20 Strict Rules Victorian Widows Had To Follow After Their Husbands Died

In most houses, it was folk custom, not etiquette, that said every clock should be stopped at the very minute a husband died, and wound up again when the funeral was finished. The house had to carry on.

Mirrors, as well as family portraits, were draped with black cloth or crape (a crimped silk material) at the wake, which some believed would keep mourners from being vain in their grief, and which was also tied to beliefs about the departed soul. It was not what etiquette books recommended but rather a custom practiced around the house.

Once the rituals at home were over, the widow’s relatives began issuing death notices printed on paper with a wide black border (this part of the process was not left up to personal choice, but was governed by the rules laid out in etiquette manuals). In the years that followed, the borders would gradually become thinner.

The fabric of choice for widows in First Mourning, the earliest and strictest stage of mourning, was heavy black silk crape, a crimped material soaked in chemical fixatives and boiled in linseed oil to strip its sheen. It was expensive, high-grade silk, not cheap wool or cotton. The chemicals used to treat it could irritate the skin and lungs, drawing criticism from period medical commentators.

During First Mourning, a widow was not allowed to wear gold, silver, or precious stones; instead, she wore jet, a polished black material, along with matte vulcanite or gutta-percha. Even her jewelry had to look suitably somber.

Even if a widow could afford furs and feathers on her bonnet, wearing them was forbidden during active mourning. Mourning garments were meant to signal respect and restraint, not a woman’s taste and wealth. Nothing that even looked like luxury was appropriate. Plain black was the norm.

There were three stages of mourning: the first year and a day was called First Mourning, the next nine months or so was called Second Mourning, and the final three to six months was known as Half-Mourning. The whole period of mourning came to almost two years. During Second Mourning, the heavy crape was replaced by trimmings, and lusterless silks like bombazine, paramatta, alpaca, or merino became acceptable again.

After 366 days, First Mourning ended, and a widow could finally leave its strictest requirements behind. It was still mourning, but she had reached a less restrictive stage, and that was the first real comfort she had known.

Half-Mourning revived softer colors like lavender and mauve, gradually replacing the strict black of the earlier mourning stages. Pearls, once forbidden alongside gold, were among the last pieces of jewelry a widow could wear again. Her wardrobe was finally beginning to look like her own again.

It was considered bad form for a widow to accept a suitor or marry again within 18 months to two years, and to even begin courting during mourning could result in severe social consequences. A widower, on the other hand, could wear his dark suit and black armband for about a year before he was encouraged to marry again. Neither time period was specified by law; it was only expected by society.

Etiquette books actually put the unequal mourning periods in writing. The 1869 edition of Cassell’s Household Guide instructs that a widow must mourn for two whole years, while some etiquette books published in the 1890s shortened that period to 18 months. For a widower, the prescribed period was only a single year.

Widows in First Mourning weren’t permitted to wear satin, velvet, or glossy silk, since their shine was considered too showy for mourning. Even the silk they did wear had to have a dull finish.

A widow at church would be put in a back row, or maybe even a hidden corner pew. She would leave as soon as the service ended. She wouldn’t engage with anyone. If a doctor advised a widow to get away for her health, she might end up in Bath or Cheltenham, English spa towns where visitors went for rest and treatment. There, she could “take the waters,” or drink and bathe in the mineral-rich spa water, to recuperate, not to frequent the assembly rooms, the social halls where spa visitors gathered for dances and entertainment.

The manuals suggested that widows shouldn’t be heard to laugh out loud or relate a comic anecdote at gatherings, as this showed a lack of respect for their deceased husbands. In public, they were expected to maintain an air of decorum, regardless of their innermost feelings. Their sorrow had to be displayed rather than hidden.

Mourning jewelry could get surprisingly personal. Widows would braid or weave their late husband’s locks and then set them in brooches or lockets made out of unshiny black enamel. Grief you could wear!

Even a widow’s stationery showed how she was doing, because according to etiquette books like Wyman’s Dictionary of Stationery (1875), her letters were bordered with black lines up to one-half inch wide during First Mourning, decreasing to one-sixteenth inch wide in later phases. Her correspondence was an indicator of her sorrow.

The widow who went out wore a handkerchief of white linen or lawn, a fine cotton fabric, edged with black. A plain black handkerchief was out of the question, for on black fabric, soiling couldn’t easily be seen, making it harder to tell when the handkerchief needed washing. The mourning rules even applied to such a small item of dress: it had to be black on white.

The underwear of widows, worn beneath their plain black dresses, was white cotton or linen, trimmed with dark silk ribbon. By the end of the century, black corsets started appearing in catalogs, but etiquette books prohibited them as an inappropriate luxury during mourning. Here too, etiquette books stood firm.

It was considered bad luck to keep the old crape. Some believed it would bring another death to the family, so the fabric was burned once a widow’s mourning was over. Mourning warehouses like Jay’s in London heavily encouraged this idea, since it brought them more sales.

Remarriage was one thing, but a widow wasn’t even supposed to begin courting during the year and a day of First Mourning. Flirting or accepting a suitor during that period could bring social disapproval or even cause her to be shunned. A widower faced far less scrutiny over when he began seeing someone again.

This content was created with the help of AI.