“Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears”, Professor Thomas Dixon (Queen Mary University of London)

Date: Monday 14 November, 2016
Time: 6:15 pm
Venue: Singapore Theatre, Melbourne School of Design (MSD), Bld 133, Masson Road, The University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus
Registration: Online here.
Enquiries: che-melb-admin@unimelb.edu.au

Tears seem to be everywhere today – the common currency of confessional television, sporting events, and political interviews. They run down the cheeks of public figures, while we in our millions at home watch and weep over soap operas and reality TV shows. In Britain, there is a generational divide between those who have never known anything different and those who were born in a more restrained age. On behalf of the older generation, journalists repeatedly ask what has happened to the good old British stiff upper lip.

In this talk I set out to answer that question, introducing examples and ideas from my book Weeping Britannia, which offers an emotional narrative history of British life and culture through the tears of men, women, children, and animals since the late middle ages, as well as explaining the origins of the ‘stiff upper lip’. The talk will look at the place of tears in religion, politics, science, and popular culture, with examples including Margery Kempe, Charles James Fox, Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin, Margaret Thatcher, and Paul Gascoigne. I will suggest that the real mystery is not what happened to the stiff upper lip, but why it refuses to go away.

Professor Thomas Dixon is the Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. His books include From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (2003), The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (2008), and Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (2015). He is currently researching anger and rage as part of a collaborative Wellcome Trust project entitled ‘Living With Feeling: Emotional Health in History, Philosophy, and Experience’. His broadcast projects have included a television programme about science and religion and a BBC Radio series entitled ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’. He is a Partner Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800, and is visiting Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne during November 2016.