Customer Reviews

Tales of a Traveler

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"Tales of a Traveller" is certainly not as well known as Irving's "Sketch Book" (which includes his famous stories "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"). When it was originally published in 1824, it was heavily criticized as both derivative and indecent. The criticism was so intense that Irving abandoned the writing of fiction and wrote history, biography, and folklore for the remainder of his career.

Yet, two centuries later, the stories have dated well. I'll return to whether the stories can be considered offensive, but modern readers' lack of familiarity with the sources that Irving apparently copied makes the accusation of imitation somewhat moot. In addition to being remarkably readable (and they are certainly never boring), many of the stories seem fresh and even modern.

The collection is divided into four parts: the first, "Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman," is a group of ghost stories (many of them notable for their lack of "real" ghosts). Irving uses the framing technique of a friend relating an overnight stay in an old mansion with a group of gentlemen trapped by a storm. They tell each other ghost stories, and in some of these the characters themselves tell tales (stories within stories within stories). The second section, "Buckthorne and His Friends," includes humorous anecdotes about the backgrounds of a group of eccentric authors attending a dinner. "The Italian Banditti" features stories of the highway robbers who afflict travelers in Italy; this section reads almost like a romantic Western novel. And, finally, "The Money Diggers" claims to be the long-lost papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker (Irving's fictional author of "A History of New York"); these spirited yarns of pirates and buried treasure set in and around the island of Manhattan are pure entertainment.

There are a number of surprising nuggets here: too many, in fact, to single them out. Although modern readers will find it difficult to see what's offensive about this collection (some readers were apparently insulted by Irving's portrayal of Englishmen, for example), there's one rather scandalous and delightfully creepy ghost story, "The Adventure of the German Student," that deserves special comment. Without giving too much away, let's just say that it can only be read as a story about necrophilia and goes further than anything even Poe ever wrote.

It's difficult to find this book in an inexpensive standalone volume, but it is available in a relatively affordable edition (which also includes "Bracebridge Hall" and "The Alhambra") published by The Library of America.