Victorian Mourning Jewelry

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Three years after her reign began in 1837, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. A relationship founded in mutual affection, Victoria’s diaries catalog a deeply ingrained love for her husband, who died just under 25 years later, in 1861.

Following Albert’s death, Victoria began a period of mourning that would last 40 years until her death in 1901. This involved going to great lengths to preserve their home as it was on the date of Albert’s death. Servants went as far as to set out Albert’s clothing, hot water for personal grooming, as well as cleaning his chamber pot and changing his linens, as though he were still alive. She also constructed the Albert Memorial, a statue with a golden covering and ornate frieze in Kensington Gardens.

Traditional Mourning

Although many members of the growing middle class could not mimic the extremities of Victoria’s mourning, plenty strove to recreate some of the new social conventions surrounding death. A high mortality rate, particularly for infants, led to frequent mourning and a pervading comfortability with death in Victorian Society. In 1850, the Infant Mortality Rate was 150 deaths per 1,000 births Widespread disease became common in England’s crowded cities, and many British women found themselves entering into multiple periods of extended mourning throughout their lifetimes. Where Victoria wore black mourning clothes for 40 years, typical women dressed in black for about two years, integrating gray and lavender into the last six months. This included all hair accessories, jewelry, and other elements like fans and umbrellas. The most common material was silk crepe fabric, which was flat and dull, unlike its overly flashy cousins satin and velvet.

In line with the traditions mentioned above, it was necessary for all elements of a widow’s wardrobe to be “Mourning” clothes and accessories, including jewelry. Supplementary to the dark jewelry that replaced its sparklier counterparts, Memorial hair jewelry was common. This phenomenon will be the main focus of the rest of our site.

Hair Jewelry

As a part of her mourning, Victoria announced that only traditional mourning jewelry, carved of jet or onyx, and hair jewelry be worn at court. Eager to keep in line with the high-brow trends of the monarchy, many middle and upper-class women fueled the hair jewelry market.

Often hair was used to fill a brooch, ring, or locket. Other times it was ornately woven into spirals and tubes for bracelets and wreaths.

Prior to its significance in the realm of Victorian death culture, hair jewelry and hair work were used as mementos for family members or lovers who were separated for an extended period or simply seeking to remember their beloved frequently. In a time when attitudes regarding health, germs, and dust were far different than today, Victorians saw little issue with wearing the hair of the deceased on their bodies or hanging it in their homes, perhaps because of their frequent proximity to death.

Hair wreaths were used as home decor and were integrated into floral displays at funerals.

Victorian Hair Work, particularly in forms other than jewelry, such as framed art, hair trees, and wreaths, was meant to display wealth to visitors and those outside the circle of mourning. In a period when death was as frequent as in the Victorian era, the economic mobility to participate in expensive and opulent mourning trends furthered middle and upper-class families’ status among their peers. Art as intricate as Hair Work was often done by former wigmakers, hairdressers, and jewelers, and was often large and extremely ornate, made to sit alone in frames or surround portraits of loved ones.

As mentioned earlier, the purpose of hair jewelry was to remind the wearer of their beloved as frequently as they encountered it. Understandably, in the case of jewelry, this was very frequent. The point wasn’t to remember the death of the loved one, but rather the loved one themself. Hair jewelry showed the connection to another, living or dead, though frequently the latter. Because it was expensive to produce, it was innately tied to the economy and consumerism, which was on the rise during the period of consumerism that characterizes Victoria’s reign. As the middle class grew, white-collar Brits had more disposable income to spend on entertainment and shows of cultural participation, such as mourning mementos.

Where did it go?

After Victoria’s death in 1901, Victorian Mourning culture came to a swift end. Although the first half of the 20th century would see two wars that would bring unforeseen death to much of Great Britain’s citizenry. With such a high rate of loss, the cultural motivations for such rigorous and showy displays of grief were no longer necessary, as they would have touched every household in the empire and sent it into mourning, degrading the performative aspect of the grieving practices of the Victorian Era. The dark parlors of the mid-to-late 19th century, accompanied by ornate wallpapers and heavy velvet in dark colors were becoming unfashionable and dying out. Therefore the kind of environment that encouraged such ornate, macabre hair wreaths and trees died with it.

The fashions that supported dark colors and onyx jewelry were being traded for lighter cotton and brighter colors, which clashed with dark jewelry.

As women took jobs outside of the home, their ability and opportunity to assert themselves as keepers of collective history and memory grew, and the need to use mourning fashions and conventions of a time gone by thus ceased to exist. The need to show others your ability to catalog and preserve the life of another simply wasn’t there any longer.

Victoria may have made great waves both during her lifetime and in the centuries that followed through her mourning of her husband, but her methods were representative of a time when, as a woman in a period of social rigor, the most upheaval she could conceivably muster on as great a social platform as the monarchy was simply to radically remember the man she loved on a global stage. This was her museum of grief. This was the preservation of her history.

Sources

“Camille Silvy (1834-1910) – Queen Victorias Locket.” Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/65301/queen-victorias-locket.

“Explore the Collection.” Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/43/collection/2927068/queen-victoria-and-princess-alexandra-of-denmark-with-bust-of-prince-albert.

Hunter, D. Lynn. “A Victorian Obsession With Death: Fetishistic Rituals Helped Survivors Cope With Loss of Loved Ones.” 04.05.00 – a Victorian Obsession with Death, 5 Apr. 2005, https://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2000/04/05/death.html.

Little, Becky. “Trendy Victorian-Era Jewelry Was Made from Hair.” Culture, National Geographic, 4 May 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/160211-victorian-hair-art-work-jewelry-death-history?loggedin=true.

“Mourning – Victorian Era.” The Australian Museum, https://australian.museum/about/history/exhibitions/death-the-last-taboo/mourning-victorian-era/#:~:text=Widows%20were%20expected%20to%20mourn,of%20a%20parent%20or%20sibling.

“Mourning Dress.” Metmuseum.org, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/155840#:~:text=Black%20mourning%20dress%20reached%20its,a%20loved%20one%20or%20monarch.

Museum, Victoria and Albert. “Bracelet: Unknown: V&A Explore the Collections.” Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O139451/bracelet-unknown/.

Museum, Victoria and Albert. “Bracelet: Unknown: V&A Explore the Collections.” Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O139453/bracelet-unknown/.

Tresoor, Jody. “Workshop: Victorian Hair Art.” The Manitoba Museum, 16 Oct. 2019, https://manitobamuseum.ca/event/workshop-victorian-hair-art.