Mourning Jewellery

For today’s blog post, I’d love to discuss the history of mourning jewellery and show some much-deserved love for such a fascinating time for jewellery craftsmanship.

Georgian mourning culture, 1714 – 1830

Mourning jewellery really found its form in the Georgian era. Renaissance memento mori (remember you must die), a general practice for a reflective relationship to our mortality, was now tied to individual life and loss. The unflinching, macabre aesthetic of memento mori remained in many ways, with skeletons, coffins and urns a regular motif in Georgian mourning jewellery, crafted in harsh blacks, studded with blood-like rubies and rocky diamonds.

Such as this gorgeous, grungy urn ring:

Towards the late Georgian period, these patent symbols of death were softened and sombered by the neoclassical sensibilities of the time. Take, for example, this intricately enamelled brooch, with a clear use of neoclassical imagery and softened colour palette. The more soulful, spiritual conceptions of death are highlighted here, rather than the focus on bodily decay. Upon the grave monument, two birds play, a tender symbol for the souls that fly above the departed’s bodies buried below. This stunning brooch is lucky enough to come with the original 1787 description of the brooch’s provenance, something very rare for a lot of mourning jewellery outside of those part of museum collections. From the description, we learn that this brooch was made in remembrance of ‘Mr and Mrs Corfield’, making it two lovebirds that sit upon the monument, together in life and afterlife.  The commissioner of the brooch chose a peaceful, commemorative scene to be enamelled, despite the tragic circumstances of the couple’s deaths; ‘they were married 8th October 1787. Mr Corfield died 9th October 1787 & she a few months after’. In this instance, the function of mourning jewellery is especially important in its creation of bittersweet legacy, a powerful tool for remembrance in the face of a short-lived time on earth. 

Victorian mourning culture, 1837 – 1901

By the turn of the Victorian era, mourning jewellery was a salient aspect of English culture. Mourning imagery had largely moved away from the skeletons and urns of the Georgian period. It was the height of the Sentimental period, a philosophical and artistic movement,  where one’s emotional inner life was deeply honoured. Much like love symbolism for the Victorians, the symbolism of grief was encoded in a myriad of subtle ways, alongside the uniform of black enamel and lustrous gold. 

Florals of cypress and forget-me-not, turquoise for remembrance, pearls for shed tears, anchors for strength in faith as the deceased journeyed through afterlife, the ouroboros snake for the cycle of death and rebirth, as well as eternal love.

The intimacies of hairwork within the mourning industry

Queen Victoria’s period of mourning for Prince Albert was infamous, the heartbreak of the century. This powerful, public grief, in combination with the aesthetic philosophies of the time, resulted in the absolute peak of mourning jewellery and hairwork during the mid 1800s, both in its widespread dissemination and its levels of innovation. 

As we can see from this 1864 edition of the Illustrated London News. The business of hair work was plentiful and competitive. Parallel to its industrialisation, hairwork had been, and remained with fervour, a personal artistic discipline and part of the extensive ‘womens craft’, alongside embroidery, lacework, engraving etc. It is important to remember the intimacy that came with most hairwork, often braided by the mourner themselves, the practice of transforming the hair into art, a process of contemplation and remembrance in of itself.  Hair became the utmost symbolic material to use, holding space for the liminal space between life and death, the corporeal of a lost loved one still living on, and a tie to their spiritual form. This tactile element to grief was especially potent, in a period where seances and spiritualism had a grip on so many. Loose locks, tenderly looped and fanned out inside a locket, tightly woven as a ring face, artfully arranged into a painting, or fantastically braided into sculpture; hair was incorporated into the majority of mourning jewellery, or atleast was accounted for in the creation of hidden compartments in rings and necklaces. 

The fact that most of these rings would have been extensively worn, yet are still in such impressive condition, speaks for the use of hair. Nowadays, hairwork could be viewed with a slight unease by some. For me, and many other Early Modern and Victorian enthusiasts or collectors of mourning jewellery, it is the most singular artistic movement to come out of the 1800s, and I am very grateful to be able to share our collection of preserved mourning jewellery and hairwork with you today. Mourning jewellery was, at turns, sombre and pious, touching and transient, or even theatrical and deliciously macabre. In every instance, utterly captivating.