Death has always called for ritual. And since the earliest civilizations, those rituals have found their way onto the body — in amulets, brooches, rings, and lockets designed not to beautify the living, but to honor, remember, and mourn the dead. Mourning jewelry is one of the most intimate and enduring art forms in human history, a tradition that spans millennia and reached its extraordinary peak during the reign of Queen Victoria, when grief was elevated to a fine art.

Mourning Jewelry: Ancient Roots

The impulse to wear symbols of death and remembrance stretches back to antiquity. Ancient Egyptians fashioned amulets from lapis lazuli and carnelian in the shapes of scarabs, the eye of Horus, and other protective symbols to accompany the deceased — and sometimes the bereaved — on their journey through grief. These objects served a dual purpose: they protected the dead in the afterlife and anchored the living to the memory of those they had lost.

In ancient Rome, mourners wore iron rings during formal mourning periods, a deliberate contrast to the gold adornments of ordinary life. The Romans also preserved locks of hair from the deceased inside medallions, a practice that would resurface centuries later with remarkable emotional intensity. Even in prehistoric burial sites, archaeologists have found grave goods and personal ornaments that suggest the dead were memorialized through objects worn close to the body.

Mourning Jewelry in Ancient Egypt

In ancient Egypt, jewelry played a significant role in funerary practices and burial rituals. The Egyptians believed in an afterlife, where the deceased would need their earthly possessions. This jewelry, often found in tombs, included amulets and charms inscribed with protective symbols to ensure safe passage to the afterlife.

Mourning Jewelry in Ancient Rome

The Romans also had their mourning customs, which included the use of jewelry. Women would wear dark clothes and mourning rings, often inscribed with the name of the deceased and phrases like "Ave atque vale" (Hail and farewell).

Mourning Jewelry in The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

During the Middle Ages, mourning jewelry became more subdued, reflecting the era's somber attitude toward death. However, the Renaissance brought a resurgence of interest in commemorative items. In medieval Europe, the focus was on religious symbols and the afterlife. Mourning jewelry from this period often featured crosses, saints, and angels, reflecting the deep Christian faith of the time.

The Renaissance era saw a revival of classical themes and a fascination with humanism, influencing mourning jewelry design. Pieces became more elaborate, incorporating portrait miniatures, cameos & intaglios, and more intricate symbolism.

Mourning Jewelry in The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Mourning jewelry gained significant popularity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England, where it became an integral part of mourning customs.

The Renaissance and Stuart Eras

By the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, mourning jewelry had evolved into a sophisticated and codified practice. Tudor and Stuart England produced some of the earliest clearly recognizable mourning pieces: rings bearing tiny enameled skulls, coffins, and skeletons, inscribed with the name and death date of the deceased. These memento mori pieces — from the Latin phrase meaning "remember that you must die" — were designed as much to remind the wearer of their own mortality as to commemorate the departed.

Following the execution of King Charles I in 1649, royalist sympathizers wore mourning lockets bearing his portrait miniature as an act of devotion and defiance. This politicization of grief jewelry set a precedent: the objects carried not just personal sorrow but social and ideological weight. Hair was often incorporated into pieces from this period, woven into delicate patterns under glass or coiled inside locket chambers.

The death of Queen Mary II in 1694 and the subsequent widespread mourning set a precedent for the use of mourning jewelry in England. During this period, mourning jewelry often featured black enamel and detailed engravings.

Georgian Sentimentality

The eighteenth century saw the rise of neoclassicism, influencing the design of mourning jewelry. Pieces became more refined, featuring classical motifs and a focus on simplicity and elegance.

• Symbolizing the soul's departure from the body, urns became a common feature in mourning jewelry.
• Painted on ivory or enamel, these portraits were often encased in gold or silver frames, sometimes surrounded by pearls symbolizing tears.

The Georgian era (roughly 1714–1837) saw mourning jewelry become more elaborate and emotionally expressive. Hairwork — the intricate art of weaving, braiding, and coiling human hair into jewelry — reached new heights of craftsmanship. Rings, brooches, and bracelets were constructed entirely from braided hair, or featured hair arranged under crystal or glass in pastoral scenes: weeping willows, urns, and clasped hands were popular motifs. These pieces were often worked by the bereaved themselves, making them acts of devotional labor as much as objects of adornment.

Jet, a form of fossilized wood with a deep, lustrous black, began to appear in Georgian mourning pieces, though it would not fully dominate until the Victorian period. Gold and seed pearls — pearls symbolizing tears — were also commonly used. The language of these objects was legible to contemporaries in a way that feels almost lost to modern eyes: a woven lock of hair coiled beneath beveled crystal spoke a whole grammar of love and grief.

The Victorian Era: The Golden Age of Mourning Jewelry

The Victorian era (1837-1901) marked the peak of mourning jewelry's popularity, driven in large part by Queen Victoria's prolonged mourning for her husband, Prince Albert. She wore black for the remaining forty years of her life, slept with a cast of Albert's hand beside her, and transformed the entire culture of her empire through the sheer force of her grief. Victorian mourning jewelry became one of the era's defining art forms — and an entire industry rose to meet the demand.

Jet from Whitby, a small fishing town on the Yorkshire coast, became the defining material of high Victorian mourning. True Whitby jet is warm to the touch, lightweight, and takes a brilliant polish, making it ideal for carving into the intricate cameos, crosses, and floral designs that adorned brooches, necklaces, and earrings. Queen Victoria wore Whitby jet herself, and the Whitby jet industry expanded enormously to serve the bereaved women of her empire. At its peak in the 1870s, the industry employed hundreds of craftsmen.

But jet was only the beginning. French jet — a cheaper black glass imitation — appeared for those who could not afford the real thing. Vulcanite, a hardened rubber compound, and bog oak from Irish peat bogs also served as affordable alternatives. The hierarchy of mourning materials mirrored the class structures of Victorian society with unnerving precision.

Victorian mourning jewelry was governed by strict social codes. The etiquette manuals of the period laid out detailed prescriptions: a widow was expected to wear "deep mourning" — entirely black, including her jewelry — for the first two years after her husband's death. Only after this period could she gradually introduce "half mourning," incorporating muted purple, grey, and mauve, and jewelry set with amethysts, pearls, or white enamel. Young children were not spared; even they wore black armbands and small jet brooches. The length and intensity of mourning was calibrated precisely to the closeness of the relationship: a year and a day for a parent, six months for a sibling.

Common themes included weeping willows to symbolize grief, doves to symbolize peace, and forget-me-nots to symbolize remembrance.

"Sacred to the Memory of 5 Children" Mourning Ring, circa 1800,  Source - Wikimedia Commons

Intricately braided or woven hair of the deceased was used to create rings, brooches, and necklaces, often accompanied by inscriptions of love and remembrance.

Hair remained central to Victorian mourning practice, but the artistry had become extraordinary. Professional hairworkers created elaborate table displays, wreaths, and framed pieces from the hair of entire families — sometimes spanning multiple generations. Lockets were designed with secret chambers to hold a curl of hair or a miniature portrait. Rings were engraved with the name, age, and date of death of the departed, then filled with black enamel and set with the deceased's hair under crystal. Some of the most touching pieces were simple and domestic: a child's lock of hair sealed under a plain oval brooch, the only ornamentation a tiny handwritten note on the reverse.

The symbolism embedded in Victorian mourning jewelry was dense and meaningful. Serpents biting their own tails represented eternity. Ivy signified fidelity and undying memory. Anchors spoke of hope; forget-me-nots, of course, of remembrance. Weeping willows and urns carried classical associations with mourning. Angels, hands clasped in farewell, and empty chairs appeared as motifs across every medium. These were not decorative choices made at random — they were a language, and those who wore the pieces were fluent in it.

A Modern Revival

Today, mourning jewelry has found a niche market among collectors and enthusiasts. Antique pieces are highly sought after, valued for their historical significance and unique beauty. There's also a growing interest in contemporary mourning jewelry, with artists and designers creating modern pieces that pay homage to traditional themes while incorporating new materials and techniques.

The impulse that drove an ancient Egyptian to press a carved scarab into a loved one's grave goods is not so different from the one that moves a person today to commission a diamond made from their grandmother's ashes. Across five thousand years and countless forms, mourning jewelry has always asked the same question: how do we carry those we have lost? And it has always offered the same answer — on the body, close to the heart, where loss and love are indistinguishable from one another.

If you're lucky enough to own a piece of antique mourning jewelry, wearing it can be a beautiful way to connect with the past.

Frequently Asked Questions: Mourning Jewelry

01
Is Victorian mourning jewelry valuable?

• Antique mourning jewelry has seen steady growth in collector interest over the past decade, and pieces that are well-preserved, authenticated, and provenance-documented tend to hold their value strongly in the antiques market. Prices vary enormously: simple vulcanite or bog oak brooches can sell for under $100, while gold-set jet pieces with engraved inscriptions, intact hairwork, or known history regularly reach $500–$2,000 at auction. As with any antique, condition, authenticity, and the desirability of the specific piece drive value more than the category alone.

02
How do I tell the difference between real Whitby jet and imitations like French jet or vulcanite?

• The simplest test is temperature: genuine Whitby jet is warm to the touch because it is fossilized wood, while French jet (black glass) feels cold and noticeably heavier. Rubbing Whitby jet on unglazed porcelain leaves a brown streak; glass leaves a white one. Vulcanite, a hardened rubber, can be identified by a faint sulfurous smell when rubbed vigorously. Bog oak has a slightly grainy texture under close inspection.

03
Did men wear mourning jewelry, or was it only women?

• Men absolutely wore mourning jewelry, though their pieces were less prominent than women's. Victorian men were expected to observe mourning dress just as women were, and their jewelry took forms suited to masculine attire: mourning rings, watch fobs, cufflinks, and stick pins, often set in jet, black enamel, or onyx. Men's mourning periods were generally shorter than women's under Victorian etiquette, but the practice of wearing commemorative jewelry was by no means limited to one gender.

04
What is the difference between mourning jewelry and memento mori jewelry?

• The terms are related but not interchangeable. Memento mori refers to objects designed to remind the wearer of their own mortality, usually through imagery like skulls, hourglasses, and coffins. These pieces were especially common in the 16th and 17th centuries and were more philosophical than personal. Mourning jewelry, by contrast, is made to commemorate a specific individual who has died, and is often inscribed with that person's name, age, or dates. Over time, the two traditions overlapped — Victorian mourning jewelry frequently incorporated memento mori symbols — but a skull ring from 1650 and a hairwork locket from 1870 serve quite different emotional purposes.

05
Was mourning jewelry a global practice?

• While the Victorian tradition of mourning jewelry was most elaborate and codified in Britain, the practice was far from uniquely British. In the United States, the death of George Washington in 1799 sparked a significant wave of mourning jewelry, and American hairwork and locket traditions closely paralleled the British ones throughout the 19th century. Continental Europe had its own mourning customs, with French and German pieces showing distinct stylistic differences. Mourning jewelry also existed in earlier forms across many cultures — from ancient Egyptian protective amulets to Roman iron rings — suggesting that the human impulse to wear grief is genuinely universal, even if the Victorian British gave it its most elaborate expression.

At Walton’s Jewelry, we have more than 50 years of experience serving Historic Downtown Franklin and the greater Nashville community. Each member of our team has trained at The Gemological Institute of America and has a deep passion for preserving the history and beauty of antique jewelry. Whether you are a Tennessee local looking to stop by our showroom, or prefer to view our selection virtually, we invite you to explore our newest arrivals and reach out with any questions you may have.