Mourning Earrings
Mourning earrings are matt black or muted pieces of ear jewellery which in the nineteenth century were an obligatory component of the female mourning toilette, and which live on today as a discreet remembrance variant with a tiny relic setting.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
Mourning earrings belonged to the three-part jewellery ensemble of the Victorian widow's toilette - together with the mourning necklace (Mourning Necklace) and the mourning brooch (Mourning Brooch). The height of the form fell in the decades between 1850 and 1900, when the social dress code of mourning (see The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century) laid down detailed prescriptions for women concerning the material, colour and form of their jewellery. Today mourning earrings have largely disappeared as a distinct form, but small, discreet studs with a remembrance function take up the tradition.
Currently available
Occasions
In a modern context, mourning and remembrance earrings are commissioned for several occasions:
- Funeral and memorial service - as discreet, formal ear jewellery in a black tone (onyx studs, black spinel hoops)
- A remembrance set with pendant and ring - as the third element of an ensemble
- Anniversary and birthday - as a personal piece worn regularly
- Heirlooms - taking over historical mourning earrings from family possession
- A personal keepsake with an ash or fingerprint detail in the earring mount
Personalisation
Three paths of personalisation dominate in modern remembrance earrings:
A relic setting. A tiny hollow setting in the earring holds a small quantity of ashes, a minute strand of hair or a fingerprint element. The technical challenge is miniaturisation - earrings have markedly less volume than pendants or rings.
An inscription. Initials or a date of death, engraved on the reverse of a stud or on a small plaque.
A symbol. A tiny symbol - cross, anchor, weeping willow, butterfly, heart - as a drop on the earring. On modern pieces often very reduced and stylised.
Material
- Historical: jet (see Jet (Gagate)), vulcanite (see Vulcanite (Ebonite)), bog oak (see Bog Oak), onyx, black enamel on gold 750, jais français (Parisian black glass), horsehair in a gold mount (see Hairwork)
- Modern: sterling silver, gold 750/585, matt gold, stainless steel, titanium (for allergic ear piercings), onyx, black spinel, black freshwater pearl
- Mounts: studs, drops, hoops, ear cuffs (rare)
History
Mourning earrings emerge as a distinct form in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their eighteenth-century predecessors (see The Georgian Era (1714–1837)) were often sentimental keepsake earrings with a portrait miniature or a lock of hair beneath glass - not explicitly black, but designed as a personal keepsake.
With the rise of the bourgeois mourning dress code (see The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century) and the parallel heyday of the Whitby jet industry (see Whitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire Coast), mourning earrings establish themselves as a fixed jewellery form. In the 1860s and 1870s - the height of mourning culture under the impression of Queen Victoria's widowhood (see Queen Victoria (1819–1901)) - long drop earrings in jet become the standard form.
In the Edwardian period (see The Edwardian Era (1901–1910/1914)) mourning earrings lose their significance. With the First World War they largely disappear from the public jewellery repertoire. Today they exist only as a reduced remembrance variant.
Mourning earrings today
In a modern context, mourning earrings are made in three variants:
Reduced and elegant. Plain studs or small hoops of sterling silver or gold with a discreet black stone (onyx, spinel) - as formal funeral jewellery or as a discreetly commemorative everyday piece.
Personalised. Earrings with a small hollow setting in which an ash, hair or fingerprint substance is sealed. The technical realisation demands microsurgically fine goldsmith's work; only a few workshops worldwide offer this form.
Historicising. Long drops of deliberately Victorian effect, in antique jet or newly carved onyx - for collectors, or as a deliberate gesture of affinity with the mourning tradition of the nineteenth century.
Wear and care
Mourning and remembrance earrings are worn freely today - daily, on anniversaries, or only at funerals and memorial services. How they are worn is the wearer's personal decision.
Care depends on the material:
- Gold studs with an onyx stone: occasional cleaning with a jewellery cloth, remove before applying lotion or perfume
- Antique jet or bog oak: store dry only, keep out of water, no ultrasonic cleaning
- Pieces with a relic setting: store dry, never open the hollow setting, have the closure checked by the workshop goldsmith if required
Earrings with incorporated relic elements (ashes, hair, fingerprint) should be handled with particular care - the substance within cannot be replaced, and its loss through improper handling would be irreversible.
Questions about this entry
- What form did Victorian mourning earrings take?
Three dominant forms are documented. Long drops - long, freely swinging ear pendants of jet, vulcanite or black-enamelled gold (5–8 cm in length). Cluster studs - small studs sitting close to the ear, of carved jet, often in the form of a flower or a bunch of grapes. Pendant hoops - narrow hoops with a central mourning symbol (cross, anchor, weeping willow). The long-drop variant dominated at the height of the fashion (1860–1880).
- Are mourning earrings still worn today?
In the Victorian sense - as a black, visible statement of mourning - hardly at all. In the sense of discreet remembrance earrings - very much so. Today there are small studs of onyx or freshwater pearl, discreet hoops with a tiny ash element or fingerprint detail (see Ash Pendant, Fingerprint Pendant) and plain gold studs with engraved initials.
- Which materials are suitable today?
For a discreet way of wearing a keepsake, onyx, black spinel, freshwater pearl, matt gold and sterling silver are all suitable. Where a historical character is wanted: antique jet from Whitby (see Whitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire Coast) or bog oak (see Bog Oak) - neither still actively worked, but available as collectors' pieces. Vulcanite (see Vulcanite (Ebonite)) is well known as a historical material, but tends to discolour and is not really to be recommended for modern pieces.
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.
- 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.
- Jewellery formsMourning Brooch
The mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- People & cultural historyMourning Rituals in the German-Speaking World
German-speaking mourning rituals differ perceptibly from the English court-mourning tradition - shaped by confessional division (Catholic / Protestant), middle-class sensibility, Biedermeier domesticity and an independent culture of memorial jewellery which carried different emphases in Vienna, Berlin and Munich according to region.