After Philip Mountbatten died in April 2021, his probate records were sealed by the High Court, as dictated by custom. In the moment, the British media was curious about what his will might reveal about his feelings about those descendants of his who were in the news. However, this privilege also illustrated an old paradox: the royal family is simultaneously the most public of households and one of the most secretive, enjoying special legal protections to its privacy. This is both because of and despite the growth of a grotesque, mendacious, and symbiotic media and publishing industry that promises access to the inner lives of the royals.

Rather than chasing this impossible, but immensely popular, project of knowing the royals, in The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media and the British Public, 1932–53, Edward Owens analyzes some of the ways in which the royal household and its close allies actively tried to shape the monarchy's public image during a period of rapid change: the 1930s to 1950s. In doing so, Owens works around the problems that royal secrecy creates for historians through the creative use of a wide range of sources, archival and published. Owens uses collections such as the Lambeth Palace Library, Mass Observation, and the Lascelles papers at the Churchill Archives Center, the limited access offered by the Royal Archives, and a wide range of other sources. Through this creative and thoughtful research, Owens shows that “contradictory ideas of self-fulfillment and self-denial” (378) were increasingly important components of both the public image of the royal family and the evolving publicity practices of the royal household.

Owens organizes The Family Firm around a chronological analysis of a series of problems and opportunities faced by the royal family between 1932 and 1953: the wedding of George, Duke of Kent and Marina of Greece and Denmark in 1934; George V's radio broadcasts in the final years of his reign; George VI's 1937 coronation; the Second World War; the romance and marriage of Elizabeth II and Philip; and Elizabeth's 1953 coronation, with a particular focus on its presentation on television.

Changes in the public image of the monarchy were often the unintended consequences of their responses to internal and external forces. At the same time, royals and royal servants had an active, conscious hand in shaping the family's image, even in cases where the message misfired. For example, Owens credits the changing focus on the royals as self-sacrificing in part to Cosmo Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, who is a central figure in The Family Firm. Lang's influence over the public image of the monarchy went beyond his regular ceremonial duties: senior royals and royal servants trusted him to provide guidance and to write speeches. Even after his retirement as archbishop, the royal family asked Lang for advice.

Analyses of the British monarchy often struggle to differentiate between the internal workings of the monarchy, how it presents itself to the public, how the media portrays it, and how the various publics that it rules over see it. Owens is admirably clear about the distinction between these four ways of understanding the monarchy. Owens carefully and sometimes laboriously leads readers through the strengths and limitations of the book's various sources, without losing sight of how they fit together to connect to larger questions in British historiography, especially the cultural history of the family and emotions. Owens's examples and themes are also suggestive of the connections between cultural and political change. For example, George V was the first and only British monarch to address the country as “my friends” (107), in his Christmas broadcast in 1935. Owens shows how this anomaly made sense in terms of the beliefs and personalities of the individuals involved in the broadcast and the wider political and cultural moment.

Owens gives occasional suggestive examples rather than a systematic analysis of what the changes and practices he describes meant for the British Empire and the wider world. This is not so much of a problem as an opportunity for other historians to think about the differences and similarities between the role of and beliefs about the monarchy in Britain versus other parts of the empire. Owens's sources and analysis makes it clear that the closest advisers to the Crown were interested in securing its popularity and role as a domestic symbol for a primarily British, and maybe even English and Anglican, audience. They were responsive first to English cultural trends, English sacrifices, and English concerns. What did this mean in other parts of Britain, the empire, and beyond (many newspapers in the United States in this era were fascinated by the royals)? Owens addresses this briefly in the conclusion, but I suspect that this is a complicated, dynamic story with significant differences from what was happening in England.

The Family Firm is part of the New Historical Perspectives series sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society with the University of London Press (an open-access digital version is also available). The book is generously illustrated, although I sometimes wished that Owens had spent more time analyzing the visual elements of the images. Overall, The Family Firm is a readable work of academic history that deserves a wide audience. Since Owens sent it to press in 2018, much has already changed in the “family firm” of the title, but the book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the modern monarchy, both for its content and as a model for analyzing and dis-enchanting the monarchy in a meaningful way that addresses wider questions about modern British cultural history.