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in his right mind and as great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry-street, or at the Office of this paper will be thankfully received.” Two weeks later, a letter writer to the Post reported that he had spotted the man, just above Kingsbridge, trudging wearily northward. The proprietor of the Columbian Hotel then announced that he had discovered “a very curious kind of a written book” in Knickerbocker’s room—and that if the vanished lodger didn’t soon pay his bill, the manuscript would be sold off. Finally, on November 28, New York’s cleverest prepublication publicity campaign to date culminated with an announcement of the availability of A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker.

Irving later explained that the idea for Knickerbocker’s History came to him after reading Samuel Latham Mitchill’s Picture of New-York. Irving found it shallow and self-important—the Lads had already mocked it in Salmagundi—and it seemed a perfect target for a spoof “written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local errors, follies, and abuses with good-humored satire.” Accordingly, with the assistance of his brother Peter, Irving concocted a “crude mass of mock erudition,” brimming with mordant sarcasm, goofy wordplay, and spurious footnotes, jumbling hilarious make-believe events together with bona fida history.

Casting himself as a serious scholar—though admitting that his name probably came from knicker, “to nod,” and boeken, “books,” hence a great nodder or dozer over books—Knickerbocker/Irving recounted the story of New York’s origins, doing for it what Virgil had done for Rome but with tongue in cheek. When Hudson first sights Manhattan, for example, he is given the memorably vacuous line: “See! There!”

It helped that in Irving’s day knowledge about the city’s Dutch roots was very skimpy. The New-York Historical Society had only recently issued a plaintive request for information: “Is there any thing known concerning Wouter Van Twiller, or William Kieft, who preceded Governor Stuyvesant in the Chief Magistracy of the New-Nether-lands? How long did each remain in office? What stations or offices did they fill prior to their appointment here? Were they removed by death or resignation, or for ill behaviour?” William Smith’s History of the Province of New York (1757) didn’t have the answers: it gave only nine pages to the entire half century of Dutch rule. Small wonder, then, that readers often couldn’t tell when Irving was pulling their leg, and in later editions he had to warn that the History was a “whimsical and satirical work, in which the peculiarities and follies of the present day are humorously depicted in the persons, and arrayed . . . in the grotesque costume of the ancient Dutch colonist.”

Knickerbocker’s History was certainly in part a sendup of contemporary politics, particularly Jefferson’s foreign policy. It portrays Kieft (“William the Testy,” Knickerbocker calls him) as an intellectual who lacks the ability or patience to run a government and whose notions of defense against foreign aggression are limited to empty proclamations and self-defeating limitations on trade—an unmistakable allusion to the recently retired president. Stuyvesant, by contrast, was an ur-Federalist who believed that “to render a country respected abroad, it was necessary to make it formidable at home.”

Irving/Knickerbocker also took a jaundiced view of contemporary cobblers, blacksmiths, and tailors—the “swinish multitude,” the “enlightened mob”—who, believing themselves competent in “matters above their comprehensions,” attempted to “attend to the measures of government.” He ridiculed modern “hoydens” who, unlike the domestic goede vrouws of yore, were “very fond of meddling with matters that did not appertain to their sex.” He bemoaned the “pride of family and ostentation of wealth, that has since grown to such a height in this city,” and heaped scorn on the “satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen