Cambridge Contributor: Elizabeth L. Bradley

Today we profile Elizabeth L. Bradley, who has contributed the chapter “Dutch New York from Irving to Wharton” to the Cambridge Companion.

Betsy is Assistant Director for Public Programs and Lifelong Learning at the New York Public Library, where she has also served as deputy director for the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She holds a doctorate in English from New York University and a bachelor’s from Harvard. Betsy is the city’s reigning expert on the life, work, and influence of Washington Irving: she is the author of Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York (Rutgers, 2009) and the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Washington Irving’s A History of New York. Her writing and reviews have appeared in several publications, including BookForum. (Click here for BookForum’s review of Knickerbocker.)

In Knickerbocker, Bradley traces the life and after-life of Washington Irving’s fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. To Irving’s “great amazement,” Bradley writes, “Knickerbocker outlasted the History‘s first print run, and its numerous printings after that as well. In fact, the ornery, insular Dutch bard became an instant icon for New Yorkers, who used him by their own means but always, finally, to the same end: to signal the city’s myopic sense of destiny and difference.” The book is elegantly written and full of delightful anecdotes. Philip Lopate calls the book “a delightful contribution to urban studies,” adding that “Bradley knows her facts and shrewdly and convincingly interprets them.”

In her contribution to the Companion, Bradley shows how the idea of the Knickerbocker comes to saturate the imagination of upper-crust New York to such an extent that even though she never mentions “Knickerbocker” by name in her novels, Edith Wharton nevertheless makes use of the cultural symbology that “Knickerbocker” has come to represent by the end of the nineteenth century. Here is an excerpt:

The gently born descendants of the “purely middle class” Dutch and English merchants whose lives are portrayed in novels such as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, as well as in the novellas that make up the collection Old New York, derive their authority over their respective New Yorks from an innate grasp of the finegrained linguistic and aesthetic cues that governed high society after the Civil War – what one Wharton character describes, with airy assurance, as “certain nuances.” The crucial importance of these “nuances” is most keenly felt in The House of Mirth, where wealthy climbers ask for the native New Yorker Lily Bart’s help in fine-tuning their “flamboyant copy” of high society, and later, in The Custom of the Country, where the inability of nouveaux riches to get the details of haute bourgeois “aspect and manner” right is handled with a Jamesian allusiveness by the narrator. In every case, the society depicted in Wharton’s novels is governed with a “Dutch deliberateness” by mandarins who adhere to old traditions and even older kinship ties, whether they be the “viceregal” van der Luydens of The Age of Innocence overseeing their vast cousinship from the Patroon’s house at “Skuytercliff”; the Trenors arranging tactical maneuvers in The House of Mirth from the terraces of Bellomont, their Hudson Valley seat; or the ethereal Ralph Marvell and his sister, Clare Van Degen, clinging to the values and Vermeer-like decorations of their ancestors in The Custom of the Country.

Unlike her literary predecessors, Wharton does not always trumpet the New Amsterdam foundations of the insular world she depicts, but they are no less apparent for being so rarely spoken aloud. Perhaps the most telling evidence of her debt to the Knickerbocker landscape may be found in the repeated mentions – in both her fi ctions and her memoir – of Knickerbocker’s creator himself. “We were brought up on the best books – Scott, and Washington Irving, and old whats-his-name who wrote the Spectator, and Gibbon and so forth,” a character in The Spark insists, “cheap journalism – that’s what most modern books are.” Whether or not Wharton agrees with this assessment, her own urban stories betray their debt to Irving’s first attempt to capture the traces of Dutch New York.

Betsy appeared on the Leonard Lopate show last January after the publication of her edition of A History of New York. You can listen to her here:

Tomorrow: Melissa Bradshaw.