Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, Tiffany Jenkins, Picador, £20

In the summer of 1610, a Gloucester clothier named Humphrey Philpott began to suspect that his neighbour was having an affair. Philpott lived in the same building as a couple named Richard and Jone Anslett, and had noticed that a certain Michael Payne often came calling when Mr Anslett was out. And so, one Friday evening, when Payne turned up again, Philpott decided to investigate. He summoned four neighbours, and they took turns to peep through a hole in the wall, through which they saw the couple in bed, Payne half-naked and ‘embracinge [and] kissinge her in most notorious and scandalous manner’.

This shocking scene was recorded for posterity because Philpott and his friends reported their discovery to the ecclesiastical authorities. And, far from condemning their voyeurism, the Church considered that they had done their duty as good Christians. Anslett and Payne were summoned before the local bawdy courts (so-called because they dealt chiefly with cases of sexual immorality), where the witnesses gave evidence against them. The outcome of their case is unfortunately unrecorded, but the guilty pair were probably made to do public penance or to pay a fine as a punishment for their sin.

As this sordid tale suggests, early 17th-century England was not a society which placed great value on privacy; as one popular proverb put it, many people thought it best to ‘Do nothing privately which you would not do publicly.’ Indeed, privacy is a surprisingly modern notion, the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins argues in this wide-ranging and extremely readable history of an idea. Medieval Europe in particular was, she suggests, a place with no real concept of privacy: politics was intensely personal, work and family life co-existed in most households, and the Church interfered in every aspect of life.

Given that medieval churchmen understood that everything from feats of asceticism to child abuse were best conducted away from the prying eyes of the laity, for fear of scandal, it seems likely that Jenkins overstates the case for medieval openness, although it is undoubtedly true that the religious controversies of the Reformation created a new focus on the public/private divide. Despite Elizabeth I’s pronouncement that she ‘had no desire to make windows into men’s souls’, the authorities continued to probe individual consciences well into the 17th century. But there was a growing sense that, as long as he did not cause trouble, a man’s privately-held opinions were his own business. By 1689, when the Toleration Act enshrined the right to religious freedom in law (though not for Catholics, who were seen as politically untrustworthy), the genie was well and truly out of the bottle.

Consequently, during the course of the 18th century, the idea of privacy began to influence other areas of life. Sex, for example, was increasingly seen as a private matter: the influence of the ecclesiastical courts waned, bridal pregnancy rates soared (reaching 40 per cent in 1800, from a low of five per cent in the 1620s), and the philosopher David Hume argued that fornication and adultery were less problematic than drunkenness. The emergence of a well-defined public sphere, in which men engaged in the serious business of politics, work, and debate while women stayed at home with the children, also helped to firm up the boundaries between public and private.

Privacy culture reached its height in the 19th century when (in the words of John Ruskin) the home was widely regarded as ‘a sacred space, a vestal temple, a temple of the heart’. Any external intrusion into this sanctuary was viewed with repugnance, so that Victorian architects designed houses which gave the inhabitants as much privacy as possible (including from their servants), and the York MP William Thornton claimed that a national census would ‘molest and perplex every single family in the kingdom’. Private property was also sacrosanct, and when the London-based political exile Giuseppe Mazzini realised that his post was being intercepted, his case was taken up in Parliament and widely discussed in the press. Most people were horrified by the possibility that their private correspondence might be opened without their permission, although Benjamin Disraeli quipped that the Home Office ‘may open all my letters, as long as it answers them’.

Such absolute privacy was not unproblematic – not least because it gave men absolute jurisdiction over their households. Nineteenth-century courts often refused to condemn domestic abusers because (in the words of one American judge) ‘the evils of publicity would be greater than the evil involved in the trifles complained of’. Even in harmonious households, many women felt oppressed by the strict divide between the public and private spheres. As the American reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) explained, the average woman was ‘so chased and trodden [by children, servants, tradesmen and callers]… that the very idea of privacy is lost to her mind’. By the time feminism’s second wave arrived in the 1960s, women’s desire to rip down the boundaries between public and private had only intensified, so that consciousness-raising sessions (at which women shared details of their personal lives, including intimate experiences of sex, relationships and abortion) became one of the movement’s favoured forms of political activism.

For critics, such practices were mere self-indulgence, but it was impossible to deny that they were also part of a broader blurring of the once-firm boundary between the public and private spheres. This shift was particularly unsettling for famous people: Princess Margaret became an early victim when, in June 1953, the Sunday tabloid the People reported rumours of her relationship with Peter Townsend, demanding that the Palace must ‘deny it now’ and insisting that the British public had a right to know the truth. Politicians also found themselves in a challenging position, trying to provide the authenticity and openness increasingly demanded by voters (and the media) without revealing information which might call their integrity into question. This balance was not always easy to achieve, as Jimmy Carter discovered when he admitted to Playboy magazine that ‘I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,’ and nearly destroyed his own chances of election as US president.

But by the late 20th century, public figures were not the only ones with a tendency to overshare. From the mid-1970s, ordinary people began volunteering themselves to appear in television programmes such as The Family (1974), and though its stars later regretted their participation (Margaret Wilkins, the mother, ruefully reflected that ‘Things change…when you wash your dirty linen in public’), people’s willingness to open up their lives for public consumption has continued to grow. By the late 1990s, the American student Jennifer Ringley was streaming her entire life to the world via webcam, claiming that it felt ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ to do so. Today, content-sharing sites such as OnlyFans enable anyone to record and share even the most intimate aspects of their lives, so that almost anything is widely available to watch online.

Such extreme self-exposure has become feasible thanks to the development of new technologies, and these inventions have vastly complicated our relationship with privacy – as well as creating significant fears about their potential misuse. As early as the 1890s, the invention of the Kodak camera provoked panic because, as photography moved out of the studio and into the street, unsuspecting individuals found that their images were being used without their consent to advertise everything from ashtrays to soap. In the 1960s, many Americans opposed Lyndon B. Johnson’s plan to create a National Data Center, combining information from 20 government agencies, because they felt uncomfortable about being defined by data that they could neither access nor control.

More recently, with the growth of the internet, privacy debates have come to focus on digital security, surveillance capitalism and the wisdom of sharing our personal information online quite so freely as most of us do. Our privacy is also threatened, Jenkins suggests, by the enthusiasm with which governments and police forces pry into our private conversations. In recent years, several Britons have been convicted of sending ‘grossly offensive’ WhatsApp messages, and in 2021 Scotland became the only country in the West in which the state has the power to police speech in private homes.

And so, while Strangers and Intimates is primarily a historical study, it is also a thought-provoking contribution to a very modern debate. In the book’s final chapter, Jenkins makes a stirring case for the importance of privacy, both for the individual (because we all need a space in which to be truly ourselves) and for the good of the public sphere, which has become dominated ‘by personality, emotion and private affairs’. Even though – as history has repeatedly shown – privacy is not always a force for good, it is hard to disagree with her argument that it is worth defending. Otherwise we may, once again, find ourselves living in a world where the neighbours feel entitled to (quite literally) peer into our private lives.