Crimson Peak and the Victorian Language of Mourning Jewellery

October 3, 2026

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) is more than a gothic ghost story. It is a carefully constructed love letter to Victorian mourning culture. From the decaying mansion to the costumes and the quiet weight of personal objects, the film understands that the dead are never truly absent.

A House Built on Memory

Allerdale Hall is a place where the past refuses to stay buried. The house itself feels like a mourning object — beautiful, damaged, and full of secrets. In this setting, jewellery and personal relics take on special power. They become the few things that still connect the living to the people they have lost.

Victorian audiences would have recognised this language immediately. In the 19th century, mourning jewellery was not considered strange or macabre. It was a normal, even expected, way of keeping the dead close.

Real Victorian Mourning Practices

After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria’s long period of mourning shaped fashion and social behaviour for decades. Jewellery played a central role. People wore:

Lockets containing hair or miniature portraits
Rings and brooches made of jet or black enamel
Pieces engraved with dates and short messages of remembrance
Seed pearls symbolising tears

These objects allowed grief to be both private and visible. They said, without words, that love continued beyond death.

From Screen to Everyday Life

Crimson Peak captures the emotional truth behind these customs. Characters cling to objects because the people they loved can no longer be held. The same impulse drives many people today to choose cremation or keepsake jewellery.

A small portion of ashes, a lock of hair, or another personal token placed inside a pendant or locket serves the same purpose as a Victorian mourning piece. It is a way of carrying someone with you when they can no longer walk beside you.

At Amarantha Jewellery we design pieces that sit within this long tradition of intimate remembrance. The Antique Style Memorial Cremation Pendant and the A Piece of My Heart Lives in Heaven Memorial Urn Pendant offer a modern expression of the same quiet devotion that shaped Victorian mourning jewellery.

Why These Stories Still Matter

Crimson Peak does not treat grief as something to be overcome and forgotten. It treats it as a relationship that continues, complicated and alive. Victorian mourning jewellery did the same. Both understand that love does not end simply because a life has ended.

If the film’s atmosphere of dark romance and enduring attachment resonates with you, you are responding to something very old and very human. The desire to keep a small, beautiful reminder close is as present now as it was in the gas-lit rooms of the 19th century.

Explore our collection of cremation and keepsake jewellery and discover pieces that continue a tradition of love that refuses to fade.