When vice was policed by church & fornication was everyone's business
Several people claimed to have witnessed the scene, which seems unlikely unless the masonry was as holey as Swiss cheese. But it certainly reveals the climate of state-sanctioned snooping that prevailed during an era when 'privacy', if mentioned at all, was considered a sinister cover for wickedness.
In her fascinating new social history, Dr Tiffany Jenkins peers through the keyhole of the past to examine the Western world's changing attitudes towards public and private life. By the early 18th century, we learn, a clear distinction between the social and personal had evolved with the (male-dominated) business of politics, commerce, and ideas conducted in Parliament, marketplaces and coffee houses.
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Meanwhile, for the wealthy at least, the domestic realm became more clearly delineated with curtains, partitioned rooms and distinct bedchambers. Grand houses even had separate service corridors to spare the gentry from encountering last night's reeking chamber pots as they were whisked away by servants (whose own sole source of privacy would have been a lockable wooden box).
As the centuries progressed, the sanctity of the private sphere became a battleground and Jenkins offers an entertaining account of controversies that have raged over people's right to defend their homes, their mail or their conversations against prying eyes and ears. During the 1840s, the interception of private letters sent to Italian political exile Giuseppe Mazzini provoked outrage, with Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle likening the practice to 'picking men's pockets'.
Half-a-century later, the newly minted snapshot camera was marketed as offering the 'thrill' of taking someone's picture 'without their knowledge' and women who'd unwittingly been photographed in the street by so-called Kodak fiends were aghast to find their faces appearing in adverts for soap or tobacco. When Broadway star Marion Manola was surreptitiously snapped onstage with her legs clad in nothing but tights, she went to court to prevent the images being ogled by 'every fellow who could afford' them prompting accusations that, having happily displayed her pins on a public stage, she hadn't a be-stockinged leg to stand on.
The hypocrisy charge remains a popular paparazzi defence against high-profile complainants. Take Prince Harry, who won substantial damages for press intrusion only to be dubbed 'the biggest invader of privacy in royal history' over the explosive revelations in his memoir, Spare.
Another tabloid trope is that 'the public interest' trumps privacy and a notorious 1960s scandal offers a case in point. When news broke that the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, was having an affair with model Christine Keeler, acres of prurient coverage were justified on the grounds that her involvement with a Soviet naval attache threatened national security. Not everyone agreed and the event helped trigger the tabling of a parliamentary privacy bill calling for 'the right to be left alone'.
Monica Lewinsky was accorded no such privilege over her affair with Bill Clinton. Her humiliating interrogation before the Starr committee, with the world's press salivating over every salacious detail, was legitimised as exposing the deceitfulness of a man unfit for presidential office but for the young White House intern, it felt like a violation.
Today, as people splurge ever more intimate details of their lives over reality TV and 'lifestream' blogs, the plea to be left alone may seem anachronistic. ('If Prince Harry really wants his privacy, he must shut up!' suggested TalkTV's royal correspondent Rupert Bell.) But Jenkins warns this ignores the complexities involved, arguing that the hard-won distinction between our public and private lives needs to be defended as - for all the righteous talk about transparency - the ability to live at least part of our lives free from observation is precious.
The private sphere, she writes, is where we 'take off our public masks' and 'can make mistakes with those we trust' - though this sanctuary is under threat at a time when people's unguarded remarks are triumphantly laid bare. Indeed, Jenkins raises the spectre of a quasi-Stalinist ethos in which 'divulging private conversations is incentivised, rather than stigmatised as reprehensible snitching', especially north of the Border where, she writes, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act makes ours 'the only country in the Western world where the state has the power to police speech in the privacy of the home'.
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You might argue that racist, sexist or homophobic remarks are an obvious evil deserving of exposure but Jenkins asks us to think carefully about the implications of a regime in which private speech (including WhatsApp messaging) is controlled, pointing out that 'a society in which we must filter everything we say through a kind of internalised show trial … inevitably encourages conformity and uniformity'.
There are conflicting concerns, not least over freedom of information and Jenkins doesn't pretend an unregulated private realm is an unmitigated good, noting that in the 1970s, some radical feminists opposed privacy rights on the grounds they served male supremacy. They had a point, too: bringing rape and domestic abuse out of the shadows and into the courts was among the triumphs of the women's movement. But she lists their well-intentioned insistence that 'the personal is political' among the factors that eroded societal respect for people's privacy, leading to a burgeoning surveillance culture that reached new heights during the pandemic lockdowns.
Agree or not, this is a debate we urgently need to be having. Hugely ambitious in its scope, Strangers and Intimates offers an accessible history of philosophical, ecclesiastical and judicial thought across more than four centuries. It also ventures into highly sensitive contemporary territory and raises questions that may challenge those who think outlawing free speech is progressive. They should definitely read this book.
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