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

This Victorian Devils amorphousness raises obvious questions of coherence. How could a single figure have so many faces, while retaining any sort of internal unity? Did he retain internal unity at all? Is it possible that, by the Victorian era, it is nonsensical to speak of the Devil as a single figure? Perhaps, in the face of theological innovation and debate, the worryingly glorious Satan of Milton, the horned buffoon of the Punch and Judy show, and the esoteric definitions of Victorian spiritualists and occultists, he had simply fragmented into hollow meaninglessness. The Devils identity was often bound together by the thinnest of threads. For the Victorians themselves, he lacked an entirely unified meaning, with individuals not only reacting to him in widely differing ways but generally being well aware of his contradictions. This awareness stemmed from nothing more complicated than having heard a sermon which mentioned the Devil, while also having heard or read a diabolic folktale, watched a Punch and Judy show, or seen a humorous image of a figure with horns and tail. How this contradiction was or was not resolved is more complex. There was a small subset of Victorians who thought that it was unwise to treat the Devil lightly. Such concerns only made sense in the context of a traditionalist view of the Christian universe, in which the Devil was not only real but powerful and dangerous. In this context, it was more than reasonable to think that laughing at a being, who could tempt you down a road which led to an eternity of torment, was not the best idea, especially if it led those who did so to stop taking the Devil as seriously as they otherwise would have done. The prevalence of diabolic humour and entertainment suggests that this view was not dominant.