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Deborah Cohen is an American historian who specialises in modern British history. In this fascinating book, that is accessible to the general reader as well as those working with families or couples, she examines how living with shame has changed from Victorian times to the present day and how dread secrets in one era hardly raise eyebrows in another.
The book combines assiduous research, a wealth of supporting references, and a capacity to engage our interest in the human tragedies and triumphs that emerge. It is enriched with a nostalgic selection of grainy black and white photos, and engages a rather prurient interest with chapter titles like “The nabob's secrets”, “Revelation in the divorce courts”, “Children who disappeared”, “Other people's bastards”, and “Bachelor uncles”. We are reminded in each of these chapters of the shame and guilt surrounding illegitimacy, divorce, mental handicap, adoption, and homosexuality in different eras, and how attitudes have changed. Surprisingly, the author does not include mental illness in her list of family secrets, although shame about this aberrant behaviour must have equalled all the others; nor is there any reference to abuse.
The trajectory of change is mostly familiar, that is, to a more liberal view, but there are surprises, as for example, in tracing how Victorian attitudes to mental handicap were a great deal more enlightened and accepting than those of the Edwardians. Cohen makes use of the remarkable archives of Normansfield, an institution run by John Langdon Down (who gave his name to Down's syndrome). Down and his wife ran a compassionate, caring establishment where children were temporarily sent in the hope that their condition could be improved. The Edwardians, by contrast thought that “the feeble minded” were incurable and needed to be segregated, as they represented a threat to the healthy population. This attitude led to the shameful neglect that Maureen Oswin highlighted in her books The Empty Hours and Ch