Irving’s Knickerbocker in Retrospect

Abstract

Roughly a hundred miles away from the Port Folio group, the young Washington Irving convened a circle of friends in 1807 to give Manhattan its own essay serial on the British model, Salmagundi. Irving was also, like Dennie, a recalcitrant law student who barely passed the bar exam and muddled through several years of undistinguished practice before abandoning it to write full-time. The efforts of the Salmagundi circle, in fact, made an immediate impression on Dennie, who favorably noticed the serial and reprinted several essays from it in the Port Folio.¹ Though Irving seems never to have had strong political commitments, Dennie saw in Salmagundi the work of ‘a well-principled Federalist’.² In his view, the generally urbane air of Salmagundi, along with the ‘extensive knowledge of the world’ it displays, its ambition to ‘correct the manners, and improve the taste of the age’ and its drive to ‘expose the absurdity of our institutions’ allied the serial with the cultural politics that animated the Port Folio.³ Most of the qualities Dennie cites place Salmagundi firmly in the British essay tradition, but he detects a distinctively Federalist variant of this literary strain in the serial’s exposure of institutional absurdity in the Jeffersonian moment. Like the Port Folio, Salmagundi satirizes the short-sighted, anti-intellectual bent of what it sees as the new American populism.