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.