New Exhibit! Victorian Halloween and Death by Fashion

For the month of October, we will be featuring a new 2-part mini exhibit in the Museum’s Victorian Room, with a display on Victorian Halloween parties and dangerous fashion trends from the Victorian period.

Many of the Halloween traditions we have in the United States today can be traced back to the Victorian period. For example, early origins of the trick or treat tradition come from this period, where the tradition of giving food to the poor to ward off evil spirits that might otherwise cause mischief while the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest, was still alive and well. In future decades, this would turn into giving children candy as part of trick or treating.  In true Victorian fashion, this time of year was a popular time for parties.

Victorian Halloween Parties

A Victorian bat costume. Oftentimes, dresses were altered to become costumes.

The big focus for Victorians at Halloween however, was hosting parties and playing parlor games. In Halloween parlor games specifically, the Victorians focused a lot on different methods of divination, trying to determine their own futures and the futures of their friends and family. This was connected to the rise of Spiritualism, an American religious movement that focused around communicating with spirits and using these communications to predict the future, oftentimes by using divination practices derived from other cultural and religious traditions. Halloween games during this period were typically played by the younger generations of Victorians, many of whom ascribed to Spiritualist ideas, whereas older generations saw the divination games as designations of a lack of intelligence.

In the Parlor, we have an example of one of these Halloween traditions geared towards divining. A fruitcake would be baked with tokens inside: a thimble, a ring, a key, a button, and a coin. Each attendee would get a slice of the cake, passed out by the oldest person in the room, and if you got one of the tokens, it was said to predict your future for the next year as a spinster or bachelor (thimble), married (ring), wealthy (coin), finding love (button) or going on a journey (key).

Another popular game involved a woman standing in front of a mirror in a darkened room with a knife and an apple. Different versions of the game exist, however a more common version was peeling the apple in front of the mirror, which would reveal the person that the woman would marry or a skeleton if they were to die before they were married. Apple bobbing was also popular, with the belief that whoever would get an apple first would be the next to get married.  ​

Photo Courtesy of Mimi Matthews

Death by Fashion

The Victorian Period was a time of rapid change. Mass production fueled by the Industrial Revolution in Britain increased access to a number of products and altered many parts of Victorian life, including fashion. These advances, however, took their toll on the people producing them, namely factory workers. There are records of many fashion trends killing those who worked in the factories and clothing industries, and we recognize some of those fashion trends here.

A cartoon commenting on the deadly nature of Arsenic Green dresses

With the rise of the electric light, women were interested in brighter colored fabrics for evening dresses, including green. With improvements in chemistry, synthetic dyes were being created, including vibrant, emerald shades that were produced using a common household product at the time: Arsenic. Green arsenic powder would be dusted onto fabric, artificial flowers, wallpaper, and more to produce an alluring green color. The production process, however, led to the deformation and eventual gruesome death of hundreds of factory workers who dusted the arsenic powder on the items day after day. Arsenic ingestion causes a number of problems, including rashes and sores, delirium and eventually death. Once the powder was on the product, it could also affect those that interacted with the item, producing sores and scabs on the skin. It was estimated that a single arsenic green dress contained enough arsenic to kill 20 people.  Children who spent a lot of time around arsenic products also fell ill, and died in some cases.  One of the origins of the term femme fatale came from a term for wealthy women who wore arsenic green dresses. Following the discovery that arsenic green was hazardous and deadly, a long tradition of avoiding green in the textile industry followed, as it was believed that using green fabric was bad luck.

The Victorian period is also known as a time when upper class women wore layers and layers of rich, heavy fabrics to illustrate their wealth. These fabrics were supported by a crinoline, a cage-like undergarment worn under heavy skirts to support them and add volume. While they did reduce the layers of petticoats (underskirts) that women had to wear to add volume to their dresses, the crinolines created their own set of problems for the wearer. 

A cartoon commenting on the effect of windy days on crinolines

They allowed the wearer to pile on elaborate folds of fabric that extended outward, which could be unexpectedly caught under carriage wheels, in machinery, or unexpectedly bump into lit candles or fireplaces, lighting the wearer on fire. Some estimates claim that in a 14-year period (1850-1864), almost 40,000 women worldwide had died from crinoline-related fires. These fires were often also attributed to flammable fabrics used in dresses.

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Be sure to stop by and see our mini-exhibit during October!