Have a Very Victorian Halloween!

In honour of this Halloween season, the Secret Victorianist brings you five top tips for having a spooktacularly Victorian October 31^st!

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham in the 1846 Great Expectations

1. Read a Victorian ghost story

You might associate Victorian ghosts with Christmas and Charles Dickens’s ever popular A Christmas Carol (1842), but they are plenty more spine tingling reads to dip into before December. Check out some Sheridan Le Fanu (review here) or quake at Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher (1884).

2. Dive into a scary story with no ghosts at all

Some of the scariest nineteenth-century reads aren’t supernatural at all. I’d recommend Wilkie Collins’s A Terribly Strange Bed (1852), which I read for the first time recently. Unsavoury characters, an ingenious murder device and an intriguing frame narrative set this one apart.

3. Even better – read one of these stories aloud

Dim the lights, huddle round the campfire, and rekindle the Victorian tradition of reading aloud to family and friends. Bonus points for your best Tennyson-inspired voice!

4. Slip into a Victorian inspired costume

There are so many Halloween costume ideas out there for the budding Victorianist. Some of my favourites: find a tattered white dress and act the eternal bride Miss Havisham, grab a friend to go as Jekyll and Hyde, or perch a toy raven on your shoulder and you’re an instant Edgar Allen Poe.

5. Binge watch Steampunk’d

Don’t fancy painting the town red on a Monday night? Have a low key Halloween by binge watching the show that pitches makers of Victoriana against each other – Steampunk’d. I just discovered it on Netflix and am gutted GSN ruled out a second season.

The judges on Steampunk'd

Did you have any Victorian-inspired fun this Halloween weekend? Let me know what you got up to – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: In a Glass Darkly, Sheridan Le Fanu (1897)

This collection of short stories from Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu varies in length, narration and style. They deal with vampires in Styria, legal malpractice in London, a strange man stalking his victim through the streets of Dublin. What unites them all is play with the supernatural and uncanny. Initial scepticism and a trust in the ‘scientific’ is increasingly unsettled and undermined as Le Fanu leaves us with no clear answers. These are ‘ghost’ stories which linger both in their telling and in their effect. Don’t expect horror movie shocks and twists. But draw up to the fireside this December to be more disturbed than entertained.

Sheridan Le Fanu

For general readers: In a Glass Darkly is an uneven experience and its strange narrative structure, as a series of loosely connected stories collected by a shadowy doctor (Dr Hesselius), may be off-putting to readers used to more traditional Victorian novels, but there is much here to interest a non-academic audience. The scepticism about the supernatural which pervades the novel, almost in spite of its content, is readily recognisable to modern reader, while the connection between the conscience or subconscious and the onset of hallucination and mania which the stories often suggest is one which is easily recognisable, even if this means the stories lose something of their ground-breaking edge. ‘Carmilla’ will probably have the widest popular appeal, dealing as it does with a form of vampirism with overtly erotic lesbian overtones. It’s the kind of story which confounds common misconceptions about the ‘Victorian’. The other longer story, ‘The Room at the Dragon Volant’, has similar character interest, especially given its hero’s actions are far from morally uncomplicated.

For students: As well as being an interesting read, ‘Carmilla’ will also be of interest to students of the Gothic and Bram Stoker in particular, predating as it does Dracula (1897), for which it provided some inspiration. Those interested in the impact of Swedenborgism on literature should turn to ‘Green Tea’, the first story in the volume, where the apparition of a phantom monkey also suggests interesting Darwinian contexts. And comparison with Charles Dickens’s short stories could also work, both in terms of structure (see my earlier discussion of MrsLirriper) and in some cases content – the judgement undergone by Justice Harbottle here makes the ghostly apparition which appear to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol seem almost cuddly.

What should the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!