Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [332]
And write he did, along with his brother William and William’s brother-in-law, the sensitive, bookish James Kirke Paulding. Over the course of 1807 the trio collaborated on Salmagundi, a running collection of droll essays on current events in “the thrice renowned and delectable city of GOTHAM” (thereby affixing a nickname to New York). Their irreverent commentaries—named after a spicy appetizer of chopped meat, pickled herring, and onions—were intended “to present a striking picture of the town; and as every body is anxious to see his own phiz on canvas, however stupid or ugly it may be, we have no doubt but that the whole town will flock to our exhibition.”
Few Salmagundian sallies were intended to do serious injury—apart, perhaps, from those ridiculing the American “mobocracy” or mocking Jefferson as “a huge bladder of wind.” Irving and his circle were, after all, gentlemen (or aspiring gentlemen). They knew their way around respectable society, and they knew that no true gentleman would wish to shock, offend, or inflict original ideas upon his readers: light, facile essays, in the knowing and self-ironic tone of the Spectator or the Gentleman’s Magazine were the objective. As Richard Henry Dana later said, Salmagundi made “exceedingly pleasant morning or after-dinner reading, never taking up too much of a gentleman’s time from his business and pleasures, nor so exalted and spiritualized as to seem mystical to his far reaching vision. It was an excellent thing in the rests between cotillions, and pauses between games at cards.”
Salmagundi’s strict adherence to the cultivated standards of eighteenth-century English letters didn’t bother Irving any more than it did Duncan Phyfe or John McComb: “We are,” he would write, “a young people, necessarily an imitative one, and must take our examples and models, in a great degree, from the existing nations of Europe. There is no country more worthy of our study than England.” (The original “Gotham,” immortalized in proverb and nursery rhyme, was of course that old English village whose inhabitants turned aside King John’s wrath by pretending to be fools.)
Yet the denizens of Shakespeare Tavern were poised to transcend the merely provincial. Imbued with a sense of patrician stewardship, they would take on the task of originating a genuinely American tradition of thought and expression—a “National Literature,” in Paulding’s phrase—reflecting the country’s growing cultural as well as political autonomy and bolstering the republican character of its institutions. Paulding, a more ardent nationalist and republican than Irving, was soon building a career out of twisting John Bull’s tail. The passionately anti-British, pro-American essays, poems, and satires that followed Salmagundi would make him a major figure in the “paper war” waged between British and American writers over the next several decades.
Irving himself, for all his aesthetic and political conservatism, had taken a step in that direction as “Jonathan Oldstyle”—“Jonathan” being the current shorthand for an uncouth American—and his contributions to Salmagundi rivaled Paulding’s in lampooning British snobbery. But he was soon to go considerably farther and become the first American writer to exploit the full literary potential of local speech, characters, scenery, folkways, and history.
On October 26, 1809, the Evening Post carried the following notice: “Left his lodgings some time since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of KNICKERBOCKER. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely