The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century

The middle classes of the nineteenth century were the principal bearers of the era's mourning jewellery. While the aristocracy supplied the model and the working class followed the practice in reduced form, it was the middle ground between the two - urban, academic, commercial and industrial families - that built mourning jewellery into a broad consumer practice. That broadening is what made the Victorian mourning-jewellery industry possible in the first place; it created the market in which Whitby jet from Yorkshire, French jet from Paris, Berlin iron from Prussia and vulcanite from Birmingham found their mass sales.

The social stratification of the middle classes

The nineteenth century knows not the middle class but a finely graded stratification with distinctly different mourning-jewellery practices:

Upper middle class (industrialists, bankers, senior officials, professors, the heads of courts and administrations):

• Mourning jewellery close to the aristocratic level
• Gold, Whitby jet, diamond mosaic, black enamel and gold
• Individual commissions from specialised workshops (Cartier, Boucheron, Friedländer, Wagner)
• Parures (brooch, pendant, bracelet, earrings) in a single style
• Family collections of mourning jewellery built up over several generations

Middle middle class (merchants, mid-level officials, teachers, clergy, the professions):

• Standard goods - vermeil (gilded silver), rolled gold (a mechanically applied layer of gold on a base metal)
• French pressed glass (French jet), vulcanite, Berlin iron
• Small workshop orders or department-store purchases
• Hair brooches with a lock from the family's own
• Photo lockets as the central memorial piece

Lower middle class (artisans, junior clerks, elementary-school teachers, minor officials):

• Often inherited family pieces, combined or reworked
• Simple hair-lock pendants in silver or silver-plated metal
• Stamped-sheet mourning pieces from mail order (Sears, Tietz, Wertheim mail order, for example)
• A black armband instead of full mourning jewellery
• A symbolic rather than a representative practice of mourning

This stratification was clearly visible in the nineteenth century - a middle-class widow could tell at once from another widow's mourning jewellery which stratum she socially belonged to.

Middle-class mourning as imitation of court mourning

Middle-class mourning practice is at its core an imitation of aristocratic court-mourning codes. Royal deaths (Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria in 1901, Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1888, Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889) each set off broad waves of middle-class mourning. The aristocratic model is reproduced with materials of its own, often cheaper ones:

• Aristocratic Whitby jet is replaced by French jet or vulcanite
• Aristocratic black enamel and gold is replaced by vermeil with black enamel
• Aristocratic diamond borders are replaced by paste or marcasite
• Aristocratic workshop commissions are replaced by department-store standard goods

This logic of imitation is constitutive of middle-class conduct in mourning. It is not primarily economic (the middle classes could often afford more than they in fact spent) but semiotic - the middle-class mourning piece was meant to stand recognisably in the tradition of aristocratic mourning without copying it or claiming equality with it.

The industrialisation of jewellery production

Middle-class mourning-jewellery practice is unthinkable without the industrialisation of jewellery production in the nineteenth century. Three technical innovations shape the era:

The rolled-gold process (a layer of gold mechanically rolled onto a copper or brass carrier). Invented in England in the 1810s, widespread by the 1850s. Rolled gold looks like gold but costs a fraction of it. Most middle-class mourning pieces of the second half of the century are rolled gold.

The stamped-sheet process (thin sheet metal formed in presses with relief ornament). This allows the mass production of brooches, pendants and lockets at very low cost. Used above all for lower-middle-class mourning pieces.

The vulcanite process (vulcanised rubber as a mass material). Invented in 1839 (Charles Goodyear). Vulcanite jewellery imitates Whitby jet at a fraction of the price. Mass production from the 1860s onwards.

The French jet process (pressed glass in mourning-jewellery form). Main centres: Paris and the glass manufactories of northern Bohemia. Mass production from the 1850s onwards.

These four innovations together make it possible for practically every middle-class family to buy mourning jewellery after a death - not made to measure, but standardised, in many patterns, at affordable prices.

Mourning warehouses

One of the most important institutions of middle-class mourning practice is the mourning warehouse - a specialised large store dealing exclusively in mourning dress, mourning jewellery and mourning accessories. Important examples:

London:

• Jay's General Mourning Warehouse (Regent Street, founded 1841 by W. C. Jay) - the most famous London mourning store, with its own jewellery department and mail-order business
• Peter Robinson's Court & General Mourning Warehouse (Oxford Street, founded 1832, mourning department from 1843) - Jay's chief competitor
• Pugh's - a workshop for special mourning commissions

Paris:

• À la Veuve (Boulevard Magenta) - specialising in mourning dress and mourning jewellery
• Stern and Boucheron - the upper segment, with a mourning-jewellery line

Berlin:

• Wertheim (Leipziger Platz, from 1875) - with its own mourning department
• Gerson (Werderscher Markt) - the upper segment, with a mourning-jewellery range
• Hermann Tietz (Leipziger Straße) - mid-priced mourning pieces

Vienna:

• Gerngross (Mariahilfer Straße) - with its own mourning floor
• Steffl and Herzmansky - a mourning range in the mid-price segment

New York:

• Lord & Taylor and B. Altman - with their own mourning departments
• R. H. Macy - mid-priced mourning jewellery

The mourning warehouses standardised the middle-class gesture of mourning. A widow could go to the mourning warehouse the day after her husband's death and buy, in the course of a single morning, complete mourning dress, mourning jewellery, mourning cards, mourning writing paper and palls. This logic of efficiency was a specifically middle-class, urban achievement.

Middle-class memorial jewellery as family practice

Middle-class mourning and memorial jewellery practice is organised not only individually but as a family matter. Three central family practices:

Family hair brooches. Brooches with strands of hair from several family members - parents, siblings, children. Built up over two or three generations, often with individual dates of death and initials. Especially widespread in the middle middle class.

Generational lockets. Mourning lockets with several small photographic compartments depicting parents, parents-in-law and grandparents. Often conceived deliberately as pieces of family identity.

Bequeathed jewellery. Mourning pieces are left in a will to named beneficiaries - often daughters, daughters-in-law or granddaughters. In prosperous middle-class families an extensive collection of mourning jewellery could be built up in this way over three or four generations, passing to the next generation with each owner's death.

This family practice distinguishes the middle classes from the nobility (which had similar practices but tied more closely to dynastic display) and from the lower middle class (which could sustain the practice only in limited form for economic reasons).

Confessional and regional subdivisions

Middle-class mourning practice in the nineteenth century is distinctly graded by confession and region:

Protestant middle classes (northern Germany, Switzerland, Protestant Austria): a more restrained mourning-jewellery practice, favouring inscription and initial pieces over pictorial work, with less use of Catholic symbolism. Biblical verse inscriptions frequent.

Catholic middle classes (southern Germany, Austria, Catholic western Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Poland, the Czech lands): an iconographically richer mourning-jewellery practice with images of the Virgin, figures of saints, crucifix pendants. Frequent use of rosaries in mourning materials.

Jewish middle classes (urban centres such as Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Frankfurt, Budapest, Warsaw, New York): a mourning-jewellery tradition of their own with the Star of David, Hebrew inscriptions, references to biblical verse. The shiva period with mourning at home; Yahrzeit as the annual occasion of remembrance.

English middle classes with dissenting traditions (Methodist, Baptist, Quaker): a particularly jewellery-averse mourning practice among Quakers, while Anglican middle-class families follow the Victorian court-mourning standard.

Middle-class sensibility and the theatre of mourning

Middle-class mourning practice has a strong cultural and emotional dimension. Following on from Georgian sensibility (see The Georgian Era (1714–1837)), a middle-class culture of mourning develops in the nineteenth century, in which mourning is organised as an explicit, visible, socially required gesture:

• Letters of mourning as an elaborated literary form
• Mourning poems as both a private and a published genre
• Mourning photographs (often with the deceased lying in state, post-mortem photography)
• Albums and memorial books with mourning entries and pressed flowers from the graves
• Mourning music as a domestic piano practice (Chopin's funeral march, Schubert's Erlkönig)

Mourning jewellery is part of this wider culture of mourning. It is not to be understood in isolation but as the material complement to the epistolary, photographic, musical and literary practices of mourning.

The end of middle-class mourning practice

With the First World War, middle-class mourning practice comes to an end in its formal shape. Three factors:

1. Demographic overload. A middle-class family in which four or five male relatives had fallen at the front could no longer keep to the Victorian mourning code in its full severity - the cumulative obligation of mourning would have stretched over fifteen or twenty years.

2. Economic crisis. The hyperinflation of the early 1920s, the world economic crisis of 1929 and the impoverishment of the middle classes in many countries made elaborate commissions of mourning jewellery impossible.

3. Cultural upheaval. The modernisation of the 1920s changed middle-class self-understanding. A heavy, dark, material practice of mourning was perceived as outdated, excessive or unhealthy. Mourning was increasingly understood as an inner process requiring no visible jewellery practice.

In the interwar years mourning jewellery still exists as a middle-class family practice - photo lockets with pictures of fallen sons, memorial pendants commemorating the family's dead. But it is no longer normative. After the Second World War middle-class mourning-jewellery practice in its historical form has disappeared.

The middle-class legacy in modern memorial jewellery

The middle-class legacy lives on in modern memorial jewellery, but in transformed shape. Three lines of continuity:

Family reference. Memorial jewellery as a family practice, often passed on across generations - modern photo lockets in the tradition of the middle-class generational lockets of the nineteenth century.

Occasion reference. Memorial jewellery is commissioned after a specific death, with reference to a particular person - the middle-class logic of remembering an individual lives on in the modern fingerprint pendant (see Fingerprint Pendant).

Standardised workshop practice. Modern memorial jewellery workshops work in a tradition that began in the nineteenth century with the mourning warehouses: standardised pieces in various price brackets, with individual personalisation, within a clearly defined workshop process.

What has been lost is the normative dimension. In the nineteenth century middle-class mourning jewellery was an obligatory gesture; in the twenty-first century it is an individual wish. But the cultural deep layer - mourning as a family-visible, lastingly commemorative jewellery practice - is a middle-class inheritance from the nineteenth century that lives on in modern memorial jewellery.