Myrtle Ashdown

Myrtle Ashdown lived in Victorian England in Surrey, a wife who dutifully obeyed and supported her husband Gilbert Ashdown, and a mother, moral adviser and guide to her only daughter Josephine. Her husband Gilbert was a cold, private man who worked all hours and often left Myrtle lonely. For 10 years Myrtle yearned for a child and after copious failed pregnancies when Myrtle had almost lost hope and all feeling she learnt she was pregnant with Josephine. Josephine; her daughter, companion and best friend, was so precious and longed for by Myrtle. Myrtle experienced 14 years of intense happiness and fulfilment with her until Josephine contracted the lung disease Tuberculosis, a disease which killed 1 in 4 Victorians. Myrtle nursed her and prayed that Josephine would survive the cough, night sweats, weight loss and appetite loss. After 6 weeks, Josephine died early one morning in her mother’s arms. In an era where death was highly visible, she became yet another woman cocooned in crape mourning clothes. She adorned her neck with hair jewellery and had a post-mortem photograph taken of her daughter. Just seven months after Josephine’s death, her husband died of old age. Alone and feeling nothing but numbness and darkness she projected this blackness to the world,   wearing her black mourning clothes for the rest of her long life.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria's funeral, 1901

Queen Victoria had a major influence on mourning rituals during the Victorian era. After her husband Prince Albert’s death from Typhoid in 1861, Queen Victoria went into mourning and remained in mourning for the 40 years left of her life. Society followed their Queens’ example and elaborate mourning rituals became the norm. In “Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion” Rappaport describes how her “unceasing ritualization of mourning” meant “the queen would raise herself as an archetype of sober Victorian widowhood”. She was the widow in which all widows would emulate. She stayed in seclusion, rarely appearing in public, which widows copied. For the first year after her husband’s death during first mourning, Myrtle remained in her home except for visits to church.  Mourning consumed and took precedence of Queen Victoria’s time just like Victorian widows in society. Myrtle had heard rumours that Queen Victoria left everything as her husband had left it.  She wore black mourning clothes for the rest of her life and whilst in full mourning for three years after his death she clothed her staff entirely in black too. Wealthy households imitated this, dressing servants in black. Like Victoria, Myrtle and fellow Victorian widows clothed themselves in black mourning clothes in the first stage of mourning which lasted a year and one day. Queen Victoria spent the 40 years left of her life commemorating him, for example getting statues made of him. This resulted in a trend for mourning memorabilia such as hair jewellery, which Myrtle along with many grieving women commissioned. Jillian Bost notes that “the public grew tired of their queen’s refusal to be seen in public, and her deep mourning that kept her from them.” Queen Victoria realized she owed it to her people to engage in the royal spectacle they yearned for. This reintroduction into society and normality and the ending of secluded mourning was also echoed in mourning etiquette as Myrtle undertook half mourning easing back into colour, social events and more elaborate jewelry and fabrics, after completing a year in full mourning and three to six months in second mourning. Myrtle idolized Queen Victoria and felt an affinity with her as she had experienced heart wrenching loss like herself. 

Victorian Mourning Rituals

Mourning rituals of the Victorian era included elaborate graves, expensive funerals, withdrawing from society, wearing black mourning clothes, and adorning oneself with memorabilia of the deceased. Elizabeth Wilson states the mourning ritual was not “conspicuous consumption” instead, it expressed “both the deep seriousness of the Victorian evangelical sensibility and the generalized hysteria of the culture”. In an era where the middle class population was large and increasingly affluent, with life expectancy rising, Wilson notes “the particular emphasis on mourning throughout the nineteenth century may have been because death at any age was no longer taken for granted”. Myrtle and Gilbert could afford children and death was not expected, instead they had hopes of a full life for their daughter. Myrtle embraced all the mourning rituals expected of her, hoping they would cure and lessen the pain she felt from the loss of her daughter and her husband. Unlike Myrtle, some were more skeptical of mourning rituals. Jalland describes how a Victorian doctor Keith Norman MacDonald wrote a pamphlet in 1875 on “Death and how to Divest it of its Terrors” in which he “rejected the wearing of mourning-dress as a “silly custom” which “adds to the embaressments’ of mourners”. Jalland also notes that Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens, “tended to ridicule extremes in mourning etiquette, enhancing the impression that widows were motivated more often by social emulation, convention and vanity than genuine sorrow”.

Myrtle's Hair Jewellery

Only a Curl

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

I.

FRIENDS of faces unknown and a land

    Unvisited over the sea,

Who tell me how lonely you stand

With a single gold curl in the hand

    Held up to be looked at by me, —

II.

While you ask me to ponder and say

    What a father and mother can do,

With the bright fellow-locks put away

Out of reach, beyond kiss, in the clay

    Where the violets press nearer than you.

III.

Shall I speak like a poet, or run

    Into weak woman's tears for relief ?

Oh, children ! — I never lost one, —

Yet my arm 's round my own little son,

    And Love knows the secret of Grief.

IV.

And I feel what it must be and is,

    When God draws a new angel so

Through the house of a man up to His,

With a murmur of music, you miss,

    And a rapture of light, you forgo.

V.

How you think, staring on at the door,

    Where the face of your angel flashed in,

That its brightness, familiar before,

Burns off from you ever the more

    For the dark of your sorrow and sin.

VI.

God lent him and takes him,' you sigh ;

    — Nay, there let me break with your pain :

God 's generous in giving, say I, —

And the thing which He gives, I deny

    That He ever can take back again.

VII.

He gives what He gives. I appeal

    To all who bear babes — in the hour

When the veil of the body we feel

Rent round us, — while torments reveal

    The motherhood's advent in power,

VIII.

And the babe cries ! — has each of us known

    By apocalypse (God being there

Full in nature) the child is our own,

Life of life, love of love, moan of moan,

    Through all changes, all times, everywhere.

IX.

He 's ours and for ever. Believe,

    O father ! — O mother, look back

To the first love's assurance. To give

Means with God not to tempt or deceive

    With a cup thrust in Benjamin's sack.

X.

He gives what He gives. Be content !

    He resumes nothing given, — be sure !

God lend ? Where the usurers lent

In His temple, indignant He went

    And scourged away all those impure.

XI.

He lends not ; but gives to the end,

    As He loves to the end. If it seem

That He draws back a gift, comprehend

'Tis to add to it rather, — amend,

    And finish it up to your dream, —

XII.

Or keep, — as a mother will toys

    Too costly, though given by herself,

Till the room shall be stiller from noise,

And the children more fit for such joys,

    Kept over their heads on the shelf.

XIII.

So look up, friends ! you, who indeed

    Have possessed in your house a sweet piece

Of the Heaven which men strive for, must need

Be more earnest than others are,—speed

    Where they loiter, persist where they cease.

XIV.

You know how one angel smiles there.

    Then weep not. 'Tis easy for you

To be drawn by a single gold hair

Of that curl, from earth's storm and despair

 To the safe place above us. Adieu.

Prior to the undertakers taking Josephine’s body, Myrtle cut a lock of her daughter’s dark hair. The hair that Myrtle routinely washed, plaited, stroked and adored.  This lock she then sent to a hair artist to be made into a locket. In a printed catalogue she chose an understated but beautiful design. At the back of the catalogue a discreet guarantee written in tiny lettering, said locks of hair would not be mixed or substituted in the process. Myrtle balked at the thought of a stranger touching and looking after the lock and carelessly muddling up the precious hair, but her husband Gilbert assured her that her worries were foolish. 

Myrtle got out her poetry book entitled ‘Last Poems, 1862’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a popular Victorian poet, finding solace in ‘Only A Curl’. Just like Myrtle, the bereaved mother has lost a child and cherishes one curl of his hair as a memento. In the poem Galia Ofek deduces that the ‘curl’ is the only ‘physical presence of the departed’ and a ‘powerful spiritual connection between the living mother and her dead child’. Barrett Browning conveys that the lock of hair should not be allowed to become a symbol of their eternal and final separation, but rather ‘an image of almost divine or mystical unity between the dead and the living, a vibrant spiritual cord which ties the two worlds’ and two people together. Pamela A.Milller claims ‘jewellery had been made from hair or had incorporated hair for centuries but it was the Victorians who turned mourning and sentimental jewelry into a true industry’. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey reasons ‘Human material that was regarded as ‘dead’ while the person was living, is thus transformed into a ‘living’ substance at death in the sense that it is reanimated as a possession capable of sustaining the deceased in close proximity to the bereaved. The physical durability of hair makes this possible as it stands in stark contrast to the instabilities of the fleshy body.” It is the only body part that endures so is therefore precious. Myrtle’s locket was a physical memorial and combined with mourning clothing, made death highly visible in Victorian culture. The locket is made of jet, a form of fossilized wood. Jet was one of the only forms of jewelry permitted to be worn under the strict Victorian code of mourning, particularly during half mourning. Inside the locket there are three small pearls which symbolize tears. The design of the hair is fluid and curvaceous. The curves and form suggest movement and are dynamic denoting life.  Shapes of solid colour created by multiple strands of hair contrast single strands delicately arranged, creating depth within the locket. The jagged edge of the jet locket juxtaposes the smooth form of the hair encased inside. A thin piece of glass separates Myrtle from the hair in the locket, much like her daughter whom she can no longer hold. The oval shape of the locket echoes the pearls and could be interpreted as one large tear. Today, society’s attitudes towards hair has changed. Physical reminders such as hair jewellery are not worn and are often viewed as macabre and distasteful.