Love or Mourning: Objects of Sentiment

Nestled amongst a mixture of old necklaces and coins sat this small locket, containing a small lock of brown hair that was beginning to spring from its glass cover. 

I acquired this piece from a box of "old stuff" gifted by my nan as she moved into a new flat, which included a variety of items loosely linked to my great grandparents and their families. So, at least we can narrow its origins down to anywhere around Dublin and London prior to 1930!

Tokens of love and mourning have existed for millennia, but the fascination with hair jewellery and ornaments in Britain is a particularly (but not exclusively) nineteenth century one. In Sentimental Cuts, Christiane Holm writes that mourning culture in England became "no longer defined by its economic but rather by its intimate and emotional value"(1) from the eighteenth century. With the increased attention to subjective emotions and sentimentality that came along with the Romanticism movement, it's not surprising that the popular imagery of grief and love became more entwined with something as intensely personal as a lock of hair. 

To us now, it might seem very morbid or unsettling to own, let alone wear such an object. Certainly, if this was a horror movie, the frightened protagonist might find this at the root of the entity possessing their house.

But, as always, human emotions are tricky and rapidly changing things. The longevity, yet fragility of hair tied to its closeness to an individual made it an apt comparison to a person's feelings and relationships. As one American women's magazine discussed in the 1850s: 

Hair is at once the most delicate and lasting of our materials and survives us, like love. (2)

Applying this idea of love and relationships to our object, what struck me the most about it on closer inspection were its marks of wear. The gold embellishment on the top link, where a chain would sit, has been completely rubbed smooth and the front glass panel has shifted to expose a small strand of hair. Anyone who wears necklaces often will certainly be familiar with the movement of touching and turning a charm in times of stress or as a habit- perhaps you are doing so right now! 

This idea of repeated movement and touch affecting the objects we discover reminded me of Sue Brunning's videos on Anglo-Saxon swords (3) ; here, the gilding on the pommel had been worn down from frequent worrying and movement, in a way that is somewhat similar to our necklace. 

Although we should be cautious when projecting our own feelings onto individuals in the past, material evidence of wear such as this can provide clues for how and how often objects were used. In this case, we can tell that the object was well-cared for, but frequently worn and touched. Whether this movement was to seek strength and reassurance like an old warrior rubbing his sword, or as an absentminded habit, we unfortunately do not know. 

Still, this object was never fully "discarded" in the modern sense- it does not sit at the bottom of a landfill somewhere, but has been forgotten about amongst a mixture of items of economic (coins) and personal (necklaces) importance. This surprisingly seems to sum up the unusual space the object occupied in the mid-Victorian imagination.

Whilst Victorian hair jewellery reached its peak around that period (1850s), by the end of the nineteenth century this culture of death in Britain was, ironically, dying away. "No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept...nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene", writes Deborah Lutz in The Dead Still Among Us (4). 

Arguably as life and death became increasingly the realm of the scientific in "Western" cultures from the late-nineteenth century, with shared emotions, belief and sentiment pushed aside as something "lesser" and "Other", we have lost a lot of the comfort and celebration that many mourning practices globally still retain. 

So instead of feeling disgusted or unnerved by having this piece of jewellery, whether it was a token of love during someone's lifetime or a relic of the deceased, I feel honoured and excited to be close to something (and someone) so loved and treasured. It is an object I will continue to think of whenever I nervously twist my jewellery in times of stress.

- Char x

1) Holm, Christiane, "Sentimental Cuts: Eighteenth-Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair", Eighteenth-Century Studies (Fall, 2004), Vol 38, No.1, pp.139-143 (p.139).

2) Godey's Lady's Book (c.1850), Cited in Virginia L. Rahm, "MHS Collections: Human Hair Ornaments", Minnesota History (Summer, 1974), Vol. 44, No.2, pp.70-74 (p.71).

3) See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIFpeBwfvbc 

4) Lutz, Deborah, "The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relic, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture", Victorian Literature and Culture (2011), Vol.39, No.1, pp.127-142 (p.127).