Widows Unveiled: Fashionable Mourning in Late Victorian New York

Preface and Note on Sources

The most complete studies of nineteenth-century American death and dying rituals are social histories written from the 1960s to the 1980s.[1] Other histories that examine material mourning have looked at Europe, sometimes generalizing American culture as the same.[2] The out-of-print exhibition catalog A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America is a comprehensive, well-written and -illustrated scholarly book on American material mourning. However, like other texts on American mourning, it treats the Victorian period as one homogeneous entity. In reality, new attitudes of daily life, fashion, and society emerged after the Civil War, and certain customs—such as creating mourning samplers or practicing other mourning parlor arts—dissipated around midcentury. Further, the late Victorian period marked a time of increasing industrialization and, with the rise of department stores, increasing consumption of ready-made, mass-produced goods. Changing attitudes in American society during this time had a great effect on mourning culture. Cultural historian Karen Halttunen has described that in midcentury, about 1830–1870, sentiment in thought and feeling was essential to daily life, but by the 1870s, Americans embraced the theatricality of daily life.[3] Mourning was part of this theatricality, and the growing perception of social rituals as performative acts is essential to understanding why widows—even those suddenly impoverished following the loss of their husbands—practiced material mourning. Further, mourning fashions more closely aligned with everyday fashions after the war.[4] This change, combined with the improvement of printing technology and a significantly greater availability of etiquette books, periodicals, and paper garment patterns, meant that mourning became embedded in life in an increasingly unremarkable manner.

It is a common misconception that American mourning customs developed after England’s Queen Victoria began a lifetime of black-clad mourning in 1861, when her husband, Prince Albert, died. Material mourning began long before, with mourning costume worn in the United States since the seventeenth century.[5] Two centuries later American writers certainly looked to English—as well as, importantly, French—society for guidance on various elements of fashionability, and many customs were based on those of their European counterparts, but the English queen was rarely the focus of etiquette instruction. American mourning should be considered as unique to American life and society. Further, this book looks to New York whenever possible in order to eliminate artificialities created by regional differences.

In this intensive study, the United States, the New York urban space specifically, is treated as a distinct place and the post–Civil War period as a distinct time period. In examining the textual, material, and visual culture surrounding or regarding the late Victorian New York widow, this book serves as an addition to existing scholarship and expands current understanding of both mourning rituals generally and the widow’s experience specifically.

The primary texts used in this book are most revealing of the widow’s experience, and, as will be demonstrated, were often inconsistent and difficult to follow. The most frequently cited periodicals are the New-York Tribune, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue. The New-York Tribune, founded as a penny paper in 1841, was distributed nationwide and by the early 1870s became the dominant news authority in the United States.[6] The Tribune avoided the muckraking yellow journalism of its competitors and instead included a range of political, social, and cultural commentary. Stories about sex and crime were presented as cautionary, emblematic of the paper’s moralistic nature.[7] Articles on mourning etiquette appeared frequently, and the advice given likely favored a conservative approach, but its inexpensive price and popularity meant that its guidance was absorbed by a range of New Yorkers, from the lower middle class to the mercantile elite, and therefore can be seen as representative of widespread beliefs. Like the Tribune, the New York Times was founded as a penny paper, in 1851 (called the New-York Daily Times until 1857), and had moralistic overtones, though distinctly catered to a more intelligent audience.[8]

Harper’s Bazaar, conversely, was a women’s monthly magazine that cost $4 per year; in 1876, that was the cost of feeding a family of five a beef dinner every night for two weeks.[9] The magazine, based in New York, anticipated a middle-class readership at minimum; it was for the fashionable, not the workaday. First begun in 1867, it had a circulation of 80,000 within ten years and published fashion plates, fiction, humor, patterns, and articles deemed of interest to women—those on domesticity, decoration, and gardening, for instance.[10]Vogue, first published in the early 1890s and also based in New York, was a competitor to Harper’s, and by the 1910s, was a class-based elite-only magazine. Its articles were decidedly fashionable, and catered strictly to the wealthy.

Generally speaking, Christian publications opposed mourning rituals as unholy. Writers in Christian Union and the Quaker publications Friends’ Review and Friends’ Intelligencer used a fervent tone to present negative or controversial aspects of mourning. More mainstream periodicals sometimes reprinted these religion-driven articles, indicating that their ideas on mourning traveled beyond their initial audiences.

Etiquette books used in this study were chosen for their focus on New York society, rather than American society more generally, whenever possible. Abby Buchanan Longstreet, who authored Social Etiquette of New York (1888), and Ellin Craven Learned of The Etiquette of New York To-day (1906) each wrote many etiquette books, and can be seen as contemporary authorities. Also cited is Collier’s Cyclopedia, published by Peter Fenelon Collier, who was a well-respected businessman in New York high society. He printed and sold more than 52 million books, and his Collier’s Weekly magazine was widely read nationwide.[11]

This study, which incorporates not only an extensive overview of primary texts, but also published and unpublished material from a variety of previously disparate sources, including anthropological and sociological scholarship, fashion studies, museum catalogs, and archival material, will provide a fuller, more in-depth look at widows and mourning in Victorian culture in order to theorize the purpose and effects of mourning etiquette on widows as well as the widows’ experiences navigating such rituals. It will fill in research gaps and identify examples that demonstrate ritualized mourning as extraordinarily ingrained in society and perpetuated well into the twentieth century.

See, for example, Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1982); David E. Stannard, ed., Death in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975); James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). ↵

Lou Taylor’s well-researched, cogent study of the history of mourning fashions provides an excellent overview of material mourning, but focuses on mostly British culture and occasionally mixes in examples from the United States. Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (1983; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2009). The following often-cited books also focus on British mourning: James Curl, Victorian Celebration of Death (Detroit: Patridge Press, 1972); Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ↵

In her thorough and lively study of the American nineteenth-century middle class, Halttunen devotes a chapter to midcentury mourning customs and how they relate to sentimentality. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). ↵

Jill Fields, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 144. ↵

Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, prologue to A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America, exhibition catalog (Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980), 11–13; Barbara Dodd Hillerman, Chrysallis of Gloom: Nineteenth Century American Mourning Costume in A Time to Mourn, 91. ↵

Stephen L. Vaughn, ed. Encyclopedia of American Journalism (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 203; About New-York Tribune (New York [N.Y.]) 1866–1924, National Endowment for the Humanities, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214. ↵

About New-York Tribune. ↵

Jeannette L. Nolen, The New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, updated October 3, 2012, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/412546/The-New-York-Times. ↵

Retail Prices of Beef, New York Times, November 5, 1876, 6, ProQuest (93545614). ↵

Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 388–89. ↵

Death of Mr. P. F. Collier, Irish Times, April 26, 1909, ProQuest (519510298); Mott, A History of American Magazines, 453. ↵

Introduction

The death of a loved one warrants grief. And from the griever, society expects a public display of sorrow. This is as true today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, as it was three hundred years ago, and so on. Death, as they say, is the only inevitability of life. Mourning rituals today involve memorials by way of Facebook pages, T-shirts, fund-raisers, scholarship programs, tattoos, a one- or two-day wake, and a burial or cremation.[1] Mourning has become individualized, with various acceptable ways to publicly display one’s grief. Always, however, the expectation is for a swift exchange of emotion from sorrow into putting on a brave face and moving on with one’s own life. But in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, moving on, especially for women, was perhaps the most egregious step one could take following a death. Mourning was prescribed and prolonged; society expected survivors, especially women, to publicly display grief and sorrow for specific lengths of time and in specific ways or risk being outcast by society. Though the rules were present and meant to be exacting, they were also conflicting and confusing, and attempting to follow them was no guarantee of acceptance by one’s peers.

In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US, when someone died, etiquette writers explained how and when to arrange and carry out the funeral and how survivors should act and live in the coming days, months, and even years. These prescriptive guidelines, intended to guide survivors in the difficult days following a loved one’s death, were most visible in material goods; guidelines and goods were together known as mourning etiquette. Mourning etiquette was part of a larger middle-class etiquette that prescribed particular ways to behave, act, buy and own goods, and simply be in everyday life; following these guidelines was vital if one wished to climb the social ladder or to retain a position there. Mourning is the expression of sorrow, while grief refers to the genuine sorrow one feels.[2] A mourner, then, did not actually have to grieve to make a show of grieving, and this potential insincerity, especially when aligned with exhaustive fashion rituals, became one of the great contradictions of mourning—and one of which Victorian Americans were well aware.

Widows faced the most extreme etiquette rules, often the most drastic lifestyle changes, and the harshest criticisms. This book