This is an insightful and stimulating book based on an extraordinary range of unusual archives and quite a few case studies ranging from the late eighteenth century on. It is full of intriguing implications for the intense current interest in the issue of privacy that affects us all. We become familiar here with a group of quite fascinating stories representative of family secrets. A complicated question throughout is the interplay between privacy and secrecy, not at all the same thing. The stories are told primarily from within the families themselves, although there are also portraits of the institutions involved and the sources of much of the material used.

The book moves forward mostly in a chronological fashion. Except for divorce, the family stories dealt with—scandalous at worst, embarrassing at best—including illegitimacy, retarded children, adoption, homosexuality, and family abuse, have existed in all countries from time immemorial. They are dealt with in historical context; it is mostly a middle-class story here. The working class makes only fleeting appearances, and there are a few aristocrats. The working class presumably left far less of a paper trail, although there was the great institution of the London Foundling Hospital, and abandoned and bastard children, no doubt, in Poor Houses. Think of Oliver Twist. It is a wise choice to limit the account to a selection of intriguing and emblematic stories.

First considered is illegitimacy, through a discussion of a few of the many Eurasian children fathered by the British in India. Their existence was beyond being an open secret on the subcontinent. Their mothers were generally resident companions to their fathers, and in some cases there may well have been some form of marriage ceremony. But the problem arose when the father returned home and wished to bring his children with him, frequently attributing their parentage to someone else for whom he was acting as a guardian. Their mothers were abandoned. Arriving home, the children would become “family secrets,” but the extent to which such a secret could be kept might depend upon the hue of the child and what others might surmise and say, particularly if these children went to school, where their school fellows might speculate on their origins. Cohen concentrates on Margaret Bruce, loved by her father's family. She was ultimately very well off, her portrait done by Henry Raeburn and Sir Francis Grant. One way or another, there were quite a few local middle- and upper-middle-class bastards about, so the Eurasian ones might almost fit into the mix. There were greater problems if funds were short, but comparatively illegitimacy as presented here does not appear to be an excessively crushing family secret. Or perhaps it is because the discussion is focused on the late eighteenth century, which may have been a more indulgent time.

The paradox of the divorce stories—made possible by the act of 1857—was that in order to obtain a divorce, family secrets had to become public. Newspapers—now much more available with the abolition of the “taxes on knowledge”—could provide their readers with the most sensational stories under the guise of sober reports from the Divorce Court. Those wishing to divorce might well collude to provide as little information as possible, but the Queen's Proctor was there to ferret out the facts. The Court dealt with the revelation of family secrets, although it became fairly difficult to keep straight who was running off with whom. Here Harriet Capel is a central figure. She wished to divorce her husband, Viscount Forth, an impecunious and violent aristocrat. Marriage, particularly among the upper classes, could serve as a cover for infidelity, but not when the situation became so bad that divorce was desired. The effective British approach if divorce were to be avoided was somewhat hypocritical and deeply practical. Extramarital liaisons were generally well known to the individual's social circle and in that sense were more than family secrets. But as long as they did not become public knowledge, such affairs could generally continue. In the immortal words of Mrs. Patrick Campbell: “Do what you want, but do not scare the horses.” Making these liaisons public was the price that had to be paid for divorce.

Cohen then moves on to two chapters devoted to children, in many ways the heart-wrenching heart of her book. First discussed is the issue of defective children, who presumably were kept at home until later in the nineteenth century. Through the archives of Normansfield, an institution founded by John Langdon Down, who gave his name to the syndrome, we are told the sad stories of Lucy Gardner and Elizabeth Scott-Sanderson, and the growing tendency to confine defective children to institutions. More and more families would have less and less contact with their discarded offspring. These family secrets were buried deeper and deeper. The so-to-speak reverse situation was adoption. A child is introduced into a household of a couple who cannot have children but desire one. Adoption itself was not regulated by the state until 1926, and the legalization of adoption, as in the case of divorce, came attached to a requirement of the public acknowledgement of a family secret. Before then, adoption came about in comparatively informal ways. This is most vividly presented here through a discussion of the activities of Mrs. Ransome Wallis and her Mission of Hope, where unwed mothers had their children, particularly the story of Vera Rose, who became Marjorie Litchfield. There is the constant question of who should know what. It is hard to say what is best. Should the child know that he or she is adopted, and if so, when should the child be told? Should the child be told who was the birth mother? Should the birth mother be allowed to be in touch? What should be on the birth certificate? Now we have moved toward an approach of much greater openness, but it may be at a price, one probably worth paying.

The chapter on the “bachelor uncle” shows that families generally knew that a relative was gay and coped with the situation with varying degrees of acceptance. There was internal family gossip, as when a grandmother said that her grandson was not the marrying kind. Nowadays our assumption is that “out” is good, but until 1967 homosexuality was illegal in Britain. The prosecution of homosexual offenses was particularly intense in the years after the Second World War. Perhaps because it was not illegal and tended to receive less attention (other than the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness in 1928), lesbianism is not discussed here. The “homosex” story is told through particular individuals such as the sometime Reverend Richard Blake Brown and the sometimes jailed Anatole James.

In the twentieth century, there has been a growing concentration on the family itself, less its particular shameful members than its internal abusive interactions. In a Reith Lecture in 1967, the anthropologist Edmund Leach famously remarked: “Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents” (228). On the same page, Cohen quotes the famously vivid language of Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” As early as the 1930s the Daily Mirror ran its readers' anonymous tales of family abuse. Individuals would come to counseling centers and tell their stories but frequently never return after that first visit. The catharsis of telling seemed to help. There was not an indication that the particular family ceased to be abusive, but at least the family secret was faced to a degree. These secrets were seen as corrosive forces. The rather splendid modern development is that most facts formerly held as secrets—illegitimacy, adoption, and homosexuality—at least in Western society, are no longer, on the whole, cause for shame. But with the new openness goes the problem of privacy. We feel, with reason, that far too much can be discovered about us through computers and the gathering of “big data.” We all talk about the necessity of privacy because nowadays it is so difficult to protect. We are much more open, but we also feel we should be able to control what might be known about us. Secrecy may well have negative connotations; privacy on the whole does not, although some have argued that it can lead to isolation and cause discontent. Through her rich and vivid discussion of these issues from the late eighteenth century on, Deborah Cohen has told a compelling story of family secrets in modern Britain.