The Devil and the Victorians: Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture

In Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Cornell, 1986) the final book in his much-lauded quartet on the history of the devil, Jeffrey Burton Russell argued that what he termed “the traditional world view” that facilitated belief in the Devil collapsed under the weight of the epistemological revolution wrought by Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke on one hand, and the reaction against the witch hunts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the other. “Before 1700,” he wrote, “the traditional Christian view [of the Devil] was still accepted by many of the educated, but by 1800 most had abandoned it or modified it out of recognition” (Russell 1986: 128). In making this argument, Russell was tacitly drawing on Max Weber’s “disenchantment thesis,” an idea first proposed by the sociologist in an address at Munich University in 1918. Boiled down, Weber’s argument was that the history of Western society can be characterized—at least from the Enlightenment—as being driven by a process of de-magicization, an intellectual rationalization through which the idea of mysterious and capricious spirits as active principles in the universe was progressively displaced in favor of a view that saw it governed by regular, definable laws that, ultimately, were comprehensible through calculation. For Russell and many other historians in the 1970s and 1980s, this notion of a “disenchanted worldview” meant that increasingly less intellectual and cultural space was afforded to the Devil and his minions from the end of the seventeenth century onward. Insofar as they survived at all, the argument continued, demonology and the enchanted world that gave it explanatory power were deemed embarrassing relics of a credulous and superstitious age.At its heart, Sarah Bartels’ new work is a challenge to Weber’s century-old thesis applied to the English context. As she writes, the Devil’s role is not a “straightforward tale of decline or secularisation” (3). Instead, the book’s primary purpose is to show that the Devil still “played a significant role in Victorian English culture” (224), shifting “between meaning and meaninglessness and between acute seriousness and light-hearted humour” (1) according to discerner and context. However, the book goes no further than this. It provides many useful and often colorful examples of sightings of the Devil in various cultural, social, and epistemological niches but offers only the most cursory analysis of their meaning, significance, or implication, rarely endeavoring to tie them into the broader history of the period.Rather than proceeding chronologically, Bartels organizes her work thematically. The first chapter, “The Theological Devil,” deals—appropriately enough—with the Devil in theology and discusses the views of Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, the Salvation Army, Presbyterians, Quakers, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, Roman Catholics, members of the Church of England, and secularists. Ultimately, she finds that none of these denominations discarded the Devil completely; rather, they adapted him to new contexts, sometimes taking him less literally than their predecessors had done. The second chapter, “The Folkloric Devil,” as its title indicates, deals with the Devil in folklore. Working from the rich collections of nineteenth-century antiquarians and folklorists, Bartels finds the Devil playing many different and sometimes nontraditional roles in popular belief, often closely related to geography and environment. She concludes that while some commentators dismissed the Devil of folklore as an antiquated superstition, he remained a vibrant force in the minds of ordinary people. The third chapter, “The Occult Devil,” deals with the Devil in mesmerism, spiritualism, and other forms of occultism, including magic and hermeticism. While most of these practices did not seek commerce directly with the demonic, as Bartels concludes, they were premised on a belief in spirits, which made discounting the Devil as one of these preternatural forces problematic. The fourth and fifth chapters—“The Popular Devil” and “The Literary and Theatrical Devil,” respectively—deal with the Devil in the realm of entertainment, first through the forms of literature and spectacle such as broadsides and Punch and Judy shows consumed (generally) by the lower classes, and then in literary and theatrical productions aimed at the upper classes, especially in the context of new adaptations of the Faust legend. Here, Bartels concludes, cultural productions capitalized on the malleability of the devil, using it to their own ends, with the work of authors “veering from the nonsensical humour of the pantomime to the terror of the ghost story” (210).There are many problems with this book. I will limit myself to commenting on just a few. First, Bartels makes much of the Devil’s malleability. This is certainly an important observation. But then it had been true of the Devil from his earliest appearances in scripture and in the writings of the early church fathers. Reading at a literal level, at least, the New Testament, for instance, seems contradictory in its description of the Devil and his role. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul seems to envision Satan as working for God, fulfilling some sort of penitential function for sinners so that they might later be saved (1 Cor 5:1–5). John, though, describes him as a murderer and liar from the beginning (John 8:44). Equally, the gospels describe a Devil who is sufficiently corporeal to transport Christ through the air to place him on top of a temple and a mountain (e.g., Matt 4:1–11), yet ethereal enough to enter into people (e.g., Luke 8:27–39) and to shape-shift into the form of an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14). Thus, from the very beginning of his history in the Christian period, it was left to commentators to craft their own versions of the Devil around the ambiguous sketch provided by scripture, and they tended to do so in response to the questions they asked about the nature of evil and the meaning and significance they attributed to misfortune.Despite the inherent ambiguity of the Devil, Bartels seems to assume a singular Devil inherited from the early modern period, albeit refracted through Enlightenment rationalism. But what that Devil actually is, she does not make clear, for she provides no definition of what Victorians understood by the figure of the Devil. Indeed, despite its title, the emphasis of her first chapter is not actually on the theology of the Devil. Rather, it examines the positions of the various denominations she identifies on Hell and last things. This is a problem, for the book really needs a starting point. Is the Devil adopted by the Victorians a version of the creature described by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—one limited by both the principal of nature and his own nature? Or are we talking about a demi-god, the almost Manichaean figure who emerges from the accounts of the witch hunters and who, at least in practice, seems to be more or less independent from God? Is the Victorian Devil a champion of liberty against tyranny, the kind of figure many readers found at the center of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or one who lurks in William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of industrializing Britain? Is he God’s henchman, as he was in the Old Testament book of Job, or the pathetic, hapless dupe whose attempts at evil are actually good, part of God’s ultimately benevolent plan for creation, as sketched by Gregory the Great? This matters, for defining the nature of the Devil and what he is believed capable of doing says much about how he resonates culturally and politically and about the intellectual niches that he can inhabit. Different versions of the Devil can do different things and engender different responses.But the flipside here is also important, for arguments about the nature and power of the Devil are de facto also arguments about the power and sovereignty of God and his relationship to creation and humanity. Thus, the way the Devil is formulated by any individual in any context is a statement about God—theology a contrariis. By extension, in some contexts at least, if the Devil of a particular community of practice is adjusted or reworked—or some aspect of his nature or eschatological role is stubbornly maintained—this can be read as a way of responding to challenges to conceptions of the divinity. This seems the case from the examples Bartels amasses in her discussion of Hell and last things. She notes that despite a shift in discursive emphasis in theology evident from the 1860s from punishments onto the eternal rewards of the faithful, the Devil is not discarded despite the “widening acceptance of biblical criticism” (29). Presumably, this is because he is necessary for sacred history to have significance and purpose. However, Bartels does not go this far. The decision to organize the book thematically also means that it lacks any sense of historical change. That is to say, “the Victorian period” functions as a discrete, homogeneous unit of time. Consequently, Bartels has no trouble juxtaposing examples from different ends of the period as if comparing like with like. This matters for two reasons. First, Revelation 12:12 makes clear that the Devil’s rage is heterogeneous, increasing as sacred history approaches its culmination, yet despite her emphasis on last things in the writings particularly of evangelical theologians in her first chapter, apocalypticism and apocalyptic speculation do not merit any sustained discussion. But second and more fundamentally, this means that the Victorian Devil, as Bartels presents him, is largely unaffected by any of the major historical developments of the age. He remains unmoved by the rise of new political philosophies. He is not affected by increased levels of industrialization and urbanization, and the profound social problems these migrations create. Nor is the Devil reconstructed or reworked in response to the rise of biblical criticism or the theory of evolution. Within the limits of the “Victorian period,” at least, he remains a creature aloof from time. Unfortunately, too, he rarely crosses the thematic boundaries Bartels has delineated: the theological devil barely interacts with the folkloric devil or those of popular or high culture—likewise, the theologians seem unaware of the lived religion of ordinary people and their understanding of evil and its relationship to the experience of misfortune. People are churchgoers, readers, theater attendees, and sometimes even enthusiasts for the occult, but there is no bleeding of devils from one demesne to another here.Perhaps the more glaring omission, though, is the fact that Bartels is not interested in the use of the Devil. She finds the Devil in many places but seems unconcerned with how he is being used. Is no one and nothing demonized—even rhetorically? Is he never used to explain difference—social, cultural, ethnic, or racial? Does he not create—again a contrariis—communities dedicated to the removal of those identified as being somehow in league with him? Does his presence never inspire any people to police society’s boundaries for deviance and difference? Ultimately, what is the point of the Devil for Victorians beyond the fact that scripture states that he exists? And is anyone actually afraid of him? While no book on the Victorian Devil could aspire to be comprehensive, the decision not to include a chapter on the Devil and colonialism—maybe expanded to include extra-European anthropology—seems an important opportunity missed. How did the engagement of missionaries with South Asian religious traditions draw on the notions of demonism that they brought with them to the colonial theater, for instance? Did their experience in these environments that were so alien and exotic to them have any effect on the construction of English demonism either among theologians or the wider reading public? Likewise, some consideration of demonism within the context of the discourse around madness and the development of psychotherapy would also have been interesting.This is a well-researched book. Bartels has unearthed a huge quantity of material demonstrating that Weber’s disenchantment thesis should be well and truly abandoned—should anyone still be clinging to it. But she never goes much further than presenting myriad snapshots of the Devil across the Victorian landscape. There is much grist here, but it still needs to be milled.

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