Mourning

From Francine Mathews:

Victorian women were obliged to go into mourning when a close family member died--and as life expectancy in the nineteenth century was dubious at best, grief and its trappings were a constant. Children died. Parents and spouses died. Mourning was expected for monarchs, as well--as though the Royals were members of one's extended family.

Queen Victoria is the most famous of mourners, of course, having adopted black at Prince Albert's death and refusing to remove it for the remaining forty years of her life. But when Victoria passed in 1901, the entire nation went into mourning. Her daughter-in-law Princess Alix, about to become Queen Alexandra, was thus in something of a bind. She had to wear exclusively black for at least six months. But as the consort of King Edward VII, she also had to look absolutely stunning. (Read more.)