Why were the middle classes so important for mourning jewellery?

Three factors. Demography: numerically the middle classes were the growing stratum of the nineteenth century - around 25 per cent of the population in Germany in 1900, up to 40 per cent in England. Economics: the middle classes had disposable income for consumer goods not required for survival, jewellery among them. Culture: the middle classes imitated aristocratic mourning codes (with materials of their own) and thereby created the mass market that made the industrialisation of mourning-jewellery production possible.

How did the upper and lower middle classes differ in their mourning jewellery?

The upper middle class (industrialists, bankers, senior officials, professors) wore jewellery close to the aristocratic level - gold, Whitby jet, diamond mosaic, individual workshop commissions. The middle middle class (merchants, mid-level officials, teachers, clergy) wore standard goods - vermeil or rolled-gold pieces, French jet or vulcanite, small workshop or department-store orders. The lower middle class (artisans, junior clerks) often wore inherited family pieces, simple hair-lock pendants or stamped-sheet mourning pieces from mail order.

What role did department stores play?

A central one. From the 1860s onwards, specialised mourning warehouses arose in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and New York - large stores dealing exclusively in mourning dress and mourning jewellery. Well known are Jay's and Peter Robinson's Court & General Mourning Warehouse in London, Gerson and Wertheim in Berlin, Stern in Paris, Gerngross in Vienna. The mourning warehouses made mourning jewellery available to the middle classes in standardised form and thereby broke the monopoly of the goldsmiths' workshops.

How long did middle-class mourning practice last?

In the full logic of court mourning, until 1914. With the First World War the system collapses - mass losses can no longer be represented within the Biedermeier and middle-class logic of mourning. In the 1920s mourning jewellery still exists (photo lockets, memorial pendants), but as an individual practice, no longer a socially codified one. Normative middle-class mourning effectively ends with the Weimar Republic.

The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century

The rising middle classes of the nineteenth century were the principal bearers and principal consumers of the era's mourning and memorial jewellery - a social stratum that took over the aristocratic model of court mourning, gave it symbols and materials of its own, and in the course of industrialisation turned it into a mass market.

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