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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Timeless Tales

Originally the eponymous tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, was just one story among more than 30 in a collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20). Geoffrey Crayon was the pseudonym of the American author Washington Irving. Of those stories, two in particular became more famous than the others: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. Both stories were set in New York State, but Irving wrote them in Birmingham – not in Birmingham, Alabama, but in the West Midlands, England, where he happened to be staying with his sister at the time.

Other stories include The Spectre Bridegroom, which has its source in a folklore tale shared by the 2005 stop-frame animation film, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Another story, entitled Little Britain, was the name of a squalid and colourful district in 19th-century London, so called because it was a microcosm of British society. Irving’s story amounts to a stroll through this defining heart of the capital. The British comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams used the same title for their comedy sketch show because they populated it with a cast of eccentrically British characters, in much the same vein as Irving’s story. Further stories are set in America, England, Scotland and Ireland.

The reasons why the stories of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle have become more successful than the others seems to be threefold. Firstly, they have a sense of completeness in the tradition of storytelling, in that they have a beginning, middle and end. Secondly, one would be forgiven for believing that they were both genuine American folk stories, which Irving had simply committed to the page. Thirdly, because they are set in America, they possess a distinctive quality – to the British audience, they had a romantic exoticness, while to the American audience, they filled a perceived gap in folk tradition as the country was still in its infancy at that time.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow cleverly combines ghost story with romantic comedy and also has an uncertain ending, leaving the reader to surmise what may, or may not, have happened. It also has memorable, if a little clichéd, characters, representing archetypes of sorts. Rip Van Winkle deals with the transition of America, from sovereignty to independence, by imagining what a character would experience if he were to fall asleep for 20 years, much like in a fairy tale.

About the Author: Transatlantic Popularity

Irving was very much a product of the emergent US. The year of his birth, 1783, marked the end of the American Revolutionary War, and he was named after George Washington, who was then commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and would go on to become the first president of the United States of America in 1789. The war had lasted eight years and was seen as a metamorphosis that was keenly felt by Irving’s parent’s generation.

This sense of transition is where he found his inspiration for Rip Van Winkle, as the character was a traveler in time, spanning the turbulence. The eponymous Rip is, in effect, a personification of the metamorphosis of America from larva, through pupa, to imago. Little was Irving to realize, however, that America would be plunged into bitter civil war just two years following his death. Independence in itself was not enough, as the North and South had different ideas about what it actually meant to be American. In the end, much more blood would be shed in order to find the way forward.

Irving is credited with having become the first American author to garner international success. This is partly because his parents were British immigrants who settled in New York. This gave Irving a footing on both sides of the Atlantic, a fact he took full advantage of by establishing many contacts in both America and Europe. In addition to this, Irving was influenced by the wealth of folk stories that emanated from the European continent and lived on in the subcultures of those who had found their new home in the US.

The result was that Irving had an eye for writing stories that, although original, had an air of traditional authenticity, along with a ready market comprising Europeans and their New World diaspora. Irving had an extended stay in Britain and Europe and, at one stage, and had a liaison with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, following the death of her husband and subsequent return to England.

Within the literary community, Irving was very highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. He actively encouraged his fellow American authors to try their luck on the international scene, and his work was also admired by contemporary British authors. At the time, writing was not generally accepted as an orthodox profession, but Irving amply demonstrated that it was possible to make a respectable living from the pen. He also initiated the idea that there should be laws to protect authors and publishers from infringement of copyright and piracy, as it was all too easy for others to steal original ideas or to simply sell counterfeit copies of novels without fear of prosecution.

Irving is famed for his clever marketing prowess. In 1809 he was ready to publish his first major work, with the ludicrously long title A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker. To garner attention, Irving placed ‘missing person’ postings in New York papers, pretending that Knickerbocker was a real Dutch author who had vanished from his hotel room. He followed this with a hoax posting from the proprietor of the hotel, stating that an abandoned manuscript would be used to settle Knickerbocker’s hotel bill if he failed to resurface. New Yorkers were so beguiled that they were primed for reading the book, which was published in December of that year.

Irving initially took the pseudonym Knickerbocker, but the readership didn’t mind when he revealed that they had been duped, because they so loved the book and admired Irving’s guile. He had become an overnight celebrity, and his writing career was assured. Today the name Knickerbocker has become synonymous with those who live in Manhattan, but it was also used as the title of an influential literary magazine. Irving himself became a member of its staff for a few years.

The period 1842–46 saw Irving enter politics, as Minister to Spain. He presumed that the role would be somewhat honorary, so that he could spend much of his time writing. However, it was anything but, as Spain was a rather turbulent place at the time due to the Spanish queen still being a child, so that there was much infighting for power among those in government. Irving also became involved with long-winded negotiations over trade between the Americans and the Iberians. This included the Spanish territory of Cuba, which was problematic due to the use of slave labour – the issue that would soon ignite the American Civil War.

When Irving returned to America, he grew ever closer to the hearts of the nation the older he became. He was viewed as a sage of American literature and a wise elder statesman. He was blessed with talent, intelligence and an affable personality, which gave him an unprecedented likeability.

Interestingly, the perception of Irving’s learnedness was so strong that he inadvertently introduced a historical myth that became taught as historical fact; a fact that has persisted after his death, to this day. He published a biography of the explorer Christopher Columbus in 1828, in which he stated that Europeans believed the world to be flat, so that Columbus’s crew feared falling off the edge of the world during their voyage into the unknown. The truth is that Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, had settled on the idea of the world being spherical in the 4th century BC and medieval European culture was based on Aristotelian thinking. Furthermore, the curvature of the Earth was clearly in evidence to those navigating the oceans in 1492.