But it
was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth
century England would be interested in American books.
The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of
Irving's happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical
Dutch historian of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and
fathered upon him a witty parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave "Picture
of New York." To read Irving's chapters today is to witness one
of the rarest and most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual
beginning of a legend which the world is unwilling to let die.
The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with laughter, and
reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain New
Yorkers were slow to see the joke.
Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the
Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was
pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much
theater-going, and plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson
River. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, returned and helped
to write the light social satire of the "Salmagundi Papers," and
became, after the publication of the "Knickerbocker History," a
local celebrity.
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