Irving Peter was was an American author and physician. He successfully worked with his brother Washington Irving and translated Giovanni Sbogarro: A Venetian Tale.
Background
Peter was born on October 30, 1772 in New York, United States, the third surviving son of William and Sarah (Sanders) Irving. His brothers included William Irving, the poet and politician, and Washington Irving, to whom he was bound throughout his life by the strongest ties of devotion.
Education
Peter was educated in the private schools of the city and studied medicine at Columbia, graduating in 1794, but, like his more distinguished brother, early displayed talents for literature. Records of the "Calliopean Society" show him to have been an important member, declaiming on one occasion the "speech of Coriolanus to the Romans. "
Career
During the first years of the nineteenth century Peter Irving, neglecting the practice of medicine, was prominent in New York society, and was the first to link the name of his middle-class family to writing.
He was known chiefly, however, as a dabbler in politics, and he became, in October 1802, owner and editor of the Morning Chronicle, a Burrite newspaper, which included Washington Irving among its contributors. In 1804 he continued his political badgering through his anonymous and almost forgotten newspaper, The Corrector, an abusive and somewhat scurrilous sheet.
After Washington Irving's return from his first journey abroad in 1806, Peter Irving was for a brief time one of the "Worthies" of "Cockloft Hall, " the rendezvous in Gouverneur Kemble's old mansion in Newark of a group of young wits, who later produced Salmagundi: or, the Whim-Whams of Launcelot Langstaff Esq. and Others, a satire which took the New York of 1807 and 1808 by storm. He himself was abroad from December 1806 to January 1808, but was again in New York to plan with his brother Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York.
He returned to Europe, however, at the beginning of 1809 before the completion and publication of the great comic burlesque, and remained abroad until 1836. Here Washington Irving joined him in Liverpool in 1815; together in 1818 they bore the disaster of the business collapse of the firm of P. & E. Irving, which Peter and his brother Ebenezer had founded in 1810. From this time on Peter Irving's life was nomadic; he was useful chiefly as companion and adviser to Washington, with whom he traveled almost constantly until the latter's departure for southern Spain in 1826. During Washington's stay in Europe, Peter remained in person or by letter the intimate sharer of all the former's literary ambitions.
He lingered on in France for four years after Washington's return to America, but, then, at Washington's earnest entreaty, he came to "Sunnyside. " His one novel, Giovanni Sbogarro: A Venetian Tale, a story of historical adventure, published in New York in 1820, was a failure. He lived, however, only two years more, dying in the summer of 1838.
Politics
He was editor of the Democratic paper The Morning Herald
Personality
Appreciative of literature, Irving lacked the creative gift. Genial, social, but irresolute, and, after 1815, a semi-invalid, Peter Irving is chiefly interesting as complement and echo of Washington Irving.
Quotes from others about the person
William Dunlap thought Irving "a gentleman of the first talents. "