The mourning locket is the central form of personal memorial jewellery in the English-speaking tradition, a small hinged pendant worn at the neck or carried on a long chain, designed to enclose a relic of the deceased — most often a lock of hair, sometimes a sepia photograph, occasionally a painted miniature on ivory or vellum. Lockets in this function appear in seventeenth-century probate inventories and persist in identifiable form into the early decades of the twentieth century, when the conventions of Victorian mourning gave way under the weight of mass bereavement in the First World War. The mourning locket is distinguished from the generic locket by its dedicated memorial function, by inscriptions tying it to a named deceased, and by aesthetic conventions of black, white, and gold that remained legible across two and a half centuries.

Form and construction

The typical mourning locket consists of a hinged metal case — gold, gilt silver, pinchbeck (a brass alloy resembling gold), or in the late Victorian period gold-filled — opening on a side hinge to reveal one or two interior compartments. The compartments are bezel-set behind glass crystals, holding the relic in place against fading and physical disturbance. The exterior face is usually decorated, often with a black-enamel border or central panel, applied gold motifs, or set with seed pearls, jet, or onyx. Inscriptions on the reverse give the deceased's name, the dates of birth and death, and sometimes a verse or phrase such as In Memoriam, Not Lost But Gone Before, or For Ever.

Sizes range from small ovals worn close to the throat — perhaps twenty millimetres in the principal axis — to large lockets four or five centimetres long, designed for display over outer mourning dress. The shape is most often oval or rectangular with rounded corners; circular lockets are less common in the memorial form. Mid-century pieces often incorporate a swivel mount allowing both faces to be turned outward in alternation, with a hairwork or photographic compartment on each side.

The hairwork interior

The interior of a mourning locket is its emotional centre. The most common arrangement is a flat compartment behind glass holding a lock of the deceased's hair, often woven into a decorative pattern: a Prince of Wales plume of three curling tendrils, a basket-weave panel, a feather, a flower form, or — in the most accomplished pieces — a tableau of woven hair set against a sepia ground depicting weeping willows, urns, or churchyards. Specialist hairworkers in London, Paris, and Boston produced these arrangements to commission; period magazines from the 1830s onward also published instructions for home practice.

Photographic compartments became common from the 1850s with the spread of the daguerreotype and ambrotype and, more decisively, from the 1860s with the carte de visite and tintype. A cabinet photograph or a tintype trimmed to fit replaces the hairwork; later lockets often combine the two, with hair on one face and a photograph on the other. Sepia miniatures painted on ivory, the dominant pre-photographic form, persist as a luxury option through the 1860s and 1870s before fading from common use.

Stuart and Georgian precursors

The form has a continuous history reaching back to the seventeenth century. Stuart-period mourning lockets used rock crystal as a transparent cover for hair or vellum inscriptions, set into gold mounts often with enamelled motifs of skulls, hourglasses, and other memento mori imagery. Georgian-period lockets refined the form: the rock crystal gave way to faceted glass crystals, the imagery softened from skull and bone to weeping willow and broken column, and the hairwork itself became more elaborate. The Wedgwood and Tassie production of small portrait medallions in the late eighteenth century intersected with the locket form, producing memorial pendants in pressed glass paste.

The Victorian apex

The mourning locket reached its broadest social distribution in the Victorian period, particularly in the four decades following Albert's death in December 1861. Mass production by Birmingham and Sheffield manufacturers, in pinchbeck and gold-filled metals, brought the form within reach of working-class buyers; the upper end remained the province of London goldsmiths in eighteen-carat gold with diamond-set borders. American manufacture in Newark, Providence, and Attleboro paralleled the English production, with regional variations in style. The locket's centrality to nineteenth-century material culture is hard to overstate: the form was worn by every class of woman in mourning, often retained for life and passed to daughters or granddaughters as family heirloom.

Identification and dating

Several features help date and place a mourning locket. The metal will often carry hallmarks: the English gold and silver assay marks give a precise date and city; American pieces are sometimes marked with maker's stamps but rarely dated. Construction details — hinge type, bezel construction, glass crystal versus faceted glass — narrow the period within which the locket was made. The interior arrangement — hairwork only, hairwork plus daguerreotype, hairwork plus carte de visite, photograph only — gives an approximate terminus post quem based on the photographic technology used.

Inscription style is also diagnostic. Eighteenth-century inscriptions tend to be Latin, formal, and engraved in the period hand. Victorian inscriptions are more often English, sentimental, and engraved in the round-hand of the period. Late Victorian and Edwardian pieces frequently abandon the inscription altogether in favour of a plain reverse, relying on the family's oral knowledge of the deceased.

Materials beyond gold

Pinchbeck — a copper-zinc alloy invented in the early eighteenth century — was the most common substitute for gold in middle-class mourning lockets. It tarnishes to a duller surface than gold but holds enamel and fine engraving well. Gold-filled construction, with a thick gold layer mechanically bonded to a base-metal core, became the dominant American technique from the 1860s onward, marketed under names such as rolled gold and gold-cased. Solid silver lockets are common in the lower middle of the market, often with applied gold motifs. Vulcanite and gutta-percha lockets — moulded from the new synthetic materials of the mid nineteenth century — represented the cheapest commercial tier.

Care and the contemporary market

Mourning lockets are routinely encountered in the antique and estate jewellery trade. Condition matters: the glass crystals are often original and irreplaceable, the hairwork should be examined for moisture damage, and the hinges and clasps should function smoothly. Enamel chips reduce value materially. The hairwork interior is irreversible — removing it destroys the locket's documentary value as well as its sentimental coherence — and reputable dealers leave it in place. The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery hold significant reference collections that anchor the connoisseurship of the form.

In the trade

Pricing for mourning lockets ranges from low three figures for ordinary late-Victorian gold-filled pieces with simple hairwork to mid five figures for important Stuart and Georgian pieces with documented provenance. The largest premium attaches to lockets with both excellent inscriptions tying them to identifiable historical figures and intact original hairwork or miniatures. Reproduction is a known issue, particularly of Georgian forms; the construction details are usually decisive in distinguishing period work from later copies.

Further reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum — The Art of Mourning
• Metropolitan Museum of Art — mourning lockets in the collection
• Bonhams — Jewellery department
• International Gem Society — Jet and mourning materials