The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature

Lydia G. Fash

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• Print ISBN:
  9780813943978
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813943992
• Index: Literature

Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby-Dick and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American.

In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States' past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.

1

Dueling Temporalities in Irving’s Best-Selling Sketch Book

On March 1, 1819, Washington Irving sent a packet from England to his friend Henry Brevoort in New York. These manuscripts, including “Rip Van Winkle,” made up the first number of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which was published by the felicitously named Cornelius S. Van Winkle. Numbers 2, 3, and 4 of The Sketch Book followed upon the tail of the first. The fifth number was in print on New Year’s Day 1820. Eight months later, before the final two numbers appeared in the United States, the eminent London publisher John Murray registered copyright on a British version of The Sketch Book.1 Even though Irving was living in England, he was an American citizen and thus ostensibly not protected by English copyright. Yet, that Murray did pay Irving for the copyright (albeit a small sum) demonstrates a fascinating fact about this collection: at the moment of its publication, both the United States and England claimed The Sketch Book and its author. These competing claims helped make the collection the first transatlantic best seller written by a native-born American and set a model for conjuring the American people through short fiction about the US past.

Because of the frayed relationship between the United States and United Kingdom in the first decades of the nineteenth century, no one thought an American author could win a domestic and international audience. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), both France and England seized American vessels, but England earned the particular ire of the US government by taking American goods and impressing any suspected Britons into the Royal Navy. In so doing, they conscripted many unwilling American sailors and raised a vital question: How could one tell the difference between a Briton and an American, especially when British captains denied the ability to relinquish the status of British subject for that of American citizen?2 American resentment over this thorny issue helped catalyze the War of 1812—the war that was, depending on one’s vantage, either “the Second War of Independence” or “the third English Civil War.” Fights between the United States and United Kingdom were often figured as family quarrels, those of an insubordinate child and wronged parent or of a tyrannical parent and a liberty-loving child. Given that reality, it is unsurprising that the American and British literary markets—and American and British literature—were similarly deeply connected and deeply opposed. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans read and reprinted British novels, poetry, magazines, and reviews.3 So, too, they adopted British narrative forms, styles, and subjects. After all, many American colonists had been British: their cultural history and patrimony were shared with their former rulers and recent enemies. And yet in January 1820, the Edinburgh Review, a publication with considerable circulation in the United States, printed Sydney Smith’s infamous taunt: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statute?”4 The young United States and its cultural products were easily dismissed.5 In line with these truths, Paul Giles argues that British literature and American literature developed “not so much in opposition but rather as heretical alternatives to each other.”6 In other words, British and American authors produced funhouse mirror images of each other—distorted and warped but still recognizable—because both countries understood themselves in relation to each other. When the United States severed itself from its cultural past, Britain lost its most precious colony.

Nowhere is this funhouse mirror phenomenon more evident than in Irving’s Sketch Book. As Giles explains, Irving’s project can be understood as one of burlesque, an attempt to lower both the American and the British to the level of the fool while allowing the two nations—which had so recently been a single country—to view each other and thus also themselves as a wishful and warped projection. Building on Giles’s description of Irving’s use of burlesque, I illuminate how composition—both the contents of the collection and the collection’s print history—helped create such a double sensibility. With the use of contemporary reviews and sales figures, I also demonstrate the practical result of such a squinting text; namely, I show how in being claimed by England and the United States, The Sketch Book became the first transatlantic best seller written by a native-born American. Irving’s luck and savvy enabled him to publish two slightly different, if identically named, collections simultaneously in New York and London. Although no other critic has remarked on the fact, both collections juxtaposed two genres, two temporalities, and two nationalities: staid sketches predominantly about Britain, composed by the fictional Geoffrey Crayon, and the lively American tales told by Irving’s previously established Dutch historian persona, Diedrich Knickerbocker.7 (The British first edition included two additional American sketches designed to appeal to British readers, a fact to which I will return.) Like the double genre format, the assorted tales and sketches are Janus-faced, allowing readers to pick out the narrative lines that flatter their own national sensibilities. Irving’s stories thus illustrate both the greatness and the stasis of English culture, both the absurdity and the vitality of American stories. It is this duality that explains the competing national claims over The Sketch Book and creates a riot of temporalities that displaces rather than counters ideas of American cultural primitivity. As I show below, The Sketch Book offers a window into the complicated structures of feelings that composed the Anglo-American relationship and provides a model for successful and authentic-feeling stories that claimed to be nationally representative. This chapter, then, starts the story of The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by describing the first massive success of the tale and the sketch, exposing its temporal flexibility, and illuminating the cultural associations it grants short fiction.

English and American, Sketches and Tales

Upon reading The Sketch Book, British reviewers boldly proclaimed that Irving was English. As the Edinburgh Monthly asked, “Who is there of us that would not hail as a brother, the man that could entertain and express such sentiments?”8 So too the Retrospective Review declared Washington Irving “not national, but English.”9 The Edinburgh Monthly lauded Crayon for being “part and portion of the English commonwealth,” while Briton Christopher North praised how Irving “has engrafted himself matter and style, on English literature, and must be contented to be among the crowd of good English writers.”10 A Blackwood’s article similarly meant a high compliment when it said that Irving’s collection was “very graceful—infinitely more so than any piece of American writing that ever came from any other hand, and well entitled to be classed with the best English writings of our day.”11 Reviewers were eager to induct Irving into the pantheon of British authors in large part because, as one reviewer said, Crayon’s sketches brought to mind “some of the best papers in the Tatler and Spectator.”12 American critics praised in similarly national terms. In 1822 the Columbian Star agreed with an enthusiastic French review that “An American, Mr. Washington Irving, has raised himself by a single work, to the level of the purest and most elegant writers produced by England.”13 Likewise the New-England Galaxy, where “Peter Rugg” would later be printed, gushed: “Those who feel an interest in the literary reputation of America, and are willing to be pleased with the productions of American scholars, will read with no common emotions ‘the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.’”14 These warm reviews reflect the generous reception given to Irving’s work on both sides of the Atlantic. Frank Luther Mott concludes that when newly published The Sketch Book sold at least seventy-five thousand American copies, a significant number for the time.15 On the English side, The Sketch Book quickly became John Murray’s best-selling item, and Murray went through three editions—the second of which had two printings—in two years.16 The American Sketch Book was on its fourth edition by 1824. The public, as far away as India, was aware of the book’s immense success. The Calcutta Journal conjectured that by November of 1822 “excepting Scott’s Novels,” The Sketch Book was “the most popular book in England.”17

Although twentieth-century critics came to see Irving as not sufficiently national, both the United States and England continued for decades to try to claim him. In 1849, John Murray III, the son of Irving’s original British publisher and then head of the House of Murray, took to court Henry George Bohn, a printer who was making cheap editions of Irving’s work. Along with explaining that Irving published in London before New York, Murray contended that Irving was legally equivalent to a Briton: he pointed out that Irving’s parents, born in the United Kingdom before the American Revolution, were British, and Irving had lived and written in England for many years. To assist the House of Murray, Irving happily certified his father’s Scottish and mother’s English births, though he could not keep himself from underlining his father’s allegiance to the American cause both before and after the Revolution.18 As Irving wrote in a memorandum designed to aid the House of Murray, he would “take all proper steps to protect” Murray’s “pecuniary interest” while not “compromising” his own “character as a native born and thoroughly loyal American citizen.”19 Murray wanted Irving and The Sketch Book to be British; Irving wanted to help Murray argue that—as long as Irving could maintain that he was also first and foremost American. This lawsuit, like the critical response that was divided along national lines, parallels bifurcations within The Sketch Book. Most obviously, the collection’s doubleness comes from its two genres and two temporalities, each with a different national association, but it also, as I show below, was encouraged by the double valence of the collection’s individual pieces, both sketches and tales.20

In the nineteenth century, the sketch was a flexible genre that held associations with truth, sincerity, and fragmentation. As Kristie Hamilton has shown, a wide variety of authors, from the enslaved (like Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson) to the cosmopolitan (like N. P. Willis and Nathaniel Hawthorne) used the genre.21 As varied as their writers, sketches could take the form of character descriptions, regional accounts, or reflective essays. Unlike the tale, they were often plotless or loosely plotted. Instead of unfolding over time, they offered a close examination of a limited moment, landscape, or idea, demonstrating the genre’s relationship to space and highlighting the visual metaphor inherent in the genre’s name. Seemingly jotted down in haste, the sketch gave the sensation of being an accurate, though incomplete, impression of a moment, place, or idea.22 Given its aesthetic of fragmentation, the sketch was particularly suited to documenting a rapidly changing modern world. According to Hamilton, the sketch “brought into the open, and made thinkable, the disruptions within modernization that the novel smoothed over with coherence and closure.”23 The genre’s acceptance of the incomplete provided a way for readers and writers to consider both the massive technological change of the nineteenth century and the dizzying variation of a geographically and demographically expanding nation.24 The tale, in contrast, hinged on the development of a planned plot; it recorded change over time and, in The Sketch Book, offered narrative ambiguity in which the central story event had two possible explanations. With these two genres, Irving set up a collection that, like early nineteenth-century British and American cultural narratives more broadly, offers a grotesque and uncomfortable twinning centered on whiteness.

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. begins with an epigraph that introduces Crayon as an unencumbered observer. He “has no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures” (Van Winkle SB 1:i).25 Crayon’s nonattachment, the epigraph implies, allows for a certain objective distance. It is because of his bachelorhood that Crayon can be a “mere spectator,” a word recalling the famous eighteenth-century English periodical the Spectator.26 Based as he was on English models, Crayon was the epitome of the gentleman sketcher, a fact his name underlines and his stated project makes explicit. (“Crayon” was a term for a hasty visual sketch.) The essays feel accurate because of their protodocumentary stance, an impression Irving cultivated by listing Crayon as the author, not just narrator, of the book. The London Literary Gazette, the magazine whose unauthorized (but legal) reprintings of The Sketch Book encouraged Irving to publish in England, praised Crayon as displaying “an amiable and cultivated mind, free from violent prejudices, and endued with very considerable talent.”27 Crayon was reliable—even to a British audience—and his subjects were apt. He goes to Westminster Abbey, Liverpool, Stratford-on-Avon, Windsor Castle, and London. He describes “the good-hearted, good-tempered” John Bull (Van Winkle SB 4:11) and the “amiable but unfortunate” James I of Scotland (Van Winkle SB 3:177) with discernment and interest. His light humor and pleasing tone encourage his British readers to see him as the ideal American, one who appreciated Britain as much as the British. In fact, although Crayon calls himself a “stranger,” his understanding frequently proves greater than the natives’. For example, when Crayon goes to Liverpool to visit the birthplace of William Roscoe, author of a well-regarded history of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he learns that the “good people of the vicinity thronged like wreckers” when the scholar’s library was sold at auction (Van Winkle SB 1:34). Only Crayon has the proper empathy to comprehend Roscoe’s loss and the refinement to see the crassness of the public means by which the books were dispersed. In short, Crayon serves as the upper-class English projection of a like-minded American and a lost brother. He allows British critics to claim him and thus to reclaim their imagined America, which, of course, was an extension of England.

But I am not accusing Irving of being Anglophilic, a label that many twentieth-century US literary critics pasted onto The Sketch Book with derision. For even while credentialing himself as British, Crayon often winks at his intended US audience. To take a case in point, in the second number, when Crayon praises the effect of rural life “upon the national character,” he is talking about both English yeomen and their American cousins who exhibit “a robustness of frame and freshness of complexation” from “their living so much in the open air” (Van Winkle SB 2:130). (It is worth remembering that the first four numbers were written for pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Narrative and Historical Beginnings
• 1. Dueling Temporalities in Irving’s Best-Selling Sketch Book
• 2. Biding Time in Hale’s Ladies’ Magazine
• 3. Nonsynchronous Synchronicity in Sedgwick’s Gift Book Stories
• 4. The Chronicle, the Reckoning, and Hawthorne’s Puritan Tales
• 5. Beginning Detection with Poe’s Mary/Marie
• 6. The Short Fiction Skeleton of the Great American Novel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index