The Devil and the Victorians

Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture

Sarah Bartels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000348040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

1 The Theological Devil

In 1897, the Westminster Review published an article reflecting on the ways in which English religious life had changed during the nineteenth century. The author, noting the influence of intellectual movements such as biblical criticism and evolutionary theory, wondered, what it meant for ‘the great organised Churches’, if:

The authenticity and infallibility of the Old Testament are not only denied by sceptics but are abandoned by many scholars in the English Church; the evolution theory has demolished the old notions concerning the creation of the world and the fall of man; [and] the moral feeling of educated people has revolted at the barbarous doctrine of eternal punishment.¹

The tumultuous and often iconoclastic landscape of nineteenth-century theological debate seemed to give ample reason for doubting the continued significance of hell and its overlord. By the late nineteenth century, William Gladstone could lament that hell had been ‘relegated…to the far-off corners of the Christian mind…to sleep in deep shadow, as a thing needless in our enlightened and progressive age’ and, by 1909, one commentator could state that religious bodies had developed a ‘prevailing cloudiness about ultimate things’.² Commenting on the great emotive power of traditional religion, he stated that ‘the whole apparatus of worship seems…unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires’. ‘The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring close to the Celestial City’ were all ‘alien to the present’.³ Despite these concerns, both hell and the Devil retained considerable significance during the Victorian era, with the very uncertainty of their status ensuring that they retained the topicality bestowed on controversial subjects.

This chapter will illuminate the significant role the Devil and hell played in Victorian England’s various religious denominations, encompassing the Church of England, the major (and a few minor) Nonconformist denominations, and the Roman Catholic Church. It will also examine the symbolic role the Devil played in secularist rhetoric, demonstrating that, even for his most ardent opponents, he was not completely irrelevant. While it would be overstating the case to place the Devil at the centre of the Victorian religious universe, to ignore or marginalise him would be to obscure a significant component of Victorian belief, practice, doctrine, and experience. The Devil played a substantial role in English religion, although his position and that of hell were often heavily contested. The Victorian Devil was an active component of a pluralistic religious environment in which belief and doubt, tradition and innovation competed and intermingled but failed to overwhelm each other.

By the late nineteenth century, hell and the Devil had become the site of a crisis of evidence. The Devil hovered on the boundary between meaning and meaningless, as while he still had a deep, symbolic resonance in the western imagination, it also became common to take him less literally.⁴ The theological significance of hell also gradually faded over the course of the century and by the 1860s an emphasis on hell and judgement had given way to a focus on the wonders of heaven.⁵ This shift extended far beyond the borders of hell, with the Devil being only one casualty of a widening acceptance of biblical criticism, which called into question the veracity and authority of the scriptures.⁶ Nevertheless, when a Victorian individual expressed the view that the Devil was imaginary or irrelevant, they were stating their own ideological position, rather than an expressing a truth which was obvious to the entire population. Throughout the period, numerous diabolic beliefs competed and overlapped, with traditional ideas coexisting and clashing with innovative attempts to remodel the spiritual universe or, more rarely, reject it entirely. Diabolic beliefs shifted gradually and, when the entire period and population are taken into account, remarkably unevenly.

The changing cultural role of the Devil and hell does not provide particularly compelling evidence for a wider phenomenon of secularisation. It was extremely common for individuals who rejected the doctrines of a personal Devil and/or a fiery hell to continue to hold (generally Christian) religious or spiritual beliefs. Individuals who doubted the existence of a personal Devil also did not necessarily reject all concepts of spiritual evil, with the Devil often being redefined as a more ‘modern’ and acceptable amorphous evil force or symbol for immorality. These alternative Devils were not simply watered-down versions of his more ‘real’ and significant traditional form, often playing an important role in the beliefs and practices of their adherents.

A significant subset of the Victorian population also continued to view the traditional Devil as real and important. Belief was as important to the story of the Victorian Devil as doubt. Hell and eternal punishment provided a reassuringly objective measure of good and evil and the threat of a supernatural punishment for moral deviants was too powerful a tool of social control to be quietly abandoned. The potential collapse of this theological structure prompted one writer to wonder what would ‘be left to hinder the bursting forth…of millions of…wolves, before whom the salt of the earth will be trodden underfoot’.⁷ James H. Rigg, in his Modern Anglican Theology, stated that, without eternal punishment, ‘all the demons of hell…may…sing merry songs’.⁸ By the late nineteenth century, the theological state of hell and the Devil was, at best, uncertain. In 1892, Gladstone noted that ‘[o]n the subject of…eternal punishment…every quack…tries his hand. Yet they do not know – and who does know? what eternity is’. The inherent limitations of the human intellect did not prevent a seemingly endless stream of thinkers from attempting to discover the truth about good, evil, and the afterlife by either devising or endorsing modified versions of hell and the Devil or, conversely, by defending or refining traditional versions.⁹ The amount of literature produced on the subject of hell provides a powerful indication of its continuing relevance for nineteenth-century Christians. The existence of hell’s defenders also demonstrates that visions of the demise of the demonic were sometimes exaggerated and that the reality of controversy did not mean that traditional views ceased to play a significant role.

Nevertheless, the concept of eternal punishment was especially controversial, with discomfort regarding the horrors of hell often playing a role in individual loss of faith.¹⁰ It was also often disturbing to believers, with Geoffrey Rowell stating in Hell and the Victorians that ‘[o]f all the articles of accepted Christian orthodoxy that troubled the consciences of Victorian churchmen, none caused more anxiety than the everlasting punishment of the wicked’.¹¹ The decline of hell and the Devil was influenced by numerous factors, including theological innovation, changing attitudes towards crime (especially an increasing focus on reform), and evolutionary ideas, which began to sit uncomfortably with the idea of a static afterlife.¹² Taking a critical view of hell and the Devil did not necessarily presage a loss of faith, with some innovators viewing it as a welcome development, indicating that theology was becoming more rational and ethical. One early twentieth-century commentator noted approvingly that there was now ‘room for much freedom of interpretation in the Church’s Eschatological teachings’.¹³ Conversely, believing in the traditional model did not necessarily indicate that an individual was comfortable with the thought of hell, with Rigg admitting that eternal punishment was such ‘a deep and awful mystery’ that there were ‘few, if any, earnest Christians…who have not felt this, even to agony’. He did not believe that this ‘agony’ disproved traditional doctrine, stating that humanity was ‘surrounded by melancholy mysteries’.¹⁴ Despite significant theological destabilisation, a supernatural worldview, including a belief in some sort of ...