ABSTRACT
TRADESMEN and industrialists with business interests in death made a good living in
the Victorian period. Some made their fortunes. The undertakers, mourning warehouses,
stationers, florists, stone masons and textile manufacturers ran thriving enterprises. They were careful to maintain the upper-class image attached to the rituals of death, which
appealed so much to the social pretensions of their middle-class customers. They stressed
the royal origins of their trade and exploited their royal and aristocratic patrons in
advertising campaigns. Rushton’s, manufacturers of hair mourning jewellery, of
Clerkenwell Road, London, for example, named ‘the nobility, gentry and clergy’ as their
Priestly’s went one better in the 1890s using
the name of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, Victoria, the widowed Empress of
Germany, to promote their mourning textiles in America. ‘The Empress and her
daughters wear gowns, Marie Stuart caps and long veils all of black crape…Following
her example the black crape cap has at last replaced the white one at the English
Using the familiar technique still used
by today’s commercial advertisers, they hoped to attract the lower ranks of society by
naming the rich and influential as their customers. Even the meanest undertakers’ establishments in the slums of the industrial cities were impressively decorated in black
and gold paint. Every attempt was made to make mourning warehouses and undertakers’
shops as grandiose as possible.
