the United States that would last until June. Irving met the Englishman in New York several days later and entertained him at Sunnyside. Irving's genuine fondness for Dickens was indisputable—he even agreed to preside over a February 18 dinner in Dickens's honor, an event at which Irving would be expected to make a speech.

  Days in advance, Irving prepared lengthy remarks, which he slid reassuringly under his plate as the dinner began. As he rose to make his introductory remarks, the room broke out in applause. Flustered, he made his way through a few halting sentences, then stopped. After a number of feeble attempts, he merely raised his glass and shouted his toast—“Charles Dickens, the guest of the nation!”—then glumly sank into his seat. The pages of the speech sat untouched under his plate. “There,” Irving muttered to the guests around him. “There, I told you I should break down, and I've done it.”70

  It didn't matter; the crowd loved it, and loudly cheered both writers. Cornelius Felton, later president of Harvard University, sat by Irving that night, and remembered the moment vividly. “It was delightful to witness the cordial intercourse of the young man, in the flush and glory of his fervent genius, and his elder compeer, then in the assured possession of immortal renown.”71

  Where Irving had been awkward, Dickens was dynamic. Laying a hand on Irving's shoulder, he rose and said warmly:

  I came to this city eager to see him, and here he sits! I need not tell you how happy and delighted I am to see him here tonight in this capacity. Washington Irving!… When, not long ago, I visited Shakespeare's birthplace, and went beneath the roof where he first saw light, whose name but his was pointed out to me on the wall? Washington Irving—Diedrich Knickerbocker—Geoffrey Crayon—why, where can you go that they have not been there before?… who has associated himself most closely with the Italian peasantry and the bandits of the Pyrenees?… who embarked with Columbus upon his gallant ship, traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped upon the land and planted there the flag of Spain, but this same man, now sitting by my side?… And what pen but his has made Rip Van Winkle, playing at ninepins on that thundering afternoon, as much a part and parcel of the Catskill Mountains as any tree or crag that they can boast?72

  The room erupted in thunderous applause.

  A few weeks later, the two men prepared to leave New York for Washington, D.C., together: Dickens to continue his American tour, and Irving to do some research at Mount Vernon for his George Washington biography. But Irving had another bit of official business to attend to as well.

  “I have been astounded, this morning,” Washington had written to Ebenezer on February 10, “by the intelligence of my having been nominated to the Senate as Minister to Spain. The nomination, I presume, will be confirmed. Nothing was ever more unexpected. It was perfectly unsolicited.”73

  It may have been unsolicited, but Irving's vocal break with Van Buren and support for the opposing Whig party likely had something to do with the nomination. Irving's friend Daniel Webster, now secretary of state, had recommended him to President John Tyler—who had assumed the presidency following the death of William Henry Harrison—and the president had submitted Irving's name to the Senate on February 8. “Ah, this is a nomination everybody will concur in!” Henry Clay is rumored to have said. “If the President would send us such names as this, we should never have any difficulty.”74 Irving's nomination sailed through the Senate on February 10.

  “I have determined to accept,” Washington told Ebenezer. “Indeed, under all the circumstances of the case, I could not do otherwise.” He also admitted that the minister's salary of $9,000 had made the offer particularly attractive. On February 18 Irving sent his formal acceptance to Webster and the Senate.

  As he journeyed to Washington, D.C., where he would meet with President Tyler and receive further instructions, Irving's emotions were mixed. “The only drawback upon all this is the hard trial of tearing myself away from dear little Sunnyside,” he wrote to Ebenezer. The next day he gave his brother the keys to his cottage. “I now abandon the care of the place entirely to you.”75

  Washington Irving was going back to Spain.

  14

  Minister

  1842–1846

  It is comforting to think… that I have “Uncle Sam” to take care of me, and I hope the good old gentleman will not “let go of my hand” until I am once more able to take care of myself; if that will ever be.

  —Washington Irving to Sarah Storrow, November 5, 1842

  WASHINGTON IRVING'S OFFICIAL NEW TITLE was an imposing mouthful: Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Spain. One of America's first formal diplomatic posts, it was the same position that had been occupied by Arthur Lee, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay as they worked to cultivate Spanish goodwill during the American Revolution. More attracted to the job's salary than its status, Irving looked forward to his time in Spain as more of a paid vacation than a full-time government job. “I shall apply myself steadily and vigorously to my pen, which I shall be able to do at Madrid, where there are few things to distract one's attention,” he told Ebenezer, “and in a little while I shall amass a new literary capital.”1

  Before his departure, there were formalities to attend to in Washington, D.C., where Irving reviewed his instructions with Webster and dined with President Tyler. Irving's appointment was hailed enthusiastically by politicians and the public alike, and his presence electrified the city. He was mobbed by fans at a presidential reception and spent more than an hour during an evening walk “penned up against the wall,” he wrote, “shaking hands with man, woman, and child from all parts of the Union, who took a notion to lionize me.”2

  There was also the matter of choosing a good secretary for the legation, a position Irving knew well from his service at McLane's side. Irving's top pick, Joseph Cogswell, was wooed away at the last minute by John Jacob Astor to assist in building and establishing Astor's newest pet project, the New York Public Library. Irving was embarrassed, as Cogswell's appointment had already been approved by the Senate, but he then recommended Alexander Hamilton Jr., the twenty-six-year-old grandson of George Washing-ton's treasury secretary. It was a controversial choice, given Hamilton's Federalist roots, but Irving pled the young man's case in letters to Webster, Attorney General Hugh Legaré, and the president himself, finally telling Tyler to consider the nomination “as a great personal favor to myself.”3 Hamilton was approved, and departed for Madrid later that spring with another young attaché Irving had picked for the legation, Henry Brevoort's twenty-four-year-old son, Carson.

  Irving also had his business affairs, such as they were, to put in order. He left his power of attorney to Pierre, authorizing him to continue to work with Kemble on their land speculations. He also gave his nieces access to his funds, providing each with a yearly allowance of $100, in addition to their continued residence at Sunny-side. However, his most important assets—his writings—were in flux, and required a personal discussion with Lea & Blanchard in Philadelphia. His seven-year exclusive agreement with the publisher was set to expire in mid-1842, and Irving, anxiou
s to have this regular source of income, was determined to negotiate and sign an agreement before he left for Spain.

  Irving's first offer—$3,000 annually for exclusive rights to an author's revised edition, plus any new works—was firmly but politely refused by Lea & Blanchard. That was more than twice their current annual payment of $1,150. Citing a “distressed” market, the publishers made a counteroffer of $2,000 for two years of exclusive rights, or $5,000 if Irving wanted to throw in the unfinished Mahomet and any other new books he might complete. That offer frustrated Irving. “I am sorry to say your answer to my proposition does not by any means meet my views,” he wrote. He asked Ebenezer to continue negotiations on his behalf.4

  All that remained were the dreaded good-byes. Irving had wept during his farewell to Dickens in Washington, D.C., and had refused an invitation from fifty distinguished New Yorkers for a public dinner in his honor the night before he left for Spain. On the morning of his April 10 departure, he stood on his sister Catharine's doorstep, but the words caught in his throat; he couldn't even raise the knocker. “I reflected that a parting scene would only be agitating to us both,” he said. He boarded the ship Independence without saying good-bye.5

  On April 30, after twenty days at sea, Irving landed at Bristol, where he boarded a train to London. His hopes for visiting his sister in Birmingham were delayed by the eager American minister to the Court of St. James's, Edward Everett, brother of Irving's old friend Alexander Hill Everett, who wanted to present his famous fellow minister to Queen Victoria at her May 4 levee. Irving obliged grudgingly; he was already homesick—“looking back,” he said, “with an eye of regret to the unpretending quiet of dear little Sunnyside.” But he did want to meet the twenty-three-year-old queen, only five years into what would be a sixty-year reign. He was disappointed. “She is certainly quite low in stature, but well formed and well rounded,” he wrote. “Her countenance, though not decidedly handsome is agreeable and intelligent.” He also noted that her mouth tended to hang open.6