Volume 17 , Issue 46

1909 - Knickerbocker's Centenary

The following information was found in The New York Times, New York, New York, 26 August 1909, Thursday, page 8, with the "Knickerbocker's Centenary."

Found on Newspapers.com

Collier's Weekly reminds us that the centenary of the publication of Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New y=York" was at hand. Just about one hundred years ago an advertisement in The Evening Post asked for information touching "a small, elderly gentleman in an old black coat and cocked hat," who had disappeared from the Columbian Hotel, in Mulberry Street, and left behind "a very curious kind of written book." It was a bogus advertisement, and of the morality of such a device for creating advance interest in a forthcoming hook there was not a word to be said. That was a simple and primitive age. people did not bother about complex or subtle ethical questions. The missing Diedrich Knickerbocker never was found. But his "very curious kind of written book" soon appeared in print, and survives now as one of the earlier American classics.

Washington irving lived until the first decade of the second half of the nineteenth century was nearly spent. The town of New York of his young manhood, comparison of which, with the New Amsterdam of the Dutch seemed to him so droll, had developed into a bustling metropolis. Central Park had been laid out, in the very heart of the prospective city, but many miles north of the Dutch stockade, beyond which all was wilderness. He lived to see the name his pen made famous accepted as a symbol of the city. Knickerbocker hotels, omnibus lines, insurance companies abounded.

Knickerbocker may have been, indeed, a name honored among the Cutch burghers of Wouter Van Twiller's day; but Irving gave it all its lasting fame.

Knickerbocker's "History of New York" survives because of its unforced humor, its charm of simplicity. It may not rank with "Rabelais" or "pickwick," but it is worth preserving. It was begun, in a playful mood, as a travesty of a handbook circulated in 1809; it developed into something much better. it is worth while to remember that the fine simulation of frankness and veracity in this purely fanciful account of Dutch society and politics on the Western Continent deceived many worthy persons.

Some more or less illustrious citizens who were proud of their Dutch descent actually accused old Mr. Knickerbocker of falsifying the records. While an erudite German historian cited passage from the work to illustrate an important point of his own.
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