The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker’s History of New York and the Hudson Valley Folktales by Elisabeth Paling Funk
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025)
by Firth Haring Fabend, PhD
In her book The Dutch World of Washington Irving, historian Elisabeth Paling Funk joins several authors of recent books about Irving, identified in her Epilogue, that herald a welcome new interest in him in this century. Among these, Funk’s book is unique in that, as Dutch is her native language, she has been able to consult many sources in that language, some of which also were known to Irving and used by him 200 years ago. Besides plumbing exotic, little-known sources, her book is unique as well for three useful 50-page-long appendices on Dutch language, popular culture, and proper names. But it is her penetrating analyses of Irving’s work that sets it in a special place in Irving criticism.
The book’s first two of five chapters offer in Chapter 1 a brief summary of New Netherland’s origins and Irving’s immersion from boyhood in the Dutch culture and folklore of the Hudson Valley and, in Chapter 2, an ambitious explication de texte approach to the seventeenth-century Dutch poet Jacob Cats’s beloved emblem book the Spiegel. Here she develops a taxonomy that she refers to throughout her discussions of the main works Irving is remembered for, starting with Knickerbocker’s A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty.
“Author” Diedrich Knickerbocker is a fictional character invented by Irving to tell the theretofore virtually unknown history of the New Netherland Colony, with the goal of preserving the Dutch folk customs of the Hudson Valley so dear to him. These customs were already in the post- Revolutionary period into the early 1800s being eclipsed as the area was increasingly overrun by Yankee newcomers to the Hudson Valley. However, in doing so, Irving made an authorial decision in A History of New York in 1809 to satirize that history and those folk customs by creating a burlesque version of them. This attempt at comedy enchanted many when it was published, but at the same time angered many who were descended from the very people who had brought that culture to his dear Sleepy Hollow. As Funk notes, Irving apologized for this in a revised version of the History published nearly 40 years later. His goal, he stated in 1848, had been merely “to describe the distinctive life within the Dutch American enclaves of his youth.” This was too modest. In those four decades, Irving persisted in his stated goal, which he repeated numerous times in various ways during his career. And, indeed, his record of the “distinctive life” of the Hudson Valley Dutch-descended people he knew and moved among is what he is treasured for today.
Today, readers familiar with Irving’s works will welcome Funk’s reprise of them in her book and the care with which she relates them to issues that undergirded Irving’s concerns in creating them. In particular, she stresses the values of the Dutch-descended Americans, with their substantial houses, pride in household possessions, zeal for cleanliness, their companionable fireside storytelling with servants democratically included, as well as their conservatism in dress and their formation of “companies” of young folk that inevitably led to “bundling” in adolescence and to marriages in adulthood, always within the Dutch American community. In contrast, the Yankees’ houses were “rickety,” and they wore their greed on their shirtsleeves, as Connecticut Yankee Ichabod Crane lusts after the buxom Katrina for her presumptive inheritance. Ichabod yearns not for the fertile rolling Van Tassel meadows, as he might, but rather for the vision he has of their being divided into building lots, with him their handy proprietor, to accommodate more Yankee newcomers.
Irving also drew sharp distinctions between Dutch and English women. Dame Van Winkle was “shrewish in tongue,” had an equal say in running the farm, managing finances, and performing the farm’s heavy labor, whereas English women were noted, in Funk’s description, for their “romanticized, clinging demeanor” and their subservience to their menfolk. Is it possible that Irving’s portraits of women played a role in affecting society’s attitude toward women long after he created them? Though Irving was well aware that the Hudson Valley customs and behaviors he observed had their origins in Europe, by incorporating them in his fiction, he preserved them, as Funk notes, “as part of newly formed regional American traditions.”
Religion too finds its way into Irving’s fiction, most notably in his treatment of Saint Nicholas, at first a fourth-century bishop whose cult eventually extended from Turkey to Russia, Italy, France, Flanders, the Netherlands, and of course to America, but who along the way somehow osmosed into a secular Sinterclaas in the Netherlands and Santa Claus here. In her discussion of St. Nicholas and his various permutations, Funk’s expertise, acquired over years of immersion into all things Irving, results in a complex portrait of the quasi-religious figure known to generations of Americans over two centuries, but one lacking any actual religious or theological significance. He became, as Irving intended, pure and simple, a secular Dutchlike folk hero uncannily resembling one of Irving’s pleasant Hudson Valley Dutch American farmers imbued with the lively and sometimes scary folk culture of his time.
In the two best-beloved stories he created, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving provides a wide window into the Hudson Valley Dutch heritage that he remembered from his younger days and that he is valued for today. Rip falls asleep for twenty years from 1769 to 1789, thus missing the Revolution, its runup and its aftermath, including the existence of George Washington. It’s a folktale, but Irving also shows the other side of village life by presenting in it “modern democracy’s disadvantages,” Funk writes—i.e., “the contrasts between New England and the former New Netherland and Yankee encroachment upon Dutch America.” In Irving’s youth, the material culture of New Netherland, such as houses and barns of seventeenth-century Netherlandic design, was still prevalent around him, and he could easily access visual clues to dress, beards, and hair styles in Dutch genre paintings of the day. His attention to noticeable differences between local Dutch and English women in demeanor and position is clear, again, in the portrait he draws of Katrina Van Tassel in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Katrina dresses “in a mixture of ancient and modern,” including a gold hair band that had been handed down to her through the generations, witnessing, Funk writes, to the “tenacity with which the Hudson Valley Dutch valued their ethnic identity.” In the contest between Brom Van Brunt and Ichabod Crane for Katrina’s favor, Brom is the lusty champion of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod its spare shadow yearning that its abundance might be his to exploit. In the ruse that scares Icabod’s witch-addled mind away for good, Irving provides a vigorous connection between the “popular culture of the region’s Dutch heritage and the Dutch traditions he members from his youth.”
Readers new and old will be grateful to Funk for her probing interpretations of Washington Irving’s fiction, for without him, this part of our American past and our past Dutch world may have faded beyond recovery. Not insignificantly, with her book, she also makes welcome suggestions for further study of America’s somewhat forgotten first storyteller.
