mourning dress

“His purity was too great, his aspiration too high for this poor, miserable world! His great soul is now only enjoying that for which it was worthy!”

— Queen Victoria after her husband’s death

Victoria was breathlessly in love with her husband, Prince Albert, the Germanic butt of modern-day tobacco can jokes. She was known to describe him as “my all in all.” A sober, conscientious prince, Albert composed formal diplomatic correspondence even on his death bed. Victoria’s grief was boundless when he died from a gastric fever in the spring of 1862. Thus began the saga of the Widow of Windsor as Victoria retreated behind a black wall of mourning dress for the rest of her life. Other women emulated her grief, making black bombazine, paramatta, and crape regular wardrobe staples.

Her widow’s weeds did not prevent her from carrying on the affairs of state, but she was also able to use her mourning as a means of evading other social obligations. Many people rued the fact that the royal court was a victim of this evasion. They looked to Prince Edward, the heir, as a means of bringing liveliness to the nobility. Edward did the best he could to live up to this, using his long tenure as Prince of Wales to carouse and idle his time winningly. He inevitably followed this path in part because of his mother’s unremitting censure. Prince Albert had been forced to travel away from home in order to rescue “Bertie” from the consequences of some youthful high jinx, and he fell ill shortly afterwards with the disease that cost him his life. Victoria, mad with grief, blamed her son for this development, and would never forgive him.

Because I’m going to a funeral at the end of this week, I thought I’d take a look at the nineteenth century’s special affection for mourning dress. Black mourning survived over the centuries in various forms. It took the mid-nineteenth century, however, to give the fashion for mourning an added fillip. The Victorian era is awash with ornaments and details affiliated with mourning, from jet and onyx jewelry to lacy veils and black tippets.

Women, of course, carried the particular burden of grief. Their physical appearance was rendered according to the dictates of society: deepest black for a full year when glossy materials were forbidden, like furs, velvet and satin, and then permission to go to half-mourning, to add dull colors—like lavender or gray—before a slow return to original dress. Widows were encouraged in the dowager look, aided by that most familiar of examples perched on the English throne. Black lent dignity to the rituals of grief. Yet, did it ever cross a woman’s mind, that her mourning dress isolated her further? That, here, through the vagaries of fashion, was a western way to emulate the Hindu practice of suttee?

By the mid-1870s, there were groups speaking out against the extremes of mourning wear for women. The adoption of morning clothes put an economic squeeze on poor and lower middle class families. However, the social regulations governing mourning dress didn’t really begin to relax until the 1890s. Many critics of the era consider that mourning dress was a form of conspicuous consumption, symbolic of the pervasive atmosphere of gentility and conformity. Do you agree?