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

the saving power of good fellowship, which, whether officially promoted by Protestant denominations or not, was the religious drift of many in the nineteenth century. Most fully realized in literature by his English heir, Charles Dickens, this was the underlying faith of Irving’s miscellany. Only five years before its publication, the second of the two wars between Britain and the United States in a little more than a generation had come to an end. Though prompted largely by Irving’s personal frustrations and financial distress, The Sketch Book, as the projection of Crayon’s longing for peace and domestic tranquility, succeeded in giving literary form to an emotional need widely shared by Americans in what was coming to be called the Era of Good Feelings.
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    -William L. Hedges

A NOTE ON THE TEXT
    The text of this edition is that established by Haskell Springer for the Twayne edition (Boston, 1978) of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., volume VIII of The Complete Works of Washington Irving. Based on modern editorial principles, the Twayne text is certified by the Modern Language Association’s Center for Editions of American Authors. It is reprinted here with permission. The complicated publishing history of The Sketch Book made for many difficulties in establishing an authoritative text. For a complete explanation of the decisions made by Springer, the reader is referred to his “Textual Commentary” in the Twayne edition (pp. 340-79). Briefly, however, he has used Irving’s manuscripts, where they survive, as his copy-texts, except where a sketch was later so much revised as to become virtually a new work. Such copy-texts are the basis for almost one-third of the book. Somewhat more than a third is based on the first American edition (1819-20). And the first English edition (1820) provides the copy-texts for the remainder of the Twayne edition of The Sketch Book, except for a few small sections added in the Author’s Revised Edition (1848). The arrangement of the items in the book is that of the 1848 edition. As Springer observes, “This use of multiple copy-texts results ... in some unevenness of texture in the book as a whole.” The variation in spelling and punctuation, however, is apt to be scarcely noticeable to readers who are not looking for it. The compensation is that the text for each sketch or tale comes as close to being what Irving originally intended as possible.

THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.
    â€œI have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.”
    BURTON

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
    The following papers, with two exceptions, were written in England, and formed but part of an intended series for which I had made notes and memorandums. Before I could mature a plan, however, circumstances compelled me to send them piecemeal to the United States, where they were published from time to time in portions or numbers. It was not my intention to publish them in England, being conscious that much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press.
    By the time the contents of the first volume had appeared in this occasional manner, they began to find their way across the Atlantic, and to be inserted, with many kind encomiums, in the London Literary Gazette. It was said, also, that a London bookseller intended to publish them in a collective form. I determined, therefore, to bring them forward myself, that they might at least have the benefit of my superintendence and revision. I accordingly took the printed numbers which I had received from the United States, to Mr. John Murray, the eminent publisher, from whom I had already received