A Mourning Doll

Victorian Mourning & Glasgow's Necropolis

A good friend died. It might seem odd to say we never actually met in person, but we spoke on the phone for many years.

She was wonderfully encouraging, always asked engaging questions and was an inspiring woman who led a fascinating life.

In a social media post her daughter wrote beautifully about wanting to explain to people that her mother just died. The meltdown at the post office, or the tears that the store was out of grapefruit - my mom just died, my mom just died, my mom just died!

As a woman who designs clothes and works with fabric she recalled Victorian mourning clothes - what if we could return to wearing a symbol or dressing a certain way which would allow us to be held with care and understanding as we wade through on of the most heartbreaking times in our lives.

It is a beautiful thought but I can only imagine patience would wear thin and we’d be expected to ‘get over it’ all too quickly. The Victorian custom was to wear full black mourning clothes for a year following the death of a parent, or sibling. If you were a widow then you were to wear mourning dress for two years, which then transitioned over to half-mourning, which allowed you to wear lighter but still somber shades such as grey, mauve and purple, but also introduce different fabrics such as velvet and silk.

In the weeks before my friend’s death I wasn’t aware of how ill she had become but I had been making a cloth doll. I had a bundle of fabrics but non worked and I picked out all the blacks, and as I folded and fitted them I had been thinking of my friend - not realising I had been making a mourning doll, all dressed in black.

Perhaps the black fabric was inspired by the swishing black crepe fabric mourning dresses I imagined visiting their beloved dead in Glasgow’s Victorian Necropolis cemetery. It’s definitely one of my favourite cemeteries, which has some wonderful architecture, great view of the city and its own herd of roe deer.

Perhaps my mourning doll needs some black crepe, just like the Victorian mourning dresses - but not the wax dolls that were often made to commemorate a child’s death. The wax figure would incorporate a hair cutting of the deceased child and was often dressed in their clothes. These dolls were often to scale - so it could be a small baby or the height of a teenager! Sometimes the dolls were left by the grave!

This post then has to lead onto a tour of Glasgow’s Necropolis, which I’ll cover next (after tomorrows Tales from the Studio) - I hope you’ll join me….