Hair Under Glass: How the Victorians Wore Their Grief

A brooch the size of a thumbnail sits in a museum case. Under a small oval of glass is a flat plait of brown hair, laid in a pattern like a woven basket. On the back, engraved in a script so fine it needs a lens, are initials and a date. Nobody now living knew whose hair it was. Someone once wore it every day, against the chest, as a way of not letting go.

Hair jewelry is one of the strangest objects a modern visitor meets in a nineteenth century collection. It can look morbid. It was not meant that way. It was a way of keeping a small, durable piece of a person after the rest of them had gone into the ground.

Why hair

Hair does not rot the way flesh does. Cut and dried, it keeps its color for a very long time. That made it ideal for a relic. It also came from the body without harming it, and it could be taken before death, as a keepsake from someone who was ill, or after, at the bedside.

The practice was older than Victoria. Mourning rings were a common bequest in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. Wills sometimes set aside money for rings to be given to named friends and relatives, often engraved with the dead person's name and date of death, and sometimes set with a small lock of hair. Georgian pieces often show weeping willows, urns and grieving figures painted on ivory, sometimes worked in chopped hair as pigment.

What changed in the nineteenth century was scale. Hair work became an industry and a parlor craft at once. Professional workers made elaborate pieces, and published manuals taught readers how to braid and set the hair themselves. There was a practical reason for doing it at home: families worried that a jeweler might substitute a stranger's hair for the beloved's. A piece you had made yourself, or watched being made, carried no such doubt.

A queen in black

The custom became a national grammar because of one widow. Prince Albert died in December 1861. Queen Victoria wore mourning for the rest of her life, until her own death in January 1901. Her withdrawal from public life in the years after Albert's death was so long that it caused political grumbling.

Her grief was also visible in objects. She wore jewelry containing Albert's hair and his portrait. Mourning became fashionable in the strict sense of the word: something to be done correctly, in stages, with the right materials.

Etiquette guides of the period set out the stages for different relationships. A widow's mourning was the longest and strictest, often described as two years or more, moving from deep mourning in dull black fabrics such as crape toward half-mourning, when grey, mauve and lavender were allowed. Mourning for a parent, a child or a sibling was shorter. The rules varied from guide to guide and were followed far more strictly in wealthy households than in poor ones, where a single black dress might be dyed and reused.

Jet from Whitby

The approved stone for deep mourning was jet, a black fossilized wood found most famously near Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. It could be carved and polished to a deep shine. Whitby's jet industry grew dramatically in the middle of the century as demand for mourning jewelry rose. Cheaper imitations, including black glass sometimes called French jet and early molded materials, made the look available to those who could not afford the real thing.

That market shows how far mourning spread through society. Grief had a uniform, and most families tried to wear some part of it.

What the jewelry was doing

It is tempting to read these objects as theater, a society performing sorrow because the rules said so. Some of it was. Etiquette always has a social edge, and the rules about crape and jet also said something about class and respectability.

But the hair is harder to dismiss. A brooch with a lock of a dead child's hair is not a statement to strangers. It is worn under a collar or close to the heart. It is a way of carrying the attachment past the point where the relationship can continue. The museum case can make it look like an artifact of a culture. On a living body, it was a bond kept in physical form.

Historians of emotion have noted that the nineteenth century also had very high child mortality by modern standards. Many families lost infants and young children. The objects that survive are, in part, evidence of how ordinary loss was, and how much effort went into marking each one.

Why it faded

Mourning dress began to loosen at the end of the century and fell away faster after the First World War. The scale of death in that war made long periods of formal mourning impractical, and in some places discouraged as bad for morale. Fashion changed, and so did ideas about how long grief should be displayed. Hair jewelry went from treasured to odd within a generation or two.

Many pieces survived because no one knew what to do with them. They sit now in drawers, in antique shops and in museum cases. The initials on the back point to people who were deeply loved by someone, once.

The record in a lock

For historians, these objects are an unusual kind of archive. They rarely come with documents. Often there is only an engraved name or date, and sometimes not even that. They are records of attachment rather than records of fact. They tell us not what happened to someone, but that someone else could not bear to let them go.

The brooch in the case still holds its plait of brown hair. The wearer is gone, and so is the person whose hair it was. What remains is the bond itself, held under glass.