Prince Albert's Private Etchings
In the Victorian age private life was a privileged site of sacred meaning
This is the second post in a four-part long read on the rise and fall of private life told through royal privacy scandals. Read the first post, Harry and Meghan’s Privacy Paradox, here.
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Queen Victoria and Prince Albert devoted their leisurely moments to the art of etching. With unwavering dedication, they captured the likenesses of each other, their cherished offspring, their faithful hounds, and the picturesque landscapes enveloping Windsor and Claremont House. These etchings were fashioned primarily for their personal amusement, and to safeguard their privacy, they maintained a private press. However, they wished to present a limited number of bound volumes to their dear friends and kin. Thus, as the year of 1848 drew to its conclusion, a selection of the plates was entrusted to the care of Mr. John Brown, of Castle-Street in Windsor, for printing.
Ever mindful of the significance and sensitivity of his work, Brown took precautions to ensure that none but those within the royal sphere might catch a glimpse. The plates were guarded, locked away from prying eyes, and the amount of paper in the workshop was strictly regulated. Alas, despite such efforts, an apprentice by the name of Middleton, surreptitiously purloined over sixty etchings and promptly sold them to one Jasper Tomsett Judge, a specialist in royal reportage.
Judge harboured the audacious ambition of holding a public exhibition in London of the illicitly obtained etchings. He searched out a venue of good repute, and approached William Strange, a publisher situated at 21 Paternoster Row, with 63 etchings, and commissioned a descriptive catalogue. Strange, when not entangled within the intricacies of bankruptcy court or engaged in a multitude of legal battles, published political satire, cheap periodicals and penny-part serials. He leapt at the opportunity. In no time, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Royal Victoria and Albert Gallery of Etchings rolled off the presses, each copy priced at a modest sixpence.
Judge forwarded a copy of this catalogue to the royal household, along with a detailed account of his plans apparently, and somewhat optimistically, seeking their permission. Advertisements extolling the exhibition's merits adorned the venerable columns of The Times, boldly proclaiming the inclusion of portraits of the young Princess Royal, executed with maternal devotion by none other than Her Majesty the Queen herself.
Alas, before the renowned journal of record could even bask in the warmth of this sensational revelation, news of the royal reaction reached its hallowed halls. Horrified at the invasion of their privacy, Albert and Victoria immediately sought legal advice, and issued a writ for an injunction to have the exhibition banned and the etchings returned. Because the Queen cannot sue in her own courts, the claim was brought in her husband’s name.
In front of the packed Court of Chancery, Knight Bruce VC issued an injunction to ‘restrain’ Strange and, ‘his agents, servants, and workmen,’ from exhibiting the etchings, making copies, or publishing any description of them. The ruling also demanded that Judge surrender them. After Strange appealed, the Lord Chancellor, Charles Christopher Pepys, 1st Earl of Cottenham, confirmed the ruling.
Prince Albert v. Strange relied on two legal doctrines. One, the authors ‘right and property’ in the etchings. Her Majesty's Attorney-General argued that the concept of private property was expansive enough to include the act of mental creation, and therefore the etchings could not be reproduced, or summarised in the descriptive catalogue:
The Vice Chancellor Sir James Lewis Knight-Bruce concurred.
The second doctrine was a breach of confidence. On appeal, Strange argued that he had not known that the impressions had been improperly obtained and therefore he was still entitled to publish the Catalogue. Cottenham refused his appeal, summarising that the prints could only have come into the publishers possession through ‘surreptitious means’.
More broadly, the case was discussed in the court—and the courts of public opinion—as a vital defence of the private sphere. When delivering his judgement, Knight Bruce VC lamented that the printmaker’s actions had been:
‘'an intrusion not alone in breach of conventional rules, but offensive to that inbred sense of propriety natural to every man - if, intrusion indeed, fitly describes a sordid spying into the privacy of domestic life - into the home (a word hitherto scared among us)'.
The press reports, and an expanding middle class, were also very much on the side of the royals—and the necessity of defending the border of the private sphere. The Lady’s Newspaper & Pictorial Times breathed a sigh of relief that the courts had exerted a right the royals:
‘incontestably ha[d], of preventing . . an intrusion upon their private life’. Adding that ‘every member of society’ should be able to adopt such ‘proper means’ to ‘stop the evil’ of ‘impudent or injurious inquisitiveness’.
In The Home Life in Light of its Divine Idea (1866), the congregational minister, James Baldwin Brown, summed up the place of the home in Victorian society: ‘God made the first man after a divine original, and after a divine original too, he made the first home.’ For the critic John Ruskin, in the age of industrialisation, home was:
‘a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the heart watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love.’
Privacy was a powerful value in Victorian society and the private sphere held to be sacred. Not just for the royals, ‘but for every member of society’ as the Lady’s journal put it. Privacy was cherished not merely as an individual's concern but as a collective obsession. The scandalous escapades of the royal etchings was but one thread in the tapestry of a nation embroiled in the ceaseless battle for the preservation of privacy.
Just a few years before, in 1844, another major privacy scandal had erupted after the Secretary of State for the Home Office, Sir James Graham, an upright baronet in Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government, engaged in a most intrusive act. At the request of the Austrian ambassador, Baron Philipp von Neumann, Graham had intercepted nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini’s mail and that of other nationalists in his London circle, to anticipate any plot, lest it sow the seeds of discord and unrest.
The breach of privacy, so wantonly committed by a man of such high stature, sent waves of consternation throughout the land. The very foundation of trust was shaken, as citizens grappled with the notion that even their most intimate communications were not sacrosanct in a time when the postal service had only recently been democratised by the Penny Post. Thomas Carlyle gave a rousing defence of his friend, Mazzini, and clarified the issues at stake in the ‘disgraceful affair’, in The Times:
‘… it is a question vital to us that sealed letters in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected as things sacred; that opening of men’s letters, a practice near of kin to picking men’s pockets, and to others still viler and far fataler forms of scoundrelism, be not resorted to in England, except in cases of the very last extremity.’
The home was sacred. Private letters were sacred.
The Mazzini letter opening affair was a national scandal that spread from the pages of British newspapers to those in Australia and the United States, where at the end of the century, two Bostonian lawyers, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, wrote the most famous article in the history of privacy: the twenty-eight page ‘The Right to Privacy’, published in the Harvard Law Review (1890).
Warren and Brandeis rallied against the invasions of ‘the sacred precincts of private and domestic life’ which came with the intrusive, gossipy press and the invention of the Kodak camera. They argued that privacy and a private sphere was a necessity for the modern person and that citizens should have new legal recourse against those who publish private facts about private figures: they sought ‘a right to be let alone’. One one of the central cases that Warren and Brandeis cite in their argument for that right was Prince Albert v. Strange .
But as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century, the Victorian defence and idealisation of the private sphere would not last. As we will see in the next post, ‘Princess Margaret's not so private affair’, a century after Prince Albert v. Strange another royal privacy scandal erupted, revealing a remarkable shift in privacies fortunes as it fell out of favour.