Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning

Preface

On September 6, 1997, a funeral cortege wound its way down Kensington High Street toward Westminster Abbey, passing on its way an enormous crowd of mourners. Outside the royal palaces, grieving men and women, adults and children, Britons and foreigners, had deposited more than a million bouquets and displays for the deceased Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer. The New York Times reported that there seemed “something more Latin than British about the intensity of people’s words and actions; a largely Protestant culture that epitomizes restraint and values privacy was galvanized by a need to display its powerful emotions publicly.”1 One mourner told a London Times reporter how she had suddenly begun to grieve for this “stranger” and had felt compelled to share her grief with others.2 Like her, millions of people had been moved to congregate near Buckingham Palace and attend the public rites held on the day of the funeral. “How could one doing such good works die so tragically?” many asked. “How could she be gone?” Such occasions of massification swiftly transform reporters and others into armchair sociologists delivering up various explanations for whatever group behavior is at issue, in this case that of people crowding before palaces or alongside roadways or in front of television screens. Is the underlying cause the allure of celebrity and glamour? Is it widespread emotional impoverishment ? Voyeuristic consumption? A false sense of intimacy fostered by the media? Among the crowds commemorating Princess Diana one could no doubt find testimony to support any of these hypotheses. But for many of the mourners one other, ostensibly simple, fact might best explain their behavior and feelings: when burdened by grief, people wish to assemble with kindred mourners and sufferers—millions of them in the case of Diana Spencer, thousands or hundreds in the cases of others of some renown. Death draws together human beings to mourn, even to mourn the loss of a virtual stranger. They gather to share their burdens of loss and to try, in doing so, to appease or fulfill their need to express their grief and to properly mourn. Although mourning on the grand scale occasioned by Princess Diana’s death is rare, even in these media-driven times, the social phenomenon of ix P R E F A C E shared mourning in response to grief, and the community of mourners it gathers together, is by no means so. One need not look back to the anguished crowd of fans congregated outside the Dakota Apartments in New York City to mourn the death of John Lennon3 or to the spate of memorial scenes for murdered schoolchildren in American towns like Jonesboro, Arkansas, or Littleton , Colorado. We need not even review the aftermath of grief that followed the disaster of September 11, 2001. The loss of a family member or close friend can as easily spark a desire for the social possibilities afforded by sharing one’s grief with others, particularly when that grief is felt to be burdensome or even unbearable. It seems clear from all these social manifestations that for such grief to be shared there must be something common to those who gather together, whether what is imparted is grief for the deceased or the unique problems of grief itself. One widower or widow or friend or neighbor seeks out another for comfort and for the particular kind of social cohesion offered by mutual mourning. It was that sense of shared, personal loss that underlay at least some of the national (and global) spectacle associated with Diana’s funeral and the memorials that preceded it. A century and a half earlier a similar experience of loss provoked Britons to parade and exchange their grief, at the occasion of the death of another beloved princess. On Sunday, November 16, 1817, memorial sermons for Princess Charlotte, who had died in childbirth on November 6, were delivered across Britain in Anglican, dissenting, and Catholic churches and in synagogues. That Wednesday her funeral at St. George’s Chapel proved an exercise in what Stephen Behrendt, in his study of the mourning and later mythologizing of Charlotte, calls a “grandiose demonstration of Regency ostentation.” But it was one that, for all its regal spectacle, “did not have the effect of entirely removing the dead princess from the thoughts—or the view—of those citizens to whom she had meant so much.”4 Such are the powers of the dead and of their survivors’ grief. Britain’s newspapers and journals brimmed...