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Ichabod Crane |
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Ichabod Crane is a fictional character in Washington Irving's short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, first published in 1820. According to a notation by Irving, the character of Ichabod Crane was based on a schoolteacher named Jesse Merwin, whom Irving befriended in Kinderhook, New York in 1809. Irving may have borrowed the name from that of a colonel in the US Army during the War of 1812 whom he had once met, also named Ichabod Crane. Colonel Crane is buried in New Springville Cemetery, in Bulls Head, 1 Staten Island,New York2.
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The most obvious feature of Ichabod Crane is his bizarre appearance. As taken from the book:
In this by-place of nature, there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, "tarried", in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut; a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodsmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
Later, Ichabod is compared to a grasshopper because of his posture on horseback.
As described in the story, Ichabod Crane is a school teacher who travels to Sleepy Hollow to teach the children of the area. This, in company with his ability to ingratiate himself, persuades many of the townspeople to make an overnight guest of him, which serves as his sole means of lodging. He follows strict morals in the schoolroom, including the proverbial "Spare the rod and spoil the child"; outside the schoolroom, he is shown to have few morals and no motive but his own gratification. Despite being thin, he is capable of eating astonishingly large amounts of food and is constantly seeking to do so. In addition to this, he is excessively superstitious, often to the extent of believing every myth, legend, tall tale, etc. to be literally true. As a result, he is perpetually frightened by anything that reminds him of ghosts or demons.
A turning point in the story occurs when Ichabod becomes enamored of one Katrina Van Tassel, the ravishing daughter and only child of a wealthy farmer named Baltus Van Tassel, who pays little attention to his daughter other than to be proud of her merits when they are praised. On accounts both of her beauty and her father's wealth, which he is eager to inherit, Ichabod begins to court Katrina, who responds in kind. This attracts the attention of the town rowdy, Abraham "Brom Bones" van Blunt, who also wants to marry Katrina and is challenged in this only by Ichabod. Despite his efforts to humiliate or punish the schoolmaster, Brom is made to look foolish at every opportunity throughout this rivalry.
Eventually, however, Ichabod's proposal of marriage to Katrina is refused, allegedly because her sole purpose in courting him was either to test or to increase Brom's desire for her. Therefore Ichabod leaves the harvest festival he has been attending at her house. During his journey, he encounters another traveler, who is eventually revealed to be the legendary Headless Horseman; the ghost of a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball. Ichabod flees, eventually crossing a bridge near the Dutch burial ground. Because the ghost is incapable of crossing this bridge, Ichabod assumes that he is safe; however, the Hessian throws his own severed head at Ichabod, knocking him from the back of his own horse and falling onto the road. The next morning, Ichabod's hat is found abandoned, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin. Ichabod is never seen in Sleepy Hollow again, and is therefore presumed to have been spirited away by the Headless Horseman. Later, a tertiary character suggests that he had been frightened, both of the Horseman and of his (Ichabod's) landlord, into leaving the town forever, later to become a lawyer in Philadelphia. Katrina marries Brom, who is said "to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always laughed heartily at the mention of the pumpkin", which events "led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell"; therefore, that he himself was the Horseman, of whose legend he took advantage so as to dispose of his rival.
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