Review: How our personal affairs became public

Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life

Tiffany Jenkins

Picador, £20, pp464

In January 1868, in the supreme court of the state of North Carolina, judgment was awarded against Mrs Elizabeth Rhodes. Mrs Rhodes had taken her husband to court for striking her several times with a thick stick – something he admitted to. The original jury having somehow found him not guilty of battery, his wife’s appeal came before Justice Reade. Reade upheld the original decision. “However great are the ills of evil temper and even personal conflicts inflicting only temporary pain,” Tiffany Jenkins quotes Reade as saying, “they are not comparable with the evils which would result from raising the curtain, and exposing to public curiosity and criticism, the nursery, the bedchamber.”

This idea, that the home was a necessary shelter from the eyes and judgment of others, may have marked the zenith of what Jenkins describes as the Victorian concept of privacy. And if it had its unfortunate features, it also had its upsides. Twenty-four years earlier, in London, the Italian liberal nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini had caught the government out in intercepting and opening his letters. The resulting fuss – which revealed for the first time the extent of this kind of surveillance – showed that elite opinion was firmly opposed to such intrusion.

Things did not stay that way: probably the first written record of my birth is the transcript of an intercepted phone call made by my father from Communist party headquarters to the maternity home in north London just after I had been born. The family had always assumed that our letters were sometimes opened and the phone was bugged.

The Mazzini and Rhodes cases might be said to represent the high-water mark of privacy – a concept that had barely existed in the ancient or medieval worlds. Jenkins traces this development through the birth of religious conscience with Martin Luther, to – entertainingly – the popularity of the novel, which was for the first time, in Jenkins’s words, “a uniquely interior cultural form”. Before that, virtually every pastime was to be enjoyed publicly. So it was that by the mid-19th century the art critic John Ruskin could write that the home was “a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the heart”.

Jenkins, a celebrated cultural historian, sees these developments in purely cultural terms. An economic historian might be more inclined to give some credit to the change in notions of power, property and ownership. So, for example, when plates made of Victoria and Albert’s family etchings of each other were stolen from the printer’s where a private publication was being prepared, a rogue publisher was successfully sued not just on the basis of privacy but of copyright.

But by the end of 19th century this idea of total privacy was already being eroded by the “yellow”, or popular, press. In 1890 two lawyers – one of whom, Louis Brandeis, would go on to become associate justice of the supreme court – penned the famous treatise The Right to Privacy, which sought to create a “right to be let alone”. “To occupy the indolent,” wrote the authors, “column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle.”

From then on, this has been contested ground. But in Britain – despite the experience of the abdication – there was a certain restraint regarding the royals. This evaporated shortly after the coronation in 1953 when the queen’s sister’s relationship with a divorced airman seemed to be revealed when she plucked a piece of fluff from his uniform during the ceremony.

The newspapers in the US went mad for the story but the British were very restrained – until 10 days later when the People ran a piece arguing that “it is high time for the British public to be made aware of the fact that scandalous rumours about Princess Margaret are racing around the world”. The rumours were of course untrue, said the paper, but all the same, the palace should “deny it now”’.

The newspaper knew its readership. And understood, too, that their appetite for protecting their own privacy was only surpassed by their appetite for having the privacy of others invaded for their entertainment. By the 1990s, Jenkins relates, this intrusiveness reached its apotheosis in the US with the intrusive and almost ghoulishly sexually detailed Starr report into President Clinton, in which the Lewinsky affair was used to lever a failing investigation into a real estate deal.

Prurience was one prong of the assault on privacy. Feminism was another. The slogan “the personal is political” expressed the idea that when it came to women’s rights, the Victorian approach was essentially a cover for the patriarchy. The “vestal temple” as understood for two centuries was one where wives could be beaten and raped and children abused.

The third prong has been confessionalism – the growing desire among many to share their private lives with others. And the concomitant belief that the others’ private lives should be shared right back. Jenkins begins the book with the haunted figure of Prince Harry demanding privacy while writing the most personal of autobiographies.

And the fourth is just social intrusion. Jenkins’s work is always interesting, always well written and always provocative, but it’s here, in a chapter cleverly titled Saving Private Life, that the book becomes a call to action (or, maybe, to inaction). In it she asserts that “the private realm is now under assault from both indifference… and from a growing suspicion of privacy itself”.

Her particular recent targets are intrusive attempts to clarify the issue of consent in sexual relations – attempts she clearly sees as infantilising young women – and the punishment of police officers for expressing racist and misogynist views in private WhatsApp messages.

From these and other phenomena she deduces that we now need “a clear boundary between the private and public domains. This border must be erected and defended not only online but also in the offline world.”

Why? Because the private realm is where we try things out and develop our true selves. Its disappearance will stymie our creative lives. And she sees this as imminent.

But what I think she has actually shown is that this tension between public and private has been a classic dialectic, subject to constant renegotiation. And until someone forces us to have Elon Musk’s Neuralink chips implanted in our brains, the truth is neither Google nor anyone else knows what we are thinking. Not even our therapists. For example, you have no idea what I am thinking as I write this. No one has. You only know what I wrote.

Order Strangers and Intimates at observershop.co.uk for a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply

Photographs by Dirck Halstead/Getty, Slim Aarons/Getty