A History of New York

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A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty
Author Washington Irving
Country United States
LanguageEnglish
Subject History of New York City
Genre Satire
Publishervarious
Publication date
1809

A History of New York, subtitled From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, is an 1809 literary parody on the early history of New York City by Washington Irving. Originally published under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, later editions that acknowledged Irving's authorship were printed as Knickerbocker's History of New York.

Contents

The book is significant as early media describing what became modern Christmas traditions in the United States. [1]

Background

Irving had previously published his compilation of sketches Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802) and headed a short-lived periodical called Salmagundi (1807–1808). He completed his satirical A History of New York in 1809 after the death of his 17-year-old fiancée Matilda Hoffman. It was his first major book and a satire on local history and contemporary politics. Before its publication, Irving started a hoax by placing a series of missing person advertisements in New York newspapers seeking information on Diedrich Knickerbocker, a Dutch historian who had allegedly gone missing from his hotel in New York City. As part of this guerilla marketing ruse he placed a notice from the hotel's proprietor informing readers that if Mr. Knickerbocker failed to return to the hotel to pay his bill he would publish a manuscript that Knickerbocker had left behind. [2]

Unsuspecting readers followed the story of Knickerbocker and his manuscript with interest, and some New York city officials were concerned enough about the missing historian to offer a reward for his safe return. Irving then published A History of New York on December 6, 1809, under the Knickerbocker pseudonym, with immediate critical and popular success. [3] "It took with the public", Irving remarked, "and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America". [4] The name Diedrich Knickerbocker became a nickname for Manhattan residents in general and was adopted by the New York Knickerbockers basketball team. [5]

Reception

Contemporary critics of the book described it as "an attempt to annihilate the history of America". [6] [7]

The book loosely inspired the musical Knickerbocker Holiday .

In 2005, reviewer Christine Wade described the book as satire and not being a modern novel. [8]

In the introduction to the 2008 edition, Elizabeth L. Bradley argues that the work is an unconventional novel; she notes that early readers were reminded of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and that "the proto-postmodern innovations of the History" resemble "the same inventive qualities in such subsequent American writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo". [9]

In 2012, reviewer Jerome McGann said that, despite the book being satire, it also contains useful historical facts and context. [10]

Related Research Articles

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Washington Irving was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus, and the Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s.

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"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their liquor and falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains. He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.

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The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, was a literary magazine of New York City, founded by Charles Fenno Hoffman in 1833, and published until 1865. Its long-term editor and publisher was Lewis Gaylord Clark, whose "Editor's Table" column was a staple of the magazine.

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Diedrich Knickerbocker is an American literary character who originated from Washington Irving's first novel, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). He is a Dutch-American historian who is dressed in a specific type of baggy-kneed trousers referred to as knickerbockers, later shortened to knickers. The word knickerbocker is also used to refer to people who live in Manhattan, and was adopted in a shortened form as the Knicks by the city's NBA professional basketball team.

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Tales of the Alhambra (1832) is a collection of essays, verbal sketches and stories by American author Washington Irving (1783–1859) inspired by, and partly written during, his 1828 visit to the palace/fortress complex known as the Alhambra in Granada, Andalusia, Spain.

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The Monikins is an 1835 novel, written by James Fenimore Cooper. The novel, a beast fable, was written between his composition of two of his more famous novels from the Leatherstocking Tales, The Prairie and The Pathfinder. The critic Christina Starobin compares the novel's plot to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The novel is a satire, narrated by the main character, the English Sir John Goldencalf. Goldencalf and the American captain Noah Poke travel on a series of humorous adventures to an Antarctic archipelago inhabited by a race of civilized monkeys.

Knickerbocker, also spelled Knikkerbakker, Knikkerbacker, and Knickerbacker, is a surname that dates back to the early settlers of New Netherland that was popularized by Washington Irving in 1809 when he published his satirical A History of New York under the pseudonym "Diedrich Knickerbocker". The name was also a term for Manhattan's aristocracy "in the early days" and became a general term, now obsolete, for a New Yorker.

<i>Mahomet and His Successors</i>

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References

  1. ↑ Burstein, Andrew (25 December 2005). "How Christmas Became Merry". The New York Times.
  2. ↑ Jones, Brian Jay. Washington Irving: An American Original. Arcade, 2008: 118–27. ISBN   978-1-55970-836-4
  3. ↑ Burstein, Andrew. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. Basic Books, 2007: 72. ISBN   978-0-465-00853-7
  4. ↑ Washington Irving to Mrs. Amelia Foster, [April–May 1823], Works, 23:741.
  5. ↑ "Knickerbocker". Oxford English Dictionary.
  6. ↑ Ferguson, Robert A. (June 1981). ""Hunting Down a Nation": Irving's A History of New York". Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 36 (1): 22–46. doi:10.2307/3044549. JSTOR   3044549.
  7. ↑ Williams, Stanley T. (1971). Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols (Reprint ed.). Octagon Books. pp. 147–48, 374n. ISBN   0374986304 . Retrieved 12 September 2022.
  8. ↑ Wade, Christine (25 May 2015). "A Satirical Novel of Historic New York". Off the Shelf.
  9. ↑ Introduction, A History of New York (NY: Penguin Books, 2008), xvi, xxiv.
  10. ↑ McGann, Jerome (2012). "Washington Irving, A History of New York, and American History". Early American Literature. 47 (2): 349–376. doi:10.1353/eal.2012.0031. S2CID   162275862.

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