The Devil and the Victorians
Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture
Sarah Bartels
Routledge 2021
Hb, 236pp, £120, ISBN 9780367444204
What did the Victorians think about when they thought of the Devil? He was a mercurial figure, manifesting in cheap print, theological argument, night-time fears and music-hall numbers. Sarah Bartels has combed the folklore archive, ecclesiastical controversy, popular media and occult literature in search of a figure who turns out less consistent than she may have hoped. The rise of industrial capitalism enabled the manufacture of diabolic representations on a scale which outstripped society’s ability to process them. It is possible to entertain beliefs that you don’t actually hold, and this book says more about the Devil’s popularity as a signifier than his influence in the world of ideas.
High Churchmen wanted to hang onto him, if only as a recruiting agent; a deep whiff of incense could ward off the threatened smoke of Hell. Low Churchmen, having purged so much from their Christianity, were not averse to getting rid of the great adversary too, at least as an active agent, though all Hell broke loose whenever a progressive divine denied eternal punishment.
The Devil inhabited the negative and was assumed to be behind anything you didn’t understand, like hypnotism, or didn’t like, like Catholicism. The man who smashed a machine because he was convinced the Devil must be in it was only taking things a shade too literally.
Colourful rather than terrifying, the Devil added fireworks to any theatrical production that needed jazzing up. As a stage character, he was a godsend – sardonically humorous, full of dark glamour, and clever with it. Every avenue of novelty was explored, including gender-bending in the hit ballet-pantomime Satanella
( Le Diable amoureux). Disappointingly, the female Satan turned out to be a good girl after all. Whatever passions might have seethed in those buttoned Victorian bosoms, they do not seem to have included diabolical sex. Dante Gabriel Rossetti rather liked the idea, but then he was half Italian.
The Victorians were primed to see the Devil in foreigners, subdued races and the working classes (if you were a social reformer) or the upper classes (if you were a working man telling folktales). Their literary Devil traced his ancestry across the Channel, either to Dante’s very hot and ungentlemanly Hell, or to Goethe’s more speculative Mephistopheles. The Devil could also appear as an angel of light, or what passed for one in the gloom of the séance room. Occultists were more theologically innovative than churchmen because they were not inhibited from contradicting each other, or themselves, so they remixed mediæval demons as the astrals or elementals responsible for promiscuity, hysteria and meateating.
The Theosophists were rather fond of Lucifer, and of his pride – a vice with growing appeal in the age of self-help. But the horned, tailed Devil who haunted crossroads and could be called up by muttered charms was too plebeian to be believable. He was part of a world that the 19th century was leaving behind, until even the Punch & Judy men learn to replace him with the Russian Bear or something else more topical. Hell was simply not Victorian enough: it presented no opportunities for self-improvement. By 1900 the Devil was an idea whose time had gone. Jeremy Harte
★★★★