In a history of Britain from the perspective of families and their hidden stories, Deborah Cohen looks at changing notions of shame since Victorian times
WHEN A COUPLE called the Litchfi elds wrote to a Croydon mother-and-baby home in 1919, they knew exactly what they wanted. Married ten years, they had been unable to have children of their own. T ey wanted, therefore, a real daughter; a member of the family who would be their heir. No matter that the girl’s parents “were not what they should be” – they believed that an “illegitimate child would do”. At a time when illegitimacy was
widely construed as evidence of “bad blood” and a symbol of degeneracy, tens of thousands of British families such the Litchfi elds privately adopted. T ey did it on the faith that the illegitimacy would remain a family secret. T ey told lies and misled their neighbours; they forged birth certifi cates and deceived their adopted children. Rejecting age-old stigmas and the
subscribers with the lure of secrets to be ferreted out: ‘Who will you discover?’ is the bait. To restore to the family tree the suicide or the homosexual pruned out by a judgmental ancestor is to know oneself better. And yet, for all of the
attention that has been devoted to unmasking the
rising tide of eugenics, adoptive parents believed that illegitimacy didn’t matter so long as no one knew about it. That families repress their
members – and that secrets damage people’s lives – is by now a commonplace belief. A slew of memoirs, such as John Lanchester’s Family Romance and Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, have anatomised the destructive consequences of supposedly shameful facts fruitlessly hidden away. T e website Ancestry.co.uk tempts prospective
family secrets of the past, we understand very little about the functions they once served. Family secrets were a strategy of defence and protection, a means of guarding a black sheep as well as the family’s reputation. When the various sorts of shame that could be visited upon families – an illegitimate birth, a son with a propensity for “unnatural acts”, adultery, bankruptcy, a mentally disabled child – were considered catastrophic, subject both to legal disability and to social scorn if they were known, secrets were the