The Devil and Tom Walker

Washington Irving (1783–1859)
From Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra

Interesting Links

“Washington Irving and the model for Rebecca in Ivanhoe” (Reader’s Almanac)

“A Rough Deal for Captain Kidd” (Daniel Gilfoyle, The National Archives, London)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Adventure of the German Student,” Washington Irving
• “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” Edgar Allan Poe
• “In Dark New England Days,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Stephen Crane

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Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra
1,104 pages
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The Devil and Tom Walker, 1856. Oil on canvas by American artist John Quidor (1801–1881). The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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“Long before this reaches you, you will have had my last work, the Tales of a Traveller,” Washington Irving wrote his sister Catharine Paris in September 1824. “I am happy to hear that it sells rapidly in England. I do not know how it may please you, as it is written in a different mood from my late works. . . . For my own part, I think there are in it some of the best things I have ever written.”

The book did indeed sell well. Yet, after waiting three years for the long-promised new work from America’s most famous author, most critics and some readers were underwhelmed. As Judith Giblin Haig remarks in an edition of Tales of a Traveller published in 1987, “Irving's public expected a sketch book based on his yearlong odyssey in Germany; he gave them instead a four-part miscellany of short fiction, his most extensive specimen of the genre in which American literary historians would regard him as a pioneer.” The disappointment was clear from the earliest reviews, one of which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: “[Irving] has been not only all over Germany, but all over Italy too; and he has produced a book, which, for aught I see, might have been written, not in three years, but in three months, without stirring out of a garret in London. . . . There is nothing German in here at all, except that the preface is dated Mertz.” It was a complaint that would appear again and again in subsequent notices.

In addition, many of the legends and anecdotes in Irving’s new book had already been told (and retold) by previous writers—the type of thing Nathaniel Hawthorne would later make famous as “twice-told tales.” The more conservative reviewers disapproved of the book’s metafictional comedy and “revolting” anecdotes, as well as Irving’s often satirical and self-referential takes on storytelling itself. “He displays a levity and sometimes stoops to a vulgarity, which must pain a serious and disgust a delicate mind,” griped one anonymous critic. “If Mr. Irving believes in the existence of Tom Walker's master we can hardly conceive how he can so earnestly jest about him.” Even the painter Gilbert Stuart Newton, Irving’s friend and fellow lodger in England, confided in a letter that he worried that the book suffered from a common malady afflicting popular writers: “They give the world a work, however well executed, but resembling in its nature what they have already done.” Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the section entitled “The Money-Diggers” was “told amazingly well.”

The sequence admired by Newton includes “The Devil and Tom Walker,” which remains the best-known piece in the book. A retelling of the story of Faust, Irving’s darkly comic tale in turn inspired a number of works, including Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. In both Irving’s and Benét’s stories, the devil goes by the name of “Old Scratch” (probably from the Old Norse scrat, or goblin), an epithet also used in works by writers such as Dickens, Trollope, and Kipling and transformed into Scratchy Wilson, the outlaw drunkard in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”

Irving prefaces “The Devil and Tom Walker” with a short biographical sketch of Captain William Kidd, the real-life British privateer turned pirate who was convicted and hanged in London in 1701. Rumors spread that Kidd had buried his ill-gotten booty somewhere along the coast of the northeastern United States. Irving’s narrator concludes his profile of Kidd with frustration that he had been unable to uncover any specifics regarding the missing treasure. “All these rumors, however, were extremely vague, and for a long time tantalized without gratifying my curiosity. There is nothing in this world so hard to get at as truth, and there is nothing in this world but truth that I care for.”

The narrator of the account of Captain Kidd is on a fishing trip off Manhattan when one of his companions reels in from the river “a long pistol of very curious and outlandish fashion.” The group speculates it might well have belonged to one of the “buccaneers of old times,” which leads “an iron faced Cape Cod whaler” to recount a story he had heard about Kidd’s buried treasure. That tale is “The Devil and Tom Walker,” and it is reprinted below as our Story of the Week selection.

Although Irving’s story is set “about the year 1727,” seven years after the financial crash from the South Sea Bubble, the historical details describing the collapse refer more specifically to the circumstances of the Land Bank scheme of 1739–40, which occurred toward the end of the administration of colonial governor Jonathan Belcher. Given Irving’s painful, personal bankruptcy after the War of 1812, it’s surely not a coincidence that Tom Walker’s chosen profession in evildoing is financial wizardry—accumulating bonds and mortgages and forcing foreclosures and bankruptcies during the “hard times” following a speculative real estate bubble gone bust. Despite the tale’s many comic and satiric elements, the bleak background and moralizing tone (“Let all griping money brokers lay this story to heart”) make for what biographer Andrew Burstein calls “perhaps Irving’s most pessimistic tale.”

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A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp, or morass. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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