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The Myth of Victorian Tear CatchersA highly decorative example of a supposed tear catcher. ( The Victorianachronists )“You’ll get over your grief, Howard. Everyone does. Unless he is Queen Victoria.”[1]No one mastered the art of mourning quite like the Victorians. The untimely death of Prince Albert in December 1861, marked the beginning of a 40 year period of nationalistic mourning by Queen Victoria and her Empire.[2] Victoria, as well as those in her presence,, dressed in widow’s black from the day her beloved husband, the Prince Consort Albert, died in 1861 until her death on January 22, 1901.Following Victoria’s example, it became customary for families to go through elaborate rituals to commemorate their dead. This included wearing mourning clothes, having a lavish (and expensive) funeral, curtailing social behavior for a set period of time, and erecting an ornate monument on the grave.[3] Clocks were stopped and mirrors covered in black or brown cloth up until the the funeral was over, usually about one week.[4] The stopping of the clock symbolized stopping time so that dead could move on. The mirrors were covered so that the dead would not get distracted and stay in this realm unwillingly.The length of mourning depended on your relationship to the deceased. The different periods of mourning dictated by society were expected to reflect your natural period of grief.[5] Widows were expected to wear full mourning for two years. Everyone else presumably suffered less – for children mourning parents or vice versa the period of time was one year, for grandparents and siblings six months, for aunts and uncles two months, for great uncles and aunts six weeks, for first cousins four weeks.[6] In the Victorian era, no one would ever think of telling a mourner that they had grieved long enough or that they should hurry up and get over it. Indeed it would have been a most egregious breach of protocol to do so.Full mourning attire 1861 (Wearing a 19th-Century Mourning Veil Could Result in — Twist — Death)Victorians wore black for extended periods. Mourning clothes became a family’s outward display of their inner feelings. The rules for who wore what and for how long were complicated, and were outlined in popular journals or household manuals such as The Queen and Cassell’s – both very popular among Victorian housewives. They gave copious instructions about appropriate mourning etiquette. Fashion itself became a means of removing oneself from regular society.[7]For deepest mourning, clothes were to be black, symbolic of spiritual darkness. Dresses for deepest mourning were usually made of non-reflective paramatta silk or the cheaper bombazine – many of the widows in Dickens’ novels wore bombazine. Dresses were trimmed with crape, a hard, scratchy silk with a peculiar crimped appearance produced by heat.[8] Crape is particularly associated with mourning because it doesn’t combine well with any other clothing – you can’t wear velvet or satin or lace or embroidery with it. After a specified period the crape could be removed – this was called "slighting the mourning."[9] The color of cloth lightened as mourning went on, to grey, mauve, and white – called half-mourning.[10]A small gold memorial locket, set with central oval onyx, black on white, with diamond star set in plain gold border with blue enamel inscription, 'Die reine Seele schwingt sich auf zu Gott', roughly translated as 'The pure soul flies up above to the Lord'. Opens to reveal hair on one side and photograph of Prince Albert on the other, both under glass.(Camille Silvy (1834-1910) - Queen Victorias Locket )Women were permittec to wear jewelry during the second phase of mourning. Jewelry was limited to jet, a hard, black coal-like material sometimes combined with woven hair of the deceased.[11] It is said that Queen Victoria started this trend by always wearing a locket of Prince Albert’s hair. Woven human hair into elaborate wreaths and pieces of jewelry, and wept, it is said, into delicate glass bottles called “tear catchers.” [12] Tear catchers or “lachrymatories,” are beautifully gilded vials depicted next to mourning wreaths and crushed velvet capelets, the very height of romanticism.The terms “Victorian” and “mourning” in general have become catchalls for anything old, sentimental, or made of black materials. The Internet is, in a lot of ways, its own folklore-creating machine. If a unit of data gets shared enough times it is considered true.During the 19th century, and especially in America during and after the Civil War, supposedly, tear catchers were used as a measure of grieving time. Once the tears cried into them had evaporated, the mourning period was over.[13] In truth, both science and history agree, there’s really no such thing as a tear catcher.Tear Catchers, or Throwaway Perfume Bottles(tear catchers – The Victorian Book of the Dead )If there was a practice of tear collecting during the Victorian period, it is certainly not very well documented. So what is it that are passed around as so-called antique tear catchers? The bottles most are looking are throwaway perfume bottles.[14] But the “tear catcher” term has stuck, through a combination of historical accident and deceptive, yet effective, marketing.Throwaway bottles were typically made of glass — usually clear though sometimes colored, especially amber or dark green — and were decorated with hand-painted gilt and enamel.[15] The most common decoration was alternating gilt cross-hatching and simple gilt striped oval shapes painted in the recessed “thumbprints”.[16]Many of the bottles are simple flasks for scented vinegars, smelling salts, perfumes and toilet waters to scent handkerchiefs.[17] The remainder — the 7″-8″ long vials with a stopper, often gilded with spirals and crosshatching over the clear or candy-colored glass — are “throwaways,” little containers of attar of rose or oxford lavender sold at spas, fairs, and shops.[18] They were effectively “to go” containers for scent which would later be conflated with tear catchers.Smelling salts vessel (antique-colgate-smelling-salts-victorian )The myth likely began with archaeologists and an oddly chosen term. Most of the myths associated with “tear catchers” use them to measure the length of the mourning period, which contradicts the mourning rules actually set in place by Victoria. [19] Those discussing the tradition of tear bottles often cite Psalm 56: 8:“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” [20]Small glass bottles were often found in Greek and Roman tombs, and early scholars romantically dubbed [them] lachrymatories or tear catchers. [21]The false association continued 19th century Iran.They still bottle tears in Persia. As the mourners at a funeral sit around weeping wads of cotton are passed with which the cheeks are mopped, the tears are then squeezed into a bottle and used as a charm and to revive dying persons. The practice was once universal, as every old tomb has a tear bottle. Otago Daily Times 24 November 1884: p. 4[22]Iran “tear bottle” (perhaps a perfume sprinkler)(Transparent Fiction – The Myth of the Victorian Tear Bottle)Both pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and Persian poetry have a long tradition of talking about tears. A lot of crying tears of blood (crying so hard the eyes bleed) or crying enough to wash off a body in preparation for burial.[23] There is a Farsi word for tear-bottle: Ashk-daan, but these objects seemed to be, like lacrymatories, historical objects or archaeological finds in graves, and not in current or 19th-century use.[24]The Persian tear bottle seems to be a poetic conceit conflated with grave finds. The Victorian public’s interest in Sir Richard Burton’s books and Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám may have suggested the idea of this Persian custom.[25]Those glass bottles held perfume and unguents, not tears, Scientists have performed chemical tests on these flasks and they disproved the romantic theory.[26] Occasionally a bottle will still have remnants of liquid fragance in the bottom of the teardrop.[27] But stories sometimes acquire their own momentum. No scholarly works have been written on tear catchers.This throwaway vessel contains a full reservoir of dark liquid scent, and shows the teardrop cavity very clearly. (Throwaway Scent Bottles - CandiceHern.com)Google Books searches reveal no discussion of the lachrymatory custom in etiquette manuals, nor do they appear in product catalogs. There are seemingly no unambiguous descriptions of real or fictional characters making actual use of a tear bottle as a normal part of Victorian mourning practice.[28]Sellers and antique collectors are the main perpetrators in the continuation of tear catcher tales. Much of the online information that still links the bottles to the mourning story can be traced back to Tear Catcher Gifts, a company that sells modern tear bottles intended to be given as gifts at special occasions.[29] Wikipedia lists only two sources: the website of Tear Catcher Gifts, and another registered to a Tear Catcher email address.[30]The owners of the largest wholesale distributor of Tear Catcher Gifts’ modern bottles, Timeless Traditions, were inspired by the 1996 bestselling novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in which a character gives her mother a lachrymatory.[31]“I looked everywhere [for them],” coowner Jacqueline Bean told Belgrade News. “[I] found no bottles but I did find all these women who had read the book and were looking for them too. … Our goal was to saturate the market as quickly as we could to keep competition at bay.” The bottles are available at dozens of stores, both online and off, and several “informative” sites appear to exist entirely to drive customers to purchase them.[32]Transparent Fiction – The Myth of the Victorian Tear Bottle This 1897 weeping widow uses a black-bordered handkerchief and not a tear bottle. (tear catchers – The Victorian Book of the Dead )During the Victorian Regency eras, references for purported tear catchers refer to an ancient, long-forgotten custom and not a mourning curiosity of a decade or two before.A tear bottle is a little container whose mouth is shaped just like an eye and which, when put to the eye, fits very snugly. It is made, you see, so that one may catch his tears. No, tear bottles are not made any longer, not really, but in far off Egyot, many many years ago, thousands of them were made. (They were possibly also made in ancient Palestine, for we find the Psalmist praying, “Put thou my tears into thy bottle.”) [33]It is possible that the tear-bottle myth arose from the great many references in Victorian deathbed scenes and poetry to the “last tear” of the dying.[34] This is a phenomenon not unknown to those who work with the dying. It is called lacrima mortis, a tear, usually shed at the moment of death.[35] While there are copious references to “the last tear” there are far fewer references to actually catching that tear. These references are found mainly in a religious context and the tear is caught, not in a bottle, but on a bit of cloth or a handkerchief.It’s convincing evidence and, in the absence of anything else, seems damning: Modern society has extrapolated the poetry of its own sorrows onto the Victorians, imbuing their trinkets with romantic symbolism. In a culture that denies death and chides outbursts of emotions, the Victorians must emote for us, their dramatic gestures sustaining us in our moments of need. For grief is,“more often often a dull pain, a lingering sense of absence that never fully disappears, and that is all together too pervading and intangible to be poured into a bottle and held in one’s hand.”[36]Footnotes[1] Doctors still argue about this prince's early death[2] Doctors still argue about this prince's early death[3] Victorian mourning etiquette[4] Old Tradition: Stopping Clocks After a Loved One Dies[5] The Death of Mourning: From Victorian Crepe to the Little Black Dress - Sonia A. Bedikian, 2008[6] The Rules And Regulations Of Mourning In The Victorian Era ...[7] The Stages of Victorian Mourning[8] Colleen Anne Coyle's answer to What is a disturbing fact most people are unaware of?[9] Death and Mourning[10] Death and Mourning Practices in the Victorian Age[11] Memorial Jewelry: A Victorian Era Trend - TM Keepsake[12] Victorian Mourning Rituals: Tear Catchers[13] Tear Catcher — Harrison Atelier[14] Throwaway Scent Bottles - CandiceHern.com[15] флакончики и пузырёчки[16] Throwaway Scent Bottles - CandiceHern.com[17] The Connection Between Vinegar and the Fainting Couch: 19th Century Customs[18] Catching Feelings: The Myth of Victorian-Era Tear Catchers | Haute Macabre[19] Debunking the Myth of 19th-Century ‘Tear Catchers’[20] Psalm 56:8 You have taken account of my wanderings. Put my tears in Your bottle--are they not in Your book?[21] Debunking the Myth of 19th-Century ‘Tear Catchers’[22] Transparent Fiction – The Myth of the Victorian Tear Bottle[23] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/39342/1/gupea_2077_39342_1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjM0NX2s8zvAhUHbc0KHeiyDXMQFjACegQIGRAC&usg=AOvVaw2qE_oZgtSABiBYvPJcWc5o[24] tear vials – The Victorian Book of the Dead[25] Rub�iy�t of Omar Khayy�m[26] History of love hidden in lachrymatory bottles[27] Throwaway Scent Bottles - CandiceHern.com[28] Victorian Mourning Rituals: Tear Catchers[29] Death/Scent[30] Tear catcher - Wikipedia[31] Belgrade women strike gold with unique ‘Passion’ product[32] Transparent Fiction – The Myth of the Victorian Tear Bottle[33] http://The Pantagraph [Bloomington IL] 23 November 1941: p. 17[34] Death and Mourning[35] LACRIMA MORTIS: THE TEAR OF DEATH[36] Victorian Mourning Rituals: Tear Catchers