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By Root 558 0

America, literature was considered part of public discourse rather than the unique expression of an individual artist. Poetry and fiction had a well-defined civic purpose: to educate readers in the virtues of citizenship. This was especially important in the newly formed republic, where common law practices were being implemented across regions with widely divergent social customs, from puritan New England to the plantation-based South. Writers were expected to produce stories and poems that were morally instructive, domestic and national allegories that illustrated how and why individuals should subordinate their personal interests and inclinations to the public good. Purely imaginative literature, and especially the novel, was suspect, because it elicited from readers emotional and psychological responses that were unregulated by principles of community. However, the public conception of literature began to change as British and European romanticism made its way across the Atlantic. The works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and other prominent romantic writers were printed and reprinted by American booksellers and magazine editors. Gradually, fiction came to represent a space of imaginative freedom, a setting suitable for the self-reliant individualism championed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. What appeared as a dangerous and seductive wilderness to the citizen of the early republic came to be perceived as a symbolic space of unlimited possibility.

Washington Irving’s writings were an integral part of this transformation. He was among the first American writers to separate literary fiction from public discourse. Although his early writings contain elements of social and political satire, he refused to put his writing in the service of a single party or cause. Evidence of this can be found in his 1848 “Preface to the Revised Edition of The Sketch-Book,” in which Irving relates his struggle to find a publisher. He appealed to Sir Walter Scott for help; Scott, after reading some parts of the manuscript, offered Irving the editorship of a weekly periodical but warned him that it would have “somewhat of a political bearing.” Irving’s reply makes clear that he preferred to write when and what he pleased.

[I am] peculiarly unfitted for the situation offered to me, not merely by my political opinions, but by the very constitution and habits of my mind.... I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weather cock. Practice and training may bring me more into rule; but at present I am as useless for regular service as one of my own country Indians, or a Don Cossack.

I must, therefore, keep on pretty much as I have begun; writing when I can, not when I would. I shall occasionally shift my residence and write whatever is suggested by objects before me, or whatever rises in my imagination; and hope to write better and more copiously by and by (Irving, The Complete Works of Washington Irving, vol. 8, p. 5).

What is remarkable about this retrospective account of his correspondence with Scott is the extent to which Irving identified as his own character traits he attributed to Geoffrey Crayon, the narrative persona he constructed for The Sketch-Book. In “The Author’s Account of Himself,” Irving describes how he spent the “holiday afternoons” of his youth “in rambles about the surrounding country [making himself] familiar with all its places famous in history or fable [and] neglect[ing] the regular exercises of the school” (pp. 49-50). These idle, romantic habits informed his peculiar narrative perspective, that of an outside observer of “the shifting scenes of life.”

In describing this point of view, Irving presents writing as an activity that affords an aesthetic pleasure akin to travel or to shopping for prints.

I have wandered through different countries, and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say