7.8 /10 1 Votes
Language English Media type Print (Hardback) Country United States of America | 3.9/5 Goodreads Publication date 1828 Originally published 1828 Genre Biography Preceded by Tales of a Traveller | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Publisher John Murray (UK)
G. & C. Carvill (USA) Followed by Chronicle of the conquest of Granada Similar Washington Irving books, Christopher Columbus books, Biographies | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus is a biographical account of Christopher Columbus, one of the first examples of American historical fiction and one of several attempts at national myth-making undertaken by American writers and poets of the 19th century, written by Washington Irving in 1828 and published in four volumes in Britain and in three volumes in the United States. The work was the most popular biographical account of Columbus in the English-speaking world until the publication of Samuel Eliot Morison's biography Admiral of the Ocean Sea in 1942.
Contents
Writing
Irving was invited to Madrid to translate Spanish-language source material on Columbus into English. Irving decided instead to use the sources to write his own four volume biography and history. Irving was a fictional writer and employed his talent to create an hyperbolic story of Christopher Columbus.
During the research, he worked closely with Alexander von Humboldt, who had recently returned from his own South American trip, and could provide deep knowledge of the geography and science of the Americas and together they charted the route and first landing of Columbus in the Americas. Humboldt praised the biography afters it release, which Walls biographer partially attributes to Irving's willingness to pursue a wide ranging scope of topics within the work, paralleling Humboldts own effort Examen Critique.
Criticism
Historians have noted Irving's "active imagination" and called some aspects of his work "fanciful and sentimental." Literary critics have noted that Irving "...saw American history as a useful means of establishing patriotism in his readers, and while his language tended to be more general, his avowed intention toward Columbus was thoroughly nationalist. From Irving's preface to the work, however, a contradictory intent emerges, that of the desire to write an accurate history: "In the execution of this work I have avoided indulging in mere speculations or general reflections, excepting such as rose naturally out of the subject, preferring to give a minute and circumstantial narrative, omitting no particular that appeared characteristic of the persons, the events, or the times; and endeavoring to place every fact in such a point of view, that the reader might perceive its merits, and draw his own maxims and conclusions" (I, 12-13). The critic William L. Hedges, in "Irving's Columbus: The Problem of Romantic Biography," argues: "To a large extent [Irving] may have been unconscious of his approach to history. And consciously he could not formulate his intentions except in stock phrases.".
One glaring weakness, then, of the work as a historical biography, is the enduring mythic assertion that it was only the voyages of Columbus that finally convinced Europeans of his time that the Earth is not flat. In truth, no educated or influential member of medieval society believed the Earth to be flat. The idea of a spherical Earth had long been espoused in the classical tradition and was inherited by medieval academics.
From the perspective of constructivist literary critique, "[m]ost of the critics who react this way, however, attack the work with counterevidence that is already present in Irving's text. The problem with the biography, therefore, is not that Irving presented only a partial portrait but rather that, in his ambivalence about the character of his hero and the imperialism that established the American colonies, as well as in his confusion about the function of historical writing, he created two portraits of Columbus"