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Stephen C. Behrendt, Royal Mourning and
Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte.
London: Macmillan, 1997. xii + 268pp.
illus: 8 portrait plates. £50.00 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-333-69580-1).
Bibliographic Citation: Bainbridge, Simon.
"On Stephen C. Behrendt's Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies
and Memorials of Princess Charlotte." [date of access].
Romantic Circles Reviews 3.3 (2000): 6 pars. 24 Aug. 2000.
<http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/behrendt.html>.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
1. Introduction
2. The Image of a Princess
3. The First Poems
4. Women's Responses
5. The Holy Lesson
6. The Merchandising of Mourning
7. 'Some Glorious Phantom': Buried in Myth
Notes
Index
Reviewed by
Simon
Bainbridge
Keele University
- "The great historical event of 1817," according to
Harriet Martineau, was the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte
Augusta, the twenty-one year old heiress to the throne and the
daughter of the Prince of Wales. Martineau described the reaction
to what was seen as a tragic event as follows: "never was
a whole nation plunged in such deep and universal grief. From
the highest to the lowest, this death was felt as a calamity that
demanded the intense sorrow of domestic misfortune" (1).
In Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials
of Princess Charlotte, Stephen C. Behrendt provides an extensive
survey and scholarly examination of the many and varied forms
taken by the extraordinary outpourings of grief for Charlotte,
investigating particularly the appropriation and "commoditization"
of Charlotte's death by "writers, clergymen, politicians,
artists, artisans and commentators" (2). For Behrendt, whose
previous work in the period has often focused on the relation
between history and myth, Charlotte's death is not only a "great
historical event" in which a potential political disaster
was transformed into a "normative, ultimately calming
event by a variety of cultural forces" (2), it is also a
subject which enables us to study mythmaking—"the ways
in which historical figures and events come to be invested with
qualities of myth, not just by an intellectual and aesthetic elite
but also by the general public" (23). For Behrendt, mythmaking
is a process central to both the Romantic period and our own times,
and the outpouring of literary and extra-literary responses to
the princess's death "reveals what prove to be not historically
remote (and isolated) but rather perennially compelling intellectual,
spiritual and cultural impulses, which drive the mythologizing
of a popular subject in times of domestic instability and cultural
or spiritual crisis" (26). Behrendt's claim for the contemporary
relevance of his study was underlined by the death of Princess
Diana and the subsequent mourning, appropriation and commodification
of her in the same year as the publication of Royal Mourning
and Regency Culture.
- Behrendt examines an impressive range of the responses to the
princess's life and death: educational writings addressed to the
young princess, an allegorical Oriental tale (Gulzara: Princess
of Persia: or, The Virgin Queen), poems by Barbauld, Byron,
Southey, Hemans, and Landon as well as by less familiar writers,
sermons, political pamphlets, memorial cards, china, ceramics,
jewellery, textiles, music, engravings, commemorative prints,
and sculptures. Through lengthy summaries, detailed analysis and
generous extracts, Behrendt builds up a convincing verbal and
visual iconography for Charlotte, tracing, for example, her association
with flower and tree imagery (especially the rose and the oak)
and her representation in terms of abstractions ("England's
Hope"), key figures (Britannia) and iconographic traditions
(the Madonna).
- Behrendt's accumulation of key tropes from across this wide
range of forms is meticulous and detailed. Perhaps understandably,
given the huge amount of material he has clearly worked through,
at times he seems to lose patience with his chosen approach, the
critical judgement of the literary scholar occasionally sitting
a little awkwardly alongside the tropological methodology of the
cultural historian. For example, writing of the "poem after
poem" which appeared in the months following Charlotte's
death, Behrendt comments that these "poems were almost invariably
formulaic and artificial, perhaps because the general insincerity
of the sentiments they expressed was often matched only by the
affectation reflected in their ornate and laboriously allusive
inkhorn style" (89). Elsewhere Behrendt refers to the "frankly
wretched writers (in all genres)" (32) who wrote on Charlotte's
death and dismisses as "unremarkable" a poem to which
he dedicates a page and a half of analysis (103). As literary
judgments, Behrendt's dismissal of these texts may well
be justified but they seem unnecessary in what he is keen to emphasise
is a cultural rather than a literary project. It is not just that
the "secondary" literature is important as raw material
to be appropriated and manipulated by "more sophisticated
writers" (31) (though some of the high points of the book
are Behrendt's analysis of this process, especially the excellent
final chapter on Percy Shelley's An Address to the People on
the Death of the Princess, in which Shelley "turns"
Princess Charlotte into Liberty). Rather the formulaic and conventional
nature of these works is central to Behrendt's argument for the
workings of myth. As Behrendt explains:
As poet after poet manipulated the collection of increasingly
familiar materials the poems invariably took on more and more
similarities. And the reiteration of these similarities—with
or without significant variations—itself furthers the enactment
of ritual and hence the formulation of myth. For by their continual
reiteration, the details, descriptions, tropes, figures, allusions
and iconographic indicators—the numerous signifiers, in
short—come gradually to be perceived as universals that
by their very omnipresence transcend the "mereness"
of individual being located in the actual person of Charlotte.
(94)
It is through his study of "poem after poem," text after
text, that Behrendt establishes his argument for the ritualization
of mourning.
- If much of Royal Mourning and Regency Culture works to
establish a common set of tropes and figures used to represent
Charlotte, it also draws attention to the many different
ways in which the princess was understood through the process
of mythmaking; as Behrendt comments, Charlotte "could be
read as person (and specifically as woman), as princess, as emblem
of the nation, as symbol for the aspirations of the disenfranchised
and as figurehead for an emerging cult of domesticity" (34).
Charlotte was a figure of what Behrendt terms "symbolic
utility" (158), a means of writing about other matters,
whose life and death could be presented as a lesson to the nation,
as a parable or as a moral exemplar. As Behrendt comments of one
educational pamphlet, "Princess Charlotte becomes merely
the occasion for discourse: her private person and her
public signification are appropriated to the purposes of an author
who writes with a very different audience in view" (61).
For sermon writers, the life and death of the princess could be
used for didactic purposes while historical works such as memoirs
and biographies politicized the same events.
- As Behrendt's bifurcated title suggests, then, he moves beyond
the specific topic of "elegies and memorials of Princess
Charlotte" to use these material for a more ambitious consideration
of the much broader subject of Regency culture: "How an event
like the princess's death is viewed by various segments of the
public, moreover, tells us a great deal about how that public
is constituted, about what are the sources and applications of
its governing values, and about what are its responses to the
changing relationship among the private and family-oriented individual,
the politically-conscious public citizen and the members of the
royal establishment, viewed both as symbolic figureheads for the
government and as 'real people'" (23). In considering the
constitution of the regency public, Behrendt links the mourning
for the princess and the forms it took with the development of
a domestic ideology of womanhood and with the emergence of the
middle class. As a figure of woman, wife and mother, tragically
dying in childbirth, Charlotte was someone with whom "women
could and did identify physically and psychologically" (29).
Dedicating a chapter to "Women's Responses," Behrendt
examines women's writing on the princess through the framework
of Anne Mellor's concept of "Feminine Romanticism" with
its celebration of the values of "sympathy, tolerance, generosity
and a commitment to the preservation of familial values"
(123). The version of Charlotte produced through this compact
of the female subject, female poet, and female audience is at
once elevating and levelling in its equation of the princess with
the non-royal subject: "Not only are the circumstances of
Charlotte's life and death as wife and mother rendered
comparable to the 'average' Englishwoman's in this mythic construction,
so too are the moral and cultural values ascribed to Charlotte
in her time those which Mellor in our own time associated with
feminine Romanticism" (123). For Behrendt, Charlotte becomes
one of the key figures in the development of the Victorian concept
of woman, celebrated by writers such as Hannah More, Leigh Hunt
and Robert Huish (who collected together excerpts from sermons)
for her domestic affections, inborn piety, fortitude, moral excellence
and obedience to authority, and exemplifying the traits that characterize
the "angel in the house." This process itself Behrendt
sees as part of a larger shift in the constitution of the public,
the emergence of a middle class community consolidated through
mourning for Charlotte and through the commodification of her:
"This was a community of mourning, to be sure, but it was
also a community of human experience in which rank and distinction,
like time and place, were rendered largely irrelevant by the fact
that the artifacts—the 'relics', as it were—were eminently
portable, easily affordable, and therefore 'consumable' in a way
that lent them the status of secular 'icons' in the home, while
nevertheless allowing them at the same time to be objects of trade
and commerce: commodities, in short" (175).
- As Behrendt's conclusions would suggest, his interesting readings
of texts are placed within the richly established contexts of
the Regency period and particularly of the years of economic crisis
that followed the battle of Waterloo. The only contextual element
that I felt was missing from Behrendt's study was a sense of how
the mourning for Charlotte was related to other contemporary examples
of public and private mourning; how does it compare, for example,
with the national grief expressed in the previous decade for Nelson
whose death prompted a similar if not greater outpouring of mourning,
memorials, and commemorations? By maintaining such a close focus
on Charlotte, Behrendt certainly alerts us to what became the
conventions of mourning the princess but we lose some sense of
how these conventions drew on or transformed those of a wartime
and post-war culture in which grief and mourning were key elements.
However, such a project is perhaps beyond the scope of any single
volume and this work makes an important contribution to this field
of study. As a "case study" (23), Royal Mourning
and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte
is a very valuable work, both for its careful cataloguing and
detailed analyses of the wide variety of responses to Charlotte's
life and death and for its broader investigation into the workings
of myth in society.
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