The locket is a small hinged container designed to be worn as a pendant, brooch or attachment to a chain, holding a portrait, lock of hair, prayer, miniature relic or other token of sentimental value. Its history runs unbroken from medieval Christian reliquary practice through the personal-portrait tradition of the Renaissance and Baroque, the sentimental locket of the Georgian and Victorian periods, the mourning locket of the long nineteenth century, and the photo locket of the twentieth and twenty-first. Few categories of jewellery have remained so culturally consistent across nine centuries of changing material, technique and fashion.

Medieval roots

The earliest direct ancestor of the locket is the medieval reliquary pendant, a small enclosed container worn around the neck containing a fragment of bone, cloth or other relic of a saint. Reliquary pendants from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries survive in church treasuries and museum collections in considerable numbers, typically in gold or silver-gilt with cabochon stones and enamelled imagery. The piety of relic-wearing established the cultural template that personal possession of a small enclosed object had spiritual and emotional weight.

By the late medieval period, secular versions had appeared in noble inventories. The Lyte Jewel in the British Museum, made around 1610, is a transitional object: a gold locket enamelled and set with diamonds, holding a miniature portrait of King James I of England, given by the king to Thomas Lyte. The form anticipates the seventeenth-century portrait locket while retaining the goldsmithing vocabulary of medieval reliquary work.

Renaissance and Baroque portrait lockets

The development of portrait miniature painting in watercolour on vellum, attributed in part to Hans Holbein the Younger and to Nicholas Hilliard at the Tudor and Stuart courts, gave the locket a new function. Holbein's Hilliards portraits of Elizabeth I, James I and members of their courts circulated as miniatures, often set in oval lockets that could be opened to reveal the portrait or worn closed with the portrait hidden. The political and emotional charge of carrying a sovereign's likeness, or that of a beloved or absent friend, made the locket a piece of political and personal currency at the European courts.

French, German and Italian goldsmiths produced lockets enamelled in champlevé and basse-taille techniques, with hinged compartments and elaborate cover designs. The Spanish court favoured cross-shaped lockets opening to reveal reliquary or portrait. The Dutch and Northern European market produced more restrained, often black-enamelled mourning lockets that anticipated later British forms.

Georgian and Victorian sentimentality

The eighteenth century saw the locket migrate from courtly to bourgeois use. Georgian lockets often held plaited hair set under glass or rock crystal in a compartment, with a miniature on the obverse. Hair work itself became a specialised craft: hair could be braided into intricate patterns, mounted as a flat back, or even formed into entire scenes (a willow, an urn, a mourning figure) within the locket compartment.

The Victorian period made the mourning locket an institution. Following Albert's death in 1861, Queen Victoria's public mourning gave the form royal sanction and commercial momentum. Mourning lockets in jet, vulcanite, onyx, garnet and black enamel held photographs (after the daguerreotype's introduction in 1839 and its rapid spread through the 1840s) or hair work, often inscribed with names and dates. The category was so commercially significant that Whitby jet, the principal material for Victorian mourning jewellery, sustained an entire industrial town.

Sentimental lockets, distinct from mourning lockets, used colour. The acrostic locket, with stones whose first letters spelled a word (D-E-A-R-E-S-T using diamond, emerald, amethyst, ruby, emerald, sapphire, topaz; or R-E-G-A-R-D using ruby, emerald, garnet, amethyst, ruby, diamond), was a Georgian-Victorian invention that remains in production today. Lockets with secret compartments, hidden behind portraits or initials, held messages or tokens.

Twentieth century: photography and the working locket

The twentieth century democratised the locket. Mass-production techniques, particularly the stamping and hollow-fabrication methods perfected in Birmingham and Pforzheim, made gold and gold-filled lockets affordable to the working middle class. Photographic miniaturisation made it trivial to insert a small black-and-white photograph behind the locket's glass.

The two World Wars made the locket a soldier's keepsake and a wife's or mother's vigil object. Surviving lockets from both wars, often holding photographs of fiancées, children or fallen sons, are among the most poignant categories of sentimental jewellery. The trade still encounters them regularly in estate sales.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the locket had migrated to an everyday gift category: a child's first "good" piece of jewellery, a confirmation gift, a Mother's Day present. Stamped gold-filled and silver lockets dominated this market.

Contemporary practice

The locket has experienced two notable revivals in the early twenty-first century. The first is the personalised-charm boom, in which Pandora and similar brands marketed lockets that could be filled with small floating charms. The second is the artisan and high-jewellery revival, in which named designers (Monica Rich Kosann, Jessica McCormack, Aurélie Bidermann, Lindsay Reinsmith of Aurum & Gray) have made the locket a serious fine-jewellery category again, with prices into five figures and complex multi-compartment designs.

The form remains technically demanding. Hinges and clasps must be precise to keep dust and moisture out, glass or rock-crystal lights must be set without obscuring the contents, and the case must be light enough for comfortable wear while robust enough for daily use. The best contemporary lockets are made by specialist workshops with multi-generational experience, often in Birmingham, the Jewellery Quarter of which retains several of the historic locket-making firms.