A history of British weeping

First published:
Thursday 12 November 2015 9:46AM
Alex McClintock

While Britons pride themselves on their stiff upper lips, in truth they love a good cry. That's the conclusion of author Thomas Dixon, who told Late Night Live that despite changes in religion and fashion, blubbering has always been a British pastime.

From the Victorian stoicism of Rudyard Kipling to Winston Churchill's resolve in the face of disaster, a stiff upper lip and a certain emotional reserve are often flagged as the defining characteristics of the British national character.

However, according to Dr Thomas Dixon, the director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, things are a bit more complicated than that.

Of course, Protestants didn't stop crying, but behaviour at Protestant funerals was very strongly policed by reformers and that did change.

Thomas Dixon, author

For starters, Britons love a good cry. It's just that weeping openly has been more popular in some eras than other.

'At a personal level I've always been quite sentimental despite my British stiff upper lip education, which clearly failed in my case,' says Dixon, who is also the author of Weeping Brittania: Portrait of a Nation in Tears. 'On a professional level I became more and more intrigued to discover that the meaning of extent of weeping had varied hugely across history.'

Dixon sees the Protestant Reformation as a key precursor to the modern reticence to show emotion in public. For the more dour Protestant reformers, the overt displays of grief seen at Catholic funerals were even seen as blasphemous.

'In the very austere Protestant view, mourning cannot change anything,' he says. 'Tears can't change God's mind, and to weep in that way shows a lack of faith in God's power and God's goodness to do what is right for the soul of the dead. That was one strong line of argument against weeping in the context of death.


But like beards, bell bottoms or wigs (to use a more historically appropriate example), crying came back. In fact, shedding a tear over a particularly affecting novel or painting was considered the height of fashion during the 18th century.

'The "cult of sensibility" as it is known to historians, was a movement in literature and art in 18th century Europe that put great value on human feeling and those emotions and feelings that bind us together,' says Dixon. 'One of these signs that one had learned the lessons of sensibility was that one was able to weep freely in response to paintings and especially to novels, the new, fashionable form of literature.

'Dickens, writing in the following century, is clearly an echo of this tradition of sensibility. He's one of the important writers to think about when we think about the Victorian age. People might think of the Victorians on one level as being very buttoned-up and the origin of this stiff upper lip ideal, but on the other hand we mustn't forget that they were all weeping buckets over Dickens.'

And although the phrase 'stiff upper lip' now seems iconically British, it was actually coined in the United States in 1815.

But the Victorian era also signalled a move away from emotion in public life. The Rudyard Kipling poem If-, with its line, 'If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/and treat those two impostors just the same,' became an emblem of the stoic ethic taught in British public schools.

The carnage Europe faced during the 20th century further entrenched the ideal, argues Dixon: 'The era of the British stiff upper lip exactly coincides with the sanitisation, denial and hiding from death that certainly happened in this country during the two world wars.

'In a way, the death was so extreme and so frequent that it was impossible to deal with ... people were being taught this more general ideal of restraint and emotional resilience.'

Yet emotion always seems to bubble to the surface. Even Winston Churchill, that most iconic of British leaders, was known weep in public and even enjoyed the odd tearjerker at the cinema.

'Winston Churchill had this depression that he called his black dog, and he struggled throughout his life with that. I think there was more to it than that, even,' says Dixon.

'I think he was a very emotional man. Both in public and in private he shed tears. He was seen weeping in the streets of Peckham in South London when he saw the resilience and the heroism of the people who had been bombed out of their homes. He wept in the House of Commons after he gave some very important speeches in 1940—the acclaim of his fellow MPs reduced him to tears.

'And like many of his fellow countrymen he was a great fan of the movies, and he would sit and watch sentimental and historical films and shed tears in the dark of the movie theatre.'

So where is Britain's emotional pendulum now? Dixon points to the unprecedented outpouring of grief after Princess Diana's death in 1997 and the popularity of tear-stained reality TV to posit that the UK has entered a new, emotionally forthright era. But it might not last for long.

'In this country recently we've had the Great British Bakeoff, which is a surprisingly lachrymose affair it turns out. It's a reality show that involves the emotions of the nation.

'Even I, who got into this subject as a relatively sentimental and lachrymose person, am beginning to find the amount of weeping that seems to be compulsory on television almost unbearable.

'I imagine that relatively soon there's going to have to be a backlash, just as there was after the age of sensibility. People say "enough is enough" because it devalues the currency to have this emotional hyperinflation where tears are just obligatory.'


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