Mourning Cuff
A mourning cuff is a broad bangle worn at the wrist, established in the nineteenth century as a formal mourning accessory of the English and American upper class, and living on today as a wide bracelet with a relic setting or an inscription panel.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
The mourning cuff is a broad bangle form established in Victorian England and in the United States of the second half of the century. Unlike the narrower Mourning Bracelet, the cuff is deliberately designed to be large and visible - it signals formal mourning and belongs to the representative toilette of a grieving lady of polite society. In Germany the form was less current; the German bourgeoisie preferred narrower, more discreet forms of mourning jewellery (see The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century).
Currently available
Occasions
A modern mourning cuff or broad remembrance cuff is chosen in the following contexts:
- A formal funeral with a historicising character - as a deliberately visible keepsake
- Passing on within the family - taking over a historical cuff as an heirloom
- A deliberately emphatic keepsake - where the piece is meant to be worn rather than hidden
- A personalised gift to a grieving person - with engraving, inscription or a relic setting
- A collector's piece - historical cuffs in jet, vulcanite or gold enamel form an auction category of their own
Personalisation
Several paths of personalisation are available:
Engraved inscription. The broad outer surface offers room for extensive inscriptions - names, date of death, a biblical verse, a short motto or the deceased person's life maxim. The engraving is done classically in capitals or as facsimile handwriting (see Engraving and Inscriptions).
Relic setting. A small hollow setting holding an ash capsule, a fingerprint or a lock of hair is worked into the inner or outer face of the cuff.
Symbolic pictorial elements. Classical mourning symbols - weeping willow, anchor, cross, angel, butterfly - are applied to the outer surface as shallow engraving or niello inlay (see Niello (Black Inlay Technique)).
Multiplex personalisation. On family cuffs, several names, dates or symbols are combined - in memory of an entire family group.
Material
- Historical: solid jet (see Jet (Gagate)), vulcanite (see Vulcanite (Ebonite)), gold enamel with a black enamel ground (see Black Enamel (Schwarzemail)), onyx plating on a gold body
- Modern: sterling silver, gold 750/585, stainless steel, broad leather bands with silver or gold plaques
- Inner lining: broad gold cuffs often have a light leather inlay to avoid pressure marks on the wrist
History
The mourning cuff emerges in the 1840s and 1850s as a broad version of the previously narrow mourning bracelets. With the peak of the Whitby jet industry (see Whitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire Coast) large carved jet cuffs appear, recommended in English ladies' magazines of the 1860s as formal mourning toilette.
In the United States the cuff sees its heyday after the Civil War (1865 to the 1880s). The high number of widows and family members of fallen soldiers creates a vast market for remembrance jewellery, and the broad cuff becomes the visible mourning form of the American middle and upper classes.
In the Edwardian period (see The Edwardian Era (1901–1910/1914)) the form loses relevance; with the First World War and the shift in fashion of the 1920s it largely disappears from the public jewellery repertoire.
The mourning cuff today
Three fields of application exist in the current market:
The personalised remembrance cuff. A broad silver or gold bangle (3–5 cm wide) with engraved names and dates of death - a deliberately visible, formal keepsake. Popular in funerary contexts where the piece is worn together with other family members (as a sibling set after the death of a parent, for instance).
The cuff with a relic setting. A modern variant with an integrated hollow setting holding an ash capsule, a fingerprint element or a sealed lock of hair. Technically demanding, offered by only a few workshops worldwide.
The leather-band cuff. A broad leather band (2–4 cm) with applied silver or gold plaques carrying inscriptions, symbols or relic settings. Cheaper and better suited to everyday wear than a solid metal cuff.
Care and wear
Care of cuffs depends on the material:
- Metal cuff: occasional cleaning with a jewellery cloth, remove before sport, protect from water sports (sea water, chlorine)
- Leather-band cuff: protect from water, treat occasionally with leather care products, store separately
- Antique jet or vulcanite cuff: store dry only, no water, no lotion, no ultrasonic cleaning
In wearing, the size is decisive: a cuff that is too tight presses on the wrist bone, one that is too loose slips. The correct internal width exceeds the wrist measurement by about 1–1.5 cm. On bespoke commissions the cuff is fitted precisely to the wearer's wrist.
Questions about this entry
- How does a cuff differ from an ordinary bracelet?
A cuff is broad (typically 3–6 cm) and usually rigidly formed - it has no clasp but is slipped over the hand and adjusts elastically to the wrist. An ordinary bracelet is narrower (0.5–2 cm) and generally fastened with a lobster clasp or box clasp. The mourning cuff was a representative, formal form of mourning jewellery - deliberately designed to be broad and visible.
- Was the mourning cuff widespread in Germany?
Less so than in England and the USA. The German mourning tradition of the nineteenth century (see Mourning Rituals in the German-Speaking World) favoured narrower mourning bracelets (see Mourning Bracelet) and mourning rings (see Mourning Ring (Memorial Ring)) - the broad cuff form remained rather the exception in Germany. In English Victorian fashion and in the post-bellum mourning culture of the United States (after the Civil War), by contrast, the cuff was a documented standard piece.
- Can I have a mourning cuff made today?
Yes. A few workshops worldwide make broad remembrance cuffs to commission - usually in sterling silver or a gold alloy, with engraved names or inscriptions, sometimes with an inset ash capsule or a fingerprint element. Prices lie between €600 and €4,000 depending on complexity. An alternative variant is a broad leather band with an inset silver plaque.
Further reading
- Mourning Dress - A Costume and Social History - Lou Taylor (1983)
- Whitby Jet through the Years - Helen Muller (1985)
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
Related entries
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Jewellery formsMourning Bracelet
The mourning bracelet is a remembrance piece worn at the wrist which became popular in the nineteenth century as plaited hairwork or as a jet link bracelet, and which lives on today as a leather bracelet with a relic setting or a fine gold bracelet with a remembrance element.
- Jewellery formsMourning Ring (Memorial Ring)
A mourning ring - also called a memorial ring - is a finger ring that carries the memory of a deceased person, usually in the form of an inscription, an image, a lock of hair or a fingerprint.
- Jewellery formsMourning Necklace
The mourning necklace is a chain worn at the neck in black or muted material which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, became the standard daytime wear of the mourning period, and which lives on today as a reduced remembrance variant with a pendant.
- MaterialsWhitby Jet
Whitby jet is jet from the North English coastal town of Whitby - by far the most important deposit worldwide in the 19th century and the gold standard of Victorian mourning jewellery.
- MaterialsVulcanite (Ebonite)
Vulcanite is hardened, black-dyed natural rubber - an industrial invention of the 1840s which found wide use in Victorian mourning jewellery as an inexpensive alternative to jet.
- PeriodsThe Victorian Era (1837–1901)
The Victorian era is the heyday of mourning jewellery - a period of more than sixty years in which court mourning codes, industrial mass production, new materials (jet, vulcanite, Berlin iron) and Queen Victoria's personal widowhood combined to produce a system of public and private mourning visibility without precedent in European history.
- People & cultural historyWhitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire Coast
Whitby is the small harbour town on the north-east English Yorkshire coast whose jet deposits and workshops supplied the Victorian mourning-jewellery system with its most important material foundation in the nineteenth century - at the peak around 1870, more than 1,500 cutters and carvers there worked for the global mourning market.
- People & cultural historyThe 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.