The Devil and all his workers: Wheatley’s reactionary right-hand path

The reactionary credentials of the narrative voice in Wheatley’s Black Magic novels can be in little doubt (Doherty 2022). Repeatedly, the plots of the narratives feature the delivery of characters with conservative values from the evil of the Devil and, particularly, his fellow travellers against all that is ‘good’ and ‘right’ in the traditions of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century (Wisker 1993: 102, 108). The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), perhaps, reveals the most explicit – and preposterous – mapping of the political left and right onto occult themes; however, the article proposed here will argue that broadly the same kind of mapping occurs in all of Wheatley’s Black Magic stories, as well as the entire Sallust saga. This mapping is driven by plot elements, but also by the work of representation, in which working-class characters are excluded not just from depiction of individuals’ interactions in an early twentieth-century environment of “snobbery with violence” (Watson 1975) but, especially and most interestingly, from the sphere of geopolitics. The article will show that what is integral to these narratives is the same confusion between view of Bolshevism and Satanism to which H.G. Wells jokingly confessed when considering the writings of Montague Summers (quoted in Baker 2009: 310). It is a confusion dramatized by the abstraction of the worker and the occlusion of the lower classes from world affairs in Wheatley’s narratives.