Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

solely for entertainment” (The Development of the American Short Story, p. 21). The short stories in The Sketch-Book are regularly interspersed among sketches of daily life and social customs in Great Britain and provide imaginative relief from what might otherwise become a mundane travel narrative. Irving actively pursued the commercialization of literature in his next two works as well, enlarging the fictional component of both Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824). In Bracebridge Hall, he capitalized on the success of his descriptions of rural England, while at the same time pursuing his interest in prose fiction. The premise for Bracebridge Hall is simple. Geoffrey Crayon returns to the fictional manor he had described in some sections of The Sketch-Book to spend a few weeks there while preparations are being made for the marriage of Julia, “the daughter of a favorite college friend” of Simon Bracebridge. Like The Sketch-Book, a majority of Bracebridge Hall is made up of descriptions of the Hall and its environs and character sketches of the family, their guests, and the inhabitants of the local village. As the book proceeds, Irving regularly creates opportunities for characters to relate stories, the longest of which, “Dolph Heyliger,” Crayon presents as “a manuscript tale from the pen of my fellow-countryman, the late Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the historian of New York” (p. 214).
    Irving is doing more than simply filling out the pages of his book with an occasional story set in America. He is using the conventional genres that were popular with readers of magazines and gift books—the observational essay or character sketch written in a confessional mode—as a platform for staging stories mildly Gothic in tone and content. He would take this method a step further in Tales of a Traveller, the first of his collections in which fiction predominates over travel narrative. Divided into four books, Tales lacks the unity that a common setting gives to Bracebridge Hall, but Irving compensates for this by creating tale-telling contests, or by using frame-narratives to nest a story within a story, as with the interrelated series that includes “Adventure of the Mysterious Picture,” “Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Story of the Young Italian.” Although Irving originally intended to use his travels through Germany and Italy as the organizational premise for Tales, he abandoned this realist narrative framework and told his stories as he would. He felt that the final manuscript was uneven but also believed it contained some of his best writing. Critics in England and America unfortunately did not agree. They found it imitative and even vulgar for its moments of sexual innuendo and for the darker psychological strain of tales such as “Adventure of the German Student.” As a critic in the October 1824 issue of the Westminster Review made painfully clear, Irving’s vogue in literary London had passed.
    Geoffrey’s fame was occasioned by the fact of his being a prodigy; a prodigy for show—such as La Belle Sauvage, or the learned pig: up to the time of Geoffrey, there were no Belles Lettres in America, no native litterateurs, and he shot up at once with true American growth, a triumphant proof of what had so long been doubted and denied, namely, that the sentimental plant may flourish even on that republican soil.
    But now, this critic continued, Irving catered to the tastes of a shallow, bourgeois audience, providing them with “a little pathos, a little sentiment to excite tears as a pleasurable emotion,” yet little of “solid matter.” Still, Tales sold well and Irving’s reputation with the public was not spoiled by the poor critical reception it received.
    His interest in writing fiction was dampened, though, and he turned to popular history and biography instead, like that which he had written in A History of New York but without the satirical overtone. He