Victorian mourning jewellery, and why so much of it was black

Victorian mourning jewellery is the largest body of deliberately black ornament ever made, and almost all of it exists because of a set of social rules about what a bereaved woman was allowed to wear and for how long. The rules produced an industry, the industry produced four or five distinct black materials, and those materials behave very differently when you own them. This is what they were, why they were black, and what goes wrong with them now.

It did not start with Victoria

Mourning jewellery is much older than the nineteenth century. Seventeenth-century mourning rings carry enamelled skulls, coffins and crossed bones, often with the dead person's initials and the date, and they were frequently handed out at the funeral itself under the terms of the will.

By the later eighteenth century the imagery had turned neoclassical. The skull went and the urn arrived: brooches and pendants with a small sepia painting of an urn, a willow and a weeping figure, often painted using pigment mixed with the hair of the deceased. The habit of putting hair into jewellery is therefore Georgian in origin, not Victorian, and the Victorians inherited it already established.

1861, and the industry it created

Prince Albert died in December 1861. Victoria wore black for the remaining forty years of her life, and because court dress set the pattern for respectable dress generally, that decision had a commercial effect out of all proportion to one widow's grief.

Mourning was already a market. After 1861 it became an enormous one, with specialist warehouses selling nothing else, mail order for people in the country, and manufacturers of a single black material employing whole towns. Etiquette manuals were sold alongside the goods, which is worth remembering when reading them: the people setting out the rules were often the people selling the compliance.

The rules, and why shine was the issue

Mourning ran in stages. Full mourning came first, then second mourning, then half mourning, with each stage relaxing what could be worn. Half mourning allowed grey, white, mauve and lilac, which is why those colours still read as slightly funereal.

How long each stage lasted depended on which manual you believed and how closely related you were to the dead. For a widow the guides tend to say a year and a day or more of full mourning, often extended to two years in total before ordinary dress returned, but the manuals disagree with each other and real behaviour varied with money and class. Anyone quoting one exact figure is quoting one book.

The rule that mattered most to how things looked was about surface, not colour. Full mourning fabric had to be dull. The standard cloth was crape, a crimped silk treated so that it would not reflect light, and an English silk firm made a great deal of money supplying it. Jewellery was treated more leniently: highly polished jet was acceptable almost throughout, so a woman forbidden a shiny dress could wear a glossy black necklace with it.

The materials, one at a time

Whitby jet is the famous one. It is fossilised wood, from the Yorkshire coast, and it is the best of the black materials to wear because it is remarkably light and takes a mirror polish. It is also soft, roughly in the range of a fingernail to a copper coin on the Mohs scale, so it scratches easily and will crack if it dries out. Carved jet lets a maker put real depth into a small object, which is why the elaborate Victorian pieces are usually jet.

Vulcanite, also sold as ebonite, is vulcanised rubber: cheap, moulded rather than carved, and the material behind most mass-market mourning jewellery. It is light like jet and was often made in imitation of it. Its flaw is light: sunlight turns black vulcanite a dull khaki brown over the years and nothing reverses it.

Bog oak is Irish, genuinely wood, usually carved with harps, shamrocks and castles, and more souvenir than mourning. French jet is not jet at all: it is black glass, sometimes faceted and foiled. It is noticeably heavier, cold to the touch, and chips at the edges where jet would scratch. Onyx set in gold, and black enamel on gold, were the expensive respectable options, and gutta percha appears as another moulded substitute. Those carved and pierced patterns are the direct ancestor of modern openwork black jewellery, and a pair of pierced arch earrings is working in the same tradition of line and gap.

Telling them apart in your hand

Weight is the first test. Pick the piece up with your eyes shut. Jet and vulcanite feel like almost nothing. Glass and onyx feel like stone.

Temperature is the second. Glass and onyx are cold against the back of your hand and stay cold; jet warms up almost at once. Then look at the damage: glass chips and leaves a bright conchoidal scar, jet scratches and scuffs, vulcanite goes brown at the edges and around the clasp first. Under a loupe, moulded vulcanite often shows a faint seam and slightly soft detail where carved jet has crisp tool marks.

Avoid the destructive tests you will read about online. Rubbing a piece on unglazed porcelain to look for a brown streak, or touching it with a hot pin, damages the object and tells you nothing you could not get from weight and temperature.

Hair, which is the part people find strange

A large share of surviving Victorian mourning jewellery contains human hair, and it was not a morbid fringe practice. Hair was plaited into bracelet bands, woven into flat panels set behind glass in lockets and brooches, and built into three-dimensional flowers and wheat sheaves by professional hairworkers.

The logic is simple and unsupernatural: hair is the only part of a person that survives without preservation and can be worked like a fibre. It was a keepsake of the most literal kind, in a century that had photography only for the last part of it and could not photograph the dead cheaply until later.

The other keepsake format was the sentimental rather than funereal one: a flower, a heart, a bird, worn to mark an attachment rather than a death. A piece like a pierced heart earring sits in that half of the vocabulary, and the two halves were sold side by side in the same shops.

What this means for black jewellery now

Modern black jewellery is mostly oxidised silver, black-plated base metal, enamel, glass or resin, and it has none of jet's problems and none of its lightness. The look survives but the material history does not, so a long Victorian-style strand today is usually much heavier than the original it copies.

The design vocabulary did survive, though. Carved foliage, hearts, crosses, cameos and hand-and-flower motifs all come straight out of the nineteenth century, and a piece like a cameo in a frame is working in a format Victorian mourners would have recognised instantly, even with a different subject in the oval.

If you own real Victorian black jewellery, treat it like the fragile organic material it mostly is. Keep jet and vulcanite out of direct sun and away from radiators, store pieces separately so they cannot scratch each other, clean with a dry soft cloth only, and never put any of it in an ultrasonic cleaner. Restringing an old jet strand is a job worth paying for: the thread is usually older than it looks and jet beads are easy to lose down a floorboard.

Questions people actually ask

Why was Victorian mourning jewellery black?

Mourning etiquette required black, matte dress in the first stage of mourning, and jewellery was expected to match. Demand for black ornament created an industry in jet, vulcanite and black glass.

How can I tell real jet from black glass?

Weight and temperature. Jet is very light and warms quickly in the hand. Black glass, sold as French jet, is noticeably heavier, stays cold, and chips at the edges instead of scratching.

Why has my Victorian black jewellery turned brown?

It is almost certainly vulcanite, a hard rubber used as a cheap jet substitute. Sunlight fades it to a khaki brown over time and the change cannot be reversed. Keep it stored out of the light.