Mourning, and what grief did to appearance
Mourning was the last great sumptuary system in Britain, enforced by nobody and obeyed by almost everyone, with a specialist retail sector built to supply it.
Nineteenth century British mourning practice prescribed materials, colours and durations by relationship to the deceased, moving from full mourning in dull black crape through half mourning in grey, mauve and lilac. It supported specialist manufacturers, notably of mourning crape, and dedicated mourning warehouses in major cities. Jet from Whitby became the dominant mourning jewellery material. Cosmetics and visible adornment were incompatible with full mourning, which is one reason the period's rules are so legible in surviving photographs and dress.
Sumptuary law, which regulated what people of different ranks could wear, had largely lapsed in Britain by the eighteenth century. What replaced it in the nineteenth was something more effective: a detailed, unenforced, universally understood code governing the appearance of the bereaved, which people followed with far more precision than they had ever followed the law.
The system
Mourning practice was graded by relationship and by time. A widow's obligation was the heaviest and the longest, typically understood as two years divided into stages. Mourning for a parent, a child, a sibling, a grandparent or a more distant relative descended from there in both severity and duration, and the details were set out in etiquette manuals, women's periodicals and the catalogues of the shops that supplied the goods.
The stages were distinguished by material as much as by colour.
Full mourning required black, and specifically black that did not shine. This is the key technical point and it explains the industry: silk reflects light, and a lustrous black reads as luxury rather than as grief. The solution was crape, a silk gauze crimped and stiffened by a mechanical and chemical process that destroyed its lustre entirely, producing a dull, crimped, matt black fabric that could not be mistaken for anything else.
Second mourning permitted less crape and some trimming.
Half mourning permitted grey, white, mauve and lilac, sometimes black and white in combination. The chronology here contains a small delight: mauveine, the first commercially successful synthetic dye, was produced by William Henry Perkin in 1856 and set off a fashion for mauve at precisely the period when half mourning was at its most codified. The mourning trade and the synthetic dye industry grew up together.
The mourning warehouse
A death produced an immediate and urgent requirement for a complete set of clothing for an entire household, including servants, at a moment when nobody had the composure to shop. The response was a retail form specifically designed for it: the mourning warehouse, which stocked every required item, offered same day service, sent fitters to the house and understood the rules better than the customer did.
Jay's London General Mourning Warehouse opened on Regent Street in 1841 and was the best known of several. These were substantial businesses, and they occupy an interesting position: they were selling correctness at a moment of maximum vulnerability, and their catalogues are among the clearest surviving statements of what the rules actually were.
Jet, and the objects
Jewellery was the other major trade. Full mourning permitted almost no ornament, and what it permitted had to be black and matt. Jet, a fossilised wood found on the Yorkshire coast and worked at Whitby, was ideally suited: it is black, light, warm to the touch, and takes a carved detail well. The Whitby jet industry expanded dramatically in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and its peak coincides with the period after the death of Prince Albert in 1861, when the Queen's own permanent mourning made the practice nationally visible.
Alongside jet ran a tradition that modern viewers find far stranger than the Victorians did: hair work. Human hair from the deceased was plaited, woven and mounted into rings, brooches, bracelets and watch chains, sometimes by professional workers and sometimes at home. Museum collections hold a great deal of it. It is worth resisting the reflex to find this morbid. In an era before photography was cheap, a lock of hair was one of the very few physical traces of a person that could be kept, and converting it into a wearable object is a rational response to that scarcity rather than a pathology.
- The claim
- Victorians photographed their dead posed upright as though alive, using a metal stand to hold the body in position, and you can identify these photographs by the stand's feet visible below the hem.
- Where it appears to come from
- This has become one of the most widely circulated claims about nineteenth century photography, spread through image collections online and repeated in popular articles. The visible stand is offered as evidence in a great many cases.
- What is actually established
- Established: post mortem photography existed and was not uncommon, particularly of children. The deceased were normally photographed lying down, in a coffin or on a bed, arranged to appear peaceful. Established: posing stands existed and are visible in many photographs. Not established, and effectively disproved: that stands were used to prop up corpses. The stands were headrests designed to steady living sitters during long exposures, they could not support a body's weight, and their presence in an image is evidence that the subject was alive. Almost every photograph circulated online as an upright corpse is a photograph of a living person keeping still.
Grief and the face
Cosmetics were incompatible with mourning, and this is more revealing than it first appears. The logic was not that black and colour clash. It was that mourning required the appearance of a person who had stopped attending to their appearance. Pallor was correct. Visible effort was not.
That produces a genuine bind, because the appearance of not having made an effort was itself achieved through elaborate and expensive effort, in exactly specified materials, purchased at speed from a specialist retailer. The mourning system is one of the clearest historical illustrations of a pattern that recurs constantly in this magazine: the enormous amount of work required to look as though you have not done any.
Mourning demanded the appearance of a person who had stopped caring how they looked, and it took an entire industry to produce it.
Men, briefly
Male mourning obligations were far lighter, shorter and cheaper, consisting principally of black clothing, a hatband and gloves. This asymmetry is one of the more striking features of the system and it had a practical consequence: the visible display of a family's grief was carried almost entirely by its women, who were also the ones removed from social life for the duration.
Contemporary critics noticed. There was a real strand of nineteenth century opinion arguing that mourning custom was expensive, oppressive, unhealthy and commercially exploited, and reform associations existed to argue for simplification. They lost, until the war.
The collapse
Mourning custom did not fade gradually. It broke, and the break is dated with unusual precision to the First World War.
The reasons were practical before they were philosophical. The scale of death made universal mourning dress impossible: a society in which a very large proportion of households were bereaved could not function with a large proportion of its members withdrawn from public life and dressed in a uniform of grief. There were also arguments made at the time about morale, and a genuine question about whether visible national mourning was compatible with continuing a war.
What replaced it is what we have now: no rules, no timetable, no code, and consequently no way of signalling bereavement to strangers or of knowing how to behave towards someone who is grieving. It is worth registering that as a loss as well as a liberation. The Victorian system was expensive, gendered and commercially exploited. It also meant that a person in mourning was legible in the street, and that everyone around them knew what was required of them, which is something no subsequent arrangement has provided.
The rites that governed the other end of a life, and the equally elaborate appearance code attached to them, are the subject of the essay on marriage. The wartime disruption that ended the mourning system also reshaped everyday appearance in ways examined in beauty under rationing.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of London both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
How long did Victorian mourning last?
It depended on the relationship. A widow's mourning was commonly understood as around two years in stages; mourning for a parent, child or sibling was shorter, and for more distant relatives shorter still. The durations were set out in etiquette manuals rather than in law and were followed with considerable rigour.
What is mourning crape?
A silk gauze crimped and treated to remove all lustre, producing a dull matt black fabric with a distinctive rustle. Its purpose was to be visibly non luxurious. It was fragile, easily ruined by rain and effectively single use, which suited its manufacturers.
Why was jet used for mourning jewellery?
Because it is black, matt, light and warm to the touch and takes carving well, which met the requirement for ornament that did not read as luxury. Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, was the centre of the industry, and it expanded sharply in the decades after 1861.
Did Victorians photograph their dead standing up?
No. Post mortem photography existed, but the deceased were photographed lying down or arranged as if asleep. The metal stands frequently cited as evidence were headrests for steadying living sitters during long exposures and could not have supported a body's weight.
Why did mourning dress disappear?
Chiefly because of the scale of bereavement during the First World War, which made universal mourning dress socially and practically impossible. Reform arguments about cost and health had been made for decades without success; the war ended the practice within a few years.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Mourning dress, jewellery, hair work and nineteenth century textiles.
- Museum of London London retailing and dress collections, including mourning goods.
- British Library Etiquette manuals, periodicals and trade catalogues of the mourning industry.
- Royal Historical Society Scholarship on death, ritual and consumption in nineteenth century Britain.
- Wellcome Collection Material on death, medicine and bereavement practices.
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