This study guide contains 22 questions for The Devil and Tom Walker. Washington Irving that can be used as a review activity or as the students. 1 the devil and tom walker from the moneydiggers washington irving. Guide document for devil and tom walker active guide is available in various format such.
A few miles from Boston, Massachusetts, is a deep inlet that winds for miles inland and terminates in a swamp. This inlet is flanked by a beautiful grove on one side and a ridge on the other from which huge oaks grow, under one of which, as the old stories have it, Captain Kidd the pirate buried a great amount of treasure. It is also said that the devil (later referred to as Old Scratch) himself oversaw the hiding of the money and guards it even now, for the devil guards all buried treasure, especially treasure acquired immorally. But Kidd never recovered his wealth; shortly after burying it, he was seized at Boston, sent to England, and hanged there for piracy.
The narrative proper opens in the year 1727, when earthquakes are prevalent in New England, humbling many proud sinners to their knees. Near the inlet where Kidd buried his treasure there lives, in a forlorn house with an air of starvation about it and a starving horse in the field nearby, a poor miser named Tom Walker, who is married to a an ill-tempered, fierce, loud, strong wife as miserly as himself. So miserly are the two, in fact, that they even try to cheat each other, the wife hiding valuables like eggs, the husband prying to detect her secret hoard. The two fight often, and locals suspect that Tom’s wife even physically abuses her husband, though no one ventures to interfere between the two. At length, late in the dusk of the evening, Tom arrives at a piece of firm ground in which slump the overgrown ruins of an old fort used by Indians in their war with the American colonists, a former haven for Indian women and children, the Indians’ last foothold.
Here Tom decides to rest as no one else would, so troubled would they be by what they would have heard in stories from the Indian wars, about how “the savages” cast spells here and “made sacrifices to the evil spirit” (later called Old Scratch). Tom, however, is not afraid of such things. Warfare is an even more extreme expression of human greed than usury (money-lending), and it also results, ultimately, in nothing but ruins, as the fort bears witness to.
That the Indians worship Old Scratch is perhaps shocking (though also consistent with the racist perception of Native Americans at the time the story was written). At the same time, it’s worth noting that the story portrays American colonists like Deacon Peabody and Tom himself as also worshipping the devil by acting on their greed. When looked at in that way, the colonists are no more moral than the Indians, they are just better at deceiving themselves about their immorality. The black man (later identified as Old Scratch) demands to know what Tom is doing on his grounds; Tom retorts that the swamp belongs not to the black man but to Deacon Peabody.
The black man says that the Deacon will be damned if he doesn’t look more to his own sins and less to his neighbor’s, and he then instructs Tom to see just how the Deacon is faring, pointing to a great tree which is flourishing on the outside but rotten on the inside. On the tree is carved the Deacon’s name. Tom looks around and sees that on most of the trees about are carved the names of the great men of the colony.
Indeed, the fallen Hemlock that Tom is sitting on bears the name of Crowninshield; Tom recollects a man of that name (later identified as Absalom), mighty and vulgarly rich from buccaneering, as rumor has it. “‘He’s just ready for the burning,’” says the black man triumphantly. The story holds that ownership is an illusion: the only entity that has possession of the physical world is the devil, who uses it to tempt human beings to their damnation. The swamp both reveals the moral corruption of human society’s leaders—thriving on the outside but rotten on the inside—and also foreshadows who will soon populate hell.
Significantly, the names on the doomed trees refer mostly if not entirely to the great men of the colony, implying that to become rich and powerful one must also morally contaminate oneself. Crowninshield’s introduction here is an important plot point: Tom later knows he can trust Old Scratch because Absalom dies. Tom asks the black man what right he has to burn Deacon Peabody’s timber. “‘Prior claim,’” the black man responds. He tells Tom that he is known as the Wild Huntsman in some countries, the Black Miner in others, and as the Black Woodsman in this country.
It is to him that the Indians made their sacrifices of white men here, and since the whites killed all of the Indians, the Black Woodsman amuses himself now by overseeing the religious persecution in New England of Quakers and Anabaptists; he is the patron of slave dealers and the master of the Salem witches. Tom recognizes the black man as the one commonly called Old Scratch, that is, the devil himself. One would think that Tom would be terrified to meet this personage, but he is so hard-minded and has lived so long with an ill-tempered wife that he does “not even fear the devil.”. Tom is so spiritually blind that he persists in thinking about the swamp in terms of property rights, even after he sees the men’s names carved into trees.
It is a racial stereotype to cast the Indians as sacrificing whites to the devil, but the story also reminds us that the whites willingly sacrifice themselves to Old Scratch in selling their souls to him. The devil amuses himself by creating absurd divisions between Christians, and also by promoting slavery, the most evil of professions based on greed. It is darkly humorous that Tom is not afraid of the devil because his wife is so ferocious; but Tom should be afraid, is not only because spiritually blind. Tom and Old Scratch have a long and serious conversation together as the former makes his way home through the swamp. Old Scratch tells Tom of Kidd’s buried treasure, and offers to place it within Tom’s reach “on certain conditions,” which, though we might easily surmise them, remain unknown. These conditions must have been very demanding, however, for Tom needs time to think about them.
At the edge of the swamp, Tom asks how can he know that the devil is telling him the truth. “‘This is my signature,’” the devil says, pressing his finger on Tom’s forehead before turning off among the thickets of the swamp and disappearing into the earth.
The narrator never says explicitly that to get Kidd’s treasure Tom needs to sell his soul; it’s as if the narrator is so horrified by the idea that he can’t bring himself to put it into words. The devil’s mark on Tom’s forehead is perhaps an allusion to the biblical story of Cain and his brother Abel, in which Cain kills Abel, and is punished by God with a permanent mark and exile.
Ironically, those worthy of the devil’s mark in Irving’s story are not outcasts from, but leaders of, society, suggesting spiritual backwardness in society at large. Tom shares with his wife all that transpired in the swamp, and mention of Kidd’s hidden gold awakens the miserly woman’s greed. She urges her husband to accept Old Scratch’s conditions for securing the treasure.
As much as Tom is prepared to sell his soul to the devil, though, he refuses his wife “out of the mere spirit of contradiction.” The two subsequently have many bitter quarrels, and Tom becomes more and more resolved not to be damned, the better to spite his wife. For her part, Tom’s wife decides to secure the bargain for her own account and, if successful, to keep all the gain for herself. At the close of one’s summer day, then, Tom’s wife fearlessly treks to the ruined Indian fort herself. She is gone many hours, and returns home quiet and sullen. She tells Tom that she met Old Scratch hewing at the root of a tall tree in the swamp, but he would not come to terms with her.
She is resolved to make him another offering, however. So, the next evening, her apron loaded with the silver teapot and spoons and the like, Tom’s wife goes back into the swamp. Midnight comes, then morning; two days pass, Tom uneasy now both for his wife’s sake and the sake of their silver. But his wife is never heard of again.
Tom and his wife are often described as being fearless when confronted with the devil—far from being heroic, this is evidence of their spiritual blindness, of how little they value even their own lives. Just as the Indians sacrifice white people to Old Scratch, so does Tom’s wife sacrifice what’s of highest value to her, the household’s silver. As a darkly comic example of Tom’s greed and the way that greed has destroyed his human relationships, Tom misses the silver more than the woman he should care for. Nobody knows what fate actually befell Tom’s wife, but many theories circulate: some say she got lost in the mazy swamp and fell into a pit; others say that she ran off with the household’s silver to some other province; still others say that the devil, Old Scratch himself, had tricked her into a boggy area on top of which her hat was found lying. Indeed, it is said that late on the evening of the wife’s disappearance, a great black man was seen coming out of the swamp triumphantly carrying a bundle tied in an apron. The most current and probable story, however, holds that Tom went out searching for his wife in the swamp, when owls and bats were on the wing. Soon enough his attention was drawn by the clamor of crows hovering around a cypress, in whose branches he found a bundle tied in an apron.
He rejoiced to have found his silver, but upon recovering the bundle he found that it contained only a heart and a liver, the remains of Tom’s wife. The narrator says that, though “a female scold” is a match for Old Scratch, the devil himself, here it seems she was bested.
Devil And Tom Walker Setting
Around the cypress, it is said, Tom found cloven footprints and handfuls of coarse black hair. “‘Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it,’” Tom says to himself.
A few days pass. Tom is sitting in his counting shop in Boston, with a reputation for lending money already. This is during a time of scarcity, a time of paper credit: under Governor Belcher, the country had recently been deluged with government bills, people were receiving parcels of land to develop by the Land Bank, investors were betting wildly on this and that, settlers had gone mad with schemes to build cities in the wilderness. Everybody had been dreaming of making fortunes out of thin air. But by now the dreams have collapsed, and everybody is going through hard times. The older Tom grows, however, the more thoughtful he becomes, especially about the afterlife. He at last regrets selling his soul to Old Scratch, and sets about trying to cheat the devil of his due by becoming a “violent” churchgoer, praying loud on Sundays in proportion to how much he had sinned during the week prior.
Tom becomes as religiously as he is fiscally rigid, supervising and judging his neighbors for their trespasses, thinking each of their sins credit in his own bid for heaven. He even talks about renewing the persecution of the Quakers and Anabaptists. Still Tom dreads damnation, and for that reason keeps a Bible in his coat pocket and a Bible on his desk from which he reads when he’s not driving “some usurious bargain.”. It is only in old age, when death is near, that Tom begins to fear the devil, as he should have all along. Instead of becoming genuinely contrite for his sins, however, Tom just makes a hypocritical show of being religious, and in his zeal even furthers his service to the devil by talking about persecuting the Quakers and Anabaptists, which he must have forgotten is one of Old Scratch’s principal amusements. Tom’s hypocrisy is crystallized in his reading the Bible one minute, only to turn around and usuriously exploit his neighbors the next.
That legend goes like this. One hot afternoon in summer, Tom is sitting up in his counting house, wearing his morning gown; he is foreclosing a mortgage and thereby completing the ruin of an unlucky land speculator, or land jobber, “for whom he had professed the greatest friendship.” The land jobber is present, having just begged Tom to give him a few more months to pay, but Tom refused him even another day. The land jobber says that his family will be ruined, but Tom retorts that charity begins at home, that he must take care of himself during these hard times. The land jobber then reminds Tom that he has already made a great deal of money in interest off of him.
“‘The devil take meif I have made a farthing!’” Tom cries. Just then there are three knocks at the door: it is a black man, presumably Old Scratch himself, holding a black horse. “‘Tom, you’re come for,’” the black man says gruffly. Tom shrinks back, but he has forgotten his one Bible in his coat pocket, and the other is under the mortgage he was about to foreclose. The black man whisks Tom up like a child astride the black horse, which gallops away with him in the midst of a thunderstorm; the clerks in the counting house stare as away their employer goes. When they turn back around, the black man is gone.
Tom Walker And The Devil
Tom Walker never returns to foreclose the mortgage. A man who lives on the boarder of the swamp reports that during the thunderstorm he heard the clattering of hoofs and saw from his window Tom’s figure on the back of a black horse, which was galloping madly toward the old Indian fort. Shortly thereafter, the man says, a thunderbolt fell in that direction which seemed to set the whole forest ablaze. After Tom’s disappearance, the people of Boston just shrug their shoulders, accustomed to witches and goblins and devilry even since the first settlement of the colony.
The narrator closes the story by insisting on the value of its moral instruction-a value worth more, he might claim, than all the gold a usurer could desire. Navara d22 manual pdf. However, the story also closes with a humorous image, of Tom haunting the swamp not with tragic dignity or even scary anger, but rather in his morning gown. The detail of the still-existing holes under the trunks gives the story a sense of being historical, of being true.
That the story is now a proverb again attests to its moral instructions, though unlike the dour Puritans of New England, the narrator preaches his moral instruction with some humanity and good cheer.