Knickerbocker’s history of new York is the book,
published in December, 1809, with which Washington
living, at the age of twenty-six, first won wide credit
and influence. Walter Scott wrote to an American
friend, who sent him the second edition——
“I beg you to accept my best thanks
for the uncommon degree of entertainment which
I have received from the most excellently jocose
History of New York. I am sensible that, as a
stranger to American parties and politics, I must
lose much of the concealed satire of the piece,
but I must own that, looking at the simple and
obvious meaning only, I have never read anything so
closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as
the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have
been employed these few evenings in reading them
aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests,
and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing.
I think, too, there are passages which indicate
that the author possesses powers of a different
kind, and has some touches which remind me much
of Sterne.”
Washington Irving was the son of William Irving, a
sturdy native of the Orkneys, allied to the Irvines
of Drum, among whose kindred was an old historiographer
who said to them, “Some of the foolish write
themselves Irving.” William Irving of Shapinsha,
in the Orkney Islands, was a petty officer on board
an armed packet ship in His Majesty’s service,
when he met with his fate at Falmouth in Sarah Sanders,
whom he married at Falmouth in May, 1761. Their
first child was buried in England before July, 1763,
when peace had been concluded, and William Irving emigrated
to New York with his wife, soon to be joined by his
wife’s parents.
At New York William Irving entered into trade, and
prospered fairly until the outbreak of the American
Revolution. His sympathy, and that of his wife,
went with the colonists. On the 19th of October,
1781, Lord Cornwallis, with a force of seven thousand
men, surrendered at Yorktown. In October, 1782,
Holland acknowledged the independence of the United
States in a treaty concluded at The Hague. In
January, 1783, an armistice was concluded with Great
Britain. In February, 1783, the independence of
the United States was acknowledged by Sweden and by
Denmark, and in March by Spain. On the 3rd of
April in that year an eleventh child was born to William
and Sarah Irving, who was named Washington, after the
hero under whom the war had been brought to an end.
In 1783 the peace was signed, New York was evacuated,
and the independence of the United States acknowledged
by England.
Of the eleven children eight survived. William
Irving, the father, was rigidly pious, a just and
honorable man, who made religion burdensome to his
children by associating it too much with restrictions
and denials. One of their two weekly half-holidays
was devoted to the Catechism. The mother’s
gentler sensibility and womanly impulses gave her the
greater influence; but she reverenced and loved her
good husband, and when her youngest puzzled her with
his pranks, she would say, “Ah, Washington, if
you were only good!”
