IN 1978 I launched a tactical raid of sorts in my parents’ walk-in wardrobe. This was out of character for me – until this moment the idea that they had secrets I wished to plumb or, as I might later describe it, a private life, was not just a matter of total indifference, it was inconceivable. I was surreptitiously trying on my father’s leather jacket while he was at work and noticed that the louvred cabinet standing between the open racks of rayon sundresses and wide-lapelled suits was secured by a small brass padlock. As it happened, the cabinet proved laughably insecure; the tiny key was in a glass pin dish poking out from beneath the shoe stand. On opening the lock, I found precisely what a fourteen-year-old would wish most to find behind a moderately defended door.

Perhaps a day or two after this my father confronted me, removed at least a dozen magazines wedged under my mattress and made it clear that I was to leave the cabinet alone. In time, the force of this prohibition waned and I went searching for the key – again with the pin dish? Surprisingly, the proper, hot-cheeked shame I felt at that first confrontation had really settled into a groove of synthetic contrition by the fourth, much less the ninth. The routine circuit traced from his cabinet to my mattress and back again revealed, among other things, just how useless our home was at keeping stuff cloistered. Also – and this much was clear to me even then – as the cat was well and truly out of the bag, my dad was asking me to supply and honour his completely abstract right to privacy in the wake of the cabinet’s patent failure: I had to become the better, more secure padlock. (I declined.)

I suppose the increasingly farcical aspect of all this became too much for him to ignore, and one day I found the cabinet unlocked and emptied. This was gloomy news for all sorts of reasons. Some years later I found everything – everything! – stacked on the shelving that ran along the brick wall of the study, sharing unregarded space with old reference works, dog-eared technical manuals and boxed tax returns. I suspect he moved his collection as a weary concession to the inevitabilities of exposure, but the fact that they remained obscure for so long suggests something odd about shelves and their admittedly unstable capacity to variously attract, repel and even deform attention.

If you are a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, you will have spotted an obvious precedent here. In ‘The Purloined Letter’, an explosively scandalous document known to be hidden in a blackmailer’s apartment cannot be found despite the most rigorous examinations. The police probe bookbindings with needles, minutely disassemble furniture and place floorboards under powerful microscopes, but to no avail. Finally, a gifted amateur detective arrives on the scene and instantly finds the letter, grimy and half-torn, sitting in a cheaply made card rack that hangs in full view. The blackmailer has – almost – succeeded in making something undetectable by placing it among the scarcely registered objects of everyday life.

UNDER LESS EXTREME circumstances, shelves provide functional storage. But as we learnt from the setting of all those Covid lockdown interviews – the expert in front of their books, photographs and tchotchkes – shelves express personality, achievement and erudition. As those same interviews demonstrated, sometimes our best curatorial efforts might miss something too revealing about what we really read and truly value. For the Victorians, who were obsessed with privacy and established many of the norms around middle-class dwelling that continue to influence aspects of contemporary domesticity, shelves posed a particular problem precisely because you could never be sure who was looking at them and what kind of conclusions they might reasonably draw.

The great British architect of middle-class respectability, Robert Kerr, designed homes where privacy was the paramount and exalted objective, achieved through a complex network of ever more enclosable spaces designed to protect property and personal information from the apparently insatiable curiosity of servants. Not surprisingly, the threat posed by literate staff proved a durably anxious theme in household manuals written for servants. Recognising the rich field of information in which they laboured, authors urged their readers to either ignore everything they observed or, just as heroically, absorb it all – from the trivial to the most damning – as if in sacred trust.

A constraining hand was likewise laid on home visitors and family members who might yield to temptation. In 1855, Robert De Valcourt published The Illustrated Manners Book, which advised that the ‘trunks, boxes, packets, papers and letters of every individual, locked or unlocked, sealed or unsealed, are sacred’. Be careful where you go, he warns, ‘what you read, and what you handle’. Where privacy can’t be built into doors, walls or rooms, it must reside instead in a person’s capacity to stoically rein in their wandering, curiosity-led eyes in the face of all this tempting and telling stuff.

It’s easy to assume that this advice was designed to protect the resident from the ghastly exposures encountered in fiction or, worse, court transcripts – damning proof of malfeasance, infidelity, murder. Valcourt’s stakes are so much lower than that – glanced-at books, documents and pamphlets – but the sense of danger persists.

Early in his career, Charles Dickens notably underestimated the reputational risk of library-shelf browsing when he invited the critic George Henry Lewes home for tea. Over steaming cups, Lewes eyed naff triple-decker novels and bland travel books, ‘all obviously the presentation copies from authors and publishers’. He recalled the experience in a waspish elegy published shortly after Dickens’ death: ‘A man’s library expresses much of his hidden life, I did not expect to find a bookworm, nor even a student, in the marvellous “Boz” but nevertheless this collection of books was a shock.’

Dickens’ exposure is mortifying. Lewes rightly understands that shelves may speak more as private disclosures than public avowals and, in this case, they testified against the grain of their intention, expressing neither taste, collegial esteem nor cosmopolitan curiosity. Dickens was, in sum, judged a clueless arriviste.

Two years later, Lewes was back to find that Dickens had been fine-tuning the shelves. Even so, they had not ‘improved’: ‘The well-known paperboards of the three-volume novel no longer vulgarised the place; a goodly array of standard works, well-bound, showed a more respectable and conventional ambition; but there was no physiognomy in the collection.’

Where they had once revealed too much, now the shelves spoke to an under-specified everyman of middlebrow tastes, more of a demographic than an artist. Lewes’ judgement that the shelves were depersonalised would, of course, also be the desired outcome sought by their defensive depersonalisation – Dickens may well have left fewer traces for Lewes to gnaw on. You can see a kind of jokey version of this same strategy in the dummy-spined props that lined the sliding door to Dickens’ private study at Gad’s Hill: these included Five Minutes in China (in three volumes), Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep (in thirty-one volumes), History of a Short Chancery Suit (in twenty-one volumes) and Cats’ Lives (in nine). Doubly defended by their satirically anaesthetising titles and their literal unreadability, Dickens’s hyperbolic mock shelves are equal parts comic and utopian, simultaneously inviting and comprehensively thwarting Lewes-ian browsing.

A LATER, SADDER but no less instructive version of Dickens’ prank books is found in Colette’s Sido (1929). Sido is a lightly fictionalised memoir or a very autobiographical novel – take your pick. Either way, one section is devoted to the description of Colette’s father’s library, particularly the high shelf lined with his memoirs, each volume of which he had meticulously hand-bound in black board covered in richly marbled paper. She recalls the discouraging titles, a desiccating mix of politics, engineering and military recollection:

My Campaigns, The Lessons of ’70, The Geodesy of Geodesies, Elegant Algebra, Marshall Mahon seen by a Fellow-Soldier, From Village to Parliament, Zouave Songs (in verse)… I forget the rest.

Following his death, the library was packed up and a startling discovery was made:

The dozen volumes bound in boards revealed to us their secret, a secret so long disdained by us, accessible though it was. Two hundred, three hundred, one hundred and fifty pages to a volume; beautiful cream-laid paper, or thick ‘foolscap’ carefully trimmed, hundreds and hundreds of blank pages.

For Colette, her father’s blank volumes give form to shameful failure: they are ‘imaginary works, the mirage of a writer’s career’. It is true that as conventional memoirs go, they leave much to be desired, but their meticulous crafting cleaves to the library’s formal demand for productivity, although here adapted to eccentric ends. Each volume blankly testifies to a period of private inactivity free from familial or social obligation and surveillance, time in which to admire the symmetrical pages and mordantly conceive the next boring title. Once his secret was posthumously revealed, the pages found varied uses: Colette’s brother wrote prescriptions on them, her mother covered pots of jam, while the children had them for scrap; none of these activities seemed to exhaust the supply. Colette finds her mother seized with a ‘sort of fever of destruction’, converting the remaining pages into drawer-liners and cutlet-frills not, as she explained, out of mockery, ‘but out of piercing regret and painful desire to blot out this proof of incapacity’. Whether Mme Colette was motivated by shame or ridicule, setting those blank pages to work suggests something reparative, as if their sudden practicality was levied against this withdrawal from domestic life claimed under false literary pretenses – a reminder that privacy may not be a guaranteed feature of the house per se but an exemption from its habitual practices.

Colette’s father’s made-up journals were beside the point, and I mean that both rhetorically – they weren’t his real object – and spatially, in the sense that the attention of those peering up at the high shelf is firmly pushed towards some other object. Such organising of things beside the point opened new possibilities for shelf privacy. One detailed example of this can be found in the work of Dickens’ collaborator and close friend, Wilkie Collins.

Unjustly overshadowed by Collins’ The Moonstone and The Woman in White, The Law and the Lady (1875) features one of the first female detectives in genre fiction. Valeria Brinton, the Lady of the title, probes the mystery of her husband’s true identity. During her investigation, she visits Major Fitz-David, her husband’s old friend and a keen collector of netsuke, books, vases and, it would seem, liaisons. The Major is unwilling to meet with Valeria until he learns that she is ‘a fine woman’. A protracted negotiation begins: he wishes to charm her while, for her part, she wants to extract the secret that is poisoning her marriage. In the face of Valeria’s arguments, Fitz-David partly relents. He concedes that he knows the secret information she seeks but, having sworn an oath to her husband to never divulge it, he feels bound to disappoint her. Although he refuses to say anything, his speech, which is exaggeratedly hospitable, leaves an opening for her to exploit. Valeria asks the Major to suppose for a moment that the house was hers:

‘Consider it yours,’ cried the gallant old gentleman. ‘From garrets to the kitchen, consider it yours!’
‘A thousand thanks, Major, I will consider it mine, for the moment. You know – everybody knows – that one of a woman’s many weaknesses is curiosity. Suppose my curiosity led me to examine everything in my new house?’
Yes?’
‘Suppose I went from room to room and search everything and peeped in everywhere?’… ‘Would there be any chance,’ I went on, ‘of my finding my own way to my husband’s secret, in this house?’

Not only does the Major concede that the clue ‘might be seen and touched’ in the house but reveals that it is in the very room where they now speak. He agrees that Valeria will be left alone to search and will receive the keys to open locked cabinets.

What follows is a prolonged and intimate excavation of the Major’s shelves and drawers. His financial dealings are uncovered, boyhood toys sifted, gifts from female admirers catalogued. And yet, as each private and, from a Victorian perspective, outrageous thing is brought to the surface, it is barely acknowledged and then indifferently returned to box and shelf:

Next a box full of delicately tinted quill pens (evidently a lady’s gift) – next, a quantity of old invitation cards – next, some dog-eared French plays and books of the opera – next, a pocket-corkscrew, a bundle of cigarettes… ‘Nothing anywhere to interest me.’

The object of Valeria’s juridical quest drives her to ignore the erotic secrets of the netsuke and the notionally shameful content of the Major’s correspondence and leather-bound volumes. The kind of social questions typically posed in light of this kind of rummaged material – what kind of sybarite or degenerate or faded roué is this? – are voided and, again, entirely beside the point. Dickens’ depersonalised and comically deflected mock shelves, and Colette and Collins’ variations on hiding-in-plain-sight, make a virtue of the domestic shelf as a secret keeper: a place to hold the police, or policing, at bay.

BUT HOW WOULD similarly interrogated shelves fare in the real world? Not well, as it happens. As some of those lockdown-interview bookcases demonstrated, in addition to the seven copies of the monograph on which your claim to expertise rests sat the least admissible thing, there for the finding. You may have overlooked it, or underestimated it, or hidden it so deep that it could never come to light.

I am thinking specifically about an anecdote shared at a conference dinner several years ago. A colleague from an American university described his recent purchase of a deceased estate and the melancholy task of boxing up the remnant contents, including shelves lined with unremarkable paperbacks. While clearing one of these shelves he found another row of novels behind: a set of Dickens, or rather gay, sexually explicit adaptations of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and so on. That the deceased owner was able to claim this vacant space reveals an opportunistic understanding of the informal laws governing the way a shelf’s contents may be legitimately seen and handled. The secrecy of that collection rested on the assumption that no casual browser would feel entitled to remove the entire front row of books.

Frustratingly, my colleague was unable to recall any of the ‘pornified’ Dickens titles, although the possibilities are readily summoned and oddly instructive. Behind the Dickens, he found a small box containing nude photographs (perhaps of the previous owner?) and several manuscripts marked ‘Chapter one’. Cumulatively, these pages played out minor variations on the same story: an encounter between a straight middle-aged man and a young stranger he meets at an isolated petrol station. They converse and then engage in rough sex culminating in the older man’s climax and, it would seem, the exhaustion of whatever narrative energies were required to reach the beachhead of chapter two.

Understandably, my colleague was unnerved by his discovery: the subject of the photographs seemed uneasy and, as a writer himself, he sympathised with what was clearly an insuperable block. What to do, then, with these things as his legal property but emphatically not his to claim?

The uncovered novels, photographs and manuscripts were boxed and stored separately from items to be offered at a garage sale. Nonetheless, on the appointed day, a man approached the new owner carrying a box – the box. When my colleague explained that these items were not part of the sale, the man introduced himself as a researcher from a nearby university. This box, he argued, formed an important archive, a historic insight into what he assumed must have been a precariously closeted life in a middle-class suburb. Among the assurances he offered was that the contents would be treated with all due care and respect. Unmoved, not only did my colleague decline to donate the materials, he took the irrevocable step of burning them.

Inevitably, and appropriately, there must be question marks hovering over this story; details – unknowingly or otherwise – may have been omitted, merged or elaborated in my colleague’s telling, or in my own. How many recessive levels of concealed items could this one shelf possibly contain and reveal? Moreover, a passing familiarity with narrative convention is sufficient to foresee the box’s reappearance as a garage sale commodity: of course someone would find it on the day. Similarly, the anecdote’s conclusion – where the thrill of finding buried treasure is converted into nobler feelings of fiery sacrifice – may contribute to the sense of tricked-up artifice.

After the fact, I have been unable to locate any trace of this supposed library of Dickens erotica, notwithstanding the 2007 DVD release of something titled Oliver Twink. That said, parts of the story seem plausible, and some profoundly true. The decision to burn the box, for example, harks back to a familiar scene of guilty action in the face of the erotically charged object: on Sunday 9 February 1667, Samuel Pepys, for one fabled example, retired to his chamber to read Millot’s ‘mighty lewd’ L’escolle des filles, which he then set to the torch so that ‘it might not be among my books to my shame’.

Although countless pyres have sent smut heavenwards in self-censoring service of the innocent shelf, this box of suburban secrets burned as a principled refusal to force a modest and self-evidently reluctant archive to bear witness to a life. My colleague acted to forestall a range of powerful institutional questions inevitably triggered by the disclosure of private material: questions that begin with what kind of life was this? When the contents of the secret shelf were on the verge of becoming irrevocably un-private, my colleague did what is only possible at home, a space sometimes governed by trust and the vagaries of personal relationships: he accepted the invitation to become the padlock.

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