I think it’s a shame the title of this book was changed from The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. The old title is more arresting, it suggests Tristram Shandy It’s also a far better descriptor of the text. This isn’t a short story collection, it’s a scrapbook of all sorts, from travel writing to ethnography, bits of history, sentimental vignettes and a few short stories.
I’d have liked more character work on Geoffrey himself, made him a more interesting person like Irving’s previous narrator, Knickerbocker. The introduction said that Washington Irving softened his style for this book, cutting out some of the sarcasm and silliness, adding in little Tristram Shandy-esque moments of sentimentality and sentiment. I’d have liked something a bit spikier, more of a George Mikes take on visiting Britain in the 1810s but I suppose the flattery worked, this book made Irving’s career on both sides of the pond.
I read this to kick off my ‘short story summer’ but it’s clearly an autumn/winter book. Not only is there the staple of Halloweeny things, the headless horseman, and a set of depictions of an English country Christmas that influenced Dickens’s portrayal of the holiday, it’s just generally an autumnal/wintery book. There’s a marked antiquarianism in the book, from wandering London side streets to find the Charterhouse, an institution out of time; or vainly looking for The Boar’s Head Tavern, where Falstaff and co drank. Irving’s choices of poets to quote (especially at the headings of his chapters) are full of rather creaky names like Robert Herrick. I don’t know if there was a big taste for seventeenth century poets in America at the time but there is always a backwards looking element in the book.
The chapters on Christmas are all about the lost traditions. He stays in the country with Bracebridge a man who has “that most enviable of all blessings to an Englishman, an opportunity of indulging the bent of his own humour without molestation.” All his ways are bent towards the past, keeping the idea of the wassail, of Waites playing music in the big hall, of old games and manorial hospitality. They are warm, comforting chapters, full of Christmas cheer - if just because the literary depiction of Christmas cheer stems from these chapters.
Irving’s backward gaze is in evidence in his pieces of Shakespeare. In one he looks for Falstaff’s tavern, very much fails to find it but has a nice time talking with a bunch of Cockneys who play up for him as a tourist. In another he goes to Stratford and tries to commune with the Bard in his birth and burial places, again talking to some colourful locals. They are pleasant pieces of travel writing, following the pattern of a cosy failed quest that many books have emulated since.
One of the most striking pieces is, again, antiquary, when Irving/Crayon find themselves in an unused library in Westminster Abbey. This is a place where books go to die and he hears them croakily argue for their relevance. In another reverie, he goes to the British Library where he sees authors cut up old books to patch or ornament their clothes - something he does with his frequent quotations of poetry. Washington Irving does a good line in daydreams.
He also does a good line in melancholy. The piece where he goes into the church of Westminster Abbey and reflects on the inevitability of death, decay and irrelevance is very sobering. As is the description of a sunk ship he saw on his journey over to Britain, where a mast is covered with the handkerchiefs sailors tied to it to try and cling on. Lots of handkerchiefs, no sailors.
A lot of the sentimental stuff is pretty standard. I’ve read quite a number of books from the age of sensibility and beyond, and I find it works if overloaded with ridiculous coincidences (like the best parts of the Lee sisters’s The Canterbury Tales), contrasted with knockabout humour (like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Shandy) or cut with gothic (like Ann Radcliffe). There’s not enough vivacity to the rest of the book to set the sentimental stuff in the right light. The most successful of these pieces is probably ‘rural funerals’ which mixes the sentimental with his antiquarian/folklorist tendencies, collecting fading funerary traditions.
The two most famous entries in the sketchbook are Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. They are both more full-bodied than many of the others, essentially shaggy dog jokes or Twain-esque tall tales. Rip Van Winkle tells the story of a man who falls asleep for twenty years, ostensibly to hide from his wife. Sleepy Hollow is about a truly peculiar schoolmaster who is getting a little too close to an eligible bachelorette and is spooked out of town by pranksters playing on his superstitious nature. While they both have a certain rambunctiousness that is missing in much the rest of the book, they are also very backwards looking, playing with the Dutch past of New York State and the legends and stories connected with them. I found it interesting that British productions from this same period like Life in London were all about the now, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent is always looking to the past.
While I found him very lively in his biography of Goldsmith, here he is very much a watercolour writer, he creates a delicate wash and sketches in enough details to make out the picture. They are all very pleasant pictures but it’s not a truly eye-popping sketchbook and I found myself a little disappointed.
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