Locket with chain of braided hair, between 1861 and 1865.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS, LC-DIG-PPMSCA-37494.
Let’s start in Illinois.
Despite the extravagant unwholesomeness of its contents—the glossy embalming trocars and the jet black horse-and-buggy hearse—the Museum of Funeral Customs is, in outward appearance, wholly unassuming. One approaches more than half expecting outright kitsch. One is primed for it, in fact, by the presence, one block away, of a tourist trap shaped like a log cabin. We are, after all, in Spring-field, Illinois, where it seems every other downtown building is somehow Lincoln-themed or -decorated. The log cabin across the street from the museum hawks purple plastic Lincoln backscratchers, be-feathered and beglittered dream catchers of varying size and hideosity, and pennies embossed with the twinned faces of Honest Abe and John F. Kennedy sold with one of those lists enumerating twenty-two strange coincidences between their deaths.
Within sight and walking distance, the Museum of Funeral Customs seems to shrink almost visibly away from the Lincoln Log Mart (name changed because the real one is much more boring). While the latter marches right up to the road sporting a large, hanging sign announcing itself, the museum retreats behind a small square of tasteful lawn, its light pink imitation sandstone causing it to resemble a modern funeral home.
Locket with chain of braided hair, between 1861 and 1865.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS, LC-DIG-PPMSCA-37494.
When I ask Jon Austin about the neighboring tourist shop, his polite facial expression takes on a strain, like a canvas stretched a hair too tight. “Yes,” he allows, “they have some … interesting items for sale there.” The curator of the museum is polite but firmly distancing. There’s an impulse to make absurdity of his establishment too, to make death ludicrous; it’s an impulse he politely denies.
Once the director of the Illinois State Historical Society, Jon has curated and directed the Museum of Funeral Customs since helping the Illinois Funeral Directors Association shape the place’s design and goals eight years ago. A physically slight and conversationally intense man, he enjoys discussing the very kookiest details of American funereal history without ever quite losing the gravitas common to both funeral directors, with whom he spends a good deal of his time, and professional historians, which he is. You get the feeling he’d never use the word “kooky.”
It turns out I wasn’t imagining it: Jon tells me the museum’s facade is indeed designed to resemble that of a modern funeral home, its salmon-colored stucco inlaid with filled-in arched window shapes just like the chapel it never was—although it sits across the street from a real funeral home and catty-corner to the hilly, manicured 365 acres of Oak Ridge Cemetery. Oak Ridge is both the final resting place of Abe Lincoln and a working cemetery with hundreds of active and available plots.
The museum is small. It takes most people about forty-five minutes to walk through its display room, Jon tells me after I finish my own walk through the place. It takes me three hours.
I can’t help it. Just for starters, there are burial boxes galore here, including a small, gabled, wooden coffin that I see and immediately think, “Tiny Dracula.” Tiny Dracula widens at the shoulders and comes to a point at the head, just like vampire coffins in old movies. It is meant for no monster, of course, but a nineteenth-century child. Perpendicular to its foreboding angles sits a fluffy, pink twentieth-century counterpart. A nearby sign explains that in the United States, the term “coffin” technically refers to the older, diamond-shaped container.
The term “casket” is an American death invention from the late 1800s. It comes from a French word meaning “a box containing precious valuables.” The human body as a valuable jewel. In Great Britain today, they still use the straightforward “coffin,” while here in the States, where we’ve continued to develop and elaborate on our funeral customs far beyond anything our European cousins have done, our burial boxes are no exception. The prettier “casket” prevails.
There’s a respectable amount of floor space here devoted to the era that invented the casket. The display on nineteenth-century America, however, is decidedly not pretty. Here on view are the lives and death practices of the same people who built the most grandiose cemeteries the Western world ever saw—places like Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta and Mount Auburn outside Boston. There’s something about this part of the museum that makes the hairs on my neck and arms stand straight up. It’s so morbid. Like many an account of the Victorian era itself, it’s also claustrophobic. I’m surrounded by long black dresses and jackets standing rigid and silent like empty husks. It’s all Addams Family and photos of prairie women and their families sitting stiff, still, unsmiling.
(“Victorian era” technically refers to the years 1837–1901 in Great Britain—the years when Queen Victoria reigned. Of course, the States had its own complex patchwork of historic eras during the same period. When I say “Victorian,” I’m actually referring to the larger sense of the word, which encompasses domestic practices and style in the Western world during the same period.)
The Ghost of Funerals Past feels exceptionally potent in this part of the museum, and not just because of these objects’ origins in Dickensian days. These items are strange in all their heavy-handed austerity, but they’re also familiar. The drab clothing, hearses, and funeral processions that reached their apogee in the late 1800s pretty much cast the die for our current death traditions. Even if your own choices—say, to wear bright colors and scatter someone’s ashes barefoot on a beach—stand out in stark contrast to the Victorians, your decisions feel fresh precisely because of that contrast. We’re rebelling. Even now, more than a century later. Because say the word “funeral,” and likely as not, in the very back of your mind, in the place where the word “funeral” finds its meaning, these old shadows still stalk.
The saddest of all ceremonies is that attendant upon the death of relatives and friends, and it becomes us to show, in every possible way, the utmost consideration for the feelings of the bereaved, and the deepest respect for the melancholy occasion.
JOHN H. YOUNG, Our Deportment, 1881,
first sentence of chapter 26, “Funerals”
In the nineteenth century, just getting through one’s day posed a higher risk than it does now. Farm work, factory work, and childbirth all held their peril. But the stealthiest killer, which made it a feat even to survive childhood, was disease. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that germ theory was codified; people commonly believed that the sundry maladies that stalked them traveled in the air. In 1890, four out of five white infants lived a year. Only two out of three of all nonwhite infants lived that long. Parents, of course, were keenly aware of this; many didn’t even name their children until a first birthday. By 1900, things had improved: just sixteen out of every one hundred children died before reaching a second birthday, and the average person died around age forty-seven. (By comparison, the average child born in the United States today can expect to live to seventy-eight.)
Death by whooping cough, by gangrene, and by common cold had, of course, taken place everywhere for centuries. So why did this period see a wild eruption of mourning veils, lavish cemeteries, and death poetry? It had to do with a series of sweeping changes in the ways Americans thought about the very meaning of death—and about life itself.
Strangely enough, the sumptuous cavalcade of gloom that was Victorian mourning has, as its provenance, the bright and airy Enlightenment. Without the pronounced influence of the Age of Reason in the late 1700s, none of the deathbed scenes and gloomy cortèges would have followed. For one thing, the Age of Reason recast individuals as important enough to be grieved in a major way. American colonists who had come before had been heavily influenced by the Puritan religious worldview that held humanity to be a pack of lowly, helpless wretches, bound by original sin on one side and predestination on the other. This meant that before they were even born, God had decided whether they were bound for heaven or hell, and their actions in life could never change that fate.
However, as Enlightenment philosophy trickled across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, outlooks began to change. Thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Montesquieu, and Adam Ferguson held that the universe was governed by rational law, meaning that humans could both understand the world through reason and improve it. This bright spirit helped foster the Declaration of Independence and ideas like liberty, democracy, and the separation of church and state. And at the time, these were radical new ideas. Mind-blowing stuff.
As they caught fire, these notions spurred on an abundance of religious and philosophical ideas that themselves metamorphosed, combined, and split off as they spread from east to west through the new nation. But the two biggest ideas that most influenced death culture as we know it are evangelism and romanticism.
Evangelism began with informal services by circuit-riding ministers in places like Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and it snowballed into revival after outdoor revival. These might last for days, drawing hundreds or even thousands of families from miles around to hear the “good news” that anyone could—and should—be saved. This was a different message from the old Predestination days. The notion of human agency had trickled down from Enlightenment thinking, and if you wanted heaven, you just had to ask for it.
At the revivals, ministers from different denominations would preach fiery, emotional sermons, and the crowds would respond with similar high emotion. Sometimes people broke into frenzied dances or spoke in tongues. As one source put it, “[b]urly men sobbed uncontrollably, women barked like dogs, [and] children rolled violently on the ground.”1
The Second Great Awakening, as the movement came to be known, was more than a series of flamboyant gatherings in the fields. It was a complete makeover of Christianity that, for the first time, depicted Jesus as a friend. This, in part, was what was so exciting about it. The movement was so popular that even people who weren’t evangelical were influenced by this warm version of God and homey version of heaven—now emphasized as a place of reunion among family. This version of heaven is so familiar today that we might not even realize that it was ever seen any differently—which just shows how ingrained the evangelical model has become.
A sentimental view of God and heaven arrived at a time when other aspects of life were getting similar treatment. It was the romantic era, an age whose idealized version of hearth and home “include[ed] family prayers, reading aloud around the fireside, religious instruction of the children, and the moral earnestness of the more pious homes.”2
Romanticism transformed the way people thought about family, life and death itself, big questions of “the ultimate truth of spiritual nature.”3 If evangelism was the common people’s faith, then romanticism was the corresponding philosophy, in which anyone could find the ultimate truth through visceral experience of the natural world. Naturally, the two worked hand in glove. Both romanticism and evangelism centered on experiencing the world at its physical, emotional and spiritual fullest, to discover capital-T Truths—whether this meant wandering the forest writing poetry (romanticism) or experiencing spiritual raptures at frontier revivals (evangelism).
The ultimate romantic and evangelical experience, though, was one that would be faced by frontier people and city dwellers, Jews and Christians, poets and farmers, adults and children alike. And it was the one thing that so moved this age of romantics that they created a complex culture around it that has influenced every generation that followed.
Death marked the supreme place of mystery, the ultimate threshold between the physical world and the sublime. Poets of the era were fascinated with it. Gothic romantic writers like Edgar Allen Poe were obsessed. Death was even what motivated transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau to hightail it to the woods to “live deliberately.” After his brother died of lockjaw, he went to Walden “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” and not “when I had come to die Discover that I had not lived.”
It was this era that invented the deathbed scene. We have our dourly dressed forebears to thank for Camille, Little Women, A Farewell to Arms, The Good Earth, Love Story, Terms of Endearment, and really, every sappy movie death ever. In the romantic Victorian death, a person would die at home surrounded by loved ones who looked on as he spoke his final words—which, ideally, indicated a reunion with Christ. The idealized “Beautiful Death” was reproduced in plays, works of art, and best-selling novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
Eva lay back on her pillows; her hair hanging loosely about her face, her crimson cheeks contrasting painfully with the intense whiteness of her complexion and the thin contour of her limbs and features, and her large, soul-like eyes fixed earnestly on every one …
“I sent for you all, my dear friends,” said Eva, “because I love you. I love you all; and I have something to say to you, which I want you always to remember … I am going to leave you. In a few more weeks, you will see me no more … I want to speak to you about your souls.”4
The harsh reality of dying was never quite so beautiful for most everyday people. They strove for the simpler Christian ideal of the “Good Death” in which the sufferer did not die alone and away from home or, worst of all, unsaved.
The belief in the importance of a Good Death added considerably to the emotional devastation wrought by the Civil War. As if it weren’t bad enough to lose half of one’s family and, depending on where one resided, possibly a great deal more, much of the heartbreak of the war lay in its destruction of the Good Death, a vital cultural convention. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust puts it, “soldiers wrote home about comrades’ deaths in letters that resisted and reframed war’s carnage.”5 With words on paper, they transformed terrible deaths into Good Deaths, or maybe Okay Deaths—making them a little more tolerable for their survivors.
The shocking aggregate of death brought on by the Civil War here in the States coincided with a big death culture in Great Britain, where Queen Victoria had bowed out of social life in 1861 following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Until her own demise in 1901, Victoria absented herself from the public eye, instead hanging around her various houses clad in black mourning dress. Whether the wealthiest, chicest Brits were mostly inspired or mostly disgusted by this drastic display is up for debate. What is known is that all her life, Victoria had been a trendsetter, and that in nineteenth-century America and England alike, grief ruled fashion and custom with a grip so firm that its grasp remains at once an odd yet familiar sensation today.
The mourning for a father or mother is worn for one year. The first six months the proper dress is of solid black woolen goods trimmed with crape, black crape bonnet with black crape facings and black strings, black crape veil, collar and cuffs of black crape. Three months, black silk with crape trimming, white or black lace collar and cuffs, veil of tulle and white bonnet facings; and the last three months in gray, purple and violet. Mourning worn for a child is the same as that for a parent.
WALTER R. HOUGHTON, “Funerals,”
American Etiquette and Rules of Politeness, 1882
During the nineteenth century’s golden age of death, good taste stipulated the donning of specific mourning clothing, especially for the middle and upper classes. A number of retailers made a tidy living from selling “widows’ weeds,” and many women of poorer classes made do by dyeing their everyday dresses and then bleaching them back again once their mourning was through.
A truly stunning guide to dress for every stage of mourning can be found in an 1881 handbook to manners by John H. Young bearing the impressive title Our Deportment: or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society; Including Forms for Letters, Invitations, Etc., Etc. Also, Valuable Suggestions on Home Culture and Training.
Since public grief was mainly the woman’s province, it was toward her that rules of mourning were directed. Like most social arbiters of the era, Young, who took his rules from “an authority competent to speak on these matters,” prescribed widows two years of mourning. During the first year—or “deep” mourning phase—they were to wear “solid black woolen goods, collar and cuffs of folded untrimmed crape, a simple crape bonnet, and a long, thick, black crape veil.” Mourning bonnets ranged in style from fitted caps to huge, cone-shaped shells, and the attached veils usually extended down to a woman’s waist. This first year, the widow donned little to none of the jewelry or other trimmings so dear to her era. In year two, restrictions were diminished: she was now allowed mourning jewelry, black silk, and “a shorter veil.” Young’s guide called for twelve months’ mourning for one’s deceased child or parent, six months for a grandparent or sibling, six months for “a friend who leaves you an inheritance,” and three months for an uncle, aunt, nephew, or niece.6
To announce that they were in mourning, women trimmed their dresses with a fabric called crape, a stiff, black gauze used only in this ubiquitous corner of the fashion world. The world’s chief manufacturer of mourning crape was a British company called Courtaulds, and Courtaulds made its fortune from the fabric.
There’s an official history of the company penned by late economic historian Donald Cuthbert Coleman that reads surprisingly like a sly, clever gossip column. The book details the exploits both of the company’s founder, George Courtauld, whom Coleman gleefully characterizes as a sort of an obstreperous boob, and of his son, Samuel Courtauld, who lofted the company to its nineteenth-century zenith of crape maker to the world.
It is a challenge to stand in the Museum of Funeral Customs, to gaze upon this now-graying trim, and to imagine fortunes being made on it. It is so ugly. Though its base material is silk, I cannot survey the dresses in these cases and even think that sleek, luxuriant word. The mourning crape is dull and—you can just tell—stiff and scratchy, too. It does nothing but make a dreary dress even more unpleasant. This is kind of wonderfully obstinate in the face of fashion. Grief sucks, and while I’m experiencing it, I don’t want to look pretty.
In the great race for unpretty, companies that made crape competed with one another to an extreme. In the Courtaulds’ biography, Coleman writes of “secret rooms, specially locked doors, industrial espionage, the painstaking interrogations of employees newly secured from competitors, secrecy clauses in contracts: all these and more were practiced in the course of the nineteenth century by Samuel Courtauld & Co., and some, probably all, by the small number of their competitors in the mourning crape trade.”7 At the heart of this intrigue lay top-secret methods of taking crape’s raw material, silk, and dulling, crimping, and stiffening it to the consumer’s satisfaction. Not some baser material, mind you. Silk. It’s as if the manufacturers were working out their own grieving by bastardizing pure, beautiful things.
Black predominates over all colors. The showy costumes once worn have given way to more sober colors.
WALTER R. HOUGHTON, “Dress,”
American Etiquette and Rules of Politeness, 1882
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when people were dying from epidemics, childbirth, and farm and factory accidents, not to mention the deadliest conflict in American history—the Civil War killed more than six hundred thousand soldiers and an undocumented number of civilians—a single person’s grieving periods for different deaths were pretty much guaranteed to overlap. As a result, a woman might wear mourning clothes for years and years when, say, the death of her mother took place relatively soon after that of her husband. It would be a world of darkness.
Here in the museum, the coats are made of black alpaca. The stockings are black, and the long, black dresses are made of matte fabrics, since according to governing social directives in the late 1800s, it was disrespectful for a lady to wear anything—a skirt, pin, or button—that reflected light during her initial period of “deep mourning.”8 She was even cautioned against wearing undergarments that were not black, for what if she should have to lift her skirts a bit while engaging in some taxing activity—like, say, walking? In the nineteenth century, semaphore and symbolism ruled over all, especially for the classes who could afford it, and an accidental flash of white petticoats could send entirely the wrong signal regarding a woman’s true level of respect for her husband’s parents who had died six months before.
The very rich could also afford to hold credence in the popular superstition that it was bad luck to hang on to old mourning clothing following a particular grieving period. The Courtaulds’ bio rushes to point out that there is no evidence anywhere that clothiers had a role in generating such beliefs. “They did not need to invent them,” writes Coleman; obsessive Victorian sentimentality about death did the job on its own, thank you.9 Still, the practice of tossing old mourning clothes to buy new ones certainly didn’t do any damage to the pocketbooks of company executives.
The curse of the American home today is useless bric-a-brac.… In our chambers, perhaps, we commit the grossest violations of good taste and good health … a Franklin stove that is never lighted; we hang a wreath of wax flowers in a glass case on the walls, adding, perhaps, a coffin-plate to add a cheerful tone to the room; a carpet riotous with the most gorgeous roses is put on the floor, and then, after we have carefully pulled down every shade in the room, so as to exclude God’s pure sunshine and get a nice, musty and cemeterial smell in the room, we have what we call, in America, a parlor.
EDWARD BOK, “Is It Worth While?”
Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1900
The Victorians invented neither the knickknack nor the accessory, but they certainly engendered the hare-like proliferation of both. To be fair, the colonial Americans who had come before wore mourning jewelry too, in the form of small lockets and gold pins. In the 1800s, however, ubiquitous public mourning cranked up the popular phrase “Memento Mori,” or “Remember you must die,” to an ear-splitting pitch. This phrase became a pulse, a drumbeat behind an eruption of death-wear. It was helped along, no doubt, by the rise of industry and a new middle class who could afford “the niceties of a funeral, family plot and monument, along with mourning clothing and memorial arts for the home.”10
“Memorial arts for the home” meant metal coffin plates bearing the name of the deceased, which were often removed from coffins before burial and kept as mementos. It also meant needlepoint memorializing a lost relative. In the industrial age, needlepoint kits were mass-manufactured and snapped up by middle-class women and girls, who created sofa cushions and wall hangings that bore homey mottoes such as “Absent but Not Forgotten,” “Gone Home,” and “We Mourn Our Loss.”11
Wearable death mementos were also extremely popular. Along with their black coats, dresses, bonnets, and veils, women in the latter stages of mourning sported all sorts of brooches: black and big as fists, or small and gold-framed with painted scenes. They wore black beaded necklaces that featured pendants shaped like coffins, or small hand-painted portraits or photographs of the deceased. They wore bracelets made of beaded jet, a type of fossilized coal popular for use in mourning jewelry. Jet was heavy, and one fad involved donning long chains of the stuff, some of these reaching nearly to the floor in length and several pounds in weight.
But the accessories that found the most longevity and variety were those containing the hair of the deceased. Men and women had been sporting sentimental rings and brooches with snippets of hair since colonial days, but in the late 1800s, the popularity of what came to be called “hair craft” surged and exploded into a shock of varieties. This was the golden age of young people giving their mothers or sweethearts pendants or brooches containing a portrait and a few locks of hair, sometimes woven into little mats surrounding the image. These accessories became ready-made death-wear once the son or fiancé died.
It’s difficult to overstate how intricate these pieces could get. At one glass display cabinet at the Museum of Funeral Customs, I puzzle over a label. “Hair watch fob,” it says. The fob is flat. It’s as wide as two ordinary watchbands and long as a child’s swimming ribbon, capped with gold-colored clasps, but where’s the hair? Then, lightning-flash quickly, I realize that I’m looking at it. The whole fob is made of more than a dozen tiny braids of hair, interlaced to create one sleek, brown chain. It’s chilling to realize that I’m looking at the actual hair of the dead person. In a way, I’m experiencing the fob as it was meant to be experienced—looking at it and speculating about the person from whom the hair came, now anonymous dust in a grave.
For decades, hair craft was the sentimental height of popular fashion. One church-produced consolation book from 1852 opines, “Of all keepsakes, memorials, relics—most dearly, most devotedly, do I love a little lock of hair; and Oh! When the head it beautified has long mouldered in the dust, how spiritual seems the undying glossiness of the sad memento! Aye, a lock of hair is far better than any picture—it is a part of the beloved object herself.”12 Ladies’ magazines ran regular “How-To” columns on weaving your own hair earrings, doilies, wreaths, purses, even—ready?—tiaras.
Looking at one such project, from a midcentury issue of Godey’s Lady Book, I imagine that the upper- and emerging middle-class housewives of the day were the first to toss their craft instructions across the room. This “Make It at Home” project from 1851 features the most intricate scene imaginable, of tiny flowers and feathers pressed in glass. It looks painstaking, delicate, and nothing like human hair. Except it is. Each frond and stem in the suggested project is actually dozens of strands, curled, twisted, and knotted around the thinnest of wires, which are then bent and looped to look like the tiny buds and fronds. Thankfully, one paragraph of the directions reads frankly to those would-be crafters who were not creative savants: “We now come to a branch of the hair work which depends more on the artistic skill and delicacy of touch of the worker, and on practice, than on any instructions we can give.”13
All women’s tasks of the time, from washing clothes to cooking a potato, involved a degree of complexity and sweat that would make most of us today blanch. However, while strides were taking place in the name of modernity and expedience in other realms (the early part of the century saw innovations like tin cans and matches, while the latter half saw the appearance of the sewing machine, radar, and Coca-Cola), mourning was designed to be hard. You had buried your brother; you would stay up nights over a candle sweating over the thinnest pins wrapped in his hair. You would wear scratchy clothes and mourning veils for months. It would not be convenient or subtle, and you would not be comfortable.
Were the Victorians weird? And I mean “weird” in all its uncanniest, witchiest vibrations. Standing here in the era’s sea of mourning darkness certainly feels foreign. Directly in front of me, over a fake fire-place, hangs a mourning wreath. More than a hundred years ago, a real person wove this from her recently deceased mother’s hair; it’s both so fascinating and so repellent that I can’t decide whether to take a step back or a step forward. And so, for a moment, I am locked in place, sort of rocking on my feet. Is this any odder, I wonder, than keeping a vase of one’s mother’s ashes in the same spot? Actually, these days many of us are likely to burn the body and then sprinkle its remains over a beautiful place we’ll never return to, a beloved garden or a majestic body of water. Then there’s the hippest trend of the moment: keeping the ashes close by wearing them inside a locket. It’s 1860s fashion redux.
Only less viscerally so. We see hair and we think: human person. We might even know the person from her hair, which is just not true of ashes. In terms of emotion, there’s something much cleaner about ashes. Something less relic-like, less macabre.
Macabre. This word is uncomplimentary. It refers to things that horrify us because of their association with death. It’s a word I’ve never pegged on any of the who-knows-how-many violent movie and tv deaths I’ve borne witness to. Closing an intimate relative’s eyes, shutting his mouth, and digging his grave—that’s the stuff of my real nightmares.
Americans 150 years ago did these things all the time. I’m not saying they enjoyed them, but they did sort of revel in them. The long, drawn-out death scene in Victorian drama was huge, a guaranteed winner because it was something viewers could relate to. They’d all seen it half a dozen times or more, if not in such maudlin form. Social historians have made much of the parallel between these lavish death scenes and modern sex scenes in books and movies; sex and death, they say, have swapped places in the American psyche. One is overt and the other is hidden, where it once was the other way around.
The way the Victorians lingered over death went a lot deeper, however, than the clothes they wore and the jet chains they lugged around. During the period when a widow was required by social directive to cover her face in a veil and trim everything she wore with scratchy crape, she was also exempted from social obligations, especially those marked by levity. The mourner wasn’t invited to weddings and wasn’t expected to put in appearances at other events either. In other words, no one tried to distract the mourner, man or woman, from feeling sad. Public mourning was one time when you, Victorian mid-to-upper-class bereaved, were not expected to face your normal social obligations at all, a blessed mercy in a society utterly obsessed with appearances. And if you acted a little withdrawn or rude or crazy around other people, such behavior was entirely permissible.
Then again, there’s that twenty-year-old widow forced to spend nearly two years “mourning” the forty-two-year-old husband she never really cared for. The new wife expected to go into mourning for recently dead wife number one. The second wife directed, by at least one set of rules, to mourn the death of her husband’s first wife’s parents. The whale-boned corset of social expectation bit both ways.
All this changed, and quickly, around the start of the twentieth century as the Victorian age gave way to something less restrained. For one thing, scientific discovery was blossoming as a means of explaining humanity’s place in the world. Disease epidemics were being newly fought and prevented. Advances were being made in public health, sanitation, and hygiene, prolonging life. In a very short period of time, death itself—the everyday experience of it—was dramatically curtailed.
Take this statistic: In the waning days of the nineteenth century, the infant mortality rate was more than 125 deaths per 1,000 live births. Just forty years later, that figure had dropped to fewer than 50 per 1,000. In the same timeframe, life expectancy for adults leapt from forty-seven to over sixty. As health and science transformed the world, people saw less death, and their relationship to it changed radically. Death had always been a frequent reminder of mystery that cut across all walks of life. Now, in place of that mystery, scientifically explainable life was the source of fascination. In this new milieu, a passion play surrounding the drama of a single deathbed—Little Eva, say—seemed, well, old-fashioned and more than a little morbid.
Jon Austin, the director of the Museum of Funeral Customs, tells me that Great Britain changed its official message on mourning during the First World War. Brits were hit hard by wartime casualties, and government leaders looked out their windows and saw waves of grieving citizenry, all in black dress and black mood. Seeking to amplify morale and patriotism, they began to encourage a new message: Their soldiers had died for a noble cause; to grieve too long and loudly was to disgrace it. The idea of bucking up for the sake of country caught on, both in England and in the United States, where casualties of the Great War were far fewer. In the ensuing decades, especially Stateside, people tossed their widow’s weeds, and public mourning times were abridged from years to weeks.
The etiquette books changed too. Rather than emphasizing the importance of sufficient displays of grief, the new guides focused on tastefully suppressing it. A 1923 etiquette author named Lillian Eichler spends three of twenty pages on funeral decorum railing against the tastelessness of Victorian mourning accessories, processions, and pomp. She calls such emotionality “savage” and writes, “Simplicity characterizes the entire service among well-bred people everywhere.”14
Such standard-bearers of politesse spoke, and people listened. It did not take long for the old adornments of death, once discarded, to grow cobwebby and strange. The United States in the early twentieth century was absorbed with progress and modernity, and by the late 1920s, the same craft magazines that had once printed how-to guides for hair jewelry ran articles about the concept as a strange historic curiosity. By 1945, after a second world war, a writer profiling the antique practice for Hobbies magazine writes, “The gruesome idea of wearing jewelry made from the hair of a loved one who had died is hard for the matter-of-fact person of today to grasp.”15
For the practical person of 1945, mourning looked much like it does today. Remembering and grieving the dead had transformed from an official process with a sanctioned public face to an amorphous something one “got over” in private. The First World War had introduced the idea that the dead soldier was someone you shouldn’t grieve “too much,” and the notion of bravery in the face of grief spread to people mourning civilians in peacetime, too.16 This shift in feeling was no natural, grassroots movement; it was prescribed. The 1923 etiquette manual penned by Eichler is filled with contempt for gauche citizens who still brought their grieving into the public eye. In a sea change from the books of forty years before, Eichler recommended that “[t]he ladies of a bereaved family should not see callers, even the most intimate friends, unless they are able to control their grief. It is a source of discomfort to the visitor.” Along with other social standard-setters of her time, Eichler urged the woman whose grief was “uncontrollable to strongly consider absenting herself” from the funeral of her husband or child, not because it was unladylike to attend funerals, but to prevent disruption. “With the growing taste for privacy and simplicity,” she wrote—and pay especial attention to the choice of verb—“foolish demonstrations of grief, expressed in outward display, have been eliminated.” Eliminated. It calls to mind the caprice in a shift in hemline, or some deadlier move.
In terms of fashion, the wearing of black during this period was still accepted. However, a key difference emerged: “There is no ironclad rule concerning mourning,” writes Eichler, “and one may or may not wear it.”17 Suddenly, mourners were given the option: You could let the world know through your clothing and your behavior that you were mourning, or not. Everything else in the chapter, however, fairly screamed for its “elimination” as quickly as possible. The rebellion had begun. And in this way mourning retreated from public rite to private practice. It went underground.