Memories caught in gold and gems: The Mysterious Appeal of Victorian Memento Mori Jewellery

There's a particular kind of jewellery you sometimes find at estate sales or tucked into the back corner of an antiques shop: It could be a small ring with woven hair under glass, a black enamelled locket, or earrings with jet beads that swallow the light rather than reflect it. In modern times we may mistake them for a fashionable choice that fits with every occasion, like the iconic little black dress. But these aren't decorative afterthoughts. They are how the Victorians remembered their lost ones: Victorian mourning jewellery. Made to hold grief close to the skin, and to demonstrate how much one was grieving, of course.

A Queen Who Never Stopped Grieving

It's impossible to talk about Victorian mourning culture without starting with Queen Victoria herself. When Prince Albert died in 1861, the queen entered a mourning period that, in practice, never really ended. She wore black for the remaining forty years of her life, and the court followed her lead. Fashion has always trickled down from the top, in the past especially from the nobility. So in this case what trickled down was the sense of death itself, the romanticism of remembering, formalized into etiquette. What followed was an entire industry.

Mourning became a social performance with rules almost as strict as any other all prevailing fashion code. Deviate and thou shallt ne'er again be recognised in the 'right kind of circles'. Widows were expected to move through defined stages each with its own permitted colors, fabrics, and yes, jewellery. From full mourning (typically the first year and a day for a widow), to second mourning and then half mourning, by which time small amounts of white, mauve, and grey were permitted, and jewellery could incorporate amethyst, pearls, and eventually even small diamonds set discreetly. An entire visual system for signaling exactly how recently, and how deeply, one was supposed to be sad.

Deviating from the rules wasn't just a fashion faux pas; it could be read as a lack of respect for the dead, or worse, a suspicious eagerness to move on.

Jet: The Stone of Sorrow

The material most associated with early full mourning is jet, a fossilized wood, technically a type of lignite, mined primarily around Whitby in Yorkshire. Which wasn't bad for jet business. Whitby jet became so fashionable that it turned a modest fishing town into a manufacturing hub, with hundreds of workshops churning out brooches, bracelets, and long beaded necklaces by the 1870s.

Jet had practical virtues beyond its color. It's lightweight, easy to carve, and takes a high polish, which meant craftsmen could produce anything from simple mourning beads to elaborately carved cameos and lockets. Its matte-to-glossy black surface fit the aesthetic requirements of deep mourning perfectly: solemn, without any hint of sparkle or celebration.

As real Whitby jet became harder to source in the quantities demand required, cheaper substitutes flooded the market. They called it 'French jet', actually black glass, vulcanite, bog oak, and gutta-percha. A collector today has to look closely to tell them apart; a period wearer, moving down through the mourning stages, might have worn several of these interchangeably depending on budget and occasion.

Hair Work: Grief Made Tangible

Perhaps the most startling mourning jewellery to modern eyes is hairwork. It is jewellery incorporating some hair of the deceased, often breaded into beautiful patterns or landscapes. Specialist hairworkers in professional workshops turned the hair into beautiful pieces. Sometimes the hair picture referred to the deceased, like a boat in a harbour for a sailor. People felt it as intimate and comforting, to have a physical reminder of someone dearly missed.

But the hairwork wasn't unique to mourning jewellery, it was also exchanged between friends and lovers as tokens of affection. Like a picture of little doves were floating mid-air holding rings in their beaks.

Symbols Worth Reading

Victorian mourning jewellery is dense with symbolism, much of it drawn from a broader vocabulary of memento mori imagery that predates the Victorian era but was refined and mass-produced during it. Common motifs include:

• Willow trees, symbolizing grief and mourning

• Urns, referencing classical funerary monuments

• Forget-me-nots, a literal instruction

• Anchors, symbolizing hope

• Serpents biting their tails, representing eternity

• Clasped hands, symbolizing a farewell or a reunion in the afterlife

Black enamel bands on rings sometimes bore inscriptions like "In Memory Of" along with the name and dates of the deceased, functioning almost like a wearable headstone. Pearls, meanwhile, were sometimes used to represent tears, appearing more often in half-mourning pieces where the strict prohibition on anything bright or reflective had started to relax.

Why It Still Resonates

Mourning jewellery went into decline after World War I, for reasons that are easy to guess: mass casualties on an unprecedented scale made elaborate individual mourning rituals impractical, and the culture shifted toward more private, less codified grief. But the objects themselves survived, and they turn up regularly today in antique markets, museum collections, in the hands of jewellers and historians.

Part of what makes these pieces compelling isn't just their craftsmanship, though the best hairwork and jet carving is genuinely impressive. It's that they represent something to everyone, at one stage or other. Each and every one will encounter crucial moments that call for remembrance or tokens of affection. In current day jewellery we may carry a diamond made out of ashes or a baby tooth.

Like those, a locket with a woven lock of hair inside asks something of the person who wears it, and those who see it: to remember a loved one, or to signal your love. Something to be worn close to the heart. Something that travels along, the presence of your loved one.