fashion in Europe, while the Grimm Brothers were huddled around peasant fires and
ventilating ancient German myths and legends and tracing them back to some medieval
Volk, while English poets swathed in velvet could wax melancholic in the ruins of abbeys
and castles, while the French could vacillate between nostalgie de’ la boue and nostalgia
for the ancien regime—in the midst of all this, what history had these young United
States to offer? This land of sun-baked prairies so unsuitable for Byronic brooding in
black velvet clothing, this outback devoid of castles and cathedrals and colourful
babushkas doing folkloric dances? What past did this young country have that could be
painted on the canvas and then given an antique, golden patina? Well, if the answer could
be given telegraphically, it would be this: in answer to Sir Walter Scott’s Scottish kilts in
Ivanhoe (1819), Fenimore Cooper offered Indian loincloths in Last of the Mohicans
(1826). Of course, such syncretism takes explaining.
Of all American writers, Washington Irving was probably most aware of the dilemma
his countrymen faced. As diplomat and bohemian, Irving had travelled widely on the
European continent, amongst its capitols and castles. We might take as a symbol of this
American hunger for culture and history the remarkable fact that Irving even took up
residence for some time not just in Granada but in the Alhambra. Of course, in the late
twentieth century it has become fashionable to eschew America’s Eurocentrism; in the
nineteenth century, however, anyone observing that the USA was Eurocentric would
have been treated like the village idiot who offered as a significant discovery the
observation that the sea tastes salty. It was obviously so. Say it again: in cultural
matters, most residents of the USA slavishly aped European ways.
Understanding that, we should then see Irving’s tales about early Dutch settlers in
New York’s Hudson Valley—memorable characters like Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod
Crane—as attempts to make America’s modest, rural history into something passably
European, legendary and urbane. And these tales—in A History of New York, by Dietrich
Knickerbocker (1809) and his Sketch Book (1819–1820)—would soon became schoolroom
favourites. Though not intended exclusively for children, the young prized them; and
these stories are, perhaps, the first great works in the conventional canon of American
juvenile literature.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the American schoolroom was, in fact, a
forge for literary patriotism and the place where canons were made. Weems’s The Life of
Washington the Great provides an example, Irving’s stories another. At the same time,
Young America was learning its national history by memorising passages from poems by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (‘The Village Blacksmith’, ‘Evangeline’, ‘The Song of
Hiawatha’, ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’, and ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’) or by reading the
quasi-historical prose of (to mention just a few examples) Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of
the Mohicans (1826), Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s The Tales of Peter Parley about
America (1827), The Life of Davy Crockett (1834), and Daniel Pierce Thompson’s The
Green Mountain Boys (1839).
When Rufus Wilmot Griswold—in his Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and Prose
Writers of America (1847)—astonishingly asserted that there was something called
‘American Literature’, that seemed a specimen of audacity. Be that as it may, the actual
enterprise of fashioning a national literature had started as much as a decade earlier in
country schoolrooms, in inspired textbooks like McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader (1836 et
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