Weeping Britannia

Thomas Dixon’s pioneering study carries glowing endorsements from Jo Brand and Ian Hislop, as well as Joanna Bourke, and fully deserves the huge attention and success it has received both within and far beyond the academic sphere. Erudite and entertaining, it is intellectually ambitious, emotionally engaged, full of insight and packed with surprising details. The illustrations are well chosen, and the eighty-five pages of notes and guides to further reading are hidden away at the back. Dixon’s subject is the readiness of the British to display tearful emotion, from the medieval period to the present. His central thesis is that the ‘stiff upper lip’, far from being an ingrained feature of the national character, was no more than a relatively short-lived aberration, developing in the Victorian age, reaching its apogee in the period of the twentieth-century world wars and now in full retreat. His method is to frame short chapters (‘a series of lachrymose miniatures’, p. 10) around a series of particular episodes or individuals, and use them to access the changing cultural and emotional climate of a particular period. The British, he argues, have always been a tearful people, and he provides copious evidence covering men and women of all social classes and from all parts of the British Isles. He explores, too, how emotional regimes have fluctuated over the centuries. The Protestant Reformers encouraged emotional constraint, though Puritans, Nonconformists and early Methodists gave free rein to tearful religiosity. Mid-eighteenth-century Britons espoused a ‘tearful sensibility’, epitomised by Henry Mackenzie’s extraordinarily popular novel The Man of Feeling (1771), which the following generation repudiated. The stiff upper lip (an American phrase coined only in 1871) gradually came to dominate in the later Victorian period, but Dixon reminds us of the huge success of Charles Dickens’s tearful novels and highly charged public readings. He illustrates the emotional openness of our own time through the familiar phenomena of crying footballers, tennis champions and reality TV stars, and the outpouring of public grief at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Readers may be interested to learn that Boris Johnson, identified helpfully as a ‘Conservative politician and journalist’, has displayed a tendency to swim with the tide on the acceptability of public tears

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Period (music · Portrait · Protestantism · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Literature Analysis and Criticism · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies