With the headline, “He’s in Love Again”, Lady Diana Spencer entered the public consciousness. Once she was identified, there was a steady stream of press coverage during the months leading up to the wedding on July 29, 1981, which resulted in the largest television audience for a single event up to that time—750 million people. Invitations for the ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral were eagerly sought by both royalty and Nancy Reagan, while an estimated 250,000 persons slept on the streets for days to get coveted curbside positions so they could catch a glimpse of the newlyweds going by. Festivities ranged from humble street parties to grand balls and banquets, the greatest fireworks display seen in England since the 18th century, and the sale of more than 2,000 different commemorative souvenirs of the event. Souvenirs celebrating royal occasions date back to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887), but the intense interest in the couple sparked an unusually brisk trade in almost anything to which a picture of the royal couple and the words, “In Celebration of the Wedding of HRH The Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer…” could be affixed. Among the most numerous and enduring souvenirs are china, tins, and commemorative picture books printed both before and after the wedding. Not the Royal Wedding is a British comedy show’s satiric response to the torrent of royal wedding souvenir books flooding the market.
 
 

Many of the books published about Princess Diana in the early 1980s were caught up in the spell of the fairy tale marriage. They were uncritical, adoring works written for consumption by her devoted public and appeared in uniformly similar, large, coffee table books that were loaded with color pictures and short on text. They celebrated her marriage, her clothes, and her motherhood; and when the couple began to go on royal tours abroad, the visits were chronicled in souvenir books sold all over the world. The first biography of her was Penny Junor’s book, Diana, Princess of Wales in 1982. While Junor was a capable researcher and writer who conducted key interviews that would later be used by other authors, the book gives the impression that she was not very sympathetic towards her subject and contains the first criticism of Diana to appear within a book. It is therefore not surprising that Junor later became an outspoken advocate of Prince Charles’ cause; and after Diana’s death she wrote Charles: Victim or Villain? (1998), which caused an uproar in the British press  and resulted in an unprecedented official denial from his office that his friends had had anything to do with the book.
 
 

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