Description
By Edward Owens
Published November 2019
The Family Firm presents the first major analysis of the public projection and reception of the British monarchy’s media image in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V’s first Christmas broadcast in 1932, the royal household worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s public relations strategy. Together they elevated the royal family’s domesticity as a focal point for popular identification and this strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with royalty.
The Family Firm shows how the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on British national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War and helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was profoundly shaken by the 1936 Abdication Crisis.
- "The royal family, famous for its inscrutability, has more than met its match in this resourceful young historian", Professor Arianne Chernock (Boston University), Reviews in History (May 2020).
- "A vibrant and welcome study of the monarchy’s early interaction with the mass media … an important insight into how British royalty has been adept at making itself a powerful, popular, and frequently uncontested presence." Twentieth-Century British History (July 2020).
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Dr Edward Owens is a historian of the modern British monarchy and the media state. A former lecturer at the University of Lincoln, he has published and broadcast widely on aspects of the monarchy in the twentieth- and twenty-first century.
Published by University of London Press as part of the RHS / IHR New Historical Perspectives series
420pp, Available in print, eBook and as a free Open Access download.
To request a review copy, please contact Lauren De'ath, Publications and Marketing Officer at University of London Press.
