The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Wr - Washington Irving [9]
His knowledge of the law rendered him competent to attend to some aspects of the family’s importing business, while still allowing him time to indulge his idle inclination for literature. By the time he was nineteen, he was employed in the offices of Judge Josiah Hoffman, former attorney general of New York. Irving found relief from the monotony of legal work in penning a series of letters under the pseudonym “Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.” He probably had the encouragement of his brother Peter who, as editor of the New York weekly Morning Chronicle, agreed to publish them. A light satire on the fashionable circles of New York’s emerging middle class, these letters earned the young Irving some notoriety for his wit. The narrative persona he constructed—that of an elderly gentleman nostalgic for the social mores of the pre-Revolutionary period—anticipates his later narrators, Diedrich Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon. The satire of the “Letters” is light, written for humor rather than for purposes of social reform, and this contributed to their success. The new nation was not yet ready for the goading criticisms of an Emerson or a Thoreau, and Irving’s portrayal of New York manners allowed readers to laugh at themselves without feeling the sting of self-criticism. In this regard, the “Letters” initiate a pattern Irving would develop in his subsequent literary endeavors. His desire to appeal to the tastes of his audience caused him to avoid overtly controversial issues almost by instinct.
In his legal career, Irving experienced a similar mild success. He became a close friend of the Hoffman family, and especially enjoyed the company of the daughters, Ann and Matilda. He traveled with their father up the Hudson River to Albany, and then on to Montreal, through landscape he later described in “Rip Van Winkle” and “Dolph Heyliger.” Soon after his return, he became ill and worried that he might be developing tuberculosis. His brothers arranged for him to travel to Europe in the hope that the climate would improve his health. Irving took full advantage of this opportunity and traveled extensively through France and Italy. While in Rome, he made the acquaintance of the landscape painter Washington Allston and briefly considered becoming a painter himself. Language, however, would remain Irving’s chosen medium, even while he continued to experiment in his journals with scenic descriptions meant to parallel the picturesque style of his compatriot, Allston.
He returned to New York in March 1806 with a more worldly perspective on his native city of New York. That perspective narrowed to a satirical point in his contributions to Salmagundi, the series of twenty pamphlets he coauthored with his brother William and their friend James Kirke Paulding. Salmagundi was essentially a fictional newspaper complete with an editorial column and a variety of regular features, including theatrical criticism by “William Wizard, Esq.,” satirical verse by “Pindar Cockloft,” and political correspondence from “Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan.” Joseph Addison’s Spectactor and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World surely served as models for the substance and form of this pamphlet, but there were a number of publications closer to home that also inspired these young wits—first among them, the Philadelphia Port Folio, edited by Joseph Dennie.
The idea for Salmagundi emerged out of a social club called by various names, including “the