Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey in June 1838 and married Prince Albert two years later. Their romance and marriage inspired the nation and marked the beginning of the Romantic period.
Consistent with this, there was an upwelling of sentimental jewelry. Queen Victoria's love of jewelry and her position as the head of the most powerful nation on earth set her as the style leader for the best part of a century. Women of all classes wanted to wear fashionable clothes and jewelry. The Industrial Revolution brought with it mass production, and glass cutters in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) developed techniques for machine cutting glass, producing low-cost stones for jewelry. Together this created the environment for an explosion in jewelry production and innovation.
The pageantry of the royal wedding added impetus to the fashion for romantic jewelry. All classes owned Mizpah pins or love brooches. These were made of silver and engraved with the initials or names of loved ones. The pins featured different motifs, such as ivy leaves for friendship, bluebells for constancy and tail-eating serpents for eternal love.
Hair jewelry had been worn in the Georgian era, and Victoria brought it back into fashion. As a child, she was given a locket by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, containing a lock of her late father's hair. Three days after the birth of their first child in 1840, Albert gave her a gold bracelet with a single enameled heart locket holding the baby's hair, and a new locket was added at the birth of each of their nine children. After Albert's death, she kept a locket with his photograph and a lock of his hair. Hairwork was set into brooches, chokers and bracelets, often alongside miniature portraits of loved ones.
When Victoria purchased the Balmoral Estate, she made all things Scottish immediately desirable. Scottish agate jewelry set in silver became particularly popular.
The death of Albert from typhoid in 1861 caused an immediate and abrupt change. Victoria entered a long period of mourning, and the years that followed are known as the Grand period. She decreed that only jet jewelry could be worn at court for a year after Albert's death. Jet is a black, coal-like material formed by heat and pressure on fossilized wood. The finest jet comes from around Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, and hundreds of workers carved jet for the nation in the second half of the 19th century.
Jet is lightweight, easy to carve and good for larger pieces. French jet, a black glass, was also used. It was less fragile than Whitby jet, could be used for intricate designs, and could be wired together to create designs such as flowers.
Victoria also made charm bracelets popular. After Albert's death, she wore a series of miniature lockets on a gold chain with portraits of her family inside.
The Victorians enjoyed wearing heavy silver necklaces and lockets, most popular in the 1880s. In this period brightly colored jewelry became unfashionable and, with the arrival of electric light, diamonds came into favor. Diamonds were discovered in South Africa near Hopetown in 1867 and at Kimberley in 1871, bringing a plentiful supply to Europe. Cecil Rhodes, who arrived in the diamond fields in 1871, went on to buy up claims and formed De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888. Eventually, despite Queen Victoria remaining in mourning, the nation tired of black attire and jet. Victorian women wanted better quality jewelry rather than mass-produced pieces, and began to commission individual artists and craftsmen, a shift that fed into the Arts and Crafts movement.