Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

of the Christmas of the Illustrated London News —the emphasis on abundant feasting, quaffing, frolicking, and good cheer—derives from The Sketch Book. Or it may be more accurate to say that Irving had invented a new Christmas out of the old, invented the Christmas of modern commercial popular culture. True, it was to be a long time before the festooned Christmas tree became a fixture in American households, before Christmas cards were mass-produced or merchants began to promote Christmas buying the day after Thanksgiving. Yet only three years after The Sketch Book was published, a New York writer named Clement Moore, capitalizing on Irving’s having made Americans aware of St. Nicholas in Knickerbocker’s History, was to give Santa Claus his biggest boost with “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (officially “A Visit from St. Nicholas”). And in 1825, with the publication in Philadelphia of The Atlantic Souvenir, a new kind of literary product appeared on the market, designed specifically for purchase as a gift for Christmas or New Year. Soon similar annuals or giftbooks were available in most of the cities on the east coast, and gradually they spread westward.
    Predecessors of the monthly magazines that were to flourish in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century on, the giftbooks were miscellaneous gatherings of original literary pieces by a variety of authors. Unlike the magazines, however, they had cloth or leather bindings that were often elaborately embellished, gilded, for instance, or inlaid with mother-of-pearl. And many contained lavish illustrations. The annuals were designed, in other words, to be particularly appealing to the eye and the touch, as Christmas or Valentine boxes of chocolates are today, and were often bought by conspicuously consuming Americans as much for drawing room display as for reading.
    The literary fare inside these volumes was generally light and entertaining, its prevailing moral sentiments appropriate to the season. Looking back, one is struck by the extent to which The Sketch Book in its format, style, tone, and domestic longing anticipated the miscellanies that Americans became so fond of in the decades before the Civil War. Not incidentally, the holiday annuals, as business ventures, helped support American literature. Editors paid good money for original contributions. Work by almost every American writer of any significance—including Irving himself—appeared in the giftbooks.
    He had given form to both the literary sketch and what was eventually to be called the short story. Such major fiction writers as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville benefited by his efforts. The “sketch” book became a recognized genre, as did the more-or-less Crayonesque persona who went with it in half-random assortments such as The Idle Man (1821-22), by Irving’s critic, Dana; Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man (1832), by Theodore Fay; Crayon Sketches (1833), by William Cox; Pencillings by the Way (1832-36), by Nathaniel P. Willies; Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), by Donald Grant Mitchell; and Leaves from the Diary of a Dreamer (1853), by Henry Tuckerman. Women also compiled sketch books, and the domestic fiction written in great quantities by American women authors beginning in the 1820’s was by no means unaffected by Crayon’s style, sentiment, wit, and humor. The period from the publication of The Sketch Book through the early 1840’s became, as Van Wyck Brooks aptly observed, “the age of Washington Irving.”
    No deep thinker, the new nation’s first successful professional author tended to live, though rather uneasily, by relatively commonplace ideas that made headway in his time in the slackening of the harsher religious convictions that had prevailed in colonial America. Having rejected his father’s Presbyterianism, Irving fell back, particularly for consolation in times of trouble, on a faith in