Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

masking his more serious intentions. What his “imagination” truly “expanded with,” we are told, was the prospect of winning Katrina Van Tassel’s hand and thereby gaining possession of her father’s ample acres. These he would convert into “cash,” to be used in turn for speculating in western real estate.
    In the face of this threat the community imagination seems to materialize and frighten the imposter out of the region. Later, it is rumored, he migrates to a “distant part of the country,” probably to the west and closer to the frontier, where, by Yankee ingenuity and calculation apparently, instead of an advantageous marriage, he rises from schoolmaster and law student to lawyer, politician, and finally small-time judge. Oh yes, along the way he also writes, for the newspapers. Back in Sleepy Hollow there are no writers, but the people thrive on storytelling. A flourishing oral literature gives the locality a sense of itself and its past. It turns out that Knickerbocker is only the conveyor of the story we have read. He heard it in the city and wrote it down; Crayon apparently gets it into print. The man who told it at the “corporation meeting” in New York, which Knickerbocker attended, seems to have heard it from an “old farmer,” who thus turns out to be the creator of the second “legend of Sleepy Hollow,” that is, the legend of Ichabod Crane—unless, of course, Brom Bones had a hand in it.
    Crayon’s compendium finally becomes an artful comment on authorship or storytelling in a rapidly expanding democratic and commercial society, a comment, in effect, on itself, on the writer’s effort to satisfy both a popular audience and himself. But Crayon the writer and Crayon the traveler are not easily separated. His literary longings and anxieties closely relate to what general readers of The Sketch Book are apt to be more aware of—the traveler’s yearning for a home. Metaphorically integral to the work as a whole, the re-creation of old English Christmas at Bracebridge Hall is crucial in Irving’s promotion of Anglo-American amicability. He is helping his compatriots discover what Hawthorne was to call in the title of his own book on England (1863) Our Old Home.
    The Christmas sequence, a major event in early American popular culture, needs to be seen against the background of Puritanism’s long-established hostility, especially in New England, to Christmas as a pagan and popish holiday. Here Crayon’s felicitous style wraps the major themes and images of the book together in an attractive package, a special gift for the reader. The landscape, the manor house, the family, the servants, and the villagers unite, with Crayon, a welcome guest now in “the land of my forefathers,” to form a glowing image of peace and good will. But what gives this Christmas its full meaning is the sense of tradition behind it, a tradition in which Christianity blends with vestiges of pagan rites and customs derived from the Druids, Romans, Saxons, and Scandinavians. Holly, ivy, mistletoe, the “yule clog,” the lord of misrule, “an enormous pig’s head, decorated with rosemary, with a lemon in its mouth”—such bows to the past adorn the occasion. Simultaneously Crayon draws copiously on English Christmas poetry that he has resurrected from his libraries.
    In the juxtaposition of his writing to the earlier texts, readers may begin to sense the meaningful continuity between present and past that Crayon in his more joyful moods can count on as at least a temporary stay against the all-encompassing mutability. Irving had rediscovered Christmas for many American and even English readers. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1883 went so far as to call him “the laureate of English Christmas” because of the extent to which “the spirit of Dickens’s Christmas, and of Thackeray‘s” and