Henrietta Maffitt Lamar’s Mourning Jewelry
When Henrietta Maffitt Lamar’s husband, the second president of the Republic of Texas Mirabeau B. Lamar, died in 1859, she went into a formal period of mourning.
Mourning during the Victorian era was part of a highly structured and public etiquette system that was often completely separate from personal feelings of grief. It determined what a person could do and wear for years after a death based on their relationship to the deceased, their social status, and especially their gender.
As an upper-class widow, Lamar would have gone through several phases of mourning lasting at least two years. During the first year, she wouldn’t have entertained or attended public events besides church. She would have worn all black, preferable in dull fabrics, not just during the funeral and in public, but even when home alone. Even her jewelry, like these jet and gold pieces, was black.
Jewelry could continue to honor the dead long after the formal mourning period was over. Rings, bracelets, lockets and brooches containing hair from the deceased were a popular memento of a loved one in the days before photographs were common.
Tucked behind the photo of Lamar’s husband in her brooch is a lock of his hair.
None of this means that mourning during the Victorian era was performative or that Lamar’s grief wasn’t genuine. By all accounts, the Lamars had a happy marriage, and Henrietta Lamar never remarried, but during this period, mourning was as much an expression of one’s social status as it was of loss. Mourning attire and jewelry were some of the ways this was expressed.