As I sit down to review Weeping Britannia, Thomas Dixon's far-reaching study of British attitudes toward crying, Prince Harry is in the news, raising awareness about mental illness by admitting that he regrets not speaking about his grief over his mother's death in 1997 until now, nineteen years later. Prince Harry explained that talking openly about one's grief as a way of working through it is not weakness; remaining aloof from it is. In making this deceptively simple point, the prince confirmed a number of Dixon's major claims. For one thing, it confirms that the “British stiff upper lip” is not completely dead so much as it is a stubbornly persistent minor strain within British, especially English, culture, one that was positively reevoked with reference to Prince Harry's composure during Princess Diana's funeral (316). Yet if the stiff-upper-lip ethos has been dying a slow, postimperial death, it nevertheless remains, as Dixon shows, something of an anomaly within the broader sweep of British history. Taking hold in the wake of the French Revolution, building through the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and then climaxing in the mid-twentieth century, British stoicism is less an innate feature of the island peoples than it is a contingent historical development that has been waning for decades.

Dixon tells his story with far more charm than lugubriousness. Running from Margery Kemp to Margaret Thatcher, the book concludes with some illuminating remarks about contemporary reality programs such as X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. This historical sweep is framed by five chronologically and thematically organized sections (“Piety,” “Enthusiasm,” “Pathos,” “Restraint,” and “Feelings”), each of which has four relatively short chapters on discrete topics covering a full array of carefully selected and incisively analyzed cultural phenomena. Dixon's basic method consists of showing how key social practices serve as sites of cultural conflict over the value and meaning of affectively charged experience, especially that of weeping.

The first section, “Piety,” begins with an overview of Kemp's prolific capacity for tears in fourteenth-century Norfolk. Dixon uses this to set up the claim that the Protestant Reformation introduced new restraints on pious weeping while nevertheless continuing to value certain kinds of devout tears. If some of the broad distinctions here are a little overdrawn (counterreformers such as Robert Southwell also had recourse to principles of moderation and the via media), Dixon's main point here nevertheless serves the purpose of a wide-ranging argument that crescendos with remarkable force in the final chapters. In this early stage, we are reminded that Puritans such as Oliver Cromwell wept buckets of penitent tears and that radical Protestant religion was often highly affective in nature even as it was critical of the maudlin tears shed by Roman Catholics, especially foreign ones. Perhaps most valuably, this opening section of introduces the catch-22 of the witch paradox that gained ascendancy in Reformation England: women who wept too much were maudlin, but those who did not weep enough were hard-hearted witches. This ideological attitude returns toward the end of the book, in Dixon's quietly withering discussion of the general incoherence of ad hominem attacks on Thatcher during and after her premiership.

The section titled “Enthusiasm” begins with an overview of the Methodist revival, particularly as embodied by the affecting sermons of George Whitefield. This leads into a discussion of how pictorial depictions of female weeping in the eighteenth century occasioned a series of revealing distinctions between ethically poignant and morally degenerating modes of female affect. The result is a fascinating account of shifting attitudes towards aesthetically inspired tears in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. In a major hinge on which the book hangs, the section's final chapter, Dixon explains how the French Revolution became a site of conflicting affective regimes. It was primarily in the wake of the French Revolution, he explains, that passionate weeping became morally and politically problematic. Intriguingly, even those who critiqued the excesses of French feeling nevertheless had an odd way of finding themselves weeping, just as those who ridiculed royalist sentimentality sometimes found themselves caught up in similar states of politically charged affect. What seems to have ultimately emerged during this period was a diminished view of what weeping truly is. If it was once a “moral and religious activity … something to be cultivated, tutored, practised, learned, performed”; it later became a “mere ‘expression of emotion’” (122).

Dixon builds on this insight into shifting attitudes towards weeping by discussing responses to George III's mental illness and Queen Victoria's accession-day crying. This involves tracing the broader shift from tears of sensibility to the self-consciously nonsentimental tears of the romantic poets. More central to the broader argument is the chapter on Dickensian pathos, especially as expressed in the death of Little Nell. At its best, this chapter in “Pathos” explains the dialectical relation between literature and life in Victorian England, how there “was a flowing back and forth between real bereavements and idealized literary representations, with each giving structure and meaning to the other” (162). Dixon develops this insight in the following chapter, on weeping judges in Victorian England, including the way in which they were satirized in the dawn of the age of the British bulldog.

In the penultimate section, “Restraint,” Dixon locates the tension between sentiment and repression characteristic of the Victorian period along with those that immediately followed it. Even in the heyday of British stoicism, public acts of weeping were there to be seen—though now people tended to weep at the sight of people not weeping. This point is brilliantly made with reference to the 1945 film Brief Encounter. In the book's final section, “Feelings,” Dixon traces the complex decline of the stiff-upper-lip ethos with one powerful vignette after another.

The accumulative effect of Dixon's narrative is nothing short of operatic as we watch one affective regime rise as another falls while seeing traces of the past persist within the present. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that we are in the hands of a historian who helps us better understand the social and historical forces animating the British people's most intimate emotions.