Volume 38, Number 19 · November 21, 1991
Through the Keyhole
By David Cannadine
A History of Private Life Vol. IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
edited by Michelle Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 713 pp., $39.95
'I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.' These frivolous, dispiriting words, spoken by Amanda to her new husband, Victor, early in Noel Coward's Private Lives might also serve as the damning epigraph for the book under review. It is the latest installment in a five-volume series, originally conceived by Georges Duby and the late Philippe Ariès, which was first published in France in the mid-1980s, and is now appearing in translation. The idea was to provide a wide-ranging survey of Western private life from the Roman Empire to the present day.[1] As the editors candidly, if rather theatrically, admitted, their enterprise was 'fraught with peril.' By definition, the inwardness of private life remains largely unknowable, and the further back in time the historian probes, the more this is bound to be so. Until the nineteenth century, the very idea of private life as something separate from the public realm would have been incomprehensible to most European men and women. Undismayed by the vaulting nature of their ambition, and by the unavoidable anachronisms inherent in its realization, Duby and Ariès brought together a team of (mainly French) historians, and charged them to 'put their eyes to keyholes' and to 'spy out what happens in other people's houses, and tell the neighbors about it.'
Review, 5229 words
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