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Updated: August 7, 2024
But I woke from my nap in time to hurry up, and see Hell Gate, the Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious localities, attractive to all readers of famous Diedrich Knickerbocker's History. We were now in a narrow channel, with sloping banks on either side, besprinkled with pleasant villas, and made refreshing to the sight by turf and trees.
And here have I, as before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, "punt en punt, gat en gat," and commenced in this little work, a history to serve as a foundation on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker's New York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon's Rome, or Hume and Smollett's England!
By the shades of Knickerbocker's History of New York I seem now to have gotten at the beginning; but patience, the sun is no detail out in the arid country. It does more things than blister your nose. It is the despair of the painter as it colors the minarets of the Bad Lands which abound around Adobe, and it dries up the company gardens if they don't watch the acequias mighty sharp.
Knickerbocker's History is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful light of blameless fun.
He had won success enough through "Salmagundi" and "Knickerbocker's History" to give him the importance of an accredited literary ambassador from the Republic, in treating with a foreign audience; and he really did us excellent service abroad. This alone secures him an important place in our literary history.
The people that laughed got the best of it, however, and the book was considered one of the popular successes of the day. The real author of this book was, of course, Washington Irving. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" was undertaken by Irving and his brother Peter as a parody on a book that had lately appeared, entitled "A Picture of New York."
We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to "Knickerbocker's New York"; that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the "Biglow Papers."
My wife read Knickerbocker's History of New York after the children were grown up and she had more time for reading, and always told the children that she was positive their father must be descended from that ancient Dutchman who took thirteen months to look the ground over before he began to put up that well-known church in Rotterdam of which he was the builder.
Irving, however, is one of the few authors of his period who really manifests traces of a vein of national peculiarity which might under other circumstances have been productive. "Knickerbocker's History of New York," although the air of mock solemnity which constitutes the staple of its humor is peculiar to no literature, manifests nevertheless, a power of producing a distinct national type.
Yet it is indicative of the extent to which politics ruled the day to note that in Knickerbocker's History of New York, Washington Irving turns aside from the ostensible object of a humorous sketch of early New York to ridicule President Jefferson.
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