Secrets and ties

It is a truth universally acknowledged that secrets are toxic and break up families. Today we look back smugly on the bad old days of the stiff upper lip when skeletons were kept firmly locked in their cupboards. We think we know better. The English, once famous for their secretiveness and reserve, have become addicted to confessional culture. Celebs expose their childhood scars in misery memoirs, and transparency is hailed as the greatest good.

In this timely book, American historian Deborah Cohen challenges our complacency. The history of secrets and their relation to the family turns out to be far more complex and vastly more interesting than might be imagined. In spite of our much-vaunted openness, we hide away our mentally disabled children. Domestic violence is taboo and kept behind closed doors. Nor is secrecy always such a bad thing. As Cohen shows, our grandparents used it as a family strategy to deal with shame and misfortune; and it worked.

When East India Company servants in the late 18th century returned home with vast wealth, they sometimes brought along their illegitimate Eurasian offspring (the Indian mistresses were always left behind). Any sign of Indian blood meant social death in Georgian England, so the children had to be passed off as white. To do this, the nabob needed to make his family in Britain complicit. Parents and unmarried sisters were let into the secret. Mixed race children were anxiously scrutinised for giveaway signs such as ‘black downiness’ on a little girl’s upper lip. Sometimes this strategy was successful — Cohen gives an example of one half-Indian who ended up an heiress and happily married to an Englishman — but if the story got out, it could end in the family being ostracised.