The BBC reports that “some of the first mourners to see Queen Elizabeth II lying in state in Westminster Hall have come away in tears, describing the sight of the cloaked coffin as overwhelming”. What is really going on here?
Vast numbers of people do not simply grieve on command. Britain is not North Korea, where the dramatics of hysterical lamentation are switched on and off by official edict. But neither has the outburst of national mourning following the death of the Queen been entirely extemporaneous. Grieving crowds have had to engage with a narrative that has meaning to them, and that narrative has had to be produced, disseminated and refined over time to make it affectively resonant.
The royal narrative has been a long time in the making and, much as many commentators have pointed out that the story of Queen Elizabeth II has defined our age, we might also note that our age of sophisticated public relations and political mood management has shaped it. As the cultural historian Thomas Dixon showed in his wonderful study of crying by the British, when people weep together in moments of collective national feeling “a complex, shared, unconscious, intellectual narrative is running down your cheeks”.
