I Hope I Don’t Intrude

The earliest and simplest legal definition of privacy came from the nineteenth-century American jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, who stated in 1890 that it was ‘the right to be let alone’. The need for such legal protection was pressing in the increasingly densely populated urban spaces of Victorian Britain, as was demonstrated by the enormous success of the farce, Paul Pry, by the veteran comic playwright, John Poole, first staged in 1825 and successfully revived throughout the nineteenth century across the English-speaking world. The play centred on the character of a ‘meddling, curious, impertinent’ busybody, who interfered in the lives of others in an initially wearisome but finally (inadvertently) heroic manner. David Vincent has chosen to use the play and its titular character to explore the growing cultural obsession with privacy among the urban middle classes beset by new intrusions such as the postal service, telegraphs and the fashion for ‘visiting’, and by old ones such as eavesdropping servants, curious neighbours and snooping authorities. He highlights how James Graham, the Home Secretary, was widely lampooned as a ‘Paul Pry’ in the 1844 postal espionage crisis, when it was revealed that government agents had routinely been opening the mail of those suspected of sedition, in particular that of the Italian Republican Giuseppe Mazzini. Vincent uses this event to develop the concept of ‘virtual privacy’, whereby families and friends should have been able to maintain inviolable communications by use of the new Penny Post, but which was exposed, in the Mazzini affair, as liable to penetration by the state

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