David Vincent - I Hope I Dont Intrude: Privacy and its Dilemmas in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This book began life at Keele University. The interdisciplinary MA in Victorian Studies that I taught for many years has been the foundation of such capacity as I possess to work across so many forms of expression and creativity in the nineteenth century. My initial debt is to the students and staff on that course, and in particular to my late colleague Charles Swann, who was the first reader of an early outing of this enterprise, and supplied me with an invaluable range of references. The book was completed at the Open University, with its remarkable combination of expansive reach, high scholarship, and technical resources. I am grateful to its History Department for providing me with the necessary time and funding to finish the project.

Paul Pry has led me into new and unfamiliar fields, and I have been dependent on the advice and support of many colleagues. In particular Louis James, Jim Davis, and Brian Maidment have been exemplary in their combination of generosity of spirit and depth of scholarship. Bob Patten, master of Cruikshank and Dickens, was hugely supportive through the final trek to publication. Deborah Cohen, whose own book on privacy appeared towards the end of my work, showed just what could be achieved in this field through a combination of imaginative research and bold analysis, and was an insightful reader of this enterprise. Patrick Joyce and James Vernon set aside time in their own programme of writing to make constructive readings of the complete text. Assistance and advice on specific issues was supplied by Kirstie Ball, Sara Igo, Judith Mellby, John Naughton, John Plunkett, Michael Read, Clare Rose, Graham Vincent, and Susan Whyman. I thank Graham Tattersall for ambulatory discussions of the ideas in this book, and for advice on the technology of communication. Evie Ekins and Jo Reilly tracked down and photographed a present-day survival of Paul Pry. Gordon Shepherd helped me with the pursuit of Pry through the newspapers of late-Georgian and Victorian Britain.

This acknowledgement is being written on the day that the Guardian and the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting of the Edward Snowden revelations. I Hope I Dont Intrude was conceived and researched well before the current explosion of media interest in privacy and surveillance, but I must thank Snowden and the journalists with whom he has worked for drawing attention to the complex interactions between governments, communications systems, and the democratic process and also for demonstrating the need for an historical perspective on the specific concepts and processes. In this context, Simon Szreter and the staff of the History and Policy site provided me with an opportunity to explore some of the connections between the past and the present.

A book about print, performance, and a largely unmechanized consumer culture could not have been written without the digital revolution which has permitted new forms of access to nineteenth-century archives. I am particularly fortunate in the facilities I have enjoyed at the Open University Library with its wide-ranging and professionally organized databases. More traditional assistance has been supplied by the staff of the Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archive, the Bodleian Library, and the Rare Books Rooms of the Cambridge University Library and the British Library. Abby Yochelson and Kevin LaVine of the Library of Congress in Washington helped me with bibliographic inquiries into the American literature. I have greatly appreciated the interest and support of Robert Faber and Cathryn Steele at OUP. Charlotte Vincent was as always my ideal reader and my most encouraging listener. I can only hope that Paul Prys many intrusions into our lives can be forgiven, as he would have hoped. We both take absolute private pleasure in the dedication of the book.

Shrawardine, April 2014