The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

I just finished reading Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".It was included in a 34 story anthology "The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon" by Washington Irving,

Reading his words, the images evoked in my imagination were full-bodied, sometimes scary, and sometimes just delightful. Best of all by reading Irving's words I was able to see Ichabod Crane as the male who thinks he is so hot but not. I made the mistake of reading an adapted, simplified version a few weeks ago - so much was thrown away. Stick with the real deal, the language and ideas are not at all archaic.

4-5 Stars for Rip and Ichabod, 3 or less for most of the other fiction.

Early in the book, Irving offers maybe the first literary mention of throwing shade:

(talking about "great men") "I have mingled among them in my time,
and have been withered by the shade in which they cast me...."

Totally discouraged about his home country of America, the author lived in Europe
for many years, returns then rather goes on too long about visiting critics from England.
He also gets boring and silly in "Little Britain."

Back home, he writes as eloquently as he did about an English Christmas and Stratford,
yet strangely takes no notice of slavery.

This might be the oldest book I have, but the style of much of the writing is equally archaic, and not really to my taste. Much of the book is Irving's accounts of what he loves about rural England as an American, and after a while his florid rhapsodizing about the joys of the English countryside and her denizens makes my eyes glaze over. There are some nice bits, though. Irving's classics "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" are here, and nice bits of whimsy and suspense they are. I was intrigued by Irving's essay warning England against fostering a resentment of America, because this was a young and growing giant of a country, and someday England might need America to come to her aid (nice bit of foreshadowing there, 150 show more years before World War II). Irving's essays about the plight of the native Americans (Indians) was surprisingly and refreshingly enlightened for the times, when the Indians were being systematically herded and persecuted from their lands. A mixed bag, but in general worth the read. You can skip the pastoral stuff. show less

When school hours were over, he was even the companion and playmate of the larger boys; and on holiday afternoons would convoy some of the smaller ones home, who happened to have pretty sisters, or good housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard. Indeed, it behooved him to keep on good terms with his pupils. The revenue arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely sufficient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, and, though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help out his maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those parts, boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers whose children he instructed. With these he lived successively a week at a show more time, thus going the rounds of the neighborhood, with all his worldly effects tied up in a cotton handkerchief.

I was expecting this to be a book of short stories, when it was selected for my book club, but it's a mixture of stories and essays.

Irving starts the book by explaining how he got it published in Britain, and he comes across as a bit of a ditherer. Having had his book rejected by the London publisher John Murray, he gets Walter Scott to recommend him to a publisher in Scotland, then changes his mind and has it self-published in London, only for that to go wrong when the publisher went bust. Eventually the book was published by John Murray after Scott interceded for him again!

"The Voyage" brought home to me how different travel used to be. Irving says that the long sea voyage between America and Europe means that there is a clear break between home and abroad and allows travellers to prepare themselves mentally for new countries and new experiences. His next essay was set in Liverpool, where he landed in England, and is a tribute to William Roscoe a Liverpool man who devoted his life to writing histories of the Medicis, and on civic works in Liverpool. I found it quite ironic how Irving praised Roscoe for working so hard and doing so much for his home town, when he himself even made an excuse not to accept a job handed to him on a plate by Walter Scott when he was totally broke.

And then I finally got to a story. At least I "The Wife" may be a story, although it starts off more like an essay in praise of women and marriage. In fact, there are a couple of probably fictional accounts contained within the essays, there are only two bona fide "stories" in the whole book. These are the well known tales "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", both of which I enjoyed. Although I had heard about Rip Van Winkle's long sleep, I had assumed that he had been bewitched by fairies, whereas he actually encounters the ghosts of Hendrick (Henry) Hudson and his crew, although this fits with the intertwined folklore concerning fairies and the dead, with the same stories that are told of fairies in some places, being told about the dead in others. I had never read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" either, although I saw the Johnny Depp film when it came out, and was aware that the film-makers had changed the ending. It was quite funny actually, with Ichabod Crane's obsession with food. At one point his eyes light up when he entered a room, and I assumed was because he had caught sigh of the girl he supposedly loved (and I was glad, because I thought maybe he did love her rather than the size of her inheritance), but then I turned the page and discovered that he had actually caught sight of a table laden with food!

It took me quite a while to read this book, because some of the essays were a bit samey, as is the way with collections of journalism, so I split them up and read other things in-between. I salsa kipped the stories about old-fashioned English Christmas traditions, as they were included in "The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall" which I only read about 18 months ago .but I did enjoy his atmospheric description of a day spent wandering around Westminster Abbey, and the essay about the joys of fishing. show less

I had read "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" before, but I picked this up to read the other essays included in the collection. "The Art of Book-making" (about a visit to the British Library) was great, but most of the others here didn't do much for me, and a few really annoyed me (most notably "The Broken Heart," which is extremely sexist). Overall, quite underwhelming.

4 stars for Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. The rest are skippable, they read like the kind of op-ed that spawns lots of other op-eds and blog posts disagreeing with each other.

I picked this up and dipped into it and thought....Wow, not just a headless horseman, but some really interesting essays. I hope to read more of this later.

And now - June 24, 2010 - it Is later, and I just two hours going through these wonderful essays, not word for word, but reading most of them. I am now a real Irving fan. The essays on Christmas in England are exactly what we imagine the ideal Christmas to be, the essays on the Indians are spot on, I loved the love stories, but my favorites were his attention to libraries. What came of Roscoe's books, the wonderful piece on the British Museum when the scholars take on the clothes of their objects of study and there is a wonderful sense of ghosts. Were I to make another trip to show more England this is exactly the travel guide I would take. I now want to get the complete works...I won't (where to put them ) but I am an Irving fan as were his contemporaries. Nice to know...the editor tells us...he made a profit. And I would have never guessed Scott helped him. show less