After a study of upper and middle class mourning practices,
it left me wondering…what of the lower class?
Their grief is no less fierce. Grief
knows no class bounds. Yet, unlike upper
and middle class women, the poor were not afforded the luxury of a time of mourning—a
period set aside for one’s heart to mend.
To a life already burdened with financial woes, visited grief. There was no time to stop and mourn. Life must go on. There were mouths to feed.
Could love flourish as a couple, could parents love young
children when there was a black cloud of fatalism looming on the horizon? There was sickness, disease, accidents, plagues…and
there was Civil War. Over 600,000 men
died. Every family, from upper class to
slave, was touched by grief.
When a loved one was lost, all grieved, yet, only some could
afford to indulge mourning. For upper
class women, mourning was a job. Lower
class women already had a job and languishing in their grief was not an option. How could women so devastated by their loss as
to require a regimented three year’s mourning period, be so out of touch with
the sorrow of women less fortunate? Money
buys privilege, not brains. To be more
precise, mourning is the outward expression of grief. Mourning for the lower class was considered unnecessary.
It’s not that the poor didn’t grieve. Of course they did. They had responsibilities to uphold, where
outward signs of grief were not acceptable. In stolen moments and in private,
they grieved. Grief is the commonality
between the classes. How it is expressed
is what money could buy. The amount of
money spent on grief was inferred as an indication of depth of grief. If a lot of money was spent on mourning
attire, hired coach, funeral, headstone; then, it was inferred the departed must have been very
well loved. The man destined for the
pauper’s grave was not to have the epilogue of not being loved. Rather, he had the misfortune to be poor in
wealth, not necessarily in love, family and friends.
When someone of meager financial means passed, it must have
been difficult to separate grief from worry over the added financial burden of
a funeral and burial…not to mention the loss of a wage earner to contend
with. Loss is certainly entwined in
material concerns, but not bound by them.
More important than financial concerns, there is a broken heart, loss of
companionship, loss of dreams and plans for the future.
The poor had practical considerations in planning a funeral,
which the rich were not encumbered by. Funerals
among the working classes were planned around work and most often held on
Sundays, so family and friends wouldn’t have their pay docked to attend.
Extravagance was not equal to respectability. Even if the departed was bound for a pauper’s
grave, the family would do their best to fashion mourning attire—sometimes that
meant using black tape to make a tie (which was common). Being practical folk, they relied on their ingenuity
and simply dyed their existing wardrobe black—bundling up their clothes and
carting them to the backyard to be dyed in the wash pot. The reason they dyed their clothing outside was because the black dye smelled horrible.
To create black dye iron was used with madder and logwood. Sometimes an entire neighborhood would smell foul
from the dye pots if the person that passed came from a large extended family, or
if several neighbors were dyeing clothing to attend the funeral.
One equaling factor among classes was religion. The church was often turned to for
solace. Having lots of money or having
little money didn’t change the fact that spiritual rights were the same, rich
or poor…it was the private meaning placed on them that was important.
For upper and middle class, mourning dress was a way to
share the prevalence and stage of one’s grief with others. It was also a way to display economic and
social status. The boom years of the
mourning industry were from 1815 to 1915.
Fashion magazines flaunted mourning wear and the rich supported this
thriving industry. Accordingly, it was
expensive to look properly anguished.
In 1863, Nannie Haskings, a Tennessee teenager, called
mourning practices to task in a journal entry that questioned why she should
care at all about what she wore instead of focusing on her emotional pain: “What
do I care whether it becomes me or not? I don't wear black because it becomes
me. ... I wear mourning because it corresponds with my feelings."
The lower classes may not have been able to afford expensive
mourning attire, an extravagant funeral, ornate headstone (or mausoleum), let
alone commission a death mask or hire a
photographer for the very popular post mortem photography of the day…but what
they commonly did was save a lock of hair.
This was popular among the upper classes too, however, they would likely
have had the hair made into jewelry or art.
The lower class would paste the hair into a simple remembrance
book. An article in Godey’s Lady’s Book May 1855, expressed sentiment that crossed
class lines: “Hair is at once the most delicate and lasting of our materials,
and survives us, like love. It is so
light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that with a lock of hair
belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare
notes with the angelic nature—may almost say, “I have a piece of thee here, not
unworthy of thy being now.”
Our body is a vessel for our spirit, and once the spirit no
longer has need of it, the time has come for our body to be put to rest. For those of little means, there would be no
hearse pulled by a horse decked out in plumes.
Possibly a friend with a buckboard...otherwise, mourners carried the
coffin from the home all the way to the graveyard. There was support among friends--a spirit of
kindness, not extravagance. Having
enough money to grieve properly by societal standards, was not a reflection of
the love for the departed.
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