From the dust jacket:
Irving's classic satire on the manners and morals of early New York is now available in a facsimile of the beautifully designed and illustrated edition published by G. P. Putnam in 1854. Using the Author's Revised Edition of 1848, the publisher included 16 original designs by Felix O. C. Darley, as engraved by noted artists, and a delightful pullout illustration of "Peter Stuyvesant's Army entering New Amsterdam," from a drawing by the London-based artist, William Heath.
When A History of New-York first appeared in 1809, it was met with critical acclaim in the growing world of American letters, and by the established English critics. Originally planned as a parody of Samuel Latham Mitchill's A Picture of New York, published in 1807, Irving's satire became a sustained comic history of the early American experience.
In his Introduction to this facsimile edition, the noted Irving scholar Andrew B. Myers examines the Knickerbocker world of letters and Irving's role in American publishing history. Professor Myers is currently preparing a biography of Washington Irving. During a career which spanned the first half of the nineteenth century, Irving became America's most widely read author. Felix Octavius Carr Darley, considered by Irving himself to be his most sympathetic illustrator, was a Philadelphia-born artist whose efforts helped set new standards in the nineteenth century for book illustration.
A note on this edition: The publisher has reproduced the original 1854 edition as closely as modern technology and common sense allow. What may at first seem to be editorial oversights – broken type-faces, incorrectly numbered pages – are actually intended as part of the original impression, which has been left unchanged in all its great beauty and authentic defects,
Did you find this review helpful?