Royal mourning and Regency culture

This book examines the widespread response in British artistic media to the death in childbirth in 1817 of Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, daughter of the Prince Regent and heiress to the throne, showing how both in print materials like poetry and sermons and extra-literary artifacts like visual art, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles her life and death were invested with the qualities of myth even as her memorialists appropriated her experiences in the process of producing consumer commodities for an emerging mass audience.

Stephen C. Behrendt is George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, USA. Among his previous books are Reading William Blake, Shelley and His Audiences, and The Moment of Explosion: Black and the Illustration of Milton, as well as several edited collection of essays on Romantic literature and the other arts and two collections of poetry, Instruments of the Bones and A Step in the Dark. He is presently at work on several projects relating to British women writers of the Romantic period.