Fiction · 1820
Old Christmas
Old Christmas, first published in 1820, has been pulled into the Bibliomancer archive: the complete text, carefully cleaned and typeset, free to read online. Its editorial introduction is still being prepared.
Contents
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1783–1859 · Romantic
Washington Irving (1783–1859) was born in New York City, the youngest of eleven children, and achieved his first fame with the comic A History of New York (1809), written under the pseudonym "Diedrich Knickerbocker," before The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) — which included "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" — made him internationally famous and the first American writer to earn a living by his pen alone. He spent seventeen years in Europe as a writer and diplomat before returning to serve as U.S. minister to Spain, and his later work turned increasingly to the American frontier: Astoria (1836) recounts John Jacob Astor's Pacific fur-trading venture, and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) draws on a U.S. Army officer's own journals of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. He died at his estate, Sunnyside, in Tarrytown, New York.
Adjacent records
