Victorian Romantic Rituals and Charms

The setting is Christmas Eve, after a rollicking vacation social gathering in North Yorkshire. Whereas the remainder of the household retires, the younger girl of the home units to work. She pulls a single mistletoe berry and leaf from the pocket the place it has been stowed since her beloved kissed her underneath the bunch hung from the ceiling. (It was customary for {couples} kissing underneath the mistletoe within the Nineteenth century to take away a berry every time a kiss was had. As soon as the berries had been gone, no extra kisses.) After locking the door she swallows the berry and works by candlelight to finish the allure. She pricks the initials of ‘him her coronary heart loves finest’ into the mistletoe leaf after which stitches it to the within of her corset close to her coronary heart, the place it could ‘bind his like to her as long as there it stays’.

Although various in precise particulars, related rituals would have been going down in houses throughout England on Christmas Eve. The mid-Nineteenth century noticed a resurgence in reputation of such traditions and divinations. As soon as seen as witchcraft, magic and superstition, divination rituals akin to these had been recast as benign and applicable leisure for younger ladies and ladies. Although folk-wisdom had lengthy been replete with herbalist cures, luck charms and practices to foretell things like the climate, it was predominantly romance rituals – particularly marital soothsaying – that grew to become common with younger ladies, notably among the many center and higher courses.

This rehabilitation of superstition and ritual was largely because of the collections of people and fairy-lore revealed by a brand new group of self-fashioned folklorists within the Nineteenth century, akin to John Nicholson’s People Lore of East Yorkshire (1890). These had been primarily males who noticed themselves as collectors of disappearing English traditions in a interval of speedy modernisation and globalisation. They recounted for leisure (and instruction) the practices they present in essentially the most remoted and rural elements of Britain. Alongside these had been the so-called ‘oracles’ – common fortune-telling books which relied on readers answering questions so as to match their responses with apocryphal quotations from basic poetry and literature. ‘The Floral Oracle’, a sport described by John Ingram in 1874, taught readers to foretell their future husbands’ personalities primarily based on flower sorts (crimson rose for ‘affectionate’, daisy for ‘gentleness’ and primrose for ‘simplicity’) or their career (lily for ‘nobleman’, thistle for ‘soldier’, oak leaf for ‘farmer’ and cypress for ‘physician’). Divinations could possibly be so simple as sleeping with rosemary or ‘churchyard yew’ underneath one’s pillow so as to dream of a future husband, or peeling an apple right into a single strip which might reveal the form of a suitor’s preliminary. There have been additionally such standbys as ‘he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not’.

Botanicals could possibly be used to ship cryptic messages to draw the alternative intercourse: in 1893 Christabel Wilkinson confided in her finest pal Hilda that she had ‘scattered thought + prudence to the wind’, took out her ebook ‘with the meanings of flowers + despatched [Edmund] somewhat message all in flowers’. Nonetheless, they may be rather more intricate. One ritual, supposed to conjure the apparitions of their future husbands, required three ladies on Midsummer’s (or typically St Agnes’) Eve making intricate potions by accumulating rosemary sprigs and roses in basins after which drawing magic traces across the vessel, earlier than throwing their chemises into the centre.

Botanicals had been additionally used to assist select between a slew of suitors. One sport concerned ladies naming chestnuts after males after which roasting them
on a hearth: ‘If a nut cracked and jumped away from her then the suitor with that identify wouldn’t be true; the one which stayed and was burnt alongside the chestnut along with her identify would stay true and they’d consequently marry.’ In September 1890 Maud Berkeley, aged 29 and dwelling on the Isle of Wight, and her sister tried an analogous divination which she recorded in her diary: ‘dropped … hazelnut, into the hearth’, which, to her disappointment, ‘selected to “burn and die” as an alternative of “crack and fly” because it should have finished’. She got here to the conclusion that ‘such practices had been mere nonsense’ – however that didn’t cease her persevering with to play them.

From rituals which might reveal future husbands, to these which attracted and ensnared a selected mark, these video games present us younger ladies and ladies who weren’t passive in courtship. Certainly, regardless of their reputation we all know that at the least a few of these practices had been thought of transgressive, some being discouraged by mother and father who held their very own superstitions. It’s recorded, as an example, that many believed that honeysuckle introduced indoors would give their daughters erotic goals.

For the younger ladies for whom these books had been written, sneaking away from bed and traipsing by way of churchyards collectively – normally on the prescribed witching hour of midnight, plucking ‘yarrow from a younger man’s grave’ so as to bind unknowing males to them for all eternity – these rituals weren’t nonsense; nor had been they trivial. Marriage was the central focus of a lady or younger girl’s life and these practices converse to deep anxieties and the precarity of their lives; books promised ‘hope for the single’ or to save lots of them from ‘dying outdated maids’. These divinations allow them to experiment with company. Additionally they present a playfulness – even a contact of revolt – which is commonly absent in histories of courtship and romance on this interval. They allow us to into the key areas the place younger ladies dreamt up futures and tried to make them actual.

Maggie Kalenak has lately accomplished a PhD on romantic tradition in Nineteenth-century England on the College of Cambridge.