I know that during the Victorian period there were strictly observed periods of mourning – something like:
wife mourning her husband - two years
husband mourning his wife - one year
children mourning a parent - one year
mourning a grandparent - six months
and so on, during which you couldn’t be seen socially, let alone get married or whatever.
My question is, suppose someone dies while you are already in mourning for someone else? Do you add the mourning periods together, or just count to the last “active” mourning period?
And does anyone know the mourning periods of parents for children, periods for siblings, cousins, great-grandparents, in-laws? Just morbidly curious.
In Victorian England, I believe the mourning period for siblings, step-parents and grandparents was 3 months. A parent mourning his or her child is 6 months, a parent is 12 months, and a husband is 12 months (18 in the US).
I can’t help with specific mourning periods for other relatives but I do recall reading about “mourning” and “half-mourning”. I think that the latter was a slightly “relaxed” version of full mourning, during which the dress rules were less harsh (women for instance could wear violet or lilac colours) and some socialising was permitted.
Of course some took it to extremes - notably Queen Victoria, who insisted on going into mourning when her daughter’s husband’s grandmother died, and who remained in morning for the rest of her life after Prince Albert’s death.
Queen Vic was already in full mourning when Albert died on December 14, 1861. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, had died earlier in 1861.
When Marie Mallet went into service as one of the Queen’s ladies, she was instructed always to wear half-mourning at court, i.e. gray, violet, and pale lilac. The gentlemen of the court wore somber cravats and black armbands.
If a foreign royal died, Marie and all of the ladies and gentlemen of the court were expected to don full mourning, i.e. unrelieved black, for a period determined by the Queen’s degree of kinship with the deceased.
Mourning didn’t only mean the clothing your wore. While in mourning, you were expected to:
cover all the mirrors hanging on the wall of your house with black crape;
cover any paintings depicting merry scenes with crape (it was okay to leave religous pictures and pictures of the deceased uncovered;
lower the windowshades all the way down (they could be raised half-way up at half-mourning);
hang a black wreath on your front door;
use writing paper bordered in black.
Mourning was a big business in Vict times. There were department stores in London and other cities that sold only mourning acoutrements.
Women did not attend funerals. It was thought that emotion would overcome them, causing them to faint or make unseemly scenes. When the Duke of Wellington died in the 1850’s, Q Vic sent her empty carriage to the funeral, but did not attend the service.
It was customary to hire mutes to walk in funeral processions, and the chief mourner was expected to present each of the the other mourners with a pair of gloves.
As an example, there’s this great song “Mule Train” that my dad always had the Tennessee Ernie Ford version of, but I believe was also covered by Frankie Lane and others and is about the contents of a wagon train to settlers in the West - “there’s a letter full of sadness, and it’s black around the border”.
A former Vicereine of India, no less.