The Devil And Tom Walker

Washington Irving was born and raised in New York City in the years following the American Revolution. With his writing, Irving bridged influences from the Old and New Worlds, as well as those of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Irving lived in Europe (mostly England) from 1815 to 1832, and both Europeans and Americans welcomed him as America’s first professional man of letters. Many of his stories blend European and American influences in plot, setting, or characters. “Rip Van Winkle,” for instance, dramatizes the enormous social shift that took place as the American colonies, previously part of Great Britain, gained independence. Through this and other stories Irving tried to show Americans that, although a young nation, they already had a history and a distinctive folklore. In turn, European readers were impressed by Irving’s command of language and intrigued by the American scenes and characters he portrayed.

Before writing “The Devil and Tom Walker,” Irving had visited Germany for over a year and immersed himself in German folktales. It is possible that he drew directly from the legend of Faust, a man who makes a pact with the devil and exchanges his soul for limitless worldly pleasures. Irving’s story also bears some resemblances to his earlier works “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—with its ghostly figure on horseback and fatal ride—and “Rip Van Winkle,” with its quarrelling couple and henpecked husband. With tales blending the supernatural with everyday life, Irving helped create a distinctly American form of Romanticism in literature.

Typical of this Romantic atmosphere is the dark, mysterious gothic setting established at the start of “The Devil and Tom Walker.” The scene takes place in a “thickly-wooded swamp or morass” sitting opposite “scattered oaks of great age and immense size” (220). Such wild, mysterious, and remote settings were especially favored by Romantic writers because they gave free rein to the imagination and suggested a realm beyond the reach of reason. Irving’s description of Tom’s shortcut through the swamp continues the gothic imagery: “The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks […] which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood” (221). Further, the swamp is “full of pits and quagmires […] where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud” (221). This detail bears symbolic meaning, as the story later shows how Tom’s encounter with the devil in the swamp turns into a moral quagmire for him.

Indeed, religion and morality are important factors in the story, and they connect both to America’s early history and to Irving’s own life. The story is set among the Puritans of New England, who in the 17th century had come to America to found a society based on their religious beliefs. The Puritans were known for pursuing a strict, austere lifestyle that favored thrift and hard work. The portrayal of Tom and his wife is typical of how New Yorkers viewed New Englanders in Irving’s day. They are caricatures of puritanical New Englanders, stingy and constantly trying to cheat each other. New Yorkers also viewed New Englanders as obsessed with business and progress, always on the move, in contrast to New Yorkers’ more settled and conservative traditions. These negative traits appear in Tom’s wife’s hurry to make a deal with the devil to make money, and later in Tom’s greed for making money as a usurer. Thus, Irving’s story represents New England society as viewed negatively from the New York perspective. Irving himself was the son of an austere Presbyterian father and a more indulgent Anglican mother to whom he was close, and his portrayal of the Puritans in the story may reflect a negative appraisal of their beliefs. Thus, for example, Deacon Peabody is preoccupied with pointing out the faults of others (223), and Tom’s religious conversion is selfishly motivated and lacks sincerity.

An important component of the Puritan religious worldview was a belief that the devil could influence human affairs and tempt human beings toward sin—a belief that serves as the basis of Irving’s story. Moreover, stories in which human beings transact deals with the devil have been a staple of Western literature for centuries. Irving combines the traditional European Faustian tale (as seen, for example, in Goethe’s Faust, written a generation before Irving’s story) with a New England Puritan setting. Irving weaves together several traditional folk motifs to create a new and original tale.

In Irving’s tale, the devil is an outwardly coarse and sinister-looking person—thus his evil nature is on full display. Old Scratch describes himself as the inspiring force behind various evil episodes in American history, including the extermination of the Indians and the slave trade (see Important Quotes #5). In fact, when the devil offers Tom the possibility of engaging in the “black traffic” (becoming a slave trader) in exchange for Kidd’s treasure, Tom balks: “the devil himself could not tempt him to turn slave-trader” (228). This reflects the general northern view (shared by Irving) that slavery was evil. Irving also shows in this passage a sensitivity toward the plight of the American Indians and toward religious minorities persecuted by the Puritans. In addition, Irving depicts Tom as having some shred of moral conscience.

“The Devil and Tom Walker” appears in Tales of a Traveler within a group of stories collectively entitled “The Money Diggers”—tales depicting characters motivated by the ambition of becoming rich. The story refers to a period in America’s early history when the frontier was expanding westward, and many people hoped to make money by speculating on land. It was common to put faith in quick money-making schemes based on vague premises of new land or settlements. When the land turned out to be less than promising, the speculators were hurt financially and had to rely on money lenders to bail them out.

Irving thus draws a moral about the dangers of greed, which can ruin a person both financially and (in the case of Tom) spiritually. Tom’s greed has led him to enact unduly harsh measures with his clients and to swindle them of their money—and this at a time when “money was particularly scarce” (229). Usury, or the lending of money at inordinately high interest rates, is a practice that has been condemned as immoral in many times and places in history. This is chiefly because the usurer gains from the client’s misfortune, enriching himself with money that he did not actually earn. Tom’s entry into the field of usury signals his moral degradation following from his deal with Old Scratch.

Many observers during the period of the early American Republic noted that the United States was developing into a pragmatic society devoted to business, industry, and profit. Irving himself had tried and failed at business, including investing in steamboats in the 1820s, and finally decided to pursue the life of a writer exclusively. His correspondence shows, however, that he was often discouraged by the low status accorded authors in his country and resented the American obsession with practical values. The usury plot in “The Devil and Tom Walker” may signify Irving’s warning to his fellow Americans to beware the trap of easy money and success—not to compromise moral principles in the pursuit of utilitarian ends.

“The Devil and Tom Walker” resembles a play in several “acts”: a prologue (the Kidd backstory), Tom’s first meeting with Old Scratch, his wife’s demise, and the “final act” consisting of Tom’s career as usurer and final demise. The end of the last act finds Tom in his counting house driving a hard bargain with a luckless speculator who was a former friend. An instant before Tom utters the line that will condemn him to damnation, he “loses his patience and his piety” (231), thus letting his mask of religiosity fall and showing what he truly is: a ruthless usurer and liar.

At the story’s end, Irving again shows his creative manipulation of folklore motifs: He blends the character of Old Scratch (the devil) with the figure of the Grim Reaper who comes to gather an individual for his or her final reckoning. Old Scratch’s furious horseback ride through the streets of Boston as he takes Tom to his final destination makes for the most dramatic portion of the story, drawing it to an exciting conclusion. This ride is in full view of Tom’s fellow businessmen, thus serving as a warning of sorts and driving home the theme of the supernatural intersecting with everyday life. Finally, Irving’s inclusion of the detail of Tom’s ghost haunting the swamp on horseback after his death draws upon yet another traditional motif, that of the ghost condemned to haunt a particular spot (as also seen in the Headless Horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”).

With the story proper now concluded, Irving closes with a brief passage in which he returns to the framing device of the “Gold Digger” stories, in which “The Devil and Tom Walker” was told by a Cape Cod whaler to a fishing party off the coast of New York City. This passage in turn forms a bridge to the next tale in the series.