SYMHC Classics: Washington Irving

This 2021 episode covers Washington Irving, who is often associated with Halloween. But his writing had a significant influence on the way Christmas is celebrated in the U. S. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday, everybody. As we're approaching Christmas, it seemed like the perfect time to revisit our episode on Washington Irving. Although he's most well-known for the tale of the Headless Horseman that's told in his story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving's writing about Christmas is important and deeply influential to the way the holiday is celebrated in the United States, probably more than most people are aware. This episode originally came out on December 20, 2021. Enjoy.

• 1:39Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 1:50Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 1:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Holly. Over the years, we've talked about various influences on Christmas as a holiday, particularly in the US and the UK. So we've talked about Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, the poem, A Visit From St. Nicholas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Joel Roberts' poinsett, namesake of the poinsettia, NORAD's tradition of tracking Santa's progress on Christmas Eve, and then, most recently, our episode on how the Nutcracker Ballet became a Christmas time staple. Another Christmas influence might come to mind more in connection with Halloween because it's Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,

• 2:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  which became part of Disney's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949 and absolutely, truly terrified me when I was a child. We will talk about Irving's work and his Christmas influence today, including his influence of Charles Dickens. Washington Irving did most of his Christmas-related writing pretty early in his career, but we're going to save the most detailed discussion of it for the last third of the episode after our second sponsor break. Also, if you listen to this show with anybody who's going to be just truly eagerly awaiting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, that part of the episode might be something

• 3:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  to just save for later, like maybe listen to it yourself first before foisting it on any young ears.

• 3:20Holly Frey?

  Sounds like a great plan always. Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783, in New York City. That is the same year that the Treaty of Paris formally ended the Revolutionary War, so he was growing up as the United States was establishing itself as an independent nation. Washington Irving was named after George Washington, and he also attended George Washington's inauguration in New York City just after he turned six.

• 3:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving was the youngest of William and Sarah Irving's 11 children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Both of them had immigrated to North America. Sarah had come from Cornwall, England, and William from the Orkney Islands, Scotland. William was a church deacon, as well as being a hardware dealer and a merchant.

• 4:07Holly Frey?

  In 1798, when he was 14, Washington's parents sent him to Tarrytown on the Hudson River, not far from Sleepy Hollow, to try to protect him from a devastating outbreak of yellow fever in New York City. He fell in love with the area, wandering around and exploring and learning the folklore and heritage of its residents, many of whom were Dutch immigrants and their descendants.

• 4:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  The young Washington Irving seems to have been really doted on as the baby of the family. His father insisted that all of his younger brothers go to college, but Washington was described as kind of a dreamer and lax when it came to his studies. So rather than attending college like his brothers, he started a law apprenticeship at the age of 15. First, he was at the law office of Henry Masterson, and then with former New York Attorney General Josiah Ogden Hoffman. Irving was chronically ill, and in 1804, he went to Europe with the hope of improving his health. He stayed there until 1806. Then, when he got back to the US, he was admitted to the New York bar. Reportedly, though, just barely. He just barely passed that exam.

• 5:17Holly Frey?

  After he returned to the US, Irving started a satirical periodical with his brother William and their friend James Kirk Palding. Palding also went on to become a writer in his own right, and later served as the Secretary of the Navy under Martin Van Buren. They called their periodical Salma Gundy, or The Wimwams and Opinions of Lancelot Langstaff Esquire. They published about 20 issues in 1807 and 1808.

• 5:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  This periodical has been described as the Mad Magazine of its day, and it lampooned a number of targets. But a lot of its focus was on the political and social life of New York City. The use of Gotham as a nickname for New York City was coined in its pages. This picked up the name from the story The Wise Men of Gotham, in which the villagers of Gotham, Nottinghamshire feign incompetence in order to get out of a visit from King John. So this nickname of Gotham, not meant to be flattering.

• 6:17Holly Frey?

  Don't tell Batman. In 1808, Irving became engaged to Matilda Hoffman, daughter of his law mentor Josiah Ogden Hoffman. And about a year later, he gave up any pretense of practicing law.

• 6:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1809, Irving published a fictional history of the Dutch colonization of New York called A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. This was narrated by and written under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker. That's one of many pseudonyms that Irving used for different purposes during his career, and one of the many names that he also seems to have picked up from somebody that he knew. Thanks to this book, Knickerbocker became a nickname for New Yorkers of Dutch ancestry, and then a nickname for New Yorkers more generally. The New York Nicks, if you're not aware, is short for the Knickerbockers.

• 7:11Holly Frey?

  Knickerbockers are also baggy trousers that usually stop just below the knee and are gathered and fastened there with a button or a buckle. This seems to trace back to Irving's work as well, and to illustrations in the book that featured Dutchmen in baggy knee breeches.

• 7:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  A History of New York was another satire. It parodied Samuel L. Mitchell's The Picture of New York, or The Traveler's Guide Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States. But while it was fictional and comedic, it still drew from real people and places that Irving had known while living in New York's Hudson Valley. Irving led up to the publication of this book with something of a PR hoax. He posted a series of notices about a missing historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker, establishing the name and reputation of this fictitious person before the book hit the stands.

• 8:03Holly Frey?

  The same year that A History of New York was published, Irving's fiancee, Matilda, died of tuberculosis. That happened on April 26, 1809, and she really seems to have been the love of his life, and Irving's writing about her is full of loss. He later wrote in his journal, quote, "She died in the flower of her youth and of mine, but she has lived for me ever since in all womankind. I see her in their eyes, and it is the remembrance of her that has given a tender interest in my eyes to everything that bears the name of woman." At another point, he wrote, quote, "For years, I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret. I could not even mention her name, but her image

• 8:45Holly Frey?

  was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."

• 8:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  It doesn't seem like Irving wrote a lot over the next few years. He moved to Washington DC in 1811 to work as a lobbyist protecting the interests of his family's merchant business. During the War of 1812, after Britain invaded Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House and other major buildings, Irving enlisted in the Army. He served as an aide de camp to Governor Daniel Tompkins until the war ended in February of 1815.

• 9:17Holly Frey?

  After the war was over, Irving went back to Europe. His family had an import-export business called P&E Irving. The war had been really hard on most of these types of businesses, but Irving's brothers had also made a series of missteps in their efforts to recover after the war was over. Irving went to London to try to help them save the business, something he really felt was just hopeless from the start. In the end, he was right. The business could not be saved, and bankruptcy proceedings started in 1818.

• 9:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Washington Irving had been something of a silent partner in this business. He had been earning an income from it without being expected to really do any work, but this bankruptcy meant that income was gone. Poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, who had become one of Irving's friends and colleagues, encouraged him to try to make a living as a writer.

• 10:09Holly Frey?

  And we will talk more about that after a sponsor break.

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• 11:35Holly Frey?

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• 12:20Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  While living in Europe, Washington Irving wrote the sketchbook of Jeffrey Crayon, Gent. This was largely a series of sketches of English life based on what he had experienced while living there, and it also contained three short stories: Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Spectre Bridegroom.

• 12:55Holly Frey?

  Although the sketchbook was published under the pseudonym of Jeffrey Crayon, both Rip Van Winkle, about a man who goes off to the mountains to escape his stereotypically shrewish wife and sleeps for 20 years, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, about superstitious schoolteacher Ichabod Crane and his flight from the Headless Horseman, are attributed to Diedrich Niggerbocker. The two stories are set in Dutch communities in New York, but both are rooted in German folklore. The sketchbook also contained five essays about Christmas in England, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later.

• 13:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although many of the other pieces describe Irving's experiences in England, two of them are focused on indigenous communities in North America: their Traits of Indian Character and Philip of Poconocet. The first is a general discussion of North America's indigenous peoples, especially in New England, and the second is a narrative of King Philip's War, which took place in the 1670s and which we've covered on the show before.

• 13:55Holly Frey?

  In terms of Irving's racial attitudes, both of these writings are just a tangle. Traits of Indian Character, for example, starts off by saying that, quote, "It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America in the early periods of colonization to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. The colonists often treated them like beasts of the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize, the latter to vilify than to discriminate.

• 14:39Holly Frey?

  The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both, and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, but because they were ignorant."

• 14:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving's criticisms of Europeans' treatment of indigenous people in North America, particularly during the colonial period, are very pointed and often perceptive and astute. But then threaded through that are racist language and stereotypes, both reflecting the language that was commonly used at the time and reflecting Irving's own paternalistic attitudes. Sometimes it is almost whiplash inducing to read, like I was trying to find a quote to read as an example, and I was like, man, I just don't even want to repeat this insulting part on the show for the sake of illustration.

• 15:29Holly Frey?

  Irving's descriptions of the state of things as he was writing are also obliviously optimistic at best. While he acknowledges that the same prejudices against indigenous peoples all still exist, he frames the federal government's relationship to them as basically fine now. Here's a quote, "American government too has wisely and humanely exerted itself to inculcate a friendly and forbearing spirit towards them and to protect them from fraud and injustice." That's whiplashy in and of itself.

• 16:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. So Philip of Pocanocat is similarly striking. Irving's treatment of Medcom, who English colonists called King Philip, has been described as groundbreaking and even radical because it was way, way more sympathetic to Medcom and to the Wampanoag Confederacy than the historical sources that he would have been using for his research. His approach was probably influenced by the idea of the noble savage, which had come to prominence among Europeans in the 18th century and beyond, but his treatment of Medcom seems to really go beyond that and into a more nuanced view of the war than would really be expected, with a lot more empathy toward the Wampanoag and more acknowledgement

• 16:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  of all the context that was involved.

• 16:50Holly Frey?

  And we should also take a moment here to say that Irving's writing related to people of African descent is similarly tangled. When Irving was growing up, New York City was at the heart of the largest slaveholding region of the North, and it had an established community of free Black people as well. The Dutch communities that Irving was so fond of in the Hudson Valley were also home to both enslaved and free Black people, who were known as the Black Dutch, which is one of several meanings that term has carried. Irving clearly thought their folklore and traditions were as worthy of documentation as those of white people, and he wrote about holidays like Pinkster, which was celebrated by the black community and grew out of Dutch celebrations surrounding Pentecost.

• 17:34Holly Frey?

  But at the same time, Irving wrote about black people in a negatively stereotyped and sometimes even fetishizing way.

• 17:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving had essays from the sketchbook printed in the US at about the same time as the whole collection was coming out in the UK to try to protect himself and his profits from plagiarists. Its contents were printed on both sides of the Atlantic between 1819 and 1823. It was generally well received, especially the short stories, with later critics describing Irving as the first American short story writer. It also sold well enough that he was able to support himself.

• 18:12Holly Frey?

  In 1822, Irving was paid 1,000 guineas to write a sequel, Bracebridge Hall or The Humorists, a medley, also under the Jeffrey Crayon pseudonym. Then Tales of a Traveler followed in 1824. Tales of a Traveler contains another story attributed to Knickerbocker, and that is The Devil and Tom Walker. Critics mostly panned Tales of a Traveler, and Irving seems to have stopped writing for a while.

• 18:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  He remained in Europe, though, and Alexander Hill Everett, the US minister to Spain, invited him to Madrid. Spain had just released archival documents on its colonization of the Americas, and Everett wanted Irving to translate them for American use. Irving may have started out following that instruction, but soon he was using these documents not to translate them, but to do research on his own work.

• 19:04Holly Frey?

  The result was A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was published in 1828. This was a fictionalized biography of Columbus, sometimes described as a romantic biography.

• 19:17Holly Frey?

  This work is extremely favorable in its embellished treatment of Columbus, making him almost a mythic figure. The book also put forth the fiction that one of the reasons for Columbus's 1492 voyage was to prove that the world was not flat, an idea that has persisted until today, even though people around the world have known the planet was roughly spherical for literally thousands of years.

• 19:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Other work related to Spain followed the Columbus biography, including A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada from the Manuscripts of Fray Antonio Agapita, that being yet another pseudonym. This work is described as having a, quote, "comically biased narrator."

• 19:58Holly Frey?

  Irving had to leave Spain in 1829 after he was appointed Secretary to the American Legation in London. He worked at the American Embassy in London until 1832 and then finally returned to the United States. Irving had become famous while he was away, and he returned to find that New York City had grown tremendously in his absence.

• 20:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the fall of 1832, Irving joined Henry Levitt Ellsworth on an expedition to what's now Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. President Andrew Jackson had tasked Ellsworth with inspecting land that was going to be used for the forced relocation of indigenous peoples under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This relocation later became known as the Trail of Tears, and it forced tens of thousands of indigenous people to leave their homes and move west, including citizens of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole Creek, and Cherokee nations, among others.

• 20:55Holly Frey?

  Irving was invited to accompany this expedition, and he saw it as, quote, "an opportunity of seeing the remnants of those great Indian tribes, which are now about to disappear as independent nations, or to be amalgamated under some new form of government."

• 21:11Holly Frey?

  While on this expedition, Irving visited Sauk leader Black Hawk, who at the time was imprisoned for his role in the Black Hawk War, which had taken place earlier in 1832. In a letter to a sister Irving said of this meeting, quote, "I find it extremely difficult, even when so near the seat of action, to get at the right story of these feuds between the white and the red man, and my sympathies go strongly with the latter."

• 21:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  At the same time, though, Irving does not seem particularly critical of Jackson's removal policy. And that was something that directly led to the deaths of thousands of people, the loss of ancestral homelands, and the total upheaval of families and social structures. Irving wrote several books drawn from this experience, including "Tour on the Prairies," which came out in 1835, "Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains" in 1836, and "Adventures in the Far West" in 1837.

• 22:06Holly Frey?

  As these books were published, Irving was living at Sunnyside, which was a farm not far from Tarrytown that he bought in 1835. And he probably would have been content to live out the rest of his days there. But in 1842, President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain. He had been recommended by Daniel Webster, then-Secretary of State, who was a fan of Irving's writing and also knew of his earlier time and experiences in Spain.

• 22:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is a precarious time for Spain and for the United States' relations with it. Queen Isabella II was only 12, and there were multiple factions wrestling for control of the Spanish government. Meanwhile, the United States was in the process of annexing Texas, which would ultimately lead it to war with Mexico. And that was something that the United States really wanted Spain to stay out of, meaning they wanted Irving to make sure that Spain just stayed, stayed put.

• 23:05Holly Frey?

  Unsurprisingly, Washington Irving found this position extremely stressful, and it aggravated various chronic health conditions. But he held out until James K. Polk took office, and then he resigned when it just didn't seem like Polk was going to name a replacement anytime soon.

• 23:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving was back at home in Sunnyside in 1846. He published The Life of Muhammad and Muhammad and His Successors in 1849 and 1850. These were books that he had started working on while living in Spain. This has been described as the first sympathetic biography of the prophet Muhammad to be published in North America. I haven't personally read it. I did read articles about it by Muslim people. And that was the description was that they found a treatment of Muhammad to be generally sympathetic and that that was groundbreaking, given the time.

• 23:55Holly Frey?

  Irving spent most of his last years working on a biography of George Washington that was published in five volumes between 1855 and 1859. This is both a favorable treatment of Washington and one that humanized him, focusing primarily on his military career and his personal life.

• 24:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving experienced a series of illnesses as he was finishing this biography. His health is described as declining throughout the whole process. He died on November 28th, 1859, at the age of 76, after having had a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside.

• 24:30Holly Frey?

  Washington Irving is considered to be the first American man of letters. His work also helped establish American literature as worthwhile in its own right, rather than simply being a minor offshoot of British literature. Because some of his work has preserved Dutch oral traditions in the Hudson Valley region, he has also been described as the first folklorist in the US. His home in Tarrytown still stands today, and it is a national historic landmark.

• 24:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Especially around November and December, Christmas can seem so ubiquitous in the United States that it feels almost like it must have always been this way. But when Washington Irving was growing up, Christmas really wasn't established as a holiday, especially not as a holiday that involved lots of feasting and merriment and presents and songs. Puritans in New England outlawed Christmas in 1659, and that followed a series of laws that had been passed in England, starting in the 1640s. These laws in England had designated the Christmas season as a time for fasting and humiliation.

• 25:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  That effectively outlawed Christmas celebrations in England until the restoration of Charles II in 1660.

• 25:43Holly Frey?

  By the time Irving was born, laws outlawing Christmas in the British colonies had been repealed, but many denominations and sects still viewed it with a lot of suspicion. In many places, Christmas was a day for hard work and penitence, not for revelry. This led to strife between denominations that opposed Christmas and those like Anglicans who were more likely to celebrate it.

• 26:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Dutch colonists in the Hudson River Valley had brought the tradition of Saint Nicholas or Saint Nicholas, who brought presents to good children on Saint Nicholas Day or December 6th. Irving mentions Saint Nicholas more than 40 times in his History of New York. This includes attributing Dutch colonists' decision to settle on Manhattan to Saint Nicholas. Irving relates a tale in which Olaf van Cortlandt has a dream in which, quote, "Saint Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees in that self same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children."

• 26:43Holly Frey?

  In this dream, Saint Nicholas smokes a pipe, with the smoke from his pipe assuming, quote, "a variety of marvelous forms." Those forms include palaces, domes, and spires. And then, quote, "When Saint Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hatband, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave the astonished van Cortlandt a very significant look. Then mounting his wagon, he returned over the treetops and disappeared."

• 27:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  The History of New York came out in 1809, but this passage seems to have been added in an 1812 edition. It may have been an inspiration for the poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas," which is the poem that begins "twas the night before Christmas and all through the house." That poem was first published in 1823. This poem is often attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who was friends with Washington Irving, which really makes it seem like the poem's pipe and the flying sleigh and Saint Nick laying a finger beside his nose, that might all have been inspired by Washington Irving. However, there is a competing claim that Major Henry Livingston Jr. is the person who wrote this poem and that that happened all the way back in 1808.

• 27:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  And if that's the case, obviously, Washington Irving could not have been the person who inspired it because it was already written when his book came out. We talked about this authorship dispute in our Christmas triple feature, and that is going to be our Saturday classic on December 25th.

• 28:12Holly Frey?

  So as we said earlier, Washington Irving's sketchbook contained five essays based on a Christmas he spent in England. They are titled Christmas, The Stagecoach, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and The Christmas Dinner.

• 28:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, Christmas celebrations returned to England far more speedily than they did in North America, and Christmas contains some general observations about the holiday in England. Here's a sample, quote, "Of all the old festivals, however, that of Christmas awakens the strongest and most heartfelt associations. There is a tone of solemn and sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality and lifts the spirit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment. The services of the church about this season are extremely tender and inspiring. They dwell in the beautiful story of the origin of our faith and the pastoral scenes that accompanied its announcement.

• 29:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  They gradually increase in fervor and pathos during the season of Advent until they break forth in full Jubilee on the morning that brought peace and goodwill to men. I do not know a grander effect of music on the moral feelings than to hear the full choir and the peeling organ performing a Christmas anthem in a cathedral and filling every part of the vast pile with triumphant harmony."

• 29:33Holly Frey?

  He also repeatedly stresses the idea that this is a time to be happy and merry. He talks about being a stranger, no friends around him, quote, "Yet I feel the influence of the season beaming into my soul from the happy looks of those around me." He goes on to say, quote, "He who can turn cheerishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow beings and can sit down darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm of a Merry Christmas."

• 30:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  In "The Stagecoach," Irving describes traveling by coach on a tour of Yorkshire on the day before Christmas and seeing other passengers all bound for holiday visits with laden with hampers, full of delicious foods. He winds up at an inn that's, quote, "decorated here and there with a Christmas green." He runs into a friend who invites him to stay for a few days. Staying with friends being better than having Christmas dinner alone at an inn.

• 30:38Holly Frey?

  So for Christmas Eve, Irving winds up at the Bracebridge's estate. He hears lots of merriment coming from the servants' quarters. They are playing lots of games, some of which sound familiar today and some which do not. Quote, "Here were kept up the old games of Hoodman Blind, Shoo the Wild Mare, Hot Cockles, Steal the White Loaf, Bob Apple, and Snapdragon. The Yule Clog and Christmas Candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe with its white berries hung up to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids." A footnote explains that young men get to kiss young women under the mistletoe, removing a berry from the sprig each time, and when the berries are gone, quote, "the privilege ceases."

• 31:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving describes the Yule Clog, which is an enormous log burned during the holiday with a bit of it saved to light the next year's log, as well as a range of superstitions associated with it. He also talks about Christmas candles being wreathed in greens and lots of singing and dancing and general gaiety.

• 31:42Holly Frey?

  His Christmas Day account begins with the household's children going door to door through the house, singing a Christmas carol to wake everyone up. Then there are family prayers, followed by another carol, and then a church service later in the day, and distribution of beef, bread, and ale to the poor.

• 32:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  On arrival at the church, Irving writes, "On reaching the church porch, we found the parson rebuking the gray-headed sexton for having used mistletoe among the greens with which the church was decorated. It was, he observed, an unholy plant, profaned by having been used by the Druids in their mystic ceremonies. And though it might be innocently employed in the festive ornamenting of halls and kitchens, yet it had been deemed by the Fathers of the Church as unhallowed and totally unfit for sacred purposes."

• 32:33Holly Frey?

  In Christmas dinner, Irving is at first perplexed when a pig's head is brought out on a platter, until his host explains that it's meant to represent a boar's head, something that had traditionally been served at Christmas in earlier years, including at the Oxford College that he had attended. The family's Christmas dinner also includes turkey, pheasant pie, and a wassail bowl.

• 32:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  After dinner, the family gathers for the telling of Christmas ghost stories and a "Christmas mummery" or "masking." This has another footnote. "Maskings or mummaries were favorite sports at Christmas in old times, and the wardrobes at halls and manor houses were often laid under contribution to furnish dresses and fantastic disguisings. I strongly suspect Master Simon to have taken the idea of his from Ben Johnson's Mask of Christmas."

• 33:25Holly Frey?

  To someone living in the US today, where Christmas can feel like a giant commercial juggernaut, none of this really sounds all that dramatic, more like a quaint, old-fashioned English Christmas. But again, the holiday really wasn't established in much of the US at that point. Irving's writing about it comes across as somewhat nostalgic, emphasizing that he thinks these kinds of traditions should be preserved.

• 33:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  And as we said earlier, the sketchbook was really popular. So Irving's fond descriptions of this English holiday spread across his reading audience in the US. And it also had an impact on another writer, whose work has been credited with influencing the way Christmas is thought about and celebrated, and that is Charles Dickens.

• 34:10Holly Frey?

  Charles Dickens was kind of a Washington Irving superfan. The sketchbook was published when he was about eight and he read it over and over. It is likely that Dickens named his own sketches by Boaz after Irving's sketchbook. And the sketchbook influenced Dickens's 1835, A Christmas Dinner, as well as Christmas scenes in Pickwick Papers in 1836.

• 34:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Irving wrote to Dickens in 1841, complimenting him on his work. And Dickens' reply is effusive. Here is a sample, quote, "I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts and with my leisure hours that I rush at once into full confidence with you and fall, as it were, naturally and by the very laws of gravity into your open arms. Questions come thronging to my pen as to the lips of people who meet after long hoping to do so. I don't know what to say first or what to leave unsaid

• 35:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  and am constantly disposed to break off and tell you again how glad I am this moment has arrived." I don't know if Charles Dickens meant this to sound a little suggestive.

• 35:28Holly Frey?

  It's very romantic.

• 35:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  It is extremely romantic.

• 35:34Holly Frey?

  Irving and Dickens exchanged flattering letters back and forth until meeting during Dickens's tour of the US in 1842. In 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol, again influenced by Irving and whose influence on Christmas time we have previously discussed on the show.

• 35:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Their friendship might not have lasted beyond that tour, though. If they corresponded after Irving left for that appointment as minister to Spain, those letters have not survived. And there's also a secondhand report that Irving had found Dickens to be, quote, "outrageously vulgar."

• 36:10Holly Frey?

  Regardless, Christmas became more of an established and public holiday in the US over the course of the 19th century. And it became a federal holiday in the US on June 26, 1870.

• 36:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that's a bit about Washington Irving.

• 36:25Holly Frey?

  And his influence on the Christmas season.

• 36:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  On the season of holiday cheer and greenery and...

• 36:33Holly Frey?

  I feel like he would have an aneurysm if he walked into like a big box store and saw like the assault of Christmas everything, which I'm not complaining about, by the way, but to him, it would feel that way 100%.

• 36:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  I bet so.

• 36:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 37:14Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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