Victorian Halloween Joys Magic Mirror Fortune Telling Card

Like a modern children's app that encourages stranger danger awareness, this card teaches young girls to summon their future husbands through mirror divination at bedtime — apparently the ultimate expression of 'Halloween Joys' is a little girl in a flowing white nightgown, standing barefoot on a pink velvet stool, holding a small candle while gazing into an oval vanity mirror to divine her future husband. The mirror, helpfully, reflects back a rosy-cheeked ghostly face with pink flowers in her hair and a big bow at the throat, which is either supernatural confirmation that she's found her destined beau or evidence that mirrors in the early 1900s were deeply malfunctioning. A carved jack-o'-lantern sits cheerfully on the vanity nearby, because what every child's mystic husband-summoning ceremony truly requires is a pumpkin watching from the corner. The poem — 'Oh may I see my future beau, and may he be a bonny boy' — is printed right there in curly script, as if the card's creator looked at the concept of childhood innocence and said, 'you know what this needs? Romantic longing. For a child. With a candle.'