Archaeologies of bereavement: accessing historical grieving through object use, 1850-1900AD

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ‘cult of mourning’ reached its height. This period saw a boom in material culture related to the funeral, and to mourning. However, this boom was short-lived, reaching its peak in the 1870s and 1880s, before waning into the twentieth century. However, while the performative material culture of the funeral, the cemetery and the elaborate mourning dress, have received scholarly attention, material has not often been studied with a focus on grief. Grief, and all emotional experience, can be considered a culturally constructed phenomenon. Though all people possess the same biological and psychological foundation for emotion, the expression, conception, and even experience of emotions, are constructed from the things we’ve seen, the culture we grew up in, and the communities of which we are a part. This project explores objects related to bereavement in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the aim of identifying how the enculturation of British society was drawn on in order to create a material culture of grieving, as well as considering how that material served to reflexively produce its
own cultural schemas.
Focusing on British working- and middle-class populations, in the period 1850-1900, this project analyses four classes of objects – postmortem photographs, funeral cards, domestically produced hairwork and death memoirs. Utilising a broadly qualitative approach, this project is exploratory, considering how the use of a lens which centres the impact of culture on the experience of grieving may provide new insight into the experience of bereavement. Overall, this thesis shows how the globalisation of media in the late nineteenth century, led to the spread of cultural tropes related to grieving, and provided people with more potential schemas through which to curate their own production of the material culture of grief.