Stiff Upper Lip? 😐😢😭
ANNETTE TELLS TALES A Surprising History of British Crying Shows How Complicated Stereotypes, Identity, and People Can Be
How Long Is This Post? About 7,000 words, or 30 minutes
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Crying Time
You’ll need a box of tissues today. If you’re rolling your eyes at that suggestion, I do hope you will keep reading anyway. No, you didn't get lost. Yes, this is Non-Boring History. And I am a historian, with a proper PhD in History.
Ooh, and today, we'll also be bringing in everything from witchcraft to Winston Churchill! But first . . .
Let's meet Mrs. Margery Kempe. She was English, and she cried a lot. She cried loudly, and in public, tears , snot, the works. A devout Christian, she sobbed so much about Christ’s sacrifice during a tour of the Holy Land, other pilgrims in her tour group complained about her. Margery Kempe embarrassed them. Of course she did. These were Proper English people who never cried in public, right?
Not quite. We're talking the Middle Ages, when most things were very different. Why not attitudes about bawling in public?
I just finished an astonishing book on the history of crying in Britain, written by a British historian: Dr. Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia: Portrait of A Nation in Tears.
Oh, come on, I can hear you say. How can crying be part of history, which is about documented change? I mean, either people cry or they don't, you would think, right?
Longtime readers know me as a very unBritish Brit, someone who cries at so many things, including museum displays and TV commercials. I often feel a great kinship with my great-great-aunt Mary. She was a family legend because she was never mentioned except with rolled eyes and laughing references to ”Greeting [weeping] Mary.” Tears were her trademark.
Turns out, Weeping Britannia is not only surprising and illuminating, but very entertaining. Even though he's published by Oxford University Press, Dr. Dixon clearly is aiming to reach the British Public. And I really think that, with a bit of an on-ramp (this NBH riff ), Americans and other non-UK readers will enjoy his book too.
We all make sweeping claims about the characteristics of our own cultures (however we define those), and it’s so hard to know if we have a point. Hey, Americans are loud in public, an American historian I knew once observed to me on returning from London. But I couldn’t possibly comment on that (coughs).
Once I listened to a US university president of Asian Indian birth give a talk to a predominantly Indian-American audience, and he said Indians tend to be late to events. Everyone laughed knowingly. Almost everyone. Except this Brit. I was cringing a bit,and not just for the reasons you might expect.
Look, I have heard the same talk by black speakers about African Americans. And Highland Scots about Highland Scots (“Highland time”). And maybe they all have a point in self-mocking stereotypes. Or maybe it’s just a stereotype.
I do think all of us need to think about how seriously to take such things, and I say this as a distant cousin of Will Fyffe, a Scottish comedian who made his fortune peddling Scottish stereotypes like stinginess and drunkenness to paying customers, not only his fellow Lowland Scots, but also to English, Americans (he played on Broadway), and the world.
So this brings me to the British (English, Scots, and Welsh, but, let's be honest, English especially) and their supposed reluctance to shed tears.
Since Weeping Britannia is such an enjoyable read, I'm just going to riff on a few highlights, to tempt you to read the book yourself. This doesn’t mean it’s an easy read: I felt like a spectator at a tennis game, head jerking back and forth as I tried to keep my eye on the ball. Dixon tends to lure the reader into thinking he’s arguing one thing, only to reverse himself, and then you realize he’s arguing something else.
Just when I thought he was veering too much into a fluffy interdisciplinary approach, devoting an entire chapter to weeping in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s most revoltingly violent play, he surprised me by drawing in proper evidence about ordinary actual people whom I thought he had been ignoring.
Dr. Dixon often seems as if he’s messing with the reader, because he is. It’s a miracle he didn’t bring me to tears as I tried to write about his book for you. But I soon grew to love his style: My idea of history isn’t just to doggedly pursue an argument, to get the reader to agree with me, but to get the reader to think about where they fit into all this. And I believe it’s fair to say that Thomas Dixon is after the same thing, and showing his process. It’s fascinating.
What he’s aiming at most, though, is to test an important part of the British national self-image: The stiff upper lip, the resistance to crying for which Brits are famed. Is it true?
Of course it's true, I thought! I mean, not me, of course. And then I thought of all the people I grew up around, and started thinking of how emotional they could become. But I swept such thoughts aside! Nope, in the main, the British aren’t criers! We leave that to Americans and foreigners! [God Save the King playing in background, oh, no, I'm tearing up] OMG, that’s a bizarre thought. But surely . . . Resisting tears is part of the national character.
My internal historian was kicking in, and I kicked myself. I realized: Uh oh. This isn’t entirely right, is it? I mean, what about all the weeping in Britain’s Got Talent and even The Great British Bake-Off (US: The Great British Baking Show)?
I have cried with the contestants over ruined cake. But then,as a fairly educated Brit, I have felt deeply ashamed for feeling manipulated, much as I used to do when I visited Disney World, and cried on cue at all the emotional images and music, even It’s a Small World, which is, let’s be honest, ghastly.
However, I'm not alone, it seems.
“I’m a sucker for this kind of thing myself,” Dr. Dixon writes, recalling how he wept through a TV reality show. One thing I love about this book (and you will immediately know why, Nonnie friends) is that Dr. Dixon doesn’t pretend to be invisible: He visits places he writes about, and takes us with him. He admits to being confused and conflicted.
Back in the Middle Ages, it seems, Margery Kempe, the annoying crying lady who sobbed her way to and from Jerusalem, seems to support the assumption that it wasn’t typical to be a crying English person, even centuries ago: Everyone in her life rolled their eyes at her.
Or do we need to take a closer look? Dr. Dixon certainly thinks so. So let's riff a little more on his discussion of Margery.
Margery Kempe was an ordinary woman, the wife of a beer brewer in the small town of Lynn (today Kings Lynn). Historians know a fair bit about her because she kept an autobiography, rediscovered in the 1930s, and that’s gold to medieval historians, who typically base what they know about that period on enough documents to fill the bottom of a chamberpot.
Margery Kempe had some kind of mental illness after the birth of her first child. Dr. Dixon, following the diagnosis of the time, calls it “madness”. I’m guessing post-partum depression, but we’re talking the late 14th and early 15th centuries here, so who knows? Not me. Or anybody.
Anyway, Margery turned to religion, and her religious expression took the form of sobbing loudly in public.
In some ways, her massive crying jags got her lots of, well, not so much sympathy, as celebrity. She cried rivers of tears while her church was in danger from a nearby fire. Unexpectedly, since I guess the BBC’s forecasters misread the signs in the heavens, snow arrived, and extinguished the inferno. Margery was assumed responsible for this miraculous turn in the weather! She was a hero to the people of Lynn! This didn’t last. She kept crying. And it got kind of annoying.
I know it seems obvious that she would have got on British nerves, but it’s not.
Today, a loudly weeping woman in a British church would really stand out. If you visit a typical Church of England church today, you will likely find it very quiet, if not deserted, when services aren’t being held. Or maybe also when they are. People often talk in hushed tones, or even in whispers.
But in Margery’s day, the Church of England did not yet exist. I mean, there were churches, but all the churches in England were still part of the Roman Catholic Church. And they were busy and noisy places, not least because everyone had to go to church, or else. But since the general public weren't expected to participate until it was time for communion, when a little bell rang to get their attention (still does, ask your Catholic friends), they could bring their knitting, or just have a nice chat.
Part of the noise, though, was weeping, because there have always been what Brits now call “God botherers”, worshippers who actually take the exercise seriously.
That’s because they ( and the merely bored) had plenty to look at and think about during Mass. Churches were full of colorful yet heart-rending images, like movies today: Christ crucified. The weeping Virgin Mary, holding the broken body of her son. Oh, blimey, and I’m not kidding, I’m starting to cry just thinking of this. Don’t worry: I’m not here to convert you to any religion.
A lot of people cried in medieval churches, and they were meant to. Such images were meant to inspire emotion, and thus religious devotion. The Catholic Church was using pictures to teach compassion to the people.
I know this will annoy or amuse some of my readers, but think about it: Yes, religions are human institutions, and so very flawed, like everything else people do. But all the major faiths today teach compassion: I think of the Jewish emphasis on tzedakah, or charity. I think of the Muslim group in my hometown, who quietly feed strangers in need, and who have stirred admiration and compassion among non-Muslim neighbors. I think of the temples in India that feed all who are hungry, at huge expense. Images help stir such compassion.
Even gentle St. Francis, Catholic patron saint of animals and whatnot, found compassion through viewing a image of Christ crucified. In fact, he cried so much in his life, he allegedly went blind from crying. One legend claims he wept and thanked his donkey on his deathbed for carrying him through his ministry, and the donkey cried too. Oh, blimey, now I have all the animal rights fans weeping.
This level of caring had to be an improvement over the Romans, who slaughtered animals and people for mass entertainment, while munching larks’ tongues, or whatever served for Roman popcorn, and never gave the sufferers a second thought. Compassion, it seems, does have to be taught. And the medieval Catholic church, operating in an environment in which most people were illiterate, taught compassion through images.
Holy cow, I just had a texted conversation about an appalling and well-publicized British scandal, in which good people working for the Post Office were fired, jailed, and driven to suicide because of badly-designed software. After years of extensive news coverage, it’s still finally only sinking into public awareness because of this BBC drama. P.S. And right before hitting send, I discovered it's coming to the States on Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. Watch it, please.
This kind of thing happens all the time. People seem to only develop compassion for past people—even recently past people— through museums, through movies, through reading autobiographies and novels that let them feel they know and even identify with those people, and not just look at them from the outside.
In other news, college history and literature departments, which have long developed empathy and compassion among young people whom high school failed, are being gutted.
I really ought to be promoting weepy historical dramas, like One Life, the movie about British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, an ordinary Brit who personally saved hundreds of kids, many of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi invasion in 1938. Here’s the trailer. Nick Winton: A Brit who cared, and cried.
There was nothing unEnglish in Margery Kempe’s day about crying. Maybe the difference was that Margery Kempe cried in buckets, in public, and loudly. She wailed constantly. A visiting priest in Lynn, who wasn’t used to Margery, couldn’t hear himself think during his sermon, and kicked her out of church.
So even in this weepy, Catholic version of England, Margery stood out. And it wasn’t just priests who found her annoying, was it? On her trip to the Holy Land, she drove the other pilgrims nuts.
Annette’s Aside When I think of weepy Catholicism, I think of a Brit, oddly enough: Edward Elgar, a devout Catholic composer of early 20th century England, struggled to depict the Crucifixion in his music, and found he was emotionally too distraught to bring himself to use words to depict the moment of Christ’s death. The opening bars are his musical representation of Jesus’s last words, "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani", or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is followed by the kettle drums and strings depicting Christ’s death, and then the choir singing quietly in English, “Truly this was the son of God.” This bit only lasts about 1.30. No, again, this isn't my attempt to convert you.
Maybe the most moving thing about this music for me is imagining Elgar, an Englishman at the height of Stiff Upper Lip times, trying not to cry, dabbing at his eyes so as not to drip tears onto his score as he jotted down the notes. Why is that? Why am I, a Brit, moved to tears by the thought of British Catholic Edward Elgar not crying? In other words, the underlying question that this book gets me and should get every reader to ask is “Who am I?” At history's best, that’s the kind of question it should prompt all of us to ask. At history's best, it should also help us all connect to people, and see the world through their eyes.
Oh, and speaking of which, I need more free readers to become paying subscribers, at the annual, monthly, or Patron level.
Please respond, or I might cry, and trust me, you don't want that. You'll make my day when you do go paid (every person who goes paid really does that!) Also, the NBH Gnomes will perform their syncopated happy dance.
If you are a free reader, and you ignored my earlier requests, you will shortly see a paywall, I understand why you might cry. I really do feel your pain, and I agonized over this, as Hoosen (my long-suffering spouse) can witness. But please let’s pull ourselves together. I really do need your* support.