Introduction

This book presents an original and engaging study of the cultural history and literary significance of hairwork – the crafting of decorative objects, such as jewellery, from human hair – in Victorian Britain. Hairwork became increasingly fashionable and commercialised in the mid-nineteenth century, before swiftly declining in popularity. Yet, in the Victorian imagination, hairwork held a peculiar capacity to emerge from and capture moments of tension: it was made to mark relationships as they were redefined or consolidated; to process transitions and articulate hope for the future; and to express identities as they were questioned and explored.

Scope and Focus

This book reconstructs and interprets the role of hairwork in revealing and negotiating such desires and anxieties by studying its historical trajectory, surviving artefacts, and practices alongside its literary representations in works by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Margaret Oliphant.

Significance

It shows how the combination of hairwork’s matter, form, and craft – the material of hair, the designs and uses of hairwork, and the processes of its making – expose the complexities and tensions within identity, affective relationships, and social relations and thus contributed to its unique place in Victorian culture.