Trick or treat, dear readers! All Hallows’ Eve is nearly upon us. If, like me, Halloween is your favorite holiday, or you simply enjoyed our recent Brontë-Approved Halloween Reading List, you’ll love this blog on Halloween traditions in Regency and Victorian era England. So light your jack-a-lanterns, grab some candy corn, and let’s get started!
The Halloween tradition originated nearly 2,000 years ago with the Celts, who celebrated the festival of Samhain (pronounced sah-win) on November 1. Samhain marked the start of the Celtic new year, celebrating the summer’s last harvest. It also marked the beginning of the winter—dark, cold months associated with death. On the night before the new year, the Celts believed the boundary between the worlds of the living and dead blurred and allowed the ghosts of the dead returned to the earth. To celebrate the occasion, they burned crops and animals in sacrificial bonfires, donned costumes of animal heads and skins, and tried to read each other’s fortunes.
Years later, in 609 C.E., Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as “All Saints Day” in celebration of Catholic saints and martyrs (it had previously been celebrated in spring around the Easter holiday), followed by “All Souls Day” on November 2. Soon, All Saints Day began to incorporate the Celtic traditions of Samhain, including bonfires and costume parades. The evening before All Saints Day became known as All Hallows’ Eve, and later evolved into the holiday we now call Halloween.
According to the Jane Austen Centre at Bath, “It is clear from Scottish poet Robert Burns’ 1786 work, Halloween, that by Georgian times, the holiday was still alive and well, with much of its superstitious symbolism intact.” Although Jane Austen likely would have been familiar with the holiday’s occult rituals—such as eating an apple in front of a mirror to see the face of your future lover, as described in “Halloween” —as the daughter of a Christian clergyman, she wouldn’t have participated in them herself. However, it is likely that she celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, a then-popular English holiday of “revelry and mischief” falling on November 5, with a family bonfire.
The Regency era overall leaned heavily into the macabre, mysterious, and frightening. Gothic romances like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) were among the most popular novels of the time—and several of them feature in Jane Austen’s fiction! Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816) and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), two of the most recognizable installments in the gothic canon (and current staples of the Halloween monster-movie genre), were also created during this era.
In the lavish Victorian era, people began hosting elaborate parties to celebrate the spooky season. Costumes, pranks, and scary stories still featured heavily, but these parties truthfully focused more on matchmaking than the macabre. Hopeful singles attempted to divine the face, name, or proximity of their future spouses in poems, mirrors (like Burns!), or Barmbrack, a divinatory Irish bread containing items guests might use to predict the future. For instance, if a young single man or woman bit into a slice of Barmbrack with a ring baked into it, they knew their wedding was fast approaching.
Victorian Halloween decorations often included traditional harvest colors like red, orange, and gold, and featured carved turnips known as “Jack of the Lantern” or Jack-o-Lanterns. According to the Dalnavert Museum, this trend originated with the legend of Stingy Jack, “a man who tried to trick the devil and was cursed to enter neither heaven nor hell. He instead eternally wanders the earth with an ember trapped in a turnip as his only light. This tradition began in Ireland and Scotland, morphing into the candle-filled pumpkins we know today.”
Although we know little of how the Brontë sisters might have celebrated Halloween, their novels are laden with hauntingly supernatural characters and scenes: the ghost of Jane Eyre’s uncle in the Red Room, Villette’s phantom nun, and of course, Cathy and Heathcliff’s chilling romance in Wuthering Heights: “You said I killed you—haunt me, then!” he declares with passion. “The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth.” The ghost of Emily Brontë herself, lovingly dubbed “the grey Lady,” is said to reappear annually in Haworth on December 19, the anniversary of her tragic death.
Today, we celebrate Halloween with dollar-store costumes, bonfires, Jack-o-Lanterns, and way too much sugar. The American practice of trick-or-treating—a popular twentieth-century tradition that has recently dwindled in popularity due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as rising crime rates around the US—did not begin until the 1920s or 1930s, although it finds its roots in the older European practices of “mumming,“ “souling,“ and “guising.“ It is not uncommon to find Regency and Victorian costumes marketed to adult partakers in the Halloween tradition (most six-year-olds, of course, would rather dress as Spider-Man than Mr. Darcy).
Whether you prefer to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve by eating a boatload of candy, dressing up as your favorite Jane Austen character, or curling up with a scary movie, you’re in good company. As years pass, traditions evolve, but nothing will ever change our uniquely human fascination with the things that haunt us. You can make light of them, like Austen, or embrace them, like the Brontë sisters, but our monsters will always be there, waiting, watching—ready to drag us back to the shadows.
Happy Halloween.
Sources: Halloween: Origins, Meaning & Traditions, All Hallow’s Eve, Victorian Hallowe’en: Love, Poetry, and Stingy Jack, Brontë Halloween: The Grey Lady of Haworth
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Nice work, Sarah! Loved this!!