Hospitable History: Washington Irving’ S Bracebridge Hall and the Uses of Merry Old England

Abstract

Departing New York for Liverpool, Geoffrey Crayon declares that once the ship is under weigh, he will have “closed one volume of the world” and would not open another until reaching England. ¹ Yet in spite of that image of suspended literary activity, Washington Irving’s narrator transforms every perception into a tale as he crosses the Atlantic. Once he is in that gap, that “vast space of waters” (SB 11), stories proliferate; opportunities for narrative tumble forth one after another in “The Voyage,” the second piece in Irving’s collection titled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820). The American traveler records not the particulars of his journey—not the weather or the itinerary, not the number of days that lapse as he crosses the ocean, nor even the name of the vessel or its captain; instead, he catalogs the instigations for narrative. Being up in the ship’s rigging, taking that view from the masthead that Hester Blum has described so provocatively, allows him “to muse,” to “watch,” to “fancy [the clouds] some fairy realms, and people them with a creation of [his] own” (SB 12). He draws too upon a lifetime of reading. His imagination, he says, “would conjure up all that I had heard or read of the watery world beneath me […] and of those wild phantasms that swell the tales of fishermen and sailors” (SB 12). If on the horizon a sail is spied, that becomes “another theme of idle speculation” (SB 12). The sight of a shipwreck stimulates “many dismal anecdotes” (SB 13), and the horror of those battered spars is that “no one can tell the story” of their destruction (SB 13). In this liminal space, between leaving and landing, in this “fragment of a world” where “all is vacancy” (SB 12), Crayon could go on and on; he might after all “fill a volume with the reveries of a sea voyage, for with me it is almost a continual reverie” (SB 14).