And hair serves this function well because it’s “a very personal indicator of self,” and also “very decay resistant.” (Wealthy or famous people were often remembered through more explicitly lifelike representations of the self: President Abraham Lincoln is survived by his life masks and hand casts, and Queen Victoria kept a cast of her husband’s hand in her bedroom.) “There is some emotional drive to want to retain a physical remnant of somebody once they’re gone,” says Karen Bachmann, who teaches Victorian hair art workshops at the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

It was a way to tend to your family and home. It’s about sentiment and emotion and showing other people how you’re related to others.” Making hair work was a proper middle-class, feminine task, grounded in a consumer culture. “Not only were people used to being around bodies that were dying and had recently died, but the kind of associations that we have today of the dead body being a gruesome thing or a frightening thing was a little different,” Sheumaker says.Īnd hair work wasn’t “really about death,” she says, “even when it’s in memorial to someone who died. In the 19th century, mortality rates were much higher, and most funerals happened at home. Helen Sheumaker, author of Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hair Work. Home decor or jewelry made of dead people’s hair would seem macabre today, but not so in Victorian times, says Dr. It caught on in Europe sometime before the 19th century, and then fell into vogue in the United States around the Civil War. In its heyday, hair jewelry was considered both sentimental and fashionable. It could be a brooch, or a pendant with hair woven in the middle, or even a bracelet of hair. Hair jewelry was common, too-and not just the kind of locket that Queen Victoria wore.

Sometimes, though instances are rare, women wove relatives’ hair into dioramas: the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn has a hair work cemetery in its collection. Women could find the patterns for hair wreaths in stores and in women’s magazines, the same channels through which other middle-class trends spread. Wreaths made from the hair of one dead person were usually objects of mourning, while wreaths made from the hair of multiple people-dead and alive-were more like sentimental family trees. In the U.S., a lot of women made elaborate wreaths of hair and wire, often with floral designs. But for many people in Victorian times, the amount of hair involved in remembering loved ones went far beyond a little lock in a necklace. Queen Victoria was the monarch of mourning, a celebrity who influenced how grieving women dressed and behaved in Europe and the United States. Often, Victoria wore a locket of Albert’s hair around her neck. After her husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861, she publicly grieved him until her own death 40 years later. Sylvia Plath wrote that “Dying is an art.” For Queen Victoria, the real art was in mourning.

Victoria 2 national value