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Royalty

6 May 2023

5 min read

The art of encouraging

After uncovering the enchanting story of how Prince Albert encouraged Queen Victoria, Belle Tindall explains why it's not only children who crave the art of encouragement.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Under a gilded arch, a statue of a young Queen Victoria sits, between two standing figures.

The Queen Victoria statue in the House of Lords.

Queen Victoria 1819-1901 Reigned 1837-1901 Supporting figures: Justice & Clemency Bas-reliefs: Science Commerce Industry / Useful Arts, Fully-rounded carving by John Gibson , © UK Parliament, WOA S88 heritagecollections.parliament.uk

In the Prince’s Chamber of the House of Lords sits a mighty marble statue of Queen Victoria.

She is sitting on her throne, holding both her sceptre and her crown, hemmed in on either side by two figures who represent justice and mercy. Her expression is strong, her posture is powerful, she is visibly assured and confident in her identity and role as Queen.

You can view the statue, in all its glory, on Parliament's website.

To say it’s striking is an understatement. It’s simply unmissable.

And yet, the most remarkable thing about this statue is not that it exists, there are nine similar figures in London alone. No, what’s so notable about this statue is where it exists, and why.

The story is an admittedly enchanting one. Prince Albert commissioned this particular statue of his wife, and had it precisely placed so that it greeted her head-on as she stepped out of her Robing Room and made her way to the Chamber of the Lords. It had one purpose and one purpose only - to give Queen Victoria courage when she was likely to need it most.

And that’s exactly where it still sits, its colour may be long faded, but its impact is not. It sits as somewhat of an alter to this historic romance, but more profoundly, as an ode to something that is notably overlooked in our culture: it is an ode to the practice of encouragement.

Psychologist and Professor Y Joel Wong powerfully defines encouragement as

‘The expression of affirmation through language or other symbolic representations to instil courage, perseverance, confidence, inspiration, or hope in a person(s) within the context of addressing a challenging situation or realizing a potential’.

When defined this way, it is clear to see just how integral such expressions of affirmation are to the cultivation of a flourishing life. And yet, Prof. Wong also observes just how underestimated, understudied, and undervalued the art of encouragement is. The vast majority of research that has attempted to theorize encouragement places its focus exclusively on early childhood development, implying that they believe it to be an essential need that humans simply outgrow. And yet, while such an idea floats around on an academic level, it’s likely that we each feel a sense that this is simply not congruent with personal experiences. The delight we feel upon learning the story behind Queen Victoria’s statue in the House of Lords is surely evidence that this kind of encouragement from another person is something that we continue to crave well into adulthood.

I would suggest that the underestimation of the practice of encouragement may be a subtle symptom of the individualistic culture we now find ourselves in.

What individualism may starve us of

The political and social philosophy of individualism can be dated back to the late 1700s, primarily as a reaction to the French Revolution. Since then, it has been re-framed and refined countless times, perhaps most influentially by Emile Durkheim in 1893 and Max Weber in 1947. Each philosopher foresaw a society that looks strikingly like ours, here in the 21st Century. A society which expects individuals to grow, learn and flourish independently of each other, which values self-definition, self-sufficiency, and self-actualisation, which ultimately encourages a self-centred and goal-oriented life.

In his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that ‘nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind’. According to this school of thought, the rights and convictions of the individual supersede the duties of the community, and the Western world is arguably steeped in this very notion (of course, there are exceptions to the rule - the NHS and welfare system being two prime examples).

To condemn individualism completely seems to me to be too simple of a judgment; the notion that one is responsible for their own actions undergirds much of our justice system, our right to question institutions and power structures is integral, while the freedom that each person has (in theory) to pursue their own passions and convictions is a wonderful thing. And yet, it could be argued that the emphasis it places on individual success feeds competition and comparison, which is consequently starving us of empowerment and encouragement.

Perhaps this is one reason the theorizing of encouragement is notably neglected in so much psychological study.

Further to that, maybe this is why stories such as Prince Albert commissioning a statue of Queen Victoria, or Marilyn Monroe famously sitting front row at every one of Ella Fitzgerald’s shows in a notoriously segregated club, or the Barcelonian crowd at the 1992 Olympics who erupted in applause as Team GB’s 400m runner, Derek Redmond, weepingly limped across the finish line with a freshly-torn hamstring, affect us so profoundly. Because encouragement is profoundly absent from our culture - and we miss it.

Christianity and the emotional life

Christianity, as you can imagine, has an awful lot to say about the emotional life of humanity and the key ingredients involved in human flourishing. Although it stresses the individuality and dignity of every single human being, while also emphasising the agency (or ‘free will’) of every person, that is largely where its relationship with individualism comes to a halt. To untangle the inherent value of community from Christianity is a mean feat indeed.

In his book, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, Francis Spufford writes that Christianity is supposed to make us

‘full of passion for each other’s minds, hearts, souls, and bodies’ because it is in this curiosity and passion that we ‘recreate as best we can some fraction of the absolute and inimitable love behind everything.’

This certainly doesn’t leave much room for an exclusively self-actualising existence.

If Francis Spufford is correct, if Christianity’s worldview has even a little sense to it, then it’s possible that our success is directly linked to the success of others. Individual victories, communal victories, collective losses, personal losses – they are, to a point, inseparable from each other. If this is the case, it is worth suggesting that the art and the impact of encouragement may well be worthy of far more of our attention.

Column

Culture

Royalty

14 February 2024

4 min read

Death focuses our minds on what really matters

From ballet tales to royal soap opera, stories shed light on Lent's dark mortality.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

In the style of a Rembrandt painting Prince Harry embraces his father King Charles.

Midjourney.ai

The season of Lent – the 40 days of penitential fasting preceding the great feast of Easter – is unavoidably about death and dying. Christians try to die to sin; the season culminates with the brutal, if salvific, death of the Christ on the cross on Good Friday and it’s said that if we, as disciples, can’t die with him at Calvary, then we can’t truly know what it is to rise with him at Easter dawn.

Those of us who attend an “ashing” service at church this Ash Wednesday, will have a cross traced on our foreheads by a priest, made from the ashes of the palm crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday, with the words: “Remember that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Reprising folk goddess Joni Mitchell, we’re thus reminded that we are but stardust and these bodies that we lug about are all bound towards that destination. In short, we’re all going to die.

So as signs of new spring life are appearing all around, the Christian Church starts to wallow in existential misery. To paraphrase the lugubrious Mona Lott (geddit?) from the wartime BBC comedy It’s that Man Again, it’s being so cheerful that keeps we Christians going.

Against this, I’d like to mount a case that there really are reasons to be cheerful in Lent; that, if the words of the ancient Gregorian chant that “in the midst of life we are in death” are true, then the reverse is also true, that in the midst of death we’re living life.

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent.

This thought comes to me partly because of the extraordinary reconciliation and peace that families often experience as they lose one of their loved number. And it comes partly having just watched a livestream of the Royal Ballet’s latest production of Manon. Our heroine dies in a New Orleans penal colony, having been exiled as a prostitute from bourgeois Paris, sustained at the end not by worldly wealth but only by the devotion of her lover.

It’s quite a story – catch it if you can. It contains the key tenet of faith during Lent, that love conquers death. Having embraced our Lenten mortality, that’s the truth we endeavour to embrace at Easter. And that, for me, begins to put the love back into Lent, which is otherwise bleak and bitter, like the sour wine offered to the dying Christ.

My case is that it takes our mortality to clock what’s really important. And we witness that human realisation all the time. I believe we’ve just seen it in Prince Harry’s transatlantic flight to visit the King on his cancer diagnosis. King Charles becomes simply a dad again when his son is presented with the reality and realisation of his mortality, that sooner or later he is going to die.

As it turns out, that reality turns out to be infinitely more important than whether he got a smaller bedroom than his big brother when they were boys (copyright Spare, Bantam Press).

It’s stories like these – from Manon to the soap opera of the modern royals – that put human mortality into bas relief, so that we can see it properly. But it’s particularly Harry’s mercy mission to his father that chimes, for me, with a gospel story, or parable as we call them.

It’s not one that’s about kings or weddings – or even principally about death and dying. I’m thinking of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Plot synopsis: A landowner has two sons. The younger one asks to cash in his inheritance and travels away to a foreign land, where he spends all he has on a debauched lifestyle (cf. the Paris from which Manon “escapes”) and is reduced to tending pigs and coveting their swill. He returns humbled to the family estate, where his father welcomes him with a feast, much to the consternation of his brother.

Sound familiar? Sure, Charles isn’t God, as we assume the forgiving father to be in the parable. Nor is Harry asking to return, humbled and repentant (though we don’t know that, do we?). Nor has he been reduced to a diet of pigswill, unless California and Netflix contracts count as that.

Possibly more accurately cast is Prince William as the elder brother, who in the parable objects to his sibling’s welcome back, pointing out that he’s done all his father’s work without such reward.

Here, for our Lenten purposes, the father’s reply is key: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent. For royals, commoners, the trafficked, the desperate and alone, it delivers the one thing that death can’t extinguish: Hope.