Today I’m excerpting from The Etiquette of Today: A Complete Guide to Correct Manners, and Social Customs in Use Among Educated and Refined People of America, by Marshall Everett, 1902.
As long as the crape veil and crape trimmed gown are worn a woman should refrain from participation in all social gayeties. During the first three weeks after the loss of a near relative, women refuse themselves to all visitors except relatives and most intimate friends. After this, while not keeping any day at home, they do as a rule find themselves sufficiently resigned and controlled to receive a few callers and to speak with composure of the recent trial.
Six months after the loss of a parent, sister, brother, child or husband, a woman is entitled to call very informally on her friends. That is to say, she makes her call on some other afternoon than that of her friend’s day at home. After six months, she is privileged to attend concerts, picture shows, and, if she wishes, the matinee performances at the theater. When the crape decorations are put off, small dinners and luncheons and night performances at the theater or opera, witnessed from an orchestra chair, supply ample diversion, but not until well along in second mourning is attendance at large dinners and the like ever resumed ; and balls and the opera-box and the regular round of social calls are never, taken up again until colors are again worn.
Men do not so carefully graduate their mourning, nor their resumption of social duties, as women. After three weeks or two months, the theater, club, and small dinners and calls among intimate friends are resumed, and since so few men wear mourning at all, their social habits are resumed after brief retirement. It should be said, however, that while wearing a broad band on his hat, a man does not go to a ball, sit in an opera-box, or attend a fashionable dinner.
Detail from “Death and the Gravedigger” by Carlos Schwabe
How to Dress Becomingly in Victorian Mourning The following appeared in Arthur’s Home Magazine published in 1885 in Philadelphia. HOW TO DRESS BECOMINGLY IN MOURNING By Ella Rodman Church. BLACK has been so generally worn for a long time past that it is not always easy to distinguish between those who are in mourning and those who are not. It is...
Buying Fish and Shopping at Billingsgate Fish Market in Georgian and Victorian Times It’s time to post another modern translation from John Trusler’s The London Adviser and Guide: Containing every Instruction and Information Useful and Necessary to Persons Living in London and Coming to Reside There published in 1786. In my last post from this book, we learned how to acquire poultry and...
Travails of Edwardian Female Travelers Summer vacation is coming, ladies! Have you wired ahead to the hotels where you’ll be staying? Do you know how to pack your hats properly? What are you going to wear in the sleeper car? How will you handle unwanted male attention on a train? Are you as clueless on...
The Proper Gentleman Cyclist – Bicycle Etiquette from 1896 I must warn my gentle readers that in this post “we are not dealing with the new woman…we prefer the good, old-fashioned kind, the gentle woman, in fact, although we have mounted her upon a pair of wheels. She has broadened her intellect, but we want the same sweet, coquettish feminine woman...
May I Introduce You? The Etiquette of Victorian Introductions Dear Gentle Reader, What is your position in society? Is it higher or lower than mine? And what of your reputation? This is very important to know because I might not want to be introduced to you. After all, Lady Constance Howard, author of Etiquette: What To Do, and How...
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Parisian Manners and Fashion in the 1830s Today I’m excerpting from The Gentleman and Lady’s Book of Politeness and Propriety of Deportment: Dedicated to the Youth of Both Sexes by Elizabeth Celnart and translated from the Paris edition in 1833. The beautiful illustrations are from an 1836 issue of the famous French journal Le Bon Ton, which, oddly...
4 Replies to “Seclusion During Mourning in Edwardian Times”
Very wise guidelines. It’s a pity we’ve thrown such helpful traditions away. They worked … and saved a lot of trouble at crucial stages of life. Now everyone muddles through and … needs counselling.
Very wise guidelines. It’s a pity we’ve thrown such helpful traditions away. They worked … and saved a lot of trouble at crucial stages of life. Now everyone muddles through and … needs counselling.
Hi Judy!
You may want to read the entire funeral chapter in the book. It’s very interesting. https://books.google.com/books?id=uvZMAQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
Susanna
I find this sort of custom infuriating. Seclusion might work best for some people, while for others it just makes a difficult time worse. Argh.
Very true. I’m thinking by 1902 those old mourning customs were starting to fade.