Mourning, Victorian-style

I was listening to BBC Radio 4 this morning as I started wading through my morning cache of emails. It was Woman’s Hour and one segment on the show covered the history, style and etiquette of mourning clothes in Victorian England. And let me just say that it made me sit straight up with horror. The unfairness, the uncomfortable heavy black-craped oppression of it all! FOR TWO AND HALF YEARS. No jewelry for the first year, outfits that weighed a near metric tonne (or thereabouts), and black veils in public, whose harsh dyes often led to vicious eye and skin diseases. I mean check this quote from the April 17th edition of Harpers Bazar from 1886:

“This fashion is very much objected to by doctors, who think many diseases of the eye come by this means, and advise for common use thin nuns’ veiling instead of crape, which sheds its pernicious dye into the sensitive nostrils, producing catarrhal disease as well as blindness and cataract of the eye. It is a thousand pities that fashion dictates the crape veil, but so it is. It is the very banner of woe, and no one has the courage to go without it. We can only suggest to mourners wearing it that they should pin a small veil of black tulle over the eyes and nose, and throw back the heavy crape as often as possible, for health’s sake.”

Whereas dudes just had to wear a black ribbon around their hats for three months. What a load of stiffened black pants.

Now I don’t usually find myself outraged by sexism; concerned, annoyed and worried, yes, but outraged not so much. I mean I even laughed a black little comic laugh when I learned that women in the UK used to be burned at the stake for killing their husbands.  You see the crime they were convicted of was not murder but petty treason - generally a crime where a subordinate wrongs their superior. Men who murdered their wives were merely convicted of murder and hung. MUCH nicer and far less emphasis on the fact that killing your spouse is A CRIME AGAINST THE COUNTRY, it’s just a normal, civil sort of matter (or course men convicted of treason were hung, drawn and quartered, so maybe I shouldn’t complain so very much).