text by Emma Woodhouse
My current project is a non-fiction book, Witches and Witchcraft in Victorian Britain, which will be published by Pen and Sword Books in April 2027. My overarching research interest is Victorian working-class women’s lives, particularly those who have been overlooked. My initial interest in witchcraft belief in Victorian Britain was ignited when I learned about a local woman who was murdered in 1857 and who was known as a witch. I turned this history into a novel which comes out in September this year, called Ann Morgan, Hellish Beauty. Her story was fascinating: arrested as a young woman and charged with theft but released without charge, she allegedly ran away with gypsies when her family disowned her. When her father died, she moved back to the house she grew up in and set herself up as a local witch. In her sixties, she took a lover half her age, who murdered her. The local mayor declared that all of her papers, letters and books should be burned publicly in the yard at the back of a local inn, thus destroying all evidence of those who sought her service as a witch, and giving others the message that witchcraft would not be tolerated. The research for the novel led me into the consideration of how deeply entrenched a belief in witchcraft still was for the working class – and other classes too – even at the end of Victoria’s reign.
Using newspaper and folklore accounts from the era, statistics regarding legal proceedings, and triangulating this with the inclusion and portrayal of witches and witchcraft in Victorian literature and locational mythology, the book intends to give a rounded exploration of the significance of witchcraft in the lives of the working class in the Victorian period. It is also my intention for the book to explore to what extent the evidence supports, or disproves, the overarching social narrative of the time – that witchcraft was rapidly declining due to education, religion and industrialisation – through an intersectional feminist lens. I will be preparing talks and lectures regarding the topic as my research develops, and will also be collaborating with a member of the Folklore Library and Archives for future talks on the subject.
