Here you see one of the stranger sets of objects in the Homestead’s collection: a group of flowers, made from human hair!

Objects made of human hair have a long history--John Donne wrote a poem about a hairwork bracelet. But hairwork reached the height of its popularity from the end of the 18th through the 19th centuries. It went in and out of fashion through the 19th century and faded out almost completely around World War I. Like most mourning customs, it received a boost in popularity from Queen Victoria, who had the royal jeweler, Garrard’s, make at least eight pieces with her beloved Prince Albert’s hair.

We tend to assume that hairwork, like Victoria’s pieces, was mourning jewelry, but actually it was commonly just “sentimental”: that is, meant to remind the wearer of an absent but not dead person. Sisters and female friends exchanged locks of hair, or sent their sisters-in-law jewels made with their children’s hair, or gathered hair from family members to make a wreath representing everyone. Men wore watch chains made from the hair of their female relations (and often made by those relations). That was apparently so common that Charles Dickens uses a hairwork watch fob to establish the that a character in Our Mutual Friend is a normal, respectable young man. To us, wearing other people’s hair may seem gross, but, in the days before we all could carry hundreds of pictures around on our phones, people had a real desire for objects that made them feel connected to each other.

The simplest way to wear hair as jewelry was to put a lock of hair in a locket, just as people still do. Or, you could put the lock of hair behind glass or crystal, possibly shaping it with glue and irons into a fashionable “Prince of Wales feather” or a curl. “Gimp work,” which was probably used to form our flowers, required more skill; it wrapped the hair around wire or thread and made three dimensional shapes. Those could also be displayed under glass in a brooch, or, if larger, as artwork in a frame or glass dome. “Palette work” involved treating hair with some kind of glue to form flat sheets, which then could be cut into shapes. Often palette work hair was used on the back of pendants or pins which might have a mourning scene on the front; only the wearer would know it was there. But it could also be cut with stencils and made into elaborate pictures; at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, a full-length palette-work portrait of Queen Victoria won a prize. (That exhibition also featured a complete tea set made from hair.) The most elaborate hairwork was “table work.” That involved a specially built small wooden table, over which prepared hanks of hair were hung with weights; it could be used to make elaborate ropes and braids for bracelets, watch chains, and the popular hair bow brooches. There was also “dissolved hair,” in which hair was ground up and added to gum arabic and used as a paint.

Hair work was a home handicraft popular with wealthy women who might otherwise paint or do fine embroidery. The women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book published a series of instructional article in the 1850s and there were several how-to books, including Mark Campbells Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work (1867) and Alexanna Speight’s The Lock of Hair (1871). But there were also professional hairworkers. You could bring your relative’s hair into the jeweler, or mail it, and have it made into your desired object. Godey’s Lady’s Book, however, warned unscrupulous craftspeople might add someone else’s hair, or even horsehair, to make it easier to work; in fact Mark Campbell thought that 150,000-200,000 pounds of hair was imported to the U.S. from 1859-1860. Hair was big business.

We don’t know who made our hair flowers, or how they were meant to be used. It seems possible that they originally were, or were meant to be, part of larger object like a wreath or a bouquet. In her 1875 book Lady’s Fancy Work, Mrs. C.S. Jones writes, “Besides the encasing of hair in jewelry the formation of wreaths, bouquets, etc., for framing as house-ornaments, has become exceedingly popular in the last few years.” She gives instructions for making roses, forget-me-nots, carnations, and other flowers using rings, wire, glue, and a variety of knitting needles. It does not sound simple.

In 2018, the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia put on an exhibit which featured a number of large hairwork decorative objects, some of which have flowers a lot like ours (you can see some of it at http://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/woven-strands-the-art-of-human-hair-work). They were fortunate enough to have a wreath which came down its maker’s notes and plan; it was made in 1882-1883 by a young woman named Amy Ida Williams. Amy Ida collected hair from 52 relatives, herself and her horse. They also had a tree in a glass dome made from hair donated by the members of a Methodist church. Their most impressive object has a local connection to us; you can see it in the second video at that link. It is a large bouquet of hairwork flowers, in a specially built frame which also contains twenty pictures, presumably of the people who donated the hair. The collector who lent the bouquet to the Mutter museum doesn’t know who it belonged to, other than “a prominent Connecticut family” but the pictures were taken at the Scholfield studio in Westerly, Rhode Island—as are many photographs in the Homestead’s collection. So we can say that this kind of hairwork was definitely done in our area. If any of our Denison family members know anything about our flowers—or recognize any of the people in the Mutter Museum’s frame—please let us know!

Sources:

“Woven Strands: the Art of Human Hair Work,” an exhibit at Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, | January 19, 2018 – September 16, 2018. (http://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/woven-strands-the-art-of-human-hair-work/)

Deborah Lutz. “The Dead Still Amoung Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 127–142.

Margaret Flower. Victorian Jewelry. Read Books: 2011.

Mark Campbell, Self Instructor in the Art of Hair Work. 1867.

C.S. Jones and Henry T. Williams. Ladies' Fancy Work: Hints And Helps to Home Taste And Recreations. New York: H. T. Williams, 1876.