Weeping Britannia: Portrait of aNation inTears by Thomas Dixon – review

Are we witnessing a renaissance of crying? Do men now blub? A nuanced emotional history explodes the myth of the stiff upper lip

What to do with the tears of the past? Tears matter because they're everywhere, from the ecstatic religious narratives of the middle ages to the diaries of 20th-century cinemagoers who enjoyed a good blub in the dark. The problem is that tears don't speak a universal language. People who lived centuries ago didn't necessarily cry in the way we do, or at the same things, or even understand the act of weeping in a way that makes sense to us. This can be confusing, even infuriating - what were these people doing? - but, looked at another way, it can be an opportunity. Like reading an old document and coming across a joke you don't get, digging into how, when and why people wept can offer surprising new insights into the lives, beliefs and assumptions of past centuries.

Thomas Dixon's Weeping Britannia takes as its central premise that the British "stiff upper lip", far from being the defining characteristic of the nation throughout its history, was in fact the creation of a particular historical moment, out of which has grown a transhistorical myth of national restraint. British history, Dixon argues, was far more tearful - and far more interesting - than the myth of the stiff upper lip would suggest. Returning again and again to William Blake's assertion that "a tear is an intellectual thing", and thus something that can be interrogated and understood, Dixon presents a wide-ranging, enjoyable and accessible history of British weeping.