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Keeping Oneself to Oneself: Finding Privacy in 19th-century England
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- Author / Creator
- Molin Cherneski, Kristina S
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This thesis examines the history of privacy in nineteenth-century England, primarily London, centered on the lived experience of people who appear to have had little access to private space and time. By studying lodging-houses from the divergent perspectives of lodgers, their middle-class observers and the landladies who ran them, domestic servants who lived in other people’s homes, and middle-class reformers in settlement houses in East London, this study captures both men and women who lived with others by choice and by necessity. Their experiences and reflections reveal the ways that privacy was negotiated and balanced against economic concerns and social lives while bounded by gender and class. For nineteenth-century people, privacy was interwoven with the demands of respectability and domesticity, and the desire to assert independence and autonomy.
Rather than placing privacy solely within the realm of the private home exclusively, in a dichotomy between public and private, privacy could be found in the practices and routines of everyday life and in the ways people lived together and treated each other. While privacy as we might consider it could be limited for those that lived in common with others, it could also be found in places that appeared to be fundamentally public, claimed in unexpected ways and locations. It could also be rejected in favour of sociability and community, as a strategy for survival and a bulwark against isolation.
Privacy was not a well-defined right or legal structure in nineteenth-century England, but it was valued and could be asserted through daily decisions. It did not look the same for people of different classes; the middle class often failed to recognize the practices of privacy of the working class and did not recognize the reasons that they might have different strategies. By examining what people chose to share with those around them, or what they kept to themselves and the places and ways they spent their time, the study of privacy demonstrates the ways that people thought about and navigated their economic, social and cultural worlds. -
- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.