0:37
Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of the past, one ghostly tale at a time.
I'm your host, Michelle, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this eerie journey through the pages of history.
0:53
Picture this a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the annals of time, where the echoes of the past reverberate through haunted corridors and forgotten landscapes.
That's the realm we invite you to explore with us.
Each episode will unearth stories, long buried secrets, dark folklore, tales of the macabre, and discuss parapsychology topics from ancient legends to more recent enigmas.
1:23
We're delving deep into locations and accounts all around the globe, with guests joining me along the way.
But this podcast is also about building a community of curious minds like you.
Join the podcast on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share your own ghostly encounters, theories, and historical curiosities.
1:47
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The links are conveniently placed in the description for easy access.
So whether you're a history buff with a taste for the supernatural or a paranormal enthusiast with a thirst for knowledge, Haunted History Chronicles is your passport to the other side.
2:07
Get ready for a ride through the corridors of time where history and the supernatural converge, because every ghost has a story and every story has a history.
And now let's introduce today's podcast or guest.
2:24
Today we're stepping into the shadowy world of Victorian morning jewellery, an art form that not only adorned the living but immortalized the departed.
In the 19th century, Morning wasn't just a personal affair.
It became an art form expressed through intricately crafted jewellery.
2:43
Today, we'll explore the poignant stories behind these hauntingly beautiful adornments, delving into a time when grief took on a tangible and wearable form.
But we're not alone on this journey.
Joining us as an extraordinary guest, a true connoisseur of the art of mourning, Hayden Peters, a jewellery historian, scholar and designer, is our guide into this fascinating realm.
3:11
Hayden is the founder of The Art of Mourning, a platform established in 2005 to educate and share the rich history of mourning and sentimental jewellery.
The Art of Mourning website at www.artofmourning.com serves as a beacon of knowledge.
3:30
Reaching thousands of international students and collectors daily, Hayden's dedication is evident in over 800 articles that meticulously detail the history of early modern society, politics, design and fashion, all through the lens of morning jewellery.
3:48
Hayden has made appearances on television, graced the pages of international publications, contributed to museum installations, and penned insightful pieces for academic publications.
Today he brings his wealth of knowledge to the podcast, so prepared to be enchanted as we explore the delicate art of morning through the eyes of Hayden Peters and begin to uncover the secrets woven into the threads of Victorian morning jewellery.
4:24
Hi, Hayden.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Hello Michelle and thank you so much for your time today.
Do you want to start by just introducing yourself to the podcast listeners and sharing a little bit about yourself and your background?
Absolutely.
So my name's Hayden Peters and I run a platform called The Art of Morning, which is dedicated to my lifetime's worth of research on morning sentimental jewellery, fashion and art.
4:49
And it's something which I began pretty much when I was in single digits, when I think back to it, because I was always fascinated with fashion from around the 18th century to the early 20th century.
And what I did was I studied and I researched this fashion so much, specifically around men's fashion but also women's fashion.
5:11
And when I was very young I started working.
I I began my own little business at the back of my parents house and it gave me enough money to put towards jewellery and I was fascinated with Victorian silver and Victorian filigree jewellery.
My father bought me one of my first pieces, which was a necklace.
5:32
Essentially it was a converted fob, so it was a Birmingham Shield from around 1896, beautiful silver piece, and I just fell in love with the design so much.
And in my other career I'm a very well established designer.
So this LED into me going to a lot of antique fairs, a lot of antique shops, spending all my weekends.
5:54
I didn't have that conventional childhood like most people do where you know, you go out partying and you have other friends.
All my friends were about 60 year old antique dealers and fashion designers, so I was allowed to touch and feel and experience these jewels.
6:11
It was probably the best education you could have because books can only tell you so much and museums are hidden behind glass here.
I could actually touch and feel these pieces, and I do recall around 1996, I believe there was a ring that said in memory of, you know, a black cartouche with the enamel work and two serpents coiled around the shoulders of this little ring.
6:37
And in the back it said Mary Ann Lewis, and she died in 1853.
I thought this was one of the most beautiful and one of the most sentimental things someone could ever do for somebody.
Because as much as I appreciated the Victorian silver for its design work, and I thought this is the most beautiful way to encapsulate someone's life, to carry it forward, to think about them even when they're gone.
7:03
And I think that's what makes memorial and sentimental jewelry the most pure kind of living history that you can collect today.
It's still alive because it still has that part of somebody in it.
And what I did was I I started researching heavily into the the life, the religion, the economics, the politics of a five year bracket before and after 1853, so I could start to learn more about the context of why this ring was made.
7:30
Why was it designed this way?
Why did it say in memory of what?
What were the serpents?
What did that even mean?
And I I had these friends who were jewellers and I took it to them and it had this little glass compartment in the back.
And so they they popped that out and underneath where was a coiled plait of Mary's hair.
7:49
And I thought, Oh my gosh, that that's even more sentimental, that's so beautiful.
And ever since I started collecting jewelry and because of memorial jewelry being what it is, it's often signed and dedicated or it's hallmarked so I can, I can do the research before and after the five year bracket.
8:06
And my mission was to collect as many pieces from the earliest time of Memorial Jewelry's inception, which if you go back in the early modern period, it's around about the 1550s or at least during say, the reign of Henry the Eighth and the dissolution of the monasteries.
8:24
And that's when you start to see these, the sentiment change about identity and and fashion especially obviously for the British.
And it became a thing where I do have enough pieces to go back to 1550 and I go up to about 1920, sometimes as late as 1940.
8:42
But that's that's the collection I've got and it's about 750 pieces.
And out of mourning began in I believe it was 2005.
It's actually in my logo.
And I was living in England at the time and I have friends over in Grey's Antiques.
9:00
There's Michelle Rowan and Charlotte Carrick over there.
And they encouraged me to put all my knowledge down into writing.
And so I developed out of mourning as a platform from there and it's become very popular and it's led me to do international lectures.
I've even been the the keynote speaker for the National Association of Jewellers in the UK.
9:20
I've given lectures across America, Europe, Australia.
I've been published on TVA few times on the radio and yeah, it's become a bit of an obsession for me after the fact.
I can understand why though, that it's something that people become very immersed in, because I think you touched on something that is very, very true and that is that these are tangible pieces that you can hold.
9:43
They are something very physical and a way of connecting with the past, but not just the past as some void, something unknown.
These are connected with people.
You can, you can touch stories in the sense that you can often recognise names.
9:59
You can see something very unique in the design and the symbolism that's been used as part of the jewellery.
And I think that's what makes it something that really endures as a as a form of art and as something to collect and for people to be interested in that this is something that just allows you to find that connection with someone and something from before us and their story and their way of memory, you know, remembering someone that meant so much to them and was very important to them in life and then in their death.
10:33
And there's something really beautiful about that.
I think that it is there in the story, but then also comes through in the artistry of the piece itself.
That's exactly right.
There's so many different pathways you can take with a morning jewel, and this leads into people who are fascinated with genealogy all the way through to ephemera or even miniature portraits.
10:54
So it's it's a gateway into so many different aspects of collecting, and that's what makes it so fascinating.
I I couldn't spend a lifetime doing one thing based on something so very simple.
Because if I look at a jewel, let's say I I get a lot of people come up to me and ask about modern wedding rings.
11:14
And sure, there's a lot of diamonds and there's some white gold there, but there's no dedication, there's no sentiment, and it is what it is.
So it's very much a connection between two people.
But to understand its context outside of its paradigm is is very difficult because it is so sentimental for them, whereas these jewels resonate so much about their their time.
11:35
And if you do want to take that path down the genealogy route, I love it.
It's it.
It makes it so much more powerful as a storytelling piece.
It adds to the value, the intrinsic value.
Of course, I won't speak to the cost value and that's that's what's make it makes them so glorious.
11:50
And that's why some people do just branch off into photography.
Because collecting photography does relate to these jewels.
Absolutely.
And and one of the things that I think you touched upon that I think is really important to stress is that for a lot of people they think that morning jewellery began during the Victorian period.
12:11
You know, it's it's kind of become synonymous if hasn't it, with this, this period of deep mourning because of Queen Victoria.
But like you rightly said, morning jewellery began much earlier and I don't know if you want to elaborate a little bit more about when that began and how it evolved and why it became so popular during the Victorian period to help listeners really understand that kind of evolution in terms of the history of the jewellery itself.
12:41
Oh, absolutely.
To do this one correctly, I think I need to take you on a bit of a journey.
Ever since the Protestant Reformation, it changed the perception of identity.
In the early modern period, that and the Renaissance period, really going backtracking a little bit.
And where the British were different than the rest of Europe, is that England, especially if so they're they're locked within the sea where you can actually have mercantilism with importing and exporting.
13:07
Now here you've got society which can rapidly industrialize during the 18th century, but also stay very insular with its thinking.
There's lesser influence from external cultures, and this leads to almost a cult of identity which Henry the Eighth was very much focused on.
13:27
And that's where you've got limners and the rise of the miniaturists and miniature portraits and using personal identity to change out the things which were previously used as in an agrarian society looking up towards the Lord from the serfs perspective, working very hard at in in an agrarian culture to be judged under God.
13:50
And the Catholics very much still maintained this idea of memento Mori, which means remember, you will die.
And if you look through the chaplets and the so that like the rosary beads which have this bead at the very end, which was often shaped like a skull, and the skull on the other side might turn into a face of the person of a wealthy person in the Middle Ages.
14:14
These jewels still maintains through the 16th century and onwards.
But this was a way of saying your daily prayers but also ending on the idea of death and you will be judged by God.
Whereas during this new era of mercantilism, at this new area of new wealth which the English were doing, you've got a society which is rapidly changing, but also having enough money to spend towards other things like education, like focusing on rising wealth.
14:49
By the 17th century we have this new invention called retail, and we've got fashion.
We've got money that people were putting towards other things which weren't just about that lifestyle.
And so you've got people slowly starting to merge towards urbanization, and from that you've got memento Morai, For the English was turning into something which the wealthy men, these merchants, were wearing on their pinky fingers as a signet ring.
15:15
So to give an understanding because this isn't a visual medium, the memento Mori designs are often distilled down to the skull and crossbones, the hourglass, the burning candle, the open Bible.
And from this from the Protestant Reformation.
15:33
The Church of England was distilling down all of the symbols of life and death into their pure forms of what it should be under religion to live and die where, and this is to remove any Catholic symbols out of the church.
15:49
At this point.
By the late 16th century, there was a ban on any of the Catholic jewels and that's where you've got to change out from, like the rosary rings turned into decade rings.
So you can still there was still rings where you could say your prayers that they were hidden under a different name.
16:07
That's where you've got a ring with notches all the way around it.
As you turn through the notch, you can say your prayers, but they were still banned.
So we've got merchants with these skulls and crossbones, but by the turn of the 17th century, there was a little bit of a change out.
We've got Charles the first ascending towards the throne, and we've got he's inherited high debt, he's married to a Catholic, and he has the divine right of kings.
16:35
So following this we have the Civil War and the Puritans and led by Cromwell felt that there wasn't enough done to remove Catholicism from the Church.
And so there was smashing windows where any forms of symbolism weren't aligning with very much those memento Mori symbols.
16:53
They wanted to remove as much as they could.
Obviously it's in the name to be pure.
So by 1649 it didn't go so well for or old Charles the 1st and he was executed and you've got your Cromwells interregnum following this that by the restoration of Charles the Second in 1660, that's where things changed and that's where Memento and Mori very much became part of the morning jewels.
17:17
We understand today those designs that were made for the merchants who are wealthy, to show that they could live a better life, to give that back to their their children through education, to have a family, to show their wealth through fashion was now being used as the fashion of death.
17:36
And we have many, many forms of evidence during this time, from poems from John Donne talking about hair bracelets to the Diaries of Samuel Peeps where he's talking about 123 rings being given out at a funeral.
These were elements of fashion, so a morning ring would be fashioned with the skulls and crossbones and given out at a funeral and they were kept and often given to the the wife when a gentleman came back from a funeral or but between the two of them, shared between friends and families.
18:09
And this custom grew throughout 1680s to the 1690s where you've got banking and you've got loans and you've got very much the Goldsmiths guilds taking over and you've got people investing.
18:25
This is where this new wealth really flourished and the Goldsmiths really flourished along at the same time.
As an aside, I've done a lot of research into the Goldsmiths and the Jewelers of these times to show that the different rings and things that they would make the younger saw.
18:41
There were even Posey rings, which known as poetry rings, where the younger gentleman would go and and have a small band made of a ring for their sweethearts.
And they would have a message written inside, usually in Latin or Middle French and sometimes in very guttural English because, you know, the the dictionary wasn't developed yet until the 1760s.
19:06
And so you've got to the I true CHUUSA and beautiful little sentiments.
And they were given to a loved one.
But they carried on the form of mourning rings because after someone passed away, let's say the gentleman husband at the time had passed away, the wife would have the ring stamped with a skull.
19:24
And so the skulls and crossbones became synonymous with the idea of death.
By the early 18th century, we have the Rococo period.
This was the Lake Baroque period and morning rings from this point onwards, and jewelry in general, not just the rings, but bracelets and necklaces, brooches, they had these things called ribbon slides, which were very popular.
19:47
They lasted from about 1680 to about 1730 in popularity.
They were worn at the neck or the bodice.
They're these little things that look like brooches and they were worn on ribbons, the beautiful little things and here's where you've got the so the bezel in the interior was usually woven hair and they would place the skull and crossbones motif on top or say the Pootie or the the Cupid blowing trumpets with a skeleton.
20:15
So you've got death sitting in between them.
These were very very typical for their times and and worn by ladies.
But by the early 18th century they started to evolve, and that's where Rococo evolved the designs, but kept the same interiors with the skulls and the crossbones and all those other memento Mori symbols.
20:34
But also you've got following this, so the Enlightenments thoughts of life, liberty and property began to change things.
You've got digs in Herculaneum and Pompeii around the 17111738 period, and you've got a lot of the British gentlemen going down throughout Europe and picking up lots of archaeology and lots of knowledge from the Mediterranean.
20:57
They will bring that back into England.
And that's where we have the Neoclassical period, which redefines morning jewelry completely, and that's where the British and the Catholics really deviated, whereas the Catholics still maintain the skulls and the crossbones, but anything else was very much a religious indoctrination, a depiction of Jesus, Mary, et cetera.
21:19
Whereas the British used allegory.
They were into storytelling, and they would appropriate an ancient Greek or an ancient Roman deity, or even just design that they'd found and use that as a way of storytelling, their grief.
21:35
And in these jewels they became these wonderful depictions of a lady weeping next to an urn or a tomb with a weeping Willow over the top.
And not only this, but especially during the 1780s, this became something of pop culture We have so the The Sorrows of Young Verta, a book by Von Goethe, which was published, I think, in around 1774.
21:57
And there's a depiction of a lady in the book named Charlotte next to and she's standing next to the tomb with an urn.
And all the pretty young things at the time, they would go down to the cemeteries.
They would stand there in the same sort of pose holding the book, and even Napoleon had a copy of the book he'd carry around with him.
22:15
And a lot of the jewelry designs with the urns, they were also pop culture.
They weren't just for the sake of mourning.
And that's where culturally we have to look into it a bit deeper.
And many of the the newspapers and primary sources of the time, we're talking about creating hair urns in the most popular taste.
22:35
And so I've got many forms of primary evidence showing during the 17, late 1770s, seventeen 80s, these people, the Goldsmiths, the hair artists and the miniaturist, the silhouette artists, creating these different designs in many, many different ways for a society that was very hungry for them.
22:54
And that's what led into when we get to Victoria.
A lot of her value system was based around these customs.
It was very much the passing of Princess Charlotte in 1817, and when she passed away there was a huge outpouring of grief because essentially she was being groomed to be the new Queen Elizabeth.
23:17
This is George, the 4th's daughter.
And when she passed away in childbirth, there was an amazing outpouring of grief that created so many different morning products.
And at the time, you've got to think, well, this is balancing out the Napoleonic Wars which were also focused on this high level of nationalism.
23:37
All of these symbols and designs of the British were going into jewelry, whether it was a a victory of a win through to the death of Nelson were going into rings and jewels that were made.
So nationalism, pride and mourning all came together.
We even have Earl Marshall at the time decreed that the morning custom had to change in its timeline because the general mourning period was shutting down shops of all sorts.
24:05
Even the courts were shutting down and economic stimulus is all part of what morning jewelry and culture is all about.
There were so many products produced, but the shops couldn't sell them so they changed that timeline of when you could open up the stores just for this.
24:21
And Victoria's sentimentality is all based around this, even her periods of mourning, which would effectively put a woman in mourning for about 2 1/2 years.
And this, especially by 1861 when she transitioned into mourning, became the zeitgeist for all of the rest of the population to emulate her style.
24:43
And you have to think that the Monarch was always the Duane of fashion.
They were the ones that people looked towards whenever they changed their fashion, whenever they invested in fashion.
Even the Prince Regent George the 4th, invested so much in fashion.
24:58
You've got your Beau Brummels, you've got people who were, you know, being fashionable.
You've got fashion gazettes.
So Victoria, when she was married, her engagement ring was a serpent with emeralds for eyes and people were reproducing the serpent as a design.
25:15
And all these little designs that Victoria used, even her first birthday present from her father and her mother, was a heart-shaped Locket with two locks of their hair woven together inside of it.
People emulated that style.
So as she changed and transitioned into this mourning period, people were stuck in.
25:35
This is how it is and that's where the almost the stagnation of this leads the next generation to branch out, to look towards France, to look towards the Americas and try and find other cultures which could change the designs of fashion because she was so much set in her ways.
25:55
And also this goes into economic stimulus, which all of the the designs that she would use, the materials were very much this balancing act of industrialization versus the cottage industries of the outer colonies.
26:12
So what she would do is advertise you have to use the certain kind of crepe for your morning dress, which was usually courts arts and I've stories about them too.
They became between 1835 and 1885, rose their capital from 40,000 lbs to 450,000 lbs.
26:28
They covered 1/3 of the world in black crepe.
I was selling it even in Australia.
And when you've got a queen who says you can only use Parramatta wool for your morning dress.
Parramatta is an area out of Sydney in NSW, the colony at the time, and this was exporting the wool that was produced there from the sheep.
26:51
It's it's all about very careful economic stimulus right down to the wippy jet industry and that's what made these so very popular because the Victorians were very commercially minded.
You've got suburbs and you've got a culture which never had seen the likes of leisure time before and travel.
27:10
They, the rail networks were bringing people closer together to smaller cultures which were producing morning and sentimental jewels.
We have so much variance by this time, but also we have so much standardization that if you were wearing a morning outfit with a ring or you were any type of morning jewelry and you were in America, Australia, India, Singapore or even obviously Europe, you would be recognized and identified for your culture.
27:41
And that's why these jewels have so many stories to tell and why Victoria really was very much the queen of, you know, an empire where the sun never set.
That's why these these kinds of behaviors in morning jewelry, they're very much part of our our modern systems of behavior as well in Western culture.
28:00
Even though we think they're gone, they're not really gone.
And we don't understand the designs because if you live in a society in America, in Australia or any one of the colonies, you can look up and just see the architecture.
I mean, I'm physically watching urns outside my window because I live in a Victorian building.
28:17
All of that goes back into what I'm looking at with the same thing inside a ring.
It's quite fascinating.
Hey there.
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28:33
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31:12
Now back to the supernatural stories you won't want to miss.
What's coming up next?
It's so intriguing, the influences and the trends that kind of feed into this and the people, the individual people itself.
31:30
But then also what's happening culturally, what's happening within that country, that period at the time and how it all feeds into the fashion, the trends, the designs and what again, what endures, what lasts and what we then we still have today.
Because again, they're so enduring.
And it's it really is so interesting when you start peeling back the layers to see the impact that this had on so many aspects in terms of trade.
31:55
And it's incredible.
It's really, really intricate and layered and and so interesting that the more you kind of look and the more you start to uncover some of this history, it's really fascinating.
I think what what really interested me, especially with my last round of talks, which are the basis for a series of essays, which is becoming a book that I'm working on, I call it Profit and Loss.
32:17
And it's those businesses, the retailers, department stores and Goldsmiths that profited from people's grief.
And I find that really fascinating because after working with the Goldsmiths Guild and, you know, listening to their stories and also going back into the research, I've got all of these, these very hard working, not necessarily poor, but you know, they're, they're workers.
32:41
And these Goldsmiths, you would think had so much capital because they can afford to produce beautiful pieces of gold with rich symbolism.
But they're all under the Commission of whoever went to the retailer to Commission it and then they get the capital to produce.
So we have some designers of these rings, especially the 19th century, where, yeah, they're very similar in style, but the gold varies wildly from very low grade alloys to 22 karat gold, and some for very influential people and some for very middle class people.
33:15
And yet these, the people who created them really were just the conduit they they were just living between commissions.
And I I find that so fascinating.
As opposed to the big design houses, which created some beautiful stuff.
Even Tiffany has a morning brooch that they produced.
33:33
But it's the the workers who I find, the ones that didn't really get a chance to express themselves more than just whatever someone wanted.
Absolutely.
And and I find it fascinating that this was also something that enabled women to have a profession as well, because they were often involved in the the weaving of the hair and things, weren't they in their kind of their living rooms and their spaces in their homes?
33:53
Which, yeah, I think it just kind of shows how it impacted all levels of society too.
It's not.
I love that, especially the women's story.
Women were the ones who not only creates the style in the very inception but also because they had to wear it.
34:10
So they're the the ones who even the French with the the hair artistry in in their advertising for a chap named Lim Limner.
Yet in 50s they would call the British walking tombstones because of their designs were so austere and so you know, proper and in memory of whereas the French were used hair designs for flowers and things.
34:30
But the women were the ones to end the entire understanding of the periods of mourning, because they couldn't afford to.
And there was not enough money left behind in wheels to produce the different products that they were required to wear in in morning.
34:49
So that if their house wasn't designed in a way where you're covered in black crape, all the mirrored surfaces are covered.
You're dressed in a certain way for 2 1/2 years, which you know had slight variances, but every time there was a variance that's that costed money.
35:06
So after one year and one day in crepe, you went for nine months with less crepe and then you went for three months into black silk.
That's the first stage, the second stage and the ordinary stage that costs a lot of money.
And the the women, especially during the 1870s were very vocal against it and a lot of the pomp of because we we associate especially the Victorian era, which is a very long time with all mourning.
35:31
But it wasn't.
It was really between about 1861 and around 1875.
That's when it really peaked.
And then it went downhill from there because a funeral was costing up to about 600 lbs in their money for a proper funeral.
35:47
People couldn't afford that.
And you had a lot of businesses that were capitalizing off that, especially the burial societies, which were a form of friendly society, which in turn became our modern, you know, insurance companies that we were giving all this money to, these poor things.
36:04
And a lot of these people didn't have enough money to really survive, yet they had to have a good funeral.
And that's what the, the products, the jewelry and all of that cascaded from.
It changed so much, but it also supported a lot of people.
We have this one lady who is a a silhouette artist and she was a traveling silhouette artist in late 18th century and she was very, very well known.
36:29
She was a woman of status and married to a gentleman.
And yeah, she was quite an influential artist doing not only just memorial but sentimental silhouettes because they're not memorial, there's very small subset of them are.
36:45
But yeah, that women could work, hair artistry, absolutely.
And if you go over to other cultures the see America is very different in so many ways with their society that how they've they've grown in terms of their scope across a very wide country.
37:05
But they kept the same basic elements as when the Puritans came over.
And yeah the hair artistry was taught down from from mother to daughter right down.
It's it's basically a form of needlework.
You find these things called samplers, which these woven pieces which might depict a certain time or a message about a family and some of those who are woven from human hair.
37:27
It's honestly it's fascinating and like I said it just I think the fact that it you can see something in fashion of clothes and fashion of jewellery, the fact that it's something that was there in every level of society.
So you really can see how it, how it was used, the styles all of it.
37:46
You can.
You can learn so much in terms of the social history and the economic history.
All of it is absolutely fascinating.
I think something that you touched upon is also really important to note, which is that morning jewellery.
Again, I think people tend to think of it as something only being worn by women, but morning jewellery was something that men and women would wear and you, you would see it come through in things like cufflinks.
38:13
So it's it's something that again transcended gender as well as class systems, which again, I'm not sure that people really necessarily are aware of simply because of the the sheer volume of pieces that women I think could wear in comparison to men.
But yet it was something that everybody would would have to kind of follow that etiquette, wouldn't they Of of the rules of of mourning.
38:35
You know, it's funny you mention that because I'm actually looking at a piece from 1792 right now and it shows a gentleman leaning against the tomb with an urn on top in beautiful watercolor.
It's a gorgeous piece and that's actually more of a portrait of that gentleman.
38:51
So whenever there's a literal depiction in those allegorical ones I mentioned, that's actually them.
That's that person.
And yeah, absolutely.
Not only that but in the the Victorian times, you the one of the most common accessories, which I think is one of the most accessible ways to enter this realm of collecting memorial and sentimental hair chains.
39:12
And the watch chains that gentlemen would wear very commonly were made from human hair.
You could purchase them from just about any catalog on the planet and they're widely advertised.
Hair artists were everywhere from Pitt Street, Sydney and the colony of NSW right the way through to there were seven in a small cluster right in the center of London.
39:34
They were everywhere.
And I've got, yeah, New York, Philadelphia, you name it, these pieces.
There was a huge competition between hair artists, by the way.
They would advertise aggressively against each other during the 19th century.
And they would advertise that, you know, one ounce of hair could produce an entire chain of a necklace.
39:56
One ounce.
But often what they would do is they would color match their hair.
They would buy it from other cultures.
Which, you know, the nunneries would generally grow their hair out very long, the the nuns.
And then we cut that and sell that into other cultures.
It became very, very, I believe it rose.
40:13
I'd have to go back to my research, but it's around 50 francs to about 500 francs per pound to import hair into France during the 1850s.
So it rose the price of hair dramatically and then we give the hair back, the little cut of hair, you know, that's what the hair artist did.
40:31
But are these morning pieces?
Well, that's the thing about hair work.
No, it's very, Once again, a very smaller subset of these pieces were made for morning.
They're they're just common sentimental goods that the Victorians would wear.
But you will find that there are many, many chains with the the thing about chains is from the catalogs where you can purchase them, the charms were often bespoke.
40:56
So whether it was a monogram, and in memory of sentiments and acorn, whatever that little charm was, you might find a one with the black enamel and a morning sentiment on it.
So they're not very expensive, they're quite beautiful and very, very functional.
41:13
And gentlemen's paces too.
And often these were handed down to the children.
But most of the time, especially with the rings, the ones that were given out of funerals, they they were kept by the family.
That's why they're in such good condition today.
They weren't necessarily worn, they were bought out for special occasions.
41:31
They're not really functional pieces that were meant to last a lifetime, even though that's what their representation is meant to do.
I've got one actual interesting tale is there was a a very wealthy shipping magnates in England and he passed away in about 1901 and he left behind for his very close friends and colleagues about £100 for a morning ring and then for his staff and the workers 1 LB per ring.
41:59
So it's very much this thing that propagated so wide, but they're all men.
That wasn't for the wife, that was just a little symbol of him to give to remember him by.
Which is brilliant, isn't it?
And I I think the fact that we have these, this history, I think again just tells us so much, doesn't it, about the importance of of this and the status with which like you've kind of rightly pointed out that this was also a way of imparting your status.
42:26
You know, by being able to do this a sign of your wealth and and your position and so on.
And that importance of being remembered, that this was supposed to be something that would last in the same way that they were also obviously putting so much thought into other ways of remembering them in in kind of the funerary art, the symbolism on tombs and on memorials and so on and so forth.
42:51
You see all kind of there kind of coming through in all of these different areas, the importance and the significance of it.
Oh yes, absolutely.
And once again with status and and design.
This is an interesting one, especially for the 19th century.
43:07
There was such rapid change with the different styles that were permeating different cultures.
In the 1870s, we have a huge classical revival.
It's technically around the 1867 Paris exhibition where you've got some of the major Jewelers around the world showing off a lot of the archaeological jewels that were emulating the styles of the Greeks and the Romans.
43:30
The the Victorians were very cyclical like that.
They would copy and re appropriate not not dissimilar.
I suppose we do that today.
But the way that you would show status is in the symbolism of the design in the jewel.
So you do find pieces with cameos and taglios with symbols of classicism, but if you look under the skin of it, they're actually morning jewels as well even though once again a smaller subset.
43:55
But you do find that they emulated their style and time because the lady, generally the lady who would wear them, would need to be fashionable and show that status.
Well, you know, one of the ones that interests me the most being Australian.
I'm from the state of Victoria.
44:10
In Australia is the Gold Rush, which happened in 1851 and Melbourne became the most wealthy city in the world at the time, because we were pretty much the gold source for the British Empire and a lot of the very, very poor and desperate younger men around the planet, from America, Poland, England, everywhere, Scotland, you know they were coming here.
44:36
And in 1851 to 1852 the population jumped by 74,000 people just in Melbourne.
And they were moving off to the gold fields to pioneer as much as they could.
There was alluvial gold that could just pull out of the ground, and the designs that were happening influenced many of the jewels that the men who succeeded would take back over to Europe.
44:58
And a lot of the Australian flora and fauna were used in memorial and sentimental jewels.
So you see these wonderful depictions of our natural animals and plants taken back to Europe as this cultural fascination.
But they also have woven hair in the back.
45:14
It's it's one of those small little times where cultural fascination breeds status.
Another one would be the Halley's Comet in I think it was around 1836 and Halley's Comet brooches which is still produced today with this sort of round larger round area in the front to emulate the comet.
45:33
And then you've got a tail with another little gem in the back usually to emulate the spray.
And this was the tail of the comet.
And the many of these were also I've got one that says in memory of and it's just this wonderful little cultural fascination of its time look through the right lens.
45:50
You wouldn't know necessarily what it is.
It just looks like another brooch.
And that's where design beyond the in memory of the black enamel, the the buckle and the Garter design which is so very typical.
The burning torch for the Victorians was another one that was very popular in memoriam and the variations of those which originated back in the early 19th century from biblical quotes.
46:15
That became because religion is a huge part of standardization for morning jewels.
The Gothic revival is a whole area I could talk about and why that was popular for design of the for the Victorians, but that that that standardization creates piety creates a very focused society which has proprietary and also the right Christian family and how you should behave.
46:39
But when you get the ones that are just a little bit different and they just don't really look right or they're just a bit strange, that's where the stories really tumble out.
And I find those wonderful.
Yeah, I think there's, again, I think there's a lot.
Of misconception and I think people have a perceived notion as to what the morning jewelry looks like in terms of whether it's simply just got to have the hair work or certain types of material colour.
47:02
You know, there are, I think people have misconceptions because they're the ones maybe that that are popular in terms of gets get viewed, get shown, get talked about.
But like you've mentioned, there are so many different types of subsets and and slight changes and alterations.
And again, it kind of makes the artistry of the pieces that much more fascinating and interesting and this the layers and stories behind them.
47:24
But then also, like you pointed out, just this very rich symbolism and how that could be influenced by other cultures, travel, all of these other things that made its way into morning jewellery, which again is just so fascinating.
47:42
The symbolism and how it was deployed and used as part of that artistry is just, it's a whole other topic.
I think there's so many aspects and tangents to that.
It's just so intriguing how that has been used to represent different things in this type of jewellery.
48:01
Oh, absolutely.
I'd love to talk to you about it.
Someday I could go on that tangent.
I'd love to go on that that Gothic Revival tangent, because it's so interesting because it relates so much to even the French Revolution.
It goes that far back and then develops from there.
It's very interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
So.
48:17
One of the things that.
I I think would be interesting to to ask you whether you know is as to whether or not you know these pieces.
Were they different from who it was tended for?
So for example, if it was a style of mourning for a spouse versus a piece for a parent or a sibling, were there any differences or something that you would expect to kind of come through in some of those types of jewelry pieces that might represent a mourning for a specific type of loved one, those types of pieces?
48:48
Usually correlate with the late 18th century, early 19th century.
So pre Vic you by by victorious time everything was so industrialized and cataloged that the the bigger designers were producing the ones which were copied all around the planet.
49:05
So something which was setting a template for a memory of in London was very much going to be reproduced over in New York.
Those earlier ones though that's where you get the really interesting stuff.
So you might find something which has, I found one the other day, which has a philosopher's bust on top of a plinth being adorned with a Garland.
49:30
And you know you've got something which for the philosopher, it's something which that person identified with as that philosopher.
And that's a child showing that back to a parent.
That's saying that this is how my father wanted to be represented as an intelligent person.
49:47
You might have another one.
There's a beautiful one in the V and a museum which has nipped in the bud and it's got a flower and it's got another flower next to it with it being cut off and falling to the ground.
And that's actually for from the the child, from the dedication of a father to the friend.
50:08
So at the time the friend was still alive and then the friend passed away, so it became a double mourning ring.
And you find these sorts of ones interesting because those symbols start to differ, the ones where you've got.
So the allegorical symbols in general were pre designed, So many of the traveling miniaturists they were pre designing on unusually ivory discs, the design of the urn, the plinth, the weeping Willow and they would customize the name for the person on top of that with usually an ink or even cut hair or both.
50:43
They would desiccate the hair and put that into the ink and then paint.
Those ones are very standard, but when you get to the more higher society pieces, that's where you get the really interesting stuff.
In the the 19th century, you'll find more of the dedications start to change.
50:59
So I've got one piece which has five different family members in it.
It's a very typical Starburst design in blue enamel.
The enamel work, that's probably where the Victorians did use design to change a little bit.
They were focused on let's say blue enamel that would be to represent royalty through the color of royal blue.
51:21
There was you know red for passion, that sort of thing.
So you do find the occasional ones which have different enamel work, but it's the dedication inside and underneath that's where you find almost like a tombstone that that's more personalized inscription of what's the epitaph would be for the the father or the mother or even the child.
51:40
It's very typical.
And when children in in general, that's probably another fascinating one where you see more variants.
So in the 18th century pieces you'll find.
I just looked at one yesterday, actually, I wrote an article about it.
There's a butterfly flying from the chrysalis and there's so much storytelling there which goes into Greek history, but it also shows the soul leaving the body going into the heavens, this rebirth.
52:10
And for children, white enamel is the most popular color to be used because that shows innocence, purity and virginity.
Whenever you see a white enamel piece, that's exactly what it means.
It can be for a an unmarried lady or obviously a child or both.
52:27
And the symbolism, you might see there could be the the bird leaving a cage flying off into the heavens.
And if a woman in those days in the 18th century was holding the cage with the cage closed and the bird inside, she's holding her virtue often.
52:42
If she's giving it to a man, that's an offering of marriage and offering her virtue.
And if the bird's flying away, usually it's it's the bird flying off into the heavens and someone's past.
And if you've got that with the white enamel, then you've got something pretty interesting.
52:58
So yeah, there's there's some variations which you don't often see, but they're there.
Again, just fascinating, because what you've.
Got is story being told through colour and through symbolism that, like you said, just has its own story in itself.
But again, reveals so much in terms of what they're trying to say about the person behind that story that their virtue, their their purity, their their kind of innocence, all of these other things that again, so many, so much nuance there, I think that is just really interesting.
53:30
Some of my favourites actually.
I forgot to.
Mention because the British and all all of the sort of diaspora of the British and you know the Church of England and and the societies and cultures that they re established to set up had their own design.
53:46
The European so northern German mostly around the north European area still with Protestant cultures.
They used the designs of the Neoclassicism, but started to look through them with their own lens.
54:02
Very interesting pieces.
I've I've lived in Berlin and seen many of them there.
Those ones, they use allegory, but not in the same way because there's still that Catholic influence.
They're very reticent to show that weeping lady, and that that Lady is often the ideal depiction of our grief if she's weeping next to the tomb.
54:24
So that takes away from the religious aspects of what we should be doing, which is worshipping God in the Christian faith.
Not to say they weren't Christian, of course, of course they are.
But it's it's still not Catholic.
So what they did was they depicted romantic depictions of the castle.
54:41
In bucolic scenarios, you might see a churchyard with a grave side in front of it with a little the crucifix in the graveyard, or two people crossing a river in a boat.
And those things give you the option of considering it through your own lens of perception.
54:58
Or is it just beautiful?
That's that's actually a very hard for an historian to look back on to try and distill that into what it really meant.
But after a few different depictions you start to get the impression of what they what they were and what their culture was.
But they're fascinating because they're they're very different.
55:16
They they use all the same design elements of painted on ivory the sepia tones often sometimes with the the cut up hair and use that in the same scenario but very very different from what the English were doing.
Gosh, that's intriguing.
There's so.
55:32
Much art to.
This isn't there, there's so.
Much thought in every part of it, the detail that again I just think helps to really contribute to that process of memorializing a loved one that has made it so enduring.
So that all this time later it's still something of of huge significance.
55:50
Because you can look at a piece from so many different aspects through so many different lenses and uncover something different with with a different, you know kind of look at it.
And and that's I think the really intriguing part of looking at the fashion of what you're looking at, the symbolism of what you're looking at, all of the things that we've been discussing.
56:13
I mean it's just incredible really when you start to really examine these tiny little pieces.
But what they tell us, I know it's it's so wonderful to.
Look at and once you start.
It took me about 15 years to create my narrative and put together my thesis because it was so tying those little elements of history together through the primary research and how people interacted and through Diaries, through everything else.
56:37
And you start to see the design and the culture and how you start to have that, that aha moment of, oh, that's why that happened recently when I was doing research into photography and also the developments of the printing press.
One of the great reasons why a lot of these symbols still exist today and they're reflected obviously in funerary art and cemeteries tombstones, because a lot of those symbols that were used in classicism, the Victorians were using in morning cards and funerary cards are these funeral cards, which Victoria was not a fan of in the 1870s.
57:10
She actually frowned upon them and said they were a French tradition.
But you know, once again, economic stimulus, the use of photography and printing, the British, all the colonies made such a big business out of them and they took over from the custom of the jewelry almost seamlessly.
57:26
So by the 20th century, the mourning cards became so popular to send internationally because we have post, because I could say that my loved one lives in a different country, yet within a few days they're going to be notified about my cousin's passing.
57:41
So there it is.
And those designs still exist today.
The interpretation is still there because if you love art history, it's not gone.
And obviously I've dedicated so much writing and everything through my website and everything else to learning more about it and to to helping people educate about it.
58:01
But you just have to look and see it.
And I think that's where if you walk through a cemetery, you sit down, discover what those symbols mean beyond of it being a set template, which was popular in the 1930s or the 20s or the 1890s, you start to see the rich storytelling that goes into it.
58:19
And and the other thing is, that's not necessarily what that person's feeling or the family's mood was.
That's just what they were sold.
And it's that balancing act between commerce and emotion.
And we've got to always go for commerce, unfortunately.
58:35
Do you have any?
Particular morning jewellery pieces or styles or collections that stand out for you personally, either for their historical significance or the I don't know the emotional resonance or the craftsmanship.
You know craftsmanship.
Do you have any favorite pieces?
58:51
Well, I think the craftsmanship.
I'm always going to fall back on anything made between about 1780 and 1830, where not only was there such huge social change, there were so many different variances of trying to understand the style and standardize it and get it right.
59:15
So a lot of what we were talking about with personal symbolism, the paintings on ivory, the depictions of a person or a lady pointing upwards towards the heavens, holding an anchor for faith, hope and charity, how that relates to society.
And especially in the early 19th century, British pride in the Navy was changing a lot of morning jewelry to become using lots of naval influences because that's where their might was.
59:42
Those things I find very fascinating.
That's where you've got things like the eye miniatures, so eye portraits, which were very much a niche at the time.
So George the 4th and the Prince of Wales married Maria Fitzherbert, so a Catholic widow, and that was annulled by his dad.
1:00:02
So what he did was he had a a portrait made-up of her eye and he wore that, so they say, under his lapel until he died.
And that was one of those little things which was supposed to be hidden.
It was supposed to be anonymous, that even though he, it was very widely known that he was in love with her, this satire all through the newspapers, it's one of those things which was supposed to be secret.
1:00:24
Yet the pretty young things, they all emulated and copied that style.
So you've got ones for sentimentality and you've got ones for mourning.
And there's some beautiful ones with like a teardrop shape in black enamel with the eye set in them.
Very rare there.
There's people copying in these days, but there weren't a great deal of them produced because they were such a niche and in this period a small thing that I love.
1:00:47
I love the weird things.
You've got the rise of this style called caneteal work, where you've got, say, hammered gold and you've got gold wire work which was used to make the jewel look bigger essentially.
And this is because of the wars, Napoleonic Wars.
1:01:02
The gold is going to the war effort.
And the Goldsmiths, they're in high demand.
There are people going off to war and these people wanted to give tokens of love to their sweethearts or if they'd passed on, they needed to have a jewel.
So they're producing jewelry at a rapid rate, but they're in lower grade alloys.
1:01:19
They're in as much gold as they could use.
And so there was no standardization of the designs of these pieces.
So they they look big, but they're actually not incredibly well produced.
And also that's where hair became very popular.
Hair was always popular and used, but in the voluminous nature of how it was used.
1:01:38
The taking over of a gem where gem gems at that time was still very popular.
The price had fallen off the Cliff after the French terror because many many homes were raided.
The gold was taken, pieces were broken up, the gems were just scattered throughout Europe.
The prices dropped, but paste became very popular, so foiled glass in the color.
1:01:58
So you've got acrostic jewelry, DEAREST Diamond Emerald Amethyst, Ruby sapphire Topaz or EST emerald Topaz.
Sorry.
They spell out that from the 1st letter of the gem spells out the message of love.
And those ones I think are great, and that's where the the meaning of color came from.
1:02:20
But those pieces once again were just sentimental for their time and I think that's one of the biggest heights of like pure sentimentality in those cultures at that time.
Whereas as you get towards more of the industrialization of society, things were were very much standardized.
1:02:38
And yes, because of the nature of these jewels, they are still sentimental and loved and and they have such a rich message.
But also they were, they were made in such high volume in in the you know hundreds per funeral which at a very low cost you could they were charging about, you can get some as low as 30 shillings for a ring back in those days.
1:02:59
By the 1850s they were just cheap enough to be produced.
We have the 1854 hallmarking act where we've got lower grade alloys so you can go down to about 14 carat I think it was and that's where mass production really took off.
And so those early paces, especially the the ones where you've got that really different symbolism, I've seen ones with all sorts.
1:03:22
I've seen ones with astrology and them painted on ivory.
And it does make you sit down and think, you know what, what on earth were they thinking?
What, what does that even mean for that person?
And I love that.
So for me, it's those pieces.
But I think, you know, you can't go.
You can't forget your first.
1:03:38
And that's with in memory.
I've written on the top, but I do think that's the most pure sentiments of all.
So yeah, my my first ring for Marianne Lewis.
That's what's always going to win it for me.
I think there's just something beautiful.
In all of it and I think yeah it's almost like music it it's like when you when you can appreciate art you can find something beautiful and magical in all of them that really resonate for different reasons and and I think that's what's again what's really enjoying about when you look at when you look at this it's it's what they all reveal they're all so unique and yeah it's it's been so unbelievably fascinating to talk to you.
1:04:14
I think we could talk about jewellery forever and symbolism and and this kind of go down this route and this path.
There's just so many parts to it.
It's incredible the more you look into it.
And yeah, I just appreciate you giving up some of your time this evening to to talk about a little part.
1:04:31
Of this with.
Us.
And for people listening, Michelle, it's an absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
So much for your time.
And allowing me to even talk about these.
If anything I can do is a thrill just to educate and offer as much for a new society and a generation to learn about them.
Because if we never forget them, they're never gone.
1:04:48
So these jewels will last forever and the message of love will last forever.
And we're just caretakers for their knowledge and what they are.
And if we carry them forward, then what more could be said that's so beautiful and I think that's the perfect sentiment.
Absolutely sums it up completely.
1:05:04
And yeah, I I echoed that and I I will make sure that all of your details for your website, your Patreon page, your social media pages, etcetera, go on to the podcast description notes and on the website so that people can find you easily come and see what you're about some, see some of the articles, find out more if they want to.
1:05:25
Because I think, yeah, there's so much more to this.
If it interests you and you want to take that deep dive, there's material there and you've done an awful lot of work to help bring that together for people to help raise that awareness and and educate them about some of this.
1:05:41
So, yeah, I will make sure to put that all together and make that easy to signpost people to you.
God bless you and thank you so much.
And I will say goodbye to everybody.
Listening.
Bye everybody.
