great red eyes." Further, he associates himself with the Indians who made sacrifices to the Evil Spirit, stating:

I am he to whom the red men consecrated this spot, and in honor of whom they now and then roasted a white man, by way of sweet-smelling sacrifice.

He also says he is the patron of the slave traders and the "grand master" of the witches.

Another supernatural element is the local Christian church, which Tom joins in an attempt to wriggle out of his bargain with the devil. Comically,

He became, therefore, all of a sudden, a violent church-goer. He prayed loudly and strenuously, as if heaven were to be taken by force of lungs...

The hardened Tom believes fully in the supernatural at this point in the story, both in the devil and in the church. Finally, there is implicit evidence of the supernatural at work in the fate of Tom Walker's money and goods:

In place of gold and silver, his iron chest was filled with chips and shavings; two skeletons lay in his stable instead of his half-starved horses.

The first supernatural element in the story would be the devil, himself.  His image cannot be explained with any scientific accounts, and his presence conjures up the image of "the other side."  Another supernatural element in the story is the climax.  When Tom speaks to God, begging him to be spared, it is almost as if God was listening and his response was the devil's presence at the door.  When Tom was picked up by the devil, it was in the dark knight, away from the perceptive eyes of others.  This is supernatural, in that it retains a sense of mystery and the unknown.  The ending of the story, when Tom's house is burned and his financial record are cinders also retains some element of the supernatural, something that cannot be explained or justified through rational thought.  The element of the unexplained pervades the story.

The reader need not invest too much time in Washington Irving’s short story “The Devil and Tom Walker” to develop a sense of the setting in which the story takes place. Irving, in fact, begins “The Devil and Tom Walker” with a rather detailed description of the setting in which his protagonist, the titular figure of Tom Walker, first encounters “Old Scratch,” the dark-skinned and exceedingly gruff individual who will be revealed as the embodiment of Satan:

A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp or morass. On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises abruptly from the water's edge into a high ridge, on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size.

The year is 1727. The setting is rural Massachusetts, a heavily wooded area surrounding a swamp. Irving’s protracted description emphasizes the foreboding nature of the environment in which Tom will make his fateful encounter—an encounter the ramifications of which he can only barely comprehend. Note in the following passage the author’s use of haunting imagery to emphasize the nature of the tale that will follow:

The swamp was thickly grown with great, gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire.

Irving employed images intended to invoke nightmarish scenarios. Phrases like “gloomy pines and hemlocks,” “full of pits and quagmires,” “gulf of black,” and “dark and stagnant pools” all suggest a gothic and frightening atmosphere. For a story about an ignorant, poor, “meager and miserly” man with an ill-tempered and domineering wife who encounters and makes a deal with the Devil, Irving’s choice of a setting was entirely appropriate.

Less evocative of such a scenario, but consistent with the story’s theme, is the second main setting in “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Having shook hands with the Devil, Tom is transported to urban environs of Boston, where he occupies a position of responsibility while seated at a desk. Tom had sold his soul for short-term financial success and was occupying entirely different housing, at least until the long-anticipated bill came due. In the meantime, he is something of a responsible if avaricious citizen of the city, a church-going member of the community.

Irving switches settings consistent with the change in fortunes of his protagonist. This is New England in the years soon following the infamous witch trials of Salem. Puritanism is intermingled with sin. Irving describes the setting at the conclusion of his, and Tom’s story as follows:

The good people of Boston shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, but had been so much accustomed to witches and goblins, and tricks of the devil, in all kinds of shapes, from the first settlement of the colony, that they were not so much horror-struck as might have been expected.

The story concludes where it began, in the woods occupied by Old Scratch. All vestiges of Tom Walker’s existence, and successes, have been destroyed.

The setting is simply the place that the literary action occurs, although a better and more thorough definition usually includes the time and mood as well. Sometimes the setting is compared to modes of theatrical diction, where the same statement can be said with different accents or tone of voice, lending a different meaning. Likewise, details of the setting, such as night versus day, influence the way in which the action that takes place there is cast.

The overall setting of the story is Massachusetts in the year 1727, about a hundred years before the story was published. After briefly describing the location of a buried treasure (which is not mentioned again), the story's setting moves between a swamp with an old Indian fort, Tom's house, and Boston. The swamp is dark, foreboding and has some supernatural elements that make it a suitable place to put Old Scratch in terms of his characterization; a good majority of the story takes place in the swamp, and contributes to the overall mood of darkness and corruption. Tom's house is forlorn and miserable. Boston is full of people and business and comes across as more upscale.  

The setting of Irving's fictional sketch is New England, a few miles from Boston, Massachusetts, in the early eighteenth century, a historical area settled by Quakers and Puritans where religious piety and fanaticism are prevalent among the citizens. It is around the year 1727, and much of the narrative takes place in a forest primeval, much like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Tom Walker, the main character, heads home by taking a shortcut through a swamp filled with quagmires and pits. As he struggles along, Tom becomes exhausted and sits upon a fallen hemlock trunk where he espies the skull of an Indian with a tomahawk buried in it when a strange figure appears before him, neither "Negro nor Indian" and "begrimed with soot" with "great red eyes." This odd figure is known as Old Scratch, and it is with him that Tom Walker deals.

After Tom strikes his bargain with the devil and his wife dies, he moves to Boston where he becomes "a violent churchgoer" because in his old age he worries about the deal he has made with the devil in the swamp.

The good people of Boston shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, but had been so much accustomed to witches and goblins and tricks of the Devil...that they were not so..horror struck....

There in Boston, Tom comes to his end.

I believe that Washington Irving definitely creates an atmosphere of eeriness in "The Devil and Tom Walker." Here are some ways in which he achieves this.

Irving begins by detailing the swamp that dominates his story, and he describes it in detail: it is "thickly wooded" and features "a high ridge on which grow a few scattered oaks of great and immense size." When Walker goes into the swamp, Irving again takes pains to describe this gloomy and otherworldly setting. This extensive description is a critical tool for how Irving paints his setting, and it creates the atmosphere he is trying to convey.

In addition, there is the larger history of the swamp itself. As others have already said, even before Irving brings in Tom Walker and his family, he has already established something of the dangerous history of the swamp and its use by Captain Kidd to bury his treasure (under the watch of the Devil). However, Irving's backstory does not end there, for he also adds that shortly after burying that treasure, Kidd was actually captured at Boston and executed—an additional but noteworthy detail, in terms of the atmosphere this scene creates.

Irving adds supernatural elements with the presence of the Devil within the swamp and how he claims prior ownership to it, preceding the colonists altogether. There are also the trees, with names marked in them, each corresponding to a prominent member of the colony. Again, the description of the trees intensifies the atmosphere of eeriness and danger. Peabody's tree is described as "fair and flourishing without, but rotten at the core, and. . . nearly hewn through, so that the first high wind was likely to blow it down." There was also Crowinshield's tree, recently cut down, who Walker later finds out had only recently died. The description of the trees along with the Devil's words concerning the individuals in question, all within the context of a man later being discovered to have died, create a deeply otherworldly affect, especially when they are combined together.

Finally, as one last feature, there's the method in which the Devil departs. He descends into the swamp in a scene that has a deeply supernatural flavor to it. Irving describes it as follows:

So saying, he turned off among the thickets of the swamp, and seemed, as Tom said, to go down, down, down, into the earth, until nothing but his head and shoulders could be seen, and so on until he totally disappeared.

In the story's opening paragraph, the swamp is described as a place where the Pirate Kidd buried his ill-gotten gains; it is said that "the devil presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship." This detail is both sinister and supernatural.

Next, the story is set during the Great Awakening, and the narrator said it was "just at the time that earthquakes were prevalent in New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon their knees." This description suggests that perhaps God, a supernatural force, was sending earthquakes to New England to shake up the sinners and send them running back to the church.

The swamp through which Tom Walker takes his shortcut is described as "dark at noonday," "full of pits and quagmires," and dotted with areas of " black, smothering mud." It is an altogether sinister atmosphere and most inhospitable to travelers.

As Tom Walker is paused in the swamp, he unearths "a cloven skull, with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it," a tangible reminder of extreme violence that has taken place in the area.

When Tom Walker is joined by the "black woodsman," he correctly surmises that the man is actually the devil, who confirms his identity as a supernatural figure when Tom asserts "you are he commonly called Old Scratch" and the devil nods in agreement.

At several points the story includes sinister and seemingly supernatural details, almost of all of them centered around the appearance of Old Scratch.

When Tom first meets Scratch, he's been taking a shortcut through a swamp and eventually passes by an old Indian fort, which has fallen into ruin. The imagery of the fort is foreboding; we are told people know not to linger there because of the evil reputation of the place, but Tom doesn't seem to mind. He rests against a hemlock tree (one famous for being used as a method of execution by poison) and pokes at a cluster of black mold, and then happens to find a human skull with a tomahawk embedded in it. The tree, mold and skull all carry a sinister symbolism of death.

Later, when Tom's wife disappears and he goes looking for her, he finds her apron tied in a tree with a vulture near it. Vultures are also symbols of death and decay.

Finally, there is an abundance of imagery at the conclusion of the story. Scratch appears to collect Tom's soul as a thunderstorm approaches (symbolizing his supernatural power) and a lightning bolt strikes what is apparently the spot where Tom is "taken". His possessions are also destroyed or reduced to useless junk, none of which involves a literal transformation before anyone's eyes, but the coincidence of which is too much for the reader to really believe could occur naturally. 

The most significant ways in which the setting affects the story is by contributing to the mood, and by increasing tension.

The setting which receives the greatest amount of detail is the swamp, and the old Indian fort found there, where Scratch resides. This detail, which is mostly concerned with communicating the dark, decaying, foreboding and haunted nature of the place, contributes to marking it as an evil place, one where we should expect a normal person to avoid. The fact that Tom seems perfectly alright with it tells us that he is either brave or foolish, although once we learn more about him it just seems that he's a bad person himself and we can comfortably judge his metaphorical book by its cover.

The swamp is also difficult to access, which has not only kept the treasure safely out of anyone's hands for many years, but it also makes it difficult for Tom to find Scratch when he wants to; this increases the tension by making it slightly unclear for us, and especially unclear for Tom, whether he will actually have a chance to go through with the bargain. This is intended, however, because Scratch means to build Tom's anticipation to the point that he's willing to agree to any terms.

There isn't much devoted to other settings in the story, other than the ending, where the approaching thunderstorm and the way Tom is "returned" to the swamp and the Indian fort, suggesting that the storm was a direct manifestation of the Devil's power.

While the setting definitely contributes to a theme of decay and a foreboding mood, I don't think that the entire society presented in this story can be thrown under the same wagon as Tom and his wife. While there are surely some general and specific crimes or instances of poor morality mentioned, Tom and his wife are not representative of society as a whole, and this story still serves as a fable or moral cautionary rather than an apocalyptic social commentary. 

The most distinct elements of setting that contribute to this theme are the swamp with the ruined Indian fort, and Tom's dilapidated house. The swamp has several images that directly and indirectly convey a theme of rot and decay, and Tom's home does the same for sterility. The trees that represent people, particularly the one for Deacon Peabody, are probably the most direct link to the idea of the setting depicting moral decay, as the deacon's tree is rotten on the inside, metaphorically depicting the same rottenness inside the deacon.

This is also the only point where we can make a direct connection to the broader society; Tom sees many trees, all of them marked with prominent names, and all of them scored with the Devil's axe, as if each chop is a strike against their character. However, the exact meaning of the axe scores is not given, and it is unclear if these represent some specific act of immorality, or if the amount is any more or less than might be expected. This also does not represent decay in as clear a manner as the literal rotting of the Deacon's tree. 

So, there is probably not a theme of pandemic immorality in this society, but rather that the Devil is like a woodsman; carefully selecting his targets and nurturing them to his own ends. The average person does not seem to be very corrupted, nor particularly interesting to the Devil.

What an interesting question! As we answer it, I think we'll see that the story is universal: that it could happen anywhere, during any time, because it's simply the story of someone so greedy and immoral that he succumbs to temptation and ultimately has to pay a hefty price for it.

As such, the tale deals with the heights of human greed and the destruction it brings, which is true no matter what time period or location we're in.

For example, let's move the story from early America to Elizabethan England. A penniless actor could meet the devil while out for a walk late at night, accept the devil's offer of riches, and quickly become a wealthy owner of many theaters, overcharging his audience members and forcing his actors to work long hours. Then one day as he's yelling at a group of actors, telling them that they'll have to take a pay cut and go hungry, he says, "The devil take me if I ever made a shilling off any of you!” At that point the devil could show up and take his soul.

See? It’s easy (and kind of fun) to imagine the story with a different setting.

Let’s do it once more: we’ll move it to the distant future, to a colony on Mars. A jobless Mars-dweller meets the devil while out for a spin in her hover-car. She accepts the devil’s offer of power and money and starts a terraforming company, charging exorbitant fees to colonies on other planets whose inhabitants need safer air to breathe. One day as she’s threatening to cut off a whole planet’s oxygen supply for failing to pay the ever-increasing maintenance fees, the devil swoops in and takes her soul.

Of course, you could write a more imaginative and elaborate version of the story if you like. The point is that the setting of “The Devil and Tom Walker” is interesting and adds color to the story, but it would work just as easily in any other time or place simply because the theme is universal.

There are a variety of physical locations that are described in "The Devil and Tom Walker", and the entire story does not take place in any one of them (unless we consider the entire Massachusetts country side to be representative of moral decay...probably not a good thesis). However, there are two particularly significant physical settings that are described in detail, and which suggest moral decay; the Walker homestead, and the swamp.

The homestead is described as a fairly miserable place, not only in its appearance, but in its reputation among the neighbors and its general tone ("The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name."), due to the constant arguments and fighting between Tom and his wife. Physically, the house is described as forlorn, surrounded by sickly trees ("emblems of sterility"), surrounded by unproductive fields, and likened to being a prison. This moral decay is largely limited to the Walkers themselves; if we consider morals to be a matter of "doing what is right", then the Walkers literally live in wrong-ness; there is no moral gray area here, and their book truly can be judged by its cover.

The swamp represents a "descent into darkness" in Tom's character, but is also emblematic of social decay, moreso than the Walker home. As Tom enters the swamp, it is described as;

-an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly grown with great, gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud...

and so forth, complete with lurking alligators. The swamp is every stereotype ever conceived of about a swamp, and Tom's passage through it (particularly his choice to remain on this path) is representative of his moral decay. The aspect which pertains to social decay is largely found in the trees which the devil is chopping;

Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld one of the great trees, fair and flourishing without, but rotten at the core, and saw that it had been nearly hewn through, so that the first high wind was likely to blow it down. On the bark of the tree was scored the name of Deacon Peabody-

Irving is being so straightforward with the symbolism here that he's practically hitting us over the head with it; the Deacon's moral decay is represented by physical decay in the form of rot. To top it off, the devil declares, of the tree representing the Deacon, "He's just ready for burning!", suggesting that the Deacon's fate is not a pleasant one.

You might want to respond to this question by refering to the description we are given of the residence where Tom and his stingy wife live. It is a key feature of this description that the setting parallels the kind of characters that dwell there. Consider the following description:

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 to it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveler stopped at its door.

Of course, the hardship and misery evoked by this description tells us a lot about the characters of Tom and his wife, in particular focusing on their sterility and their lack of ability to produce any children, which hints at some kind of rottenness at the core of both their marriage and themselves as individuals.

The way in which the setting mirrors the characters in this story is also noted explicitly when the figure of the devil explains the way in which trees are related to characters in their various stages of moral decay. Consider the following description:

He now looked around, and found most of the tall trees marked with the name of some great man of the colony, and all more or less scored by the ax.

Setting is therefore shown to be a crucial part in terms of the development of character in this excellent satire.

Like many of Washington Irving's stories, "The Devil and Tom Walker" is set in colonial America near Boston. Although Irving himself wrote most of his stories during the early 1800s, setting his stories during the colonial period and the American revolution allowed Irving to give a mythical, folk tale quality to his stories. In particular, setting the story of the "The Devil and Tom Walker" in colonial America allowed Irving to put his own interpretation on the classic German legend of Faust, a scholar who makes a pact with the devil for knowledge and success. Irving uses this setting along with a distinctly American vernacular and themes to turn the classic German legend into a tale that seems as American as apple pie.