Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group



Irving and the Knickerbocker Group 185
tions of the story, but there is no doubt that little Irving
stood face to face with his namesake, whose biography he
was destined to make his last contribution to literature, in
five volumes, conscientious, reverent, without rhapsody, as
too much Washingtoniana had been.

The New York which little Washington Irving blinked
at was a small place, less than thirty thousand people
clustered along the water fronts and intervening streets.
The site of the present city hall was waste land or farm
land. As for 42nd and Broadway, corner of tumultuous
traffic, follies and tragedies, it was for practical purposes
more remote than England, for packet boats brought from
England mail and gazettes. The town which had been New
Amsterdam before the British captured it, was now pre-
dominantly American in population, but a Hollander would
have recognized its Dutch origin in the steep gables. And
the Bowery, as the name implies, was a region of Dutch
farms. Many of the notable families of the town and up
the river were Dutch.

To this day to be a Knickerbocker is to be an aristocrat,
as it is to be a Biddle in Philadelphia, where it is said that a
Biddle is a sort of Cadwallader.

The name Knickerbocker is of course an invention of
Washington Irving’s, who wrote, with a little initial as-
sistance from his brother Peter, a fantastical history of
New York under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker,
thus described for the inspiration of cartoonists to this day.

He was a small brisk-looking old gentleman, dressed in a
rusty black coat, a pair of olive velvet breeches and a small
cocked hat. He had a few gray hairs plaited and clubbed be-
hind. . . . The only piece of finery which he wore about him
was a bright pair of square silver shoe-buckles.

Such was the whimsical figure, supposititious author of the
history of New York, which began with the creation and



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