Communal Performances: Royal Ritual, Revolution and National Acts

Abstract

For a woman who was famously unamused, Queen Victoria took her pleasures both liberally and seriously, and she bid her subjects do the same, both in her advocacy of rational pleasure and in the nation-wide parties she threw to celebrate the weddings of her children. These celebrations were part choreographed pageant of state and part ‘spontaneous’ overflow of national feeling, spilling out as they did into the streets and communal spaces of the country, not to mention the nation’s illustrated press, souvenir shops and curio cabinets. Newspaper coverage of Victorian royal weddings focused closely on the nation’s crowds, on their orderliness, their joviality and their public expression of national pride and goodwill. By addressing both verbal and visual representations of English crowds at play during the royal wedding festivities, I want to think about the serious work performed by such national enjoyment. I want also to think about the category of performance itself, which I use here in both its broadest sense of action and enactment and its more theatricalized sense of public presentation and display. Ultimately, I am interested in what it meant, in 1871, to ‘act’ like a nation or in the interest of a nation, and why the scene of national action keeps returning to the theatre — or, at least, to the well-worn tropes of theatre and spectacle. What is at stake in terms of national identity formation when English crowds turn out for what is essentially a command performance of group affect? What happens when pleasure becomes a national duty, who takes part in this performance, and where and how does it take place?