Washington Irving's The Devil and Tom Walker, Explained: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
- M. Grant Kellermeyer
- Oct 2, 2020
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 17
Irving’s most famous overt supernatural story — and one which makes no apologies for it — emerges, like most of his finest works, from the German literary tradition. In this case, it draws upon the legend of Doctor Faust. Desperately hungry for forbidden knowledge, this semi-historical alchemist was said to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for wisdom, power, and magical abilities.
According to sixteenth-century German pamphlets, the scholar spent his middle years in indulgence and debauchery before meeting a gruesome end: one night, after screams and violent sounds issued from his chamber, horrified onlookers entered to discover his mutilated corpse, blood splashed across the walls and floor. Historians have speculated that the historical Johann Faustus may simply have died in a laboratory explosion, but popular legend quickly transformed him into a cautionary tale of damnation.
The Faust story would later be adapted by writers and composers as varied as Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hector Berlioz, Thomas Mann, and Mikhail Bulgakov, each reshaping the myth to suit different moral, political, and philosophical concerns. Irving’s version, in turn, would help anticipate themes later explored by Nathaniel Hawthorne in works such as “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birth-Mark,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Burial of Roger Malvin,” The Scarlet Letter, and The House of the Seven Gables.
II.
Likewise, The Devil and Tom Walker appears to have exerted at least some influence on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: Tom Walker — a miserly, emotionally desiccated man haunting a cavernous house, only to be dragged away in his robe and nightcap by supernatural forces — bears an unmistakable resemblance to Ebenezer Scrooge. Yet Irving’s tale is not merely literary pastiche. It is flooded with historical allusions and rooted in authentic regional folklore.
The story takes place in the Hockomock Swamp — sometimes called the “Devil’s Swamp” — whose Algonquian name is often translated as “place where spirits dwell.” According to Wampanoag traditions, the marshlands possessed a dark spiritual reputation and were associated with death, warfare, and uncanny forces. The swamp also played a role in the violence of King Philip's War, during which the Wampanoag leader Metacomet and his followers suffered devastating losses.
In modern folklore, the region later became associated with the so-called “Bridgewater Triangle,” famous for reports of unexplained phenomena ranging from ghosts and cryptids to UFO sightings and disappearances. Irving exploits this haunted landscape for more than atmosphere. Beneath the Gothic flourishes lies a sharp critique of colonial greed and violence. The Devil’s treasure is literally buried beneath stolen land, and the sins of exploitation — financial, political, and territorial — linger like curses in the soil itself.
III.
Unusually for Irving, the story is set in New England — a region he frequently mocked. If Dutch New Yorkers are often portrayed as dreamy, vain, indolent, and self-important, Irving’s Yankees are more likely to appear grasping, humorless, and hypocritical. Ichabod Crane, Dame Van Winkle’s meddlesome peddler, and the scheming Puritans of Knickerbocker’s History of New York rank among his most memorable New England caricatures.
For Irving, vanity and laziness were forgivable so long as one retained humor and good fellowship. What he found intolerable was ambition stripped of warmth — the cold, joyless pursuit of self-interest. Characters who embody this trait tend toward paranoia, isolation, and misanthropy. This is one reason why the calculating Ichabod Crane serves as such an effective foil to the exuberant Brom Bones.
No profession embodied this spiritual failing more perfectly, in Irving’s imagination, than the moneylender. Having watched his brother Peter suffer financial collapse and humiliation, Irving developed little patience for predatory lending or financial opportunism. Tom Walker, like his literary descendant Ebenezer Scrooge, stands as the antithesis of the generous and convivial Baltus Van Tassel.
Yet unlike Marlowe’s intellectually ravenous Faustus, Dickens’ emotionally damaged miser, or Hawthorne’s spiritually tormented Goodman Brown, Tom Walker is startlingly shallow. He does not seek wisdom, moral certainty, or even social respectability. He wants money — and not even for pleasure.
SUMMARY
Irving begins his story with the pirate legend of Captain Kidd, the Scottish privateer who was said to have hidden a cache of his ill-gotten treasure deep in the forested swamps of the sinister Hockomock Swamp, outside of colonial Boston. After burying the chests, he made a bargain with the Devil to protect the gold from searchers. Kidd didn’t live to enjoy his wealth – he was hanged in 1701 – but the Devil kept his side of the bargain, and has been guarding the hoard ever since…
Twenty-six years later, the story picks up with a bitter old miser named Tom Walker who lives in a miserable, lonely shack on the marshy outskirts of Boston with his equally greedy wife. One date he wanders through the dark swamplands and finds himself standing on the deserted ruins of the Indian fortress – a shadowy, earthen mound leftover from King Philip’s War. King Philip – one of Irving’s personal heroes, whom he viewed as an honorable and tragic individualist – was an Indian chief who was defeated in 1678 by the Puritan colonials in a conflict noted for its treachery as one of the darkest moments of American history. While wandering in the gloomy twilight of the fort, Walker encounters the Devil himself: a shaggy-haired, soot-blackened woodsman chopping down trees (sinisterly marked by the names of prominent Bostonians, including a deacon rumored to be involved in the slave trade and a rich sea captain said to have been a pirate. Walker quickly realizes who his companion is and jumps at the coal-colored man’s offer to trade Kidd’s hidden treasure for an unspecified valuable, implied to be his soul.
Tom returns to his home where his only hesitation at accepting the offer is his displeasure at the idea of sharing the windfall with his wicked wife. Eventually he mentions the encounter to her, and she heads to the Indian fort by herself to make her own deal, and later returns with the intelligence that Satan is willing strike a bargain so long as she returns with an offering. In the middle of the night, she absconds with their meagre household goods of silver and the like, and is never seen again (all Walker can find is her heart and liver tied up in her apron and hanging from a tree).
With his wife out of the way, Walker decides to accept the deal, but learns that he can only spend the money in the Devil’s name, so he briefly ponders becoming a slave trader, but this is too evil for even Tom, so he decides on becoming a predatory lender. He is given the hidden gold and becomes an extravagantly rich with the rise of financial speculation in Boston’s growing merchant class. But Tom’s miserliness has not been cured by his wealth: he has a coach, but the horses are fed so little that they are emaciated, and his big house is cold, drafty, and unfurnished. Each year he grows richer, but he continues to suffer in self-imposed penury.
As Walker ages, he begins to feel the weight of his mortality and begins to dread the end-result of his bargain with Satan. Terrified of an eternity in hell, he begins attending church religiously, singing passionately in the choir, and never going anywhere without a pair of Bibles that he takes everywhere. The treasure has only made him more miserable: not only is he living in poverty, but now his waggish cynicism has been smothered by soul-crushing guilt and angst.
None of this, however, has stopped his business dealing or his thirst for wealth. One day he is bothered by a desperate real estate speculator who owes him money and is pleading him for mercy: “My family will be ruined and brought upon [welfare],” he moans, and besides which, “You have made so much money out of me.” Walker is absolutely unmoved and barks out, “The Devil take me if I have made a farthing!” Immediately, the oath is followed by three thundering knocks on the door. Startled, he opens the door to find a large black man holding a black horse by the bridle. “Tom, you’re come for!” he barks, and Walker realizes, too late, that not only is this his saddled, one-way ticket to hell, but that he has forgotten his two Bibles at his money-counting desk.
The Devil hurls him on top of the horse, which thunders out of town, into the Swamp, and towards the Indian fortress before is vanishes entirely with a dazzle of lightning. Afterwards, all his wealth is found to be worthless: the hoarded coins are nothing but wood shavings, the mortgages are just charred cinders, his horses are dry skeletons, and his house burns down in the night. All that is left of him is the legend that his melancholy ghost prowls the dark glen of the Indian fort.
ANALYSIS
Irving has rarely been described as a progressive — and certainly not as an activist in any modern sense — his most famous straightforward horror story employs the Puritan myth of the “Black Man in the Woods,” interwoven with Faustian legend, to make a surprisingly justice-minded argument. As noted in the introduction, the principal villains of the tale are slave traders, pirates, predatory lenders, and violent land speculators: figures who profit by exploiting and dehumanizing vulnerable people.
I often find myself thinking of this story in light of the financial collapse surrounding the Great Recession of 2008. Men not unlike Tom Walker encouraged desperate borrowers to accept dangerous loans they were unlikely to repay, profiting from debt while families faced foreclosure, bankruptcy, and financial ruin.
In Irving’s own era, economic panics were alarmingly frequent, often devastating small business owners while speculative financiers emerged relatively unscathed.
Against this backdrop, Irving rhetorically groups moneylenders alongside pirates, slave traders, and those enriched through conquest and dispossession. To modern readers, such comparisons may seem disproportionate; the suffering caused by financial exploitation differs profoundly from that inflicted through slavery or warfare. Yet it remains striking that one of America’s most politically cautious writers chose to place respectable economic practices within the same moral conversation as human trafficking and colonial violence.
II.
Irving never became a public abolitionist, denounced federal Indian policy in explicitly political terms, or cultivated the reputation of a reformer. Nevertheless, he repeatedly expressed sympathy for Native peoples and discomfort with slavery, while exposing the contradictions embedded within American self-understanding.
For Irving, there was something deeply hypocritical about celebrating the ideals of liberty at Battle of Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and Battle of Trenton while tolerating slavery and the displacement of Native peoples. To invoke the moral language of freedom while ignoring suffering at one’s doorstep was, in Irving’s imagination, perilously close to making a bargain with the Devil.
In one of the story’s bitterest insights, Irving portrays the Devil not as an outsider to American life but as woven into its foundations. Without lapsing into melodrama, he suggests that elements of American commerce and expansion were built upon moral compromise. Old Scratch dresses like an American frontiersman, speaks comfortably of colonial enterprise, and boasts of relationships with prosperous merchants and speculators.
The implication is unsettling: the Devil does not merely tempt individuals — he flourishes within institutions. Irving’s story would later be famously reimagined in The Devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benét. In Benét’s patriotic retelling, an American citizen seeks legal defense against damnation through the eloquence of Daniel Webster himself.
Though far more optimistic about the nation’s moral character, Benét’s story similarly acknowledges darker inheritances. His Devil proudly points to slavery and Native displacement among his accomplishments. While Benét ultimately offers redemption through democratic idealism, both authors acknowledge the hypocrisies and moral evasions that helped shape the American experiment.
III.
Questions of gender also emerge in the figure of Goodie Walker, who ventures into the swamp seeking her own bargain with Old Scratch. Although notoriously greedy, she does not appear motivated purely by wealth; after all, she takes the family silver with her, suggesting motives beyond simple profit. What, then, does she seek?
Irving leaves the answer ambiguous, but one reading suggests that Goodie Walker craves agency in a world that affords her little social power. Quarrelsome, proud, and forceful, she possesses many of the traits associated with public authority, yet as a woman in Puritan New England, her opportunities for influence remain sharply constrained.
From this perspective, her encounter with the Devil carries an unsettling symbolic dimension. Her grotesque remains — little more than her apron containing a heart and liver — may suggest more than physical destruction. In early modern symbolism, these organs were often associated with passion, courage, temper, and emotional vitality. Read symbolically, Goodie Walker is stripped of the very qualities that made her formidable.
Whatever sympathy Irving extends to her is limited — she clearly belongs to the same abrasive lineage as Dame Van Winkle — yet her fate nevertheless echoes one of the story’s recurring themes: exploitation through dispossession. Like many of Old Scratch’s victims, she emerges diminished, robbed not merely of property, but of selfhood. If God, in Irving’s moral imagination, represents restoration and reconciliation, Satan operates through fracture: dividing families, distorting motives, and reducing human beings to instruments of greed or fear.
IV.
Irving’s moral investment in this story was also personal. Having watched his brother Peter endure financial collapse after the failure of his business, he developed a deep suspicion of predatory lending and speculative finance. This personal history helps explain his sympathy for Walker’s victims — struggling debtors and small proprietors — but it also sharpens the story’s broader critique of social exploitation.
The true boogeyman of The Devil and Tom Walker is not Satan alone, but the Satanic impulse within ordinary people. Old Scratch does not possess his clients and force them into cruelty; instead, he amplifies tendencies already present — greed, entitlement, vanity, and moral indifference.
Slave traders pursue profit, speculators pursue power, and land thieves pursue conquest; the Devil merely encourages what human beings have already chosen to desire.
Unlike Benét’s later adaptation, Irving offers little patriotic reassurance. The story ends not with redemption but with judgment. Tom Walker is dragged back to the swamp where corruption first took root, undone by greed and incapable even of reaching the Bible buried beneath his mortgages. His frantic gestures toward righteousness prove empty because they were never rooted in compassion.
Like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the tale functions as a warning — against hypocrisy, acquisitiveness, and the temptation to mistake worldly success for moral worth. Its lesson is as old as Faust and still painfully recognizable: build your life carefully; notice who bears the cost of your ambitions; remain mindful of the suffering hidden behind prosperity; and consider the moral company you keep in pursuit of success. One may awaken, after all, to discover that the companion beside them has been the Devil all along.