Reflection: Irving

Even though both “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” were both written by the same person, Washington Irving, they both sound like they could have potentially been written by two different people, just two people in the same writing period. While they were both very descriptive, they seemed to be written by two different authors with different themes they liked to focus on.

“Rip Van Winkle” was mainly about a very likable man living in New York before the Revolutionary War who was always being nagged by his wife because he liked to spend more time helping other people rather than working on his own farm, which was a sad excuse for a farm. It was basically reduced to a small garden due to his neglect. One day, after once again being nagged by his wife, he decided to get away by going out for a hunt. While out in the forest, he meets a stranger carrying a keg of liquor, and after helping him carry it where the man was going, he encounters a group of dwarves bowling. He drinks quite a bit of the liquor, and passes out. When he wakes up and walks back into town, he eventually, after some confusion, discovers that he has been asleep for over twenty years. He is disheartened to find that all of the friends he had in the town are now dead, but then he is relieved at the revelation that his wife is also dead, so he can now live in peace, which is what he goes on to do.

Now there is “The Devil and Tom Walker,” which is a story of a man seeking to make a quick buck who deals with the Devil. The riches that he gains from the Devil goes into his new business, in which he gives out loans with obscenely large interest rates, and when a customer accuses Tom of making a lot of money off of him Tom replies with “The Devil take me if I made a farthing” ( Irving 249 ). At this point, the Devil shows up and takes Tom Walker away.

Some of the similarities between “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” are that they are both very descriptive, which is a definite characteristic of the Romanticism period, and they both include wives that the husbands were somewhat “happy” to get rid of. One example of the great detail that the Romantic writers go into the following passage from “The Devil and Tom Walker;” 

“They lived in a forlorn looking house that stood alone and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin trees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of pudding stone, tantalized and balked his hunger.” (Irving 242).

On the subject of “Rip Van Winkle,” I was excited to finally read the full story because I’ve always heard about Rip and how he slept for a very long time. In his criticism/analysis of “Rip Van Winkle,” Don D’Ammassa agrees by saying “Rip Van Winkle is one of those characters whose story is so widely known that many readers feel they have read the story even if they have not.” The longevity of Irving’s story shows how the Romanticism period had a definite impact on American culture to this day.


D'Ammassa, Don. "'Rip Van Winkle'." Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.


Irving, Washington. The Devil and Tom Walker. Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 242-250. Print.



Matthews, Brander, ed. The Short-Story: Specimens Illustrating Its Development. New York: American Book Company, 1907; Bartleby.com, 2000.