Victorian Mourning Customs

from A True Friend, 1872

"We long for the day when this custom shall be obsolete. It is unbecoming the truly afflicted one. The wearer says by the black garment, “I have lost a dear friend. I am in deep sorrow.” But true grief does not wish to parade itself before the eye of the stranger; much less does it assert its extent. The stricken one naturally goes apart from the world to pour out the tears. Real affliction seeks privacy. It is no respect to the departed friend to say we are in sorrow. If we have real grief it will be discovered.

When God has entered a household in the awful chastisement of death, it is time for religious meditation and communion with God on the part of the survivors. How sadly out of place, then, are the milliner and dressmaker, the tying on of dresses and the trimming of bonnets. There is something profane in exciting the vanity of a young girl by fitting a waist or trying on a hat, when the corpse of a father is lying in an adjoining room. It is a sacrilege to drag the widow forth from grief to be fitted for a gown, or to select a veil. It is often terribly oppressive to the poor. The widow left desolate, with half a dozen little children, the family means already reduced by the long sickness of the father, must draw on her scanty purse to pay for a new wardrobe for herself and children, throwing away the goodly stock of garments already prepared, when she likely knows not where she is to get bread for her little ones. Truly may fashion be called a tyrant, when it robs a widow of her last dollar. Surely your sorrow will not be tioned, even if you should not call in the milliner to display it. Do not in your afflictions help on a custom which will turn the afflictions of your poorer neighbor to deeper poverty, as well as sorrow.

Mme. Demorest, in her new book, the Dressmaker, speaking of the French, says: “I believe they never wear crape at all, and I cannot see how any one, living dead, is the worse for it. In hot weather, to condemn mourners to the use of black cloth is a mild form of suttee and should in common charity be abolished.”
It was the rule at the Court of the Byzantine Empire from the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine the Great, when the father, mother, wife, son, or grandson of the emperor died, while they were reigning, for the sovereign to be clothed in white garments for as long a period as he considered proper; afterwards to change them for plain yellow; then for yellow embroidered with and precious stones, edged with trimmings of purple; and then to resume his usual imperial costume. During the period of the emperor’s white mourning, every one of his subjects, from the highest to the lowest, had to wear black; and during the yellow mourning the near relatives of the dead had to be attired in black for forty days, even in the presence of the emperor; afterwards in blue, until he went out of mourning, when theirs also expired.

HOME

(c) Copyright 2000.
 

04/22/2006