Most of the book’s 30-odd pieces concern Irving’s impressions of England, but six chapters deal with American subjects.

The result was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20), a collection of stories and essays that mix satire and whimsicality with fact and fiction. In London he met Sir Walter Scott, who encouraged him to renewed effort. In 1815 he went to Liverpool to look after the interests of his brothers’ firm. He prepared an American edition of Thomas Campbell’s poems, edited the Analectic Magazine, and acquired a staff colonelcy during the War of 1812. In 1811 he moved to Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for the Irving brothers’ hardware-importing firm, but his life seemed aimless for some years. Its writing was interrupted in April 1809 by the sudden death of Matilda Hoffman, as grief incapacitated him. His A History of New York…by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) was a comic history of the Dutch regime in New York, prefaced by a mock-pedantic account of the world from creation onward.

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