1832 Born in Manhattan in 1783, Washington Irving was to become the first American author to be read avidly on both sides of the Atlantic. He couldn’t have got there by staying at home. So he took off for Europe, where he introduced himself to Walter Scott and others, and stayed on for seventeen years. His literary speciality was turning Europe’s folklore and historiography into short stories and sketches of popular history, like The Sketch Book (1819–20), the History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and Tales of the Alhambra (1832).
By the time he returned to the US in 1832 he was an internationally bestselling author, and such a celebrity that he was given a formal banquet in New York on this day. In his thank-you speech after dinner he seemed anxious to allay any doubts about his willingness to return to, or remain in, his native land:
It has been asked, ‘Can I be content to live in this country?’ … What sacrifice of enjoyments have I to reconcile myself to? I come from gloomier climes to one of brilliant sunshine and inspiring purity. I come from countries lowering with doubt and danger, where the rich man trembles and the poor man frowns – where all repine at the present and dread the future. … I am asked how long I mean to remain here? … I answer, as long as I live.
Next day, 8 June, the speech was printed in the New York Mirror. By 11 June a copy had got as far west as Franklin, Michigan, just west of Detroit, where a hard-working English immigrant called John Fisher wrote to his brothers who had stayed behind in Suffolk: ‘I have left England and its gloomy climes for one of brilliant sunshine and inspiring purity. I have left the country cowering with doubt and danger, where the rich man trembels and the poor man frowns’ – and so on, right through Irving’s speech, virtually word for word.
Irving stayed at home and turned his attention to western lore and history, like A Tour on the Prairies (1835; see 27 January). So persuasive (and pervasive) was Irving’s rhetoric that Fisher too stuck it out, though he died soon after 1840, exhausted by clearing over 100 acres of land in eight years.