These days we resent having to wait for the next episode of a new television series instead of bingeing until our eyes fall out. Imagine how fans of Charles Dickens felt in New York in 1841, forced to wait on the wharf for the final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop to chug across the Atlantic so they could discover the fate of the freakishly virtuous Little Nell. Reader, she didn't make it. Even her creator was in bits. "Old wounds bleed afresh when I think of this sad story," wrote Dickens. Oscar Wilde, on the other hand: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
Some things don't change. Viewers once were so invested in the fate of Coronation Street's wrongly jailed Deirdre Rachid Barlow that an only semi-ironic "Free the Weatherfield One" campaign took off. It was raised in Parliament. Crazy. But having real empathy for people that aren't is also a tribute to that underrated quality in these judgmental times, imagination.
I thought about this when Prince Philip died. To me the royals, with their "fairy tale" weddings, the soap opera of their dysfunctional private lives, might as well be made up. Prince Charles once referred to his marriage to Diana as "a kind of Greek tragedy". The Crown is so popular because, despite remorseless real-life reporting, people had to turn to Olivia Colman and some stunt corgis to get a sense of what the Windsors might really be like.
I confess to being moved, in some mysterious way, by the death of Prince Philip. People posted photos on social media of the dashing young man who'd had a fractured, lonely childhood, then survived a 73-year marriage walking two steps behind a constitutional construct. Others berated them for this public display of fake emotion for a representative of a hereditary system of class privilege that should long ago have been cancelled. Fair point. There were the "gaffes" which weren't really gaffes, just unsurprising expressions of all that hereditary class privilege. Still, I felt a bit sad.
Prince Philip was born two years after my mother. My nana based her look on the Queen at Sandringham. Her generation called travel to England "going home", even if they'd never been before. Whenever royalty made it down here, the nation went barking mad. That family has been a marker in the arc of history I've lived through, with plenty of wounds to bleed afresh.
