Washington Irving was born in the city of New York, April 3, 1783. He
was the eighth son of William and Sarah Irving, and the youngest of
eleven children, three of whom died in infancy. His parents, though of
good origin, began life in humble circumstances. His father was born
on the island of Shapinska. His family, one of the most respectable in
Scotland, traced its descent from William De Irwyn, the secretary and
armorbearer of Robert Bruce; but at the time of the birth of William
Irving its fortunes had gradually decayed, and the lad sought his
livelihood, according to the habit of the adventurous Orkney Islanders,
on the sea.
It was during the French War, and while he was serving as a petty
officer in an armed packet plying between Falmouth and New York, that he
met Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl, the only daughter of John and
Anna Sanders, who had the distinction of being the granddaughter of an
English curate. The youthful pair were married in 1761, and two years
after embarked for New York, where they landed July 18, 1763. Upon
settling in New York William Irving quit the sea and took to trade,
in which he was successful until his business was broken up by the
Revolutionary War. In this contest he was a stanch Whig, and suffered
for his opinions at the hands of the British occupants of the city, and
both he and his wife did much to alleviate the misery of the American
prisoners. In this charitable ministry his wife, who possessed a rarely
generous and sympathetic nature, was especially zealous, supplying the
prisoners with food from her own table, visiting those who were ill, and
furnishing them with clothing and other necessaries.
Washington was born in a house on William Street, about half-way between
Fulton and John; the following year the family moved across the way
into one of the quaint structures of the time, its gable end with attic
window towards the street; the fashion of which, and very likely the
bricks, came from Holland. In this homestead the lad grew up, and it was
not pulled down till 1849, ten years before his death. The patriot army
occupied the city. “Washington's work is ended,” said the mother, “and
the child shall be named after him.” When the first President was again
in New York, the first seat of the new government, a Scotch maid-servant
of the family, catching the popular enthusiasm, one day followed the
hero into a shop and presented the lad to him. “Please, your honor,”
said Lizzie, all aglow, “here's a bairn was named after you.” And the
grave Virginian placed his hand on the boy's head and gave him his
blessing. The touch could not have been more efficacious, though it
might have lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his
future biographer.
New York at the time of our author's birth was a rural city of about
twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery. It did
not extend northward to the site of the present City Hall Park; and
beyond, then and for several years afterwards, were only country
residences, orchards, and corn-fields. The city was half burned down
during the war, and had emerged from it in a dilapidated condition.
There was still a marked separation between the Dutch and the English
residents, though the Irvings seem to have been on terms of intimacy
with the best of both nationalities. The habits of living were
primitive; the manners were agreeably free; conviviality at the table
was the fashion, and strong expletives had not gone out of use in
conversation. Society was the reverse of intellectual: the aristocracy
were the merchants and traders; what literary culture found expression
was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished
with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the
relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their
gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true
progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established
in 1732, and a theater had existed since 1750. Although the town had a
rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes
and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the
aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air.
These were the surroundings in which the boy's literary talent was to
develop. His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate,
God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter,
serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the
amusements of his children; he was not without tenderness in his nature,
but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,--a man of high
character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored
to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no
room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays
was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three
church services on Sunday was the reading of “Pilgrim's Progress.” This
cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for
the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother,
whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of
her children. Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety
failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted
from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant
as wicked. The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the
religious forms and worship of her husband, but she was never in
sympathy with his rigid views. The children were repelled from the creed
of their father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached
to the Episcopal Church. Washington, in order to make sure of his
escape, and feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his
father's church, went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age,
and received the rite of confirmation. The boy was full of vivacity,
drollery, and innocent mischief. His sportiveness and disinclination to
religious seriousness gave his mother some anxiety, and she would
look at him, says his biographer, with a half-mournful admiration, and
exclaim, “O Washington! if you were only good!” He had a love of
music, which became later in life a passion, and great fondness for the
theater. The stolen delight of the theater he first tasted in company
with a boy who was somewhat his senior, but destined to be his literary
comrade,--James K. Paulding, whose sister was the wife of Irving's
brother William. Whenever he could afford this indulgence, he stole
away early to the theater in John Street, remained until it was time to
return to the family prayers at nine, after which he would retire to
his room, slip through his window and down the roof to a back alley, and
return to enjoy the after-piece.
Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several
more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen.
The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity;
he studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the
classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no
doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.
He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating
about, in “Robinson Crusoe” and “Sindbad;” at ten he was inspired by
a translation of “Orlando Furioso;” he devoured books of voyages and
travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities were
exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to be
that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he
used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships
departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth.
His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is
probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had
not shown a disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he
entered a law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired
either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat
in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress
in his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well
as books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester
County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he
was afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his
first voyage up the Hudson, the beauties of which he was the first
to celebrate, on a visit to a married sister who lived in the Mohawk
Valley. In 1802 he became a law clerk in the office of Josiah Ogden
Hoffman, and began that enduring intimacy with the refined and charming
Hoffman family which was so deeply to influence all his life. His health
had always been delicate, and his friends were now alarmed by symptoms
of pulmonary weakness. This physical disability no doubt had much to do
with his disinclination to severe study. For the next two or three years
much time was consumed in excursions up the Hudson and the Mohawk,
and in adventurous journeys as far as the wilds of Ogdensburg and to
Montreal, to the great improvement of his physical condition, and in
the enjoyment of the gay society of Albany, Schenectady, Ballston, and
Saratoga Springs. These explorations and visits gave him material for
future use, and exercised his pen in agreeable correspondence; but his
tendency at this time, and for several years afterwards, was to the idle
life of a man of society. Whether the literary impulse which was born
in him would have ever insisted upon any but an occasional and fitful
expression, except for the necessities of his subsequent condition, is
doubtful.
Irving's first literary publication was a series of letters, signed
Jonathan Oldstyle, contributed in 1802 to the “Morning Chronicle,” a
newspaper then recently established by his brother Peter. The attention
that these audacious satires of the theater, the actors, and their
audience attracted is evidence of the literary poverty of the period.
The letters are open imitations of the “Spectator” and the “Tatler,”
and, although sharp upon local follies, are of no consequence at present
except as foreshadowing the sensibility and quiet humor of the future
author, and his chivalrous devotion to woman. What is worthy of note
is that a boy of nineteen should turn aside from his caustic satire
to protest against the cruel and unmanly habit of jesting at ancient
maidens. It was enough for him that they are women, and possess the
strongest claim upon our admiration, tenderness, and protection.