The devil on holiday in eighteenth-century England

Daniel Froid tells us about the place of the devil in eighteenth-century English literature, describing the devil in this age of secularisation as a mode of inquiry, a provocation to thinking and a way to investigate knowledge. He talks us through The Devil upon Two Sticks, which sees the devil looking into people’s houses, which feels both spooky and also like an early version of reality TV. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Daniel Defoe’s A Political History of the Devil and Eliza Heywood’s A Spy upon the Conjuror all also feature, as does the anonymous The Adventures of Lucifer in London, in which the devil is a kind of human connoisseur and body-hops his way around England’s capital city.