Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. By Deborah Cohen (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. xi plus 372 pp.)

Abstract

Not many people find anything of interest in Croydon, a proverbially dull swathe of suburbia to the south of London. However, Deborah Cohen has, and uses some fascinating material from the Croydon local studies archive for at least one of her chapters on adoption in this wide-ranging study of secrecy and privacy in the British family over the last two centuries. The book sets out to show “what families attempted to hide in the past and why” (1), aiming to illustrate the part that families played “in the transformation of social mores” (2) over this period. This is a fairly daunting task to set yourself, and although the book is original and many of the stories in it are powerful, heartbreaking and very well told, it does not always work in the manner intended. It could be said that there are two main approaches to the history of the modern self and its secrets: the first suggests that the decline of communal ties and the emergence of privacy, together with the rise of the idea of universal rights, has expanded the sphere of the personal, thereby licensing a kind of obsession with identity, selfhood and confession. In that reading, we have become more and more open—more free according to many writers—and more willing to disclose the most intimate details of our lives, while both secrecy and privacy have declined to the point of nothingness in the age of mass communication and, latterly, digital technology. The other, more critical version of this story derives from Foucault, who argued that the modern world has seen the development of countless mechanisms for extracting the “truth of the self.” Confessing secrets, in that interpretation, indicates the scene of discipline and surveillance, denoting (and concealing) the ever-more intense process of “individualisation and totalisation.”