The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Summary

The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband. Two tales set in the Dutch villages of the Hudson valley, both credited to the late historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, became the most famous pieces in the book. In Rip Van Winkle, a kindly, idle villager in the Catskills escapes his scolding wife by wandering into the mountains with his dog Wolf, meets a silent crew of old-fashioned Dutchmen playing at ninepins, drinks from their flagon, and falls asleep. He wakes with a long beard and a rusted gun, walks home to find the King George sign replaced by one of General Washington, his wife dead, his friends gone, and the village arguing about elections; after a moment of terror in which he cannot say who he is, his grown daughter Judith takes him in, and he lives out his days telling his story at the inn door. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the lanky Connecticut schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, a lover of good food and ghost stories, courts Katrina Van Tassel, the plump heiress of a rich farm, against the rough prankster Brom Bones. After a harvest party where the guests trade tales of the Headless Horseman, a Hessian trooper said to ride in search of his head, Ichabod rides home on a borrowed plough-horse, is chased to the church bridge by a headless rider, and is struck down by a flung head. Next morning only his hat and a smashed pumpkin are found; Brom marries Katrina and laughs knowingly whenever the pumpkin is mentioned. Between the American tales Crayon visits English places and customs: a village church and a grieving widow, rural funerals, Westminster Abbey, the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap, Shakespeare's Stratford, a German ghost story called The Spectre Bridegroom, and five linked sketches of an old-fashioned Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, with its squire, Master Simon, carols, wassail and yule log. Two essays on the Indians of New England, including a sympathetic portrait of King Philip, and a humorous sketch of John Bull complete the range. Irving issued the book in seven paperbound numbers in New York between 1819 and 1820, and it appeared in two volumes in London in 1820; the library text is the revised edition with Irving's later preface.

Top Lessons

• Waking into a changed world

  Rip sleeps through the American Revolution and wakes to find that the tavern sign has changed from King George to General Washington, though the faces under it are much the same. Irving uses a folk tale to ask what really changes when a nation changes and what a person keeps when everything familiar is gone.

• Credulity and the prank

  Ichabod Crane believes every ghost story he reads in Cotton Mather and hears from the Dutch wives, and his fear makes him easy prey for a rival. The legend never tells us plainly what happened at the bridge, but the pumpkin and Brom's laughter let the reader judge. Irving teaches by comedy that fear and greed cloud the eyes.

• Keeping old customs

  The Christmas sketches show Squire Bracebridge reviving carols, the yule log, wassail and plain hospitality for his tenants. Crayon admires these customs because they bind rich and poor and the present to the past. The book treats tradition as something that must be loved to be kept.

• Grief honored, not hurried

  Several of the English sketches, among them The Widow and Her Son, Rural Funerals and The Broken Heart, dwell on mourning. Irving argues that sorrow for the dead is a sorrow people rightly refuse to forget, and that tender remembrance can make the living gentler.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Sketch Book is a useful source for the sentimental medicine of grief around 1820. In The Broken Heart and The Pride of the Village Irving takes seriously the period belief that disappointed love could bring on a fatal decline, describing young women who waste away in silent melancholy; these are literary portraits in the tradition of lovesickness, not case histories, and any modern reading of them as depression or consumption is speculative. The Widow and Her Son and Rural Funerals treat mourning customs and the duty of remembrance with real psychological attention. Rip Van Winkle offers the comic counterpart: a long sleep after a flagon of spirits, a wakened man who cannot fix his identity, and Dame Van Winkle's death from a broken blood-vessel in a fit of passion, a common period explanation for sudden death in anger. Sleepy Hollow's atmosphere of trances, visions and the nightmare shows how a whole community could be described as prone to waking dreams.

• Rip Van Winkle

  Rip drinks repeatedly from the ninepin players' flagon, sleeps twenty years, and on waking at first blames the flagon; later he cannot say who he is before the village crowd.

• Rip Van Winkle

  Judith reports that her mother died after breaking a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New England peddler.

• The Broken Heart

  Crayon argues that women can die of disappointed love and tells of a betrothed girl who wastes away in melancholy after her lover's execution.

• The Widow and Her Son; Rural Funerals

  A poor widow mourns her only son, a sailor who comes home to die; Crayon describes English burial flowers and reflects on the sorrow for the dead.

• The Pride of the Village

  A village girl deserted by an officer declines through the spring and dies, the parish mourning at her funeral.

• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, opening

  The inhabitants are said to live in a continual reverie, subject to trances and visions, and haunted by the nightmare.