Nineteenth-Century Mourning Examples

While there are some notable examples of first hand accounts of mourning from the bereaved, and these will be discussed, most of the information about the widespread rituals come from the surviving material items used during the nineteenth century. The bereavement industry boomed in England during the time, from small shops, to large mass manufactures. Due to this, the widespread purchase of goods has left a record of trends within the items utilized during periods of mourning. While there are a wide variety of truly unique items that became manufactured especially for the bereaved, from black edged correspondence cards to bicycles targeted specifically to the newly widowed, it is in the utilization of jewellery that is of note. Jewellery in

Such as the case in many other material aspects, many times the ability to follow the societal trends relied on the financial resources to do so. Women at the time noted this association with mourning, class, and monetary requirements, such as “when the loss of a father is attended with the failure of his pecuniary resources, it adds no little to the grief into which his daughters are plunged, to be under the necessity of appearing so soon after their twofold loss, under such an outward sign of poverty as is generally understood by the world to be betrayed by cheap and humble mourning” Guides included discussions about everything from clothing and home decor to the presumptions of acceptable

There were generally no legal or financial repercussions for not abiding by what was seen as ‘proper mourning.’ Regardless widows frequently donned all black, an aesthetic that came to be known commonly as ‘widows weeds’ with only the dications and directions of social expectations as guidelines. While true notions of emotion likely played a role in the time of grieving itself for many of these women, the considerable dedication toward being the ‘perfect widow’ speak to larger motivations than that of purely sentimental feelings. When examining widows in particular, the vast array of options for remaining within the expectations of a grieving women while staying fashionable to current trends within society show that larger statements were being made through this time of mourning. From gowns made out of the expensive, but extremely popular black crape, to the highly sought after Whitby Jet jewellery, to be the idea of mourning was no small task. In turn this created an industry of bereavement being backed by those who both were financial able to purchase the materials needed for