Victorians Mourned with Vulcanized Rubber Jewellery

Within the Victorian period, mourning was greater than an emotional expertise; it was a business powerhouse. “The nineteenth century noticed the emergence of a brand new financial exercise, the ‘funeral business,’” write Stuart Rawnsley and Jack Reynolds.

The actions of an entire collection of craftsmen and merchants—drapers, stonemasons, joiners and cupboard makers, caterers, hackney carriage proprietors, coachmakers, gardeners and florists—have been stimulated. A completely new occupation—that of undertaker—got here into existence.

The bereaved have been obligated to put on black, in some circumstances for as much as a full 12 months, so a dying within the household might imply an entire new wardrobe. As literature scholar Rebecca N. Mitchell explains, it was an age of mourning warehouses, with huge buying facilities like Jay’s Mourning Emporium of London able to package the bereaved out in every thing from the plain, black matte robes appropriate for deep mourning to fashionably striped “quarter-mourning” apparel.

The necessities of mourning even prolonged to underwear. As one Buckingham palace maid of honor bemoaned:

I’m in despair about my garments, no sooner have I rigged myself out with good tweeds than we’re plunged into the deepest mourning…It’s a lesson, by no means to purchase something however black.

Dour although they have been, the accoutrements of mourning could possibly be fairly stunning: robes of smooth black moire silk, shadowy veils, and coils of chestnut hair set into golden rings. For jewellery, jet was significantly prized. A silky black stone fashioned from the fossilized stays of historic driftwood, jewelers carved into delicate chains, earrings, and pins, like drops of glimmering oil hanging across the our bodies of the bereaved.

However not everybody might afford jet. Center- and lower-class Victorians availed themselves of a stunning substitute: black rubber. Sure, the Victorians wore rubber chains as a somber image of bereavement. Maybe it helped that the fabric was dignified with the names suggestive of valuable stones: they known as it “ebonite” or “vulcanite.”

Extra importantly, the vulcanization of rubber was a brand new and considerably mysterious course of. As Cai Guise-Richardson writes, “Producers knew little about how vulcanization labored chemically earlier than 1900.” The curing of rubber to create secure varieties, each elastic and non-elastic, known as for a fancy mixture of chemical compounds and warmth. “Rubber was an affordable business to enter,” be aware Richardson, however “it remained a simple business to exit as properly,” because of the uncertainties of the remedy.

Within the nineteenth century, vulcanized rubber didn’t have fairly the identical industrial associations it does right this moment (Richardson factors out that Goodyear’s 1844 vulcanization patent utility centered on a textile manufacturing method, not the tires and belts related to the title right this moment). From the vantage level of the twenty-first century, a vulcanite head decoration with a thick, wraparound chain would possibly recommend an meeting line; however to the Victorians, it will have hinted on the solemn dignity of jet. Equally, a black cross, with “plasticky” molded roses, now appears to be like like one thing which may drop out of a Gashapon. However jet, like rubber, is surprisingly gentle and heat to the contact. It was the exact same tactile qualities that we now affiliate with “cheapness” and “tackiness” that made rubber such a perfect substitute.

Mitchell argues that the prevailing obsession with mourning was mired in uncomfortable contradictions. On the one hand, not sporting mourning garments would recommend a disturbing lack of feeling. Alternatively, expressing your grief appropriately required fairly a little bit of buying—a suspiciously pleasurable and sensual expertise. Because the satirical journal Punch put it, “the mourning fashions at the moment are so fairly that the lack of a husband is now not the horrible calamity it as soon as was.”

The embrace of rubber jewellery appears to reveal those self same contradictions: on the one hand, it was an affordable option to mimic costly fashions—a type of grief-stricken “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses.” Alternatively, the ornaments evoked a seductive sensuality. Maybe it was that heat that jet and rubber each share—their virtually flesh-like high quality—that made them so comforting for individuals mourning the lack of a beloved one’s contact.

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