The Sketch Book, fond of new scenes

This passage opens the piece Irving called The Author’s Account of Himself, which stands first in the collection. He wrote the sketches while working in Liverpool and traveling in Britain after his family business failed. The book appeared in parts in 1819 and 1820 under the name Geoffrey Crayon.

Where this text comes fromThis is a writer explaining himself before he starts, which was the convention for a book of sketches and is why the piece stands first in the collection. The voice is first person and deliberately mild, presenting a lifelong habit of wandering as something closer to an affliction than an achievement. Irving was writing in England after his family business collapsed, so the wandering was not entirely a choice, and the essay never quite says so while never quite hiding it either.

What you might not noticeThe account begins in childhood and moves forward without dates, so the reader is given a temperament rather than a biography. Not one year is named in the whole passage. Source

What it trainsFour sentences and only five commas across 435 characters, which is a light punctuation load and makes this a good passage for measuring plain speed. Nothing here is hyphenated, nothing is dashed, and there are no quotation marks at all. Seven capitals, three of them inside sentences. The longest words, observations and surrounding, both run eleven or twelve letters and both are made of familiar parts, so they are typed by rhythm rather than by letter, which is where errors slip in unnoticed.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg