For a nineteenth-century Halloween guest, an apple might be a snack, a party game, or a rather unreliable source of romantic advice.
The familiar tub of floating apples belongs to a wider history of Halloween amusements. Apples were bitten, suspended, peeled, and given jobs involving the future. Looking at a few surviving records reveals a holiday with plenty of laughter and a lively interest in who might marry whom.
A party preserved in art
One Irish Halloween gathering became a crowded picture.
In October 1832, the Irish artist Daniel Maclise attended a Halloween party in Blarney. The following year, he exhibited a painting called Snap Apple Night, or All Hallow Eve. A later engraving after the painting, dated January 1, 1845, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The museum describes a man trying to bite a suspended apple at the center of the scene, with boys bobbing for apples at the right. Adults and children share a busy interior full of games. A verse printed with the original exhibition connected the activities with predictions about love. The apple game sits inside a social evening, where a difficult bite could be entertainment for the whole room.
An interest in the future
A game could also become a matchmaking story.
Museum accounts of Halloween customs describe apple games alongside other playful forms of divination, or attempts to learn what would happen next. The Museum of the Cape Fear notes a custom in which a person slept with a caught apple under their pillow in the hope of dreaming about a future sweetheart. A successful bite was allowed to become a much larger prediction.
The Barnes Museum’s history of Halloween in Southington, Connecticut, draws on local diaries and newspapers to describe nineteenth-century dances, party games, and courtship customs. Apples and nuts appear among the things people used to speculate about relationships. These accounts give the games a location and a social setting, rather than reducing them to a single universal rule.
What survives
The joke, the challenge, and the prediction can separate over time.
Someone can enjoy bobbing for apples today without expecting the apple to reveal a spouse. The physical challenge remains easy to understand, while the meaning attached to winning can change. That gives a familiar game an interesting history: people can keep the action and tell a different story about it.
The records above show apple games in particular nineteenth-century celebrations. They are good starting points for asking what guests did and how they understood it. Earlier origin stories require their own evidence; a detailed picture from 1845 does not supply a complete timeline back through every century.
Try looking at the picture
Let the party guests be your guides.
Open the reproduction of Maclise’s painting linked below and spend a minute following the figures through the room. Find the two apple games. Notice who is playing, who is watching, and which details help you imagine the noise and movement. Then choose one person and describe what they seem to be doing.
Ask what would happen if the guests took the same game to a party today. Which part would still make people laugh? Which part would need explaining? That small comparison lets the past become both recognizable and different.
SHARE THIS WITH THE KIDS
A few things to talk about together.
- Maclise attended a Halloween party in Blarney in 1832 and made a painting of it.
- A later print shows both a suspended-apple game and apple bobbing.
- Some Halloween games were connected with predictions about future relationships.
A FEW OF THE SOURCES BEHIND THIS PIECE
Read a little deeper
- Maclise’s 1833 painting: view a reproduction on Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Snap Apple Night, 1845 engraving after Maclise (opens in a new tab)
- Museum of the Cape Fear: History To-Go, Halloween (opens in a new tab)
- The Barnes Museum: Historical Halloween in Southington (opens in a new tab)