Dead Wedding Invitation

A 5x7 invitation from a household where every clock stopped at twenty minutes to nine. A lace edge runs round the card, and a faded rose lies across the foot of the clock at the top. It belongs to the Dead Wedding party blueprint.

What’s Included

• 5x7 invitation as a dark PDF, a light PDF for home printers, and a PNG for texting or email
• Write-in lines for the day, the arrival time, the address and who takes regrets
• One line already filled in: Dress, “Finery gone yellow, or full mourning”
• The line under the title: “The ceremony was set for twenty minutes to nine. The clocks were stopped at that hour, and have not been started since. You are asked to attend as a witness.”

The Words

The quotation at the bottom is from Chapter XXII of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, where Herbert tells Pip why Miss Havisham’s house is the way it is: “The day came, but not the bridegroom.” We checked it against the Project Gutenberg text (Project Gutenberg). The time on the clock is Dickens’s too: in Chapter VIII, Pip sees “that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.”

The paragraph under the title and the dress line are ours. The art is our own: a scalloped lace border, a plain clock face and a rose drawn as a few petals and a stem. There’s no film title, no character likeness and no book cover on the card.

Printing Tips

Print at actual size on 110 lb cardstock and trim to 5 x 7. The dark version is mostly ink, so use the light version for a long guest list and write the details in white or silver pen on the dark one. Mail it in an A7 ivory envelope. For wording and RSVP timing, see our invitation etiquette guide.

Pairs With

• The Dead Wedding blueprint for the stopped clocks, the bride-cake under glass, the wedding breakfast and the jilted toast
• Dead Wedding Place Cards for the long table