Washington Irving’s ‘American’ Christmas

Washington Irving may come to mind more in connection with Halloween, but his writing had a significant influence on the way Christmas is celebrated in the U.S.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray C. B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Over
the years, we've talked about various influences on Christmas as
a holiday, particularly in the US and the UK. So

(00:23):
we've talked about Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol, the poem,
a visit from St. Nicholas, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer,
Joel Roberts, point set namesake of the point Stia, Nora
Ads tradition of tracking Santa's progress on Christmas Eve, and
then most recently, our episode on how the Nutcracker Ballet
became a Christmas Times staple. Another Christmas influence might come

(00:47):
to mind more in connection with Halloween, because it's Washington Irving,
author of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which became part
of Disney's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad in
nineteen forty nine 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.

(01:11):
Washington Irving did most of his Christmas related writing pretty
early in his career, but we're gonna 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

(01:33):
of the episode might be something to just say for later, like,
maybe listen to it yourself first before foisting it on
any young years. Sounds like a great plan always. Washington
Irving was born on April third, three in New York City.
That is the same year that the Treaty of Paris
formally ended the Revolutionary War, so he was growing up

(01:55):
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. Irving was the youngest of William and
Sarah Irving's eleven children, nine of whom survived to adulthood.

(02:16):
Both of them had emigrated 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. In seventeen, when he was fourteen,
Washington's parents sent him to Tarrytown on the Hudson River,
not far from Sleepy Hollow, to try to protect him

(02:38):
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. The
young Washington Irving seems to have been really doated on
as the baby of the family. His father insisted that

(02:59):
all of his young 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 fifteen. First he was a thought law office
of Henry Masterson and then with former New York Attorney
General Josiah Ogden Hoffman. Irving was chronically ill, and in

(03:23):
eighteen o four he went to Europe with the hope
of improving his health. He stayed there until eighteen oh six.
Then when he got back to the US, he was
admitted to the New York Bar reportedly, though just barely.
He just barely got past that exam. After he returned
to the US, Irving started a satirical periodical with his

(03:43):
brother William and their friend James Kirk Paulding. Paul Ding
also went on to become a writer in his own
right and later served as a Secretary of the Navy
under Martin van Buren. They called their periodical Selma Gundi
or The whim Whams and Opinions of Launcelot langstaff Esquay.
It published about twenty issues in eighteen o seven and
eighteen o eight. This periodical has been described as the

(04:07):
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

(04:27):
the villagers of Gotham Nottinghamshire, fame incompetence in order to
get out of a visit from King John, so this
nickname of Gotham not meant to be flattering. Don't tell
batman um. In eighteen o eight, Irving became engaged to
Matilda Hoffman, daughter of his law mentor Josiah Ogden Hoffman,
and about a year later he gave up any pretense

(04:50):
of practicing law. In eighteen o nine, Irving published a
fictional history of the Dutch colonization of New York called
A History of New York Work 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

(05:13):
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 Knicks, if you're not aware, is short for the Knickerbockers.

(05:33):
Knickerbockers are also baggy trousers that usually stopped 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 two illustrations in the book
that featured Dutch Men in baggy knee breaches. A History
of New York was another satire. It parodied Samuel L.

(05:54):
Mitchell's The Picture of New York or The Travelers 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

(06:14):
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. The same year
that A History of New York was published, Irving's fiance, Matilda,
died of tuberculosis that happened in April eighteen o nine,
and she really seems to have been the love of

(06:36):
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 mind. 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

(06:58):
another point, he wrote, vote for years, I could not
talk on the subject of this hopeless regret. I could
not even mention her name. But her image was continually
before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly. It doesn't
seem like Irving wrote a lot over the next few years.
He moved to Washington, D C. In eighteen eleven to
work as a lobbyist protecting the interests of his family's

(07:21):
merchant business. During the War of eighteen twelve, after Britain
invaded Washington, D c. 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 eighteen fifteen. After the war was over, Irving went
back to Europe. His family had an import export business

(07:44):
called P and 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,
some thing he really felt was just hopeless from the start.
In the end he was right. The business could not

(08:06):
be saved, and bankruptcy proceedings started in eighteen eighteen 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

(08:27):
him to try to make a living as a writer,
and we will talk more about that after a sponsor break.
While living in Europe Washington, Irving wrote the Sketch Book
of Jeffrey crayon gent This was largely a series of

(08:49):
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 Specter Bridegroom.
Although the sketch book 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

(09:11):
wife and sleeps for twenty years, and the legend of
Sleepy Hollow, about superstitious school teacher Ichabod Crane and his
flight from the Headless Horsemen, are attributed to Diedrich Niggerbocker.
The two stories are set in Dutch communities in New York,
but both are rooted in German folklore. The sketch book
also contained five essays about Christmas in England, and we'll

(09:34):
talk a little bit more about that later. 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 poconok It.
The first is a general discussion of North America's indigenous peoples,
especially in New England, and the second is the narrative

(09:56):
of King Philip's War, which took place in the sixteen
seventies and which we have covered on the show before.
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.

(10:20):
They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary
and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been produced
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

(10:44):
than to discriminate. 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.
Irving's criticisms of Europeans treatment of indigenous people in North America,

(11:05):
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

(11:26):
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. 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 people's

(11:47):
all still exist, he frames the federal government's relationship to
them is 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.

(12:10):
So Philip of Poconoca is similarly striking. Irving's treatment of Medicom,
who English colonists called King Philip, has been described as
groundbreaking and even radical, because it was way way more
sympathetic to Medicom and to the Wampanog Confederacy than the
historical sources that he would have been using for his research.

(12:31):
His approach was probably influenced by the idea of the
noble savage, which had come to prominence among Europeans in
the eighteenth century and beyond. But his treatment of medicom
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 towards the Wampanog and more

(12:52):
acknowledgement of all the context that was involved. And we
should also take a moment here to say that Irving's
writing really too 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

(13:16):
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,

(13:40):
But at the same time, Irving wrote about black people
in a negatively stereotyped and sometimes even fetishizing way. Irving
had essays from the sketch book 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

(14:01):
both sides of the Atlantic between eighteen nineteen and eighteen
twenty three. 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. In eighteen twenty two, Irving was
paid one thousand guineas to write a sequel, Bracebridge Hall

(14:24):
or the Humorists, a medley also under the Jeoffrey Crayons pseudonym.
Then Tales of a Traveler followed in eighteen twenty four.
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. He remained in Europe, though,

(14:47):
and Alexander Hill Everett, the U S. 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

(15:09):
his own work. The result was a History of the
Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was published in
This was a fictionalized biography of Columbus, sometimes described as
a romantic biography. This work is extremely favorable in its
embellish treatment of Columbus, making him almost a mythic figure.

(15:29):
The book also put forth the fiction that one of
the reasons for columbus 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. Other work
related to Spain followed the Columbus biography, including a chronicle

(15:52):
of the conquest of Granada from the manuscripts of Fray
Antonio Agapita, that being yet another pseudonym. The This work
is described as having a quote comically biased narrator. Irving
had to leave Spain in eighteen twenty nine after he
was appointed secretary to the American Legation in London. He
worked at the American Embassy in London until eighteen thirty two,

(16:15):
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.
In the fall of eighteen thirty two, Irving joined Henry
Levitt Ellsworth on an expedition to what's now Missouri, Oklahoma,
and Arkansas. President Andrew Jackson had tasked Ellsworth with inspecting

(16:39):
land that was going to be used for the forced
relocation of indigenous peoples under the Indian Removal Act of
eighteen thirty This relocation later became known as the Trail
of Tears, and it forced tens of thousands of Indigenous
people to leave their homes and moved west, including citizens
of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole Creek, and Cherokee Nations and others.

(17:01):
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. While on this expedition, Irving visited Stalk
leader black Hawk, who at the time was imprisoned for

(17:22):
his role in the black Hawk War, which had taken
place earlier in eighteen thirty two. 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. At the same time, though, Irving

(17:44):
does not seem particularly critical of Jackson's removal policy, and
that was something that directly led to the deaths of
thousands of people, 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

(18:04):
came out in eighteen thirty five, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky
Mountains in eighteen thirty six, and Adventures in the Far
West in eighteen thirty seven. As these books were published,
Irving was living at Sunnyside, which was a farm not
far from Terrytown that he bought in eighteen thirty five,
and he probably would have been content to live out
the rest of his days there. But in eighteen forty two,

(18:25):
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. This is
the precarious time for Spain and for the United States
relations with it. Queen Isabella the Second was only twelve

(18:47):
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.

(19:11):
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. Irving was back at home in Sunnyside.
In he published The Life of Mohammed and Mohammed and

(19:33):
his Successors in eighteen fifty 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
Mohammed 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

(19:55):
treatment of Mohammed to be generally sympathetic and that that
was groundbreaking given the time. Irving spent most of his
last years working on a biography of George Washington that
was published in five volumes between eighteen fifty five and
eighteen fifty nine. This is both a favorable treatment of
Washington and one that humanized him, focusing primarily on his

(20:17):
military career and his personal life. Irving experienced a series
of illnesses as he was finishing this biography, his his
health has described as declining throughout the whole process. He
died on November eighteen fifty nine at the age of
seventy six, after having had a heart attack in his
bedroom at Sunnyside. Washington Irving is considered to be the

(20:38):
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 Terrytown still

(21:00):
stands today, and it is a National Historic Landmark. After
a sponsor break, we will get into Washington Irving's contributions
to the Christmas holiday, including his connections to Jolly Old St. Nick,

(21:22):
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

(21:45):
outlawed Christmas in sixteen fifty nine, and that followed a
series of laws that had been passed in England starting
in the sixteen forties. These laws in England had designated
the Christmas season as a time for fasting and humiliation
that effectively outlawed Christmas celebrations in England until the restoration
of Charles the Second in sixteen sixty. By the time

(22:08):
Irving was born, laws outlining 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

(22:28):
those like Anglicans, who were more likely to celebrate it.
Dutch colonists in the Hudson River Valley had brought the
tradition of center class or St. Nicholas, who brought presents
to good children on St. Nicholas Day or December six.
Irving mentioned St. Nicholas more than forty times in his
History of New York, This includes attributing Dutch colonists decision

(22:51):
to settle on Manhattan to St. Nicholas. Irving relates the
tale in which Olaf and Cortland has a dream in
which quote St. Nick List came riding over the tops
of the trees and that self same wagon, wherein he
brings his yearly presence to children. In this dream, St.
Nicholas smokes a pipe, with the smoke from his pipe,

(23:12):
assuming quote a variety of marvelous forms. Those forms include palaces, domes,
and spires, and then quote, when St. Nicholas had smoked
his pipe, he twisted it in his hat band, and
laying his finger beside his nose, gave the astonished Van
Cortland a very significant look. Then, mounting his wagon, he

(23:32):
returned over the tree tops and disappeared. The History of
New York came out in eighteen o nine, but this
passage seems to have been added in an eighteen twelve edition.
It may have been an inspiration for the poem A
Visit from St. Nicholas, which is the poem that begins
tow was the Night before Christmas and all through the house.
That poem was first published in eighteen twenty three. This

(23:56):
poem is often attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who was
ends with Washington Irving, which really makes it seem like
the poem's pipe in the Flying Sleigh and St Nick
laying a finger aside 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

(24:17):
wrote this poem and that that happened all the way
back in eighteen o eight. 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. So, as we said earlier, Washington

(24:38):
irving sketchbook contained five essays based on a Christmas he
spent in England. They are titled Christmas the Stage Coach,
Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Christmas Dinner. So Christmas
celebrations returned to England far more speedily than they did
in North America, and Christmas contains some general observations about

(24:59):
the holl 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

(25:22):
tender and inspiring. They dwell and the beautiful story of
the origin of our faith and the pastoral scenes that
accompanied its announcement. 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

(25:44):
music on the moral feelings than to hear the full
choir and the appealing organ performing a Christmas anthem in
a cathedral and filling every part of the vast pile
with triumphant harmony. 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,

(26:07):
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
churlishly 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

(26:27):
strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial
and social sympathies which constitute the charm of a merry Christmas.
In the stage Coach, 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

(26:50):
an end 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. So
for Christmas Eve, Irving winds up at the brace Bridges estate.
He hears lots of merriment coming from the servants quarters.

(27:10):
They are playing lots of games, some of which sound
familiar today and some which do not. Quote here, we're
kept up the old games of hoodman, blind shoe, 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

(27:32):
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.
Irving describes the Yule clog, which is an enormous log
burned during the holiday, with a bit of its saved

(27:54):
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 in general gaiety. 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

(28:15):
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. On arrival at the
church Irving writes, quote, on reaching the church board, we
found the parson rebuking the gray headed sexton for having
used mistletoe among the greens with which the church was decorated.

(28:37):
It was he observed an unholy plant, profaned by having
been used by the druids and 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. In Christmas dinner, Irving is at first

(28:59):
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 families Christmas dinner also includes turkey, pheasant pie,
and a wastle bowl. After dinner, the family gathers for

(29:22):
the telling of Christmas ghost stories and a quote Christmas
mummery or masking. This has another footnote quote maskings or
mummories were favorite sports at Christmas and old times, and
the wardrobes at halls and manor houses were often laid
under contribution to furnished dresses and fantastic disguising. I strongly

(29:43):
suspect Master Simons who have taken the idea of his
from Ben Johnson's Mask of Christmas 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 Blish Christmas. But again,
the holiday really wasn't established in much of the US

(30:04):
at that point. Irving's writing about it comes across as
somewhat nostalgic, emphasizing that he thinks these kinds of traditions
should be preserved. Then, 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

(30:25):
it also had an impact on another writer whose work
has been credited with influencing the way Christmas has thought
about and celebrated, and that is Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens
was kind of a Washington Irving super fan. The Sketch
Book was published when he was about eight, and he
read it over and over. It is likely that Dickens

(30:45):
named his own sketches by Boss after irving sketchbook, and
the sketchbook influenced Dickens eighteen thirty five a Christmas Dinner,
as well as Christmas scenes in Pickwick Papers in eighteen
thirty six. Irving wrote to Dickens in eighteen forty one
complimenting him on his work, and dickens reply is effusive.

(31:06):
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.

(31:27):
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, and am constantly disposed to break off and
tell you again how glad I am this moment has arrived.

(31:47):
I don't know if Charles Dickens meant this to sound
a little suggestive. It's very romantic. It is extremely romantic.
Irving and Dickens exchanged flattering letters back and forth until
meeting during Dickens's tour of the US in eighteen forty two.
In eighteen forty three, Dickens published a Christmas Carol, again

(32:10):
influenced by Irving and whose influence on Christmas time we
have previously discussed on the show. 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 second hand
report that Irving had found Dickens to be quote outrageously vulgar. Regardless,

(32:35):
Christmas became more of an established and public holiday in
the US over the course of the nineteenth century, and
it became a federal holiday in the US on June seventy.
And that's a bit about Washington Irving and his influence
on the Christmas season, on the season of holiday cheer
and greenery. And I feel like, um, he to have

(33:00):
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. I bet so Go's a
male I do. I have listener mail from Caitlin. Caitlin says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, I belong to the camp of oh
More Nursery Rhymes. Uh. This was obviously written after our

(33:24):
six Impossible episodes Nursery Rhymes Part two. I had three
connected thoughts from the most recent edition. First, I love
the idea that the long Mother Hubbard was the author,
building off an existing skeleton. Second, little kids are creepy
and morbid and love songs about me, him and murder.
Anytime I sing anything remotely violent with my preschool class,

(33:44):
their eyes light up and they miime along with lee.
Little bunny Foo Foo getting bopped on the head as
a particular favorite. Third, and this ties together with one
and two. When I was in third or fourth grade,
we did a unit on poetry and Red Shell Silverstein.
Our teacher challenged us to add averse to his poem Sick,
figuring that the rhyming couplets and subject matter of not

(34:05):
wanting to go to school would be a hit. And
the poem Little Peggy and Mackay lists all her eggs
and pains and ailments and insists she's too sick. For
school until being told it's Saturday, at which point she
scampers off to play. I definitely remember this poem from
my chart. Caitlin goes on to say I loved this assignment.
I was a weird and morbid kid who loved learning

(34:26):
about illnesses and medical procedures and strange diseases. And I
added several more verses subjecting peggy ants who plague, rickets,
broken toes, and smallpox with illustrations to match. I have
no idea what my teacher thought, but boy, howdy would
I love to go back in time and ask this
is say no wonder a poem about animal vampireism and
murder has been such a historic faith. Thank y'all for

(34:48):
all the work you do bringing episodes to our ears. Caitlin,
thank you Caitlin for this email. First an update, I
did visit my parents over Thanksgiving. I asked my mom
if she remembered what this book was that had something
that she read to me, followed by who killed cock Rob?
And she did not remember. Um and I did dig

(35:12):
through some dusty spaces of their house, as well as
some dusty spaces of my house where things have been
transported from their house. Obviously I have not successfully found
this cock Robin book. However, after we recorded that episode
and did q A on it, I started thinking about
Grimm's fairy Tales and how many of them are incredibly violent,

(35:34):
and I was like, are people gonna think I don't
I've never heard about Grim's fairy tales? Are we gonna
get like a lot of Grimm's fairy I have? I
have complete collections of Grimm's fairy Tales, and I have
the Junior per Tree t shirt that I wear. That's
a story that involves cannibalism. Um So anyway, yes, uh,

(35:55):
there's a lot of weird, violent, morbid stuff and a
lot of kids literature rum but bringing up Shell Silverstein
in this email, I wanted to read it just so
I can talk about Shell Silverstein's other book, Uncle Shelby's
a b Z book, Yes, my favorite, which I just

(36:16):
showed to Holly. I pulled it off of my off
of my shelf downstairs. This contains material that was originally
published in Playboy, and wow, it's um it's a It's
a book that I really love. I was trying to
figure out if there was some little snippet for it.
I will read I is for ink, just because I

(36:37):
turned to randomly. I love this one. I is for inc.
Inc is black and wet, inc is fun. What can
you do with ink? What rhymes with ink? And then
it says d r dash dash dash um. This one
is also has has qus for quarantine. Isn't this a

(36:59):
big word? Do you know what this word means? It
means come in kids free ice cream? Uh So, anyway,
I just I think my favorite is B is for baby.
Oh yeah, where it's like I'm gonna misquote it, but
it's like the baby is pig, the baby is little,
and mommy loves the baby more than she loves you,

(37:21):
and it's so dark and wondrous. That's the gist of it. Um. Anyway,
if if you if the only shell Silverstein, you've ever
experienced our things like where the sidewalk ins and um
and the giving tree. They had to when they reprinted
this book, they had to put a little thing on
the front noting that it was for adults only, Yes,

(37:43):
because people were confused. Anyway, Thank you so much, Caitlin
for sharing this with us and for making me remember
that I have this copy of Dr Shelby saby Z
book on the shell and giving me the opportunity to
update everyone on No. I still am not sure what
that Who Killed cock Robin book was for my childhood.

(38:04):
The mysteries continue. If you have ideas, feel free to
send them in if you'd like to send us an email.
We're at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com
and we're all over social media at miss in History,
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(38:28):
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