For the time being, however, Victoria found no joy even in the approach of spring. Referring to herself in the third person, as was her wont, she lamented to Lord Derby that: ‘She sees the trees budding, the days lengthening, the primroses coming out, but she thinks herself still in the month of December.’57The Duchess of Sutherland, who had joined Victoria’s household on her accession in 1837, could see the potentially detrimental impact on the monarchy of the Queen’s retreat. Whilst being sensitive, as a fellow widow, to Victoria’s grief, the Duchess took advantage of her position of trust in these early months to try and persuade Victoria to return to her public duties. The Duchess’s friend William Gladstone had written to her in alarm, ‘we cannot afford to create an intense degree of pity for the woman at the cost of her character as a Queen, in which above all things balance and measure are required’. Whilst agreeing with Gladstone, Sutherland perceptively pointed out a necessary shift in how the public viewed the Queen – from active monarch to a revered national symbol of grieving; ‘It is The Widow speaking to Her children,’ she argued.58Several of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting already shared the Duchess’s apprehensions about the Queen’s insatiable commemoration of Albert. It seemed an ‘unhealthy state of mind’; and one of them, when coming off her three-month period of duty, informed Charles Dickens that the Queen insisted on ‘striking out the word “late” from all formal mention of him in documents that come before her’. This state of denial extended to the visitors’ book at royal residences, where Albert’s book was still maintained alongside that of Victoria and visitors were required to sign their names in it just as before, like ‘calling on a dead man’, as Disraeli noted.59
In March, when the mournful processional of the black-garbed royal household arrived back at the ‘living grave’ of Windsor, Victoria kept a close watch on the careful positioning of every last possession of her husband’s in its correct place: his hat and gloves laid out, the handkerchief he last used lying on the sofa, ‘the blotting book open with a pen upon it, his watch going, fresh flowers in a glass’. Without fail she daily cast freshly cut white flowers and cypress over the bed in which he had died – an act of display more Catholic than Protestant, as Clarendon noted – as well as stooping down to kiss the pillow whenever she entered. The last thing she did at night before retiring to bed was to kneel and pray by Albert’s bed in the Blue Room, her communion with his spirit constant and all-consuming.60
Work on the mausoleum, meanwhile, had progressed sufficiently by 15 March (the anniversary of the death of the Duchess of Kent) for the Queen to lay the foundation stone, containing coins and photographs of the Prince, herself and the royal children. The project had raised her spirits: ‘She is better, stronger, calmer, more resigned, more courageous and determined to walk in the path of duty,’ thought Augusta Bruce.61On the given day, in front of 100 members of the royal household and workmen involved in the construction, a dignified Victoria fulfilled her task, ‘laying the mortar and knocking the stone three times with the mallet just as any man would’ and without shedding a tear. She later recorded her ‘trembling steps’ as she performed the ceremony, but her subjective view of her ‘weakness’ was not shared by those who watched; Lord Torrington thought she looked ‘like a young girl and showed great nerve’.62
In addition to the mausoleum, Victoria now had a precious literary commemoration of her husband to cling to. In early January, Tennyson had sent the draft of his promised Dedication to the Idylls of the King for approval. The Duchess of Sutherland commended his ‘beautiful verses’ as ‘worthy of the great and tragic subject’, recommending one or two minor amendments, after which it was sent to Princess Alice on 13 January. In his verses the Poet Laureate expressed his profound admiration for the Prince as his own ‘ideal knight’:
Who reverenced his conscience as his king;
Whose glory was, redressing human wrongs;
Who spake no slander, no, nor listen’d to it;
Who lov’d one only and who clave to her…
Dear to thy land and ours, a Prince indeed,
Beyond all titles, and a household name,
Hereafter, through all times, Albert the Good.63
The seductive image of Albert as the perfect, gentle knight of old, a heroic figure who wore ‘the white flower of a blameless life’, put into words Victoria’s own long-held romantic fantasies about her husband. The verses, she said, ‘soothed her aching, bleeding heart’.64Tennyson’s idealised vision of Albert would be captured by Edward Henry Corbould in the Queen’s favourite posthumous painting of him – as medieval knight in armour sheathing his sword, with the German inscription ‘I have fought a good fight; I have finished the struggle; therefore a crown of rectitude is awaiting me’ written below. Based on an 1844 portrait of Albert in armour by Robert Thorburn, this watercolour was set into the door of the Blue Room in 1863.65Tennyson’s Dedication was rapidly taken to their hearts by the British public, setting its stamp on a century’s hagiography of the Prince and forming the cornerstone of the cult of the Prince Consort of which Victoria would be the chief votary.
In April 1862, ten years after appointing him Poet Laureate, Victoria finally met her hero Tennyson when he visited her from his home at Farringford, not far from Osborne. Tennyson admitted to the Duke of Argyll to being a ‘shy beast’ who liked to ‘keep to [his] burrow’ and he was extremely apprehensive about what seemed an ordeal to come. The Duke reassured him: the Queen liked nothing more than ‘natural signs of devotion and sympathy’. He should be guided by his feelings: ‘what is natural is right – with Her’. He should talk to the Queen ‘as you would to a poor Woman in affliction – that is what she likes best.’ When the moment finally came, the Queen completely disarmed Tennyson. ‘I am like your Mariana now’, she told him, in an allusion to one of his poems about a widow who longed to be reunited with her dead husband in a much-repeated lament: ‘I am aweary, aweary,/I would that I were dead!’66Despite her obvious state of deep melancholy, Tennyson found her sweet and kind; there was an extraordinary stateliness about her that set her apart from other women. He was so overcome by the emotion of the occasion that he could recall little of it later on. For her own part, Victoria had found the poet strange but arresting – ‘tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair and a beard’. He may have been ‘oddly dressed’, but she had found him totally lacking in pretension.67Aware of Tennyson’s strong mystical streak, she had had no inhibitions about discussing their shared experience of sudden death: he of his closest friend Arthur Hallam in 1833 and she of Albert. She recognised the poet as a kindred spirit who knew only too well that terrible feeling: the breaking of each ‘blank day’.68In Memoriam had provided her with an emotional literary capsule that mirrored her own torrent of fluctuating feeling, ranging from resignation, to morbidity, to hope, to anger, to a final overwhelming desire for reunion with the dead, until which time she – like Tennyson of Hallam – sought Albert’s spirit reflected in everything around her. Tennyson’s portrait of Hallam reminded her greatly of Albert, she told him – even down to the same blue eyes. ‘He would have made a great King,’ Tennyson told her, to which she replied, ‘He always said it did not signify whether he did the right thing or did not, so long as the right thing was done.’69Tennyson came away profoundly impressed with Victoria’s strength of character. A year later he was invited back with his wife and two sons, on which occasion Emily Tennyson found the Queen ‘small and childlike, full of intelligence and ineffably sweet and of a sad sympathy’. She too was captivated; Victoria talked ‘of all things in heaven and earth…laughed heartily at many things that were said’, but ‘shades of pain and sadness’ often passed over her face. ‘The Queen,’ she concluded, ‘is a woman to live and die for.’ 70
Chapter Ten
‘The Luxury of Woe’
The year 1862 was a very good one for Messrs W. C. Jay’s London General Mourning Warehouse. At its prime site on the south-east corner of Oxford Circus it was enjoying a boom
in trade as never before in its twenty years of business. Although general public mourning had officially ended on 10 February, there was no let-up in what had become an ‘almost incalculable demand’ for mourning goods. Victoria herself had already sent out a memorandum explicitly stating that ‘The Queen intends to wear her weeds (if she lives) at least till the beginning of 1864.’1Her intention to remain in full mourning – of the deepest, dullest crape – for the maximum two years was in itself not exceptional, but merely emphasised an already existing code of mourning observed by many pious widows. But such was the level of public sympathy for her at this time that many of the middle classes decided to follow suit and remain in mourning for longer – not just for the Prince, but, following Victoria’s example, for their own deceased relatives.
Victoria soon changed her mind about leaving off mourning after two years, determining that although she might make the transition from the gloomy crape that was favoured in the first stage of mourning, she would remain in black for the rest of her life. She also demanded that her closest ladies-in-waiting remained in black with her when on duty. After the statutory two years, the rest of her female entourage and daughters would be allowed to wear half-mourning of grey, white or the newer shades of lilac, violet and mauve, which had become popular with the introduction of aniline dyes in the mid-1850s. The lugubrious drapes of crape – a matt gauze of silk and cotton tightly crimped like the crêpe paper named after it – were left off by most widows after the first, traditional stage of retreat of a year and a day, and replaced by lighter, shinier black fabrics such as satin and silk thereafter. But for now and throughout 1862 Victoria’s children and the entire royal household, down to the footmen, remained in full mourning, and none of them was allowed to appear in public or receive anyone at home unless so dressed. Extra money was made available to less well-off members of her household, such as Marianne Skerrett and the Queen’s two dressers and her wardrobe-maids, to buy additional clothes for this extended period of mourning.2
Mourning for Prince Albert predictably cast its pall over the London season of 1862, which was, as the theatrical newspaper the Era observed, ‘at one blow strangled in its birth’. In anticipation, many of the aristocracy stayed put on their country estates that year or went abroad – to the detriment of the London trades that serviced their needs, as well as the theatres and concert halls. That year the mourning houses were the only businesses making money. The Victorian textile trade was in over-drive, offering a vast range of fabrics for mourning: ‘black silks, crapes, paramattas, French merinos, Reps, Queen’s Cords, Lustres, Barathea, Coburgs, French de Laines’, and there was a huge demand too for the dye to make them black.3
Thanks to the unprecedented demand for its ‘Noir Impériale’ black silks and its best patent crape, Jay’s had had to substantially enlarge both its 1862 catalogue and its premises on Regent Street.4The company’s substantial intake of cheap imports, rushed in from the recession-hit trade in France ‘under peculiarly advantageous circumstances’, meant they could offer them at knock-down prices. French black silk was flying off the shelves at 2s. and 6d. (12.5p) per yard, and Jay’s boasted that its stock of family mourning was now the largest in Europe.5By importing cheaply from France, Jay’s and other mourning warehouses challenged the monopoly of the powerful Courtaulds, an Essex firm established by Huguenot refugees, which had since the early nineteenth century dominated crape manufacture and was even now developing a cheap substitute – the opportunistically named ‘Albert Crape’ – to cater to growing demand.6
Currently on offer at Jay’s for the bottom end of the market was a ‘complete suit of domestic mourning’ at two and a half guineas, suitable for household servants. But for those seeking to indulge in the full ‘luxury of woe’, Jay’s prided itself on ensuring that its morning and dinner dresses, capes and mantles, whilst scrupulously tailored to the distinct stages of bereavement, should follow the latest fashions. ‘In the present day our ashes must be properly selected, our garments must be rent to pattern, our sack cloth must be of the finest quality,’ observed social commentator Henry Mayhew sardonically after a visit to Jay’s; grief, like everything else, counted for nothing if it was not fashionable.7With this in mind, Jay’s brought out elegant outfits ‘in accordance with the strictest Parisian taste and fashion’ direct from top fashion houses such as Charles Worth of the rue de la Paix. The protocols were complex: the first year of deep mourning was followed by secondary mourning less dominated by crape; then three months of ordinary mourning (black of livelier fabrics, with ribbon and ornamentation); and finally six months of half-mourning, for which Jay’s offered the best French silks in black, white, grey and suitable ‘neutral tints’. The company’s staff were the souls of discretion and calm within its harmonious, softly carpeted walls.
But Jay’s was now facing stiff competition from Peter Robinson’s Family Mourning Warehouse across the road in Regent Street, which kept a brougham ready to be dispatched, at a moment’s notice, with two black-garbed fitters to the homes of distressed lady clients. Jay’s too promised a similar rapid response on the fulfilment of orders, and delivery anywhere in the country. Its seamstresses were provided with hot dinners in Jay’s own canteen, but such was the overload that for a time Jay’s had to resort to laying on sandwiches and sherry in an adjoining room, so that the overworked seamstresses could ‘run in and get a mouthful when they can’. But while Jay’s employees enjoyed reasonably good working conditions, excessive workloads took their toll on the eyesight of the beleaguered armies of poor seamstresses working fourteen-hour days in ill-lit back rooms on black fabrics with black thread, which were particularly deleterious to the eyesight.8
In the rush to remain fashionable whilst in mourning for Prince Albert, publications such as the Lady’s Magazine had been quick to feature do-it-yourself patterns for suitable black lace and beaded trimmings, for gowns, or handkerchiefs without their usual lace trimmings, but instead embroidered with mournful symbols such as black and white tears. Even Victoria had one of these, but otherwise she paid little attention to fashion in her own choice of mourning clothes; she was no longer dressing to please anyone. As a result, the Queen’s spending on dress decreased noticeably, and with the years the corsets were increasingly left off as her waistline spread, and the same dreary gowns were made up in duplicate by her dressmakers Sarah Ann Unitt and Elizabeth Gieve with fabric from the local draper, Caley’s opposite Windsor Castle.9The only additional trapping she wore was her widow’s ‘sad cap’, as Beatrice called it, indented at the top in the style of Mary Stuart.10Framing her face in a heart shape of crisp white tulle, with a veil of black crape falling away behind, the cap enhanced Victoria’s look of resigned, nunlike widowhood and accentuated the image of vulnerability that she sought to cultivate. Beneath her skirts, her white lingerie was threaded with black rather than coloured silk ribbon; black dyes were not yet stable enough to be used on fabrics worn next to the skin without discolouring it. As for jewellery, the Queen’s strict rules on black applied equally here. Jet ornaments were de rigueur and dominated at court for the next thirty years or so, though diamonds, amethysts and pearls would be allowed during half-mourning. The Queen also favoured the morbid fashion for lockets and brooches made out of the deceased person’s hair.11Her strict directives on appropriate jewellery would prompt Sir John Bennett, royal watchmaker and jeweller, who often attended court at Windsor with a selection of his wares, to complain that ‘the Queen’s deep mourning has utterly spoilt my market. If it were not for the honour of coming to Windsor, I should give it up.’12
As the trade in jet mourning jewellery expanded, so did the fortunes of a small fishing village, formerly a whaling port, on the north-east Yorkshire coast, which was the primary source of the best-quality jet. Layers of shale in the sea coast around Whitby had long been a rich source of fossils and petrified coniferous wood, of which jet – from a prehistoric tree similar to the monkey puzzle – had been the most prized, once cut and polishe
d. Much of this jet was washed up on the Whitby coast, and was sought out by armies of beachcombers; as demand escalated, it was also mined inland at Bilsdale and Kildale and other locations on the North Yorkshire Moors. Jet from the area had been fashioned into jewellery for centuries (by ancient Britons and the Romans) and long prized as a kind of ‘black amber’. With the coming of the railways and the influx of seaside visitors to Whitby, decorative household items made of jet – beaded lampshades, Bible and prayer-book covers, vases, seals, card trays, ink stands, paper knives, board games of all kinds, even doll’s house furniture – had been produced as souvenirs and rapidly took their place in Victorian homes.
But it was the jewellery trade that catapulted local Whitby craftsmen and their wares unexpectedly into the limelight. It took considerable skill to work the brittle material without fracturing it, but jet jewellery manufacture rapidly extended to cover every aspect of Victorian mourning accessories, including beading for bodices, hair combs and headdresses, as well as jet birds, insects and clasps for hats and bonnets. In the 1830s the Whitby jet trade had employed around twenty-five people, but by the mid-1850s jet-working had become the principal occupation in the town, with 200 workshops accounting for an annual turnover of around £20,000. Jet ornaments became ever more popular and were shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and the trade received a further boost with the elaborate mourning for the Duke of Wellington a year later. In 1855, on a state visit to France, Victoria presented the French empress Eugénie with four bracelets of Whitby jet, setting a fashion soon followed by the French aristocracy.
But it was Prince Albert’s death that sparked the meteoric rise of the industry, not just with jet jewellery, but also many commemorative mementoes of Albert: medallions, miniatures and even small busts. Lightweight jet was perfect for producing the kind of large and bulky jet jewellery needed to complement the full-skirted mourning dresses of the day, although during the first year widows did not wear the highly polished version of jet, and those with less money favoured the cheaper vulcanite, or bog oak – from semi-fossilized peat. Onyx and black enamel were also used, and cut-steel and Berlin ironwork were introduced later, but nothing had quite the cachet of the best-quality jet. The income of the Whitby trade rose rapidly to £50,000 in 1862 and reached its peak in the 1870s at £90,000, when it employed more than 1,000 local men and boys as jet-finders, carvers and polishers.13The highly paid workers even had their own pub, the Jet Men’s Arms on Church Street, and the popularity of jet was further fostered at court by the Marchioness of Normanby on whose husband’s estates much of the jet was found.14
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 20