Religion in Washington Irving

In many cases while reading through literature, there is a concept or deeper significance rooted beyond the presented plotline. This is strongly the case with Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Published in 1819, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon is a collection of short stories of character Jeoffrey Crayon’s impressions as an American traveling through Europe. Greatly interested in history and old customs, he ends up in rural areas of Britain, where these practices still flourish. Not only do concepts such as history and politics appear throughout the deeper meaning of the story, but through symbolism and metaphors, Irving presents the sketches with respectives references to the Old world, Europe, and America, the New World. At the same time, Irving uses these concepts to address ethical matters such as authenticity among new authors, that also seems to be a present problem in the new republic. In the sketches “The Art of Bookmaking” and “English Writers in America,” these concepts and profound meanings are portrayed. The sketch titled “The Art of Bookmaking” takes place in the Great British Library. Jeffrey Crayon was wandering through a British Museum and curiosity led him to walk into a room where he discovered numerous men in the very act of writing books. He had always wondered where volumes and volumes of mediocre works that were published came from, and had happened to walk right into his answer as he made another unfortunate discovery. Crayon showed his disdain for bad writing, especially when he realized that these authors were stealing ideas from the old books surrounding them. Dozing off, his imagination goes into a daydream in which the working authors all begin to steal clothes from the hanging portraits on the wall. Laughing himself back into reality, Crayon then proceeded to be kicked out of the library. In “English Writers in America,” Crayon essentially calls for the halt of “the literary animosity daily growing between

Bibliography: Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book. New York. Oxford University Press. 1996. Print.