I

A number of recent interventions by historians have painted a picture of fragmentation and crisis in historical scholarship in general, and modern British history in particular.Footnote ⁷ Amidst this ongoing debate on the state of the discipline, a number of works have been published offering broad overviews of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, or of the modern period as a whole.Footnote ⁸ This spate of new books speak to a desire for ‘macro’ accounts of modern British history, whether or not the crisis and fragmentation of the field is as grave as some participants in the debate have suggested. Intimacy is often best explored by microhistorical, or at least small-scale, studies, but recent ‘macro’ accounts of modern British history are sometimes critical of microhistory – James Vernon, for example, one of the keener proponents of histories written with ‘organizing narratives’, has called for a turn away from ‘the navel gazing of microhistories’.Footnote ⁹ Yet, in arguing that modernity can be characterized as a ‘society of strangers’ that ‘provided the conditions for the reconstitution of the intimate domain of personal relations’, Vernon implicitly indicates the importance of intimacy in understanding modernity.Footnote ¹⁰ Here, we see one way in which intimacy might illuminate ‘big’ historiographical themes. It also offers a way in which to conceptualize currently separate bodies of literature as interconnected. As has been suggested, intimacy serves as an analytic lens that allows us to see both small details and across fragmented typologies.

Historians of modern Britain have produced illuminating work on many forms of intimacy; I wish to suggest that thinking with intimacy as a category allows us to examine interconnections between these forms more deeply. Some of the most interesting work being done on modern British history is that associated with what Chris Waters has called the ‘new British queer history’.Footnote ¹¹ With roots in the lesbian and gay liberation histories of the 1970s, queer methodologies have pushed beyond thinking about sexual identities, beyond thinking about same-sex desire and increasingly beyond thinking about sex at all.Footnote ¹² A good guide to the work of the new queer history can be found in a 2012 special issue of the Journal of British Studies, and a 2013 edited collection, both of which emerged from a conference on ‘British Queer History’ held at McGill in 2010.Footnote ¹³ This work includes studies of, for example, ‘the odd centrality of homosexual practices to late Victorian urban communications regulation’, of how a First World War VD film can be used to unsettle the hetero/homo binary, and of the queer domesticity of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts.Footnote ¹⁴ In particular, the work of Matt Houlbrook suggests the new avenues opened up by queer methodologies; the 2013 edited collection British queer history indicates a turning point in Houlbrook's thinking. Houlbrook pitches his essay as ‘a conversation’ between his first book, Queer London, and his then on-going project, now published as Prince of tricksters.Footnote ¹⁵ The former, according to Houlbrook, had tried to move beyond exercises in ‘social historical recovery’, and yet remained too wedded to ‘a notion of queerness-as-being’. In particular drawing on Laura Doan's work, Houlbrook makes an intellectual move from queerness-as-being to queerness-as-method; his second book uses the alterity and unknowability of a confidence trickster to unsettle ideas about the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁶ Houlbrook suggests that ‘in certain contexts and as a temporary historicising operation perhaps the time has come to both think and not think about sex’.Footnote ¹⁷

Released from the limitations of searching for the emergence of a stable homosexual identity, queer methodologies often indicate the importance of intimacy rather than sexuality per se as a useful analytic lens.Footnote ¹⁸ Much of the most significant literature on histories of friendship is concerned with women's same-sex friendships, the relationship of these friendships to same-sex desire and lesbianism, and their significance to the broader culture.Footnote ¹⁹ Sharon Marcus seeks to contextualize women's same-sex feelings and attractions within the broadest possible context, taking into account ‘friendship, mother–daughter dynamics, and women's investment in images of femininity’ in order to highlight that ‘even within a single class or generation, there were many different kinds of relationships between women’.Footnote ²⁰ For Marcus, ‘lesbian lives are best studied as part of the general history of women and the family’ and ‘heterosexual women's lives can only be fully understood if we attend to their friendships with women and their relationships to female objects of desire’.Footnote ²¹ Martha Vicinus, meanwhile, is willing to situate intimate friendships within the history of sexuality even if the relationships were celibate. For Vicinus, thinking about ‘intimacy’ offers a way in which to think about relationships that cannot easily be pinned down by any particular term; her title, Intimate friends, for her ‘embodies the indeterminacy inherent in any study of sexual behaviors and beliefs’.Footnote ²² Intimate friendship here suggests ‘an emotional, erotically charged friendship between two women’.Footnote ²³ Though they take different approaches, both Vicinus and Marcus recognize the conceptual significance of intimacy, whether as a way to think about relationships that seem indeterminate to the historian, or as a broader context without which our understanding of specific forms of intimacy cannot be adequately understood. A more recent intervention on a similar theme can be found in Seth Koven's The match girl and the heiress, which follows the relationship between Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Koven reaches to ‘queer’ rather than ‘homoerotic’ or ‘lesbian’ as the most useful way to characterize Muriel and Nellie's ‘loving friendship’. Footnote ²⁴ Same-sex relationships in the past, which were perhaps not sexual, do not accord with our contemporary understandings of friendship, and were sometimes navigated using languages of family and matrimony, starkly suggest the usefulness of thinking in terms of intimacy.Footnote ²⁵

In his review of Hera Cook's The long sexual revolution, Houlbrook points out that historians who are influenced by Foucault's concerns with regulation, power, and subjectivity tend to write the sex out of the history of sexuality.Footnote ²⁶ When historians have focused on sexual practices, this work has demonstrated that thinking in terms of the history of privacy can be particularly rewarding. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher's Sex before the sexual revolution demonstrates the importance of privacy to physical and emotional intimacy, drawing on oral history interviews with eighty-nine men and women who lived through the period 1918–63.Footnote ²⁷ They emphasize, following Joan Scott, the historicization of ‘experience’.Footnote ²⁸ Their oral history sources allow the authors to be attentive to the role played by emotions, in which sexual practices were often implicated; we see how private life was coloured by a range of feelings, from married love to fear of pregnancy. Szreter and Fisher push back against liberationist accounts of sexual change by arguing that, for example, ideas of duty and sexual innocence were not seen as repressive, but were instead conceptualized ‘as values informing a loving, dynamic and mutually satisfying partnership’.Footnote ²⁹ Changes in the availability of information about sex, in ideas about gender roles and in the availability of contraception were translated into lived experience in complex ways, ‘structured in particular’ by ideas about the privacy of sex.Footnote ³⁰ Though their interviewees were willing to talk about sex, and in some cases seemed to have enjoyed doing so, the authors argue that the respondents highlighted the privacy of their own sex lives in distinction to perceived openness among successive generations; they spoke openly in order to underline the historic importance of privacy. Rather than simply being a methodological problem, then, the privacy of sexual practices can in itself be illuminating. Indeed, implicit in this citation of historic privacy is a sense of the shifting bounds of the private. Sexual practices and talk about sex serve here to shape the appropriate bounds and forms of the intimate.

There is a small but important literature on the history of privacy in modern Britain. Deborah Cohen offers an account of the ways in which families have navigated ideas of secrecy and privacy from late eighteenth-century India to the television show Who do you think you are?. Cohen charts how privacy and secrecy were shaped by domestic, familial, and sexual intimacies in practice. The covering up of shameful family secrets, she argues, ‘accustomed those who took part to a moral relativism about behaviour’ which led to an understanding of privacy as a right, ‘intertwined with personal freedom’.Footnote ³¹ Like many historians of intimacy, Cohen points to the period between the 1930s and 1950s as key to this shift; it was then that privacy and secrecy ‘parted ways’.Footnote ³² Privacy became increasingly protected by the state, while secrecy was seen as potentially damaging to individuals and relationships. Similarly illuminating is David Vincent's recent work on the history of privacy. In I hope I don't intrude, Vincent offers a subtle history of nineteenth-century privacy via the many lives of the comic character Paul Pry, while his subsequent Privacy: a short history provides a synoptic overview of the history of privacy from the fourteenth century to Edward Snowden.Footnote ³³ For Vincent, the ‘history of intimacy is critical to the evolution of privacy as a concept and a practice’.Footnote ³⁴ Ideas of intimacy, secrecy, and privacy are clearly interlinked. The intimate is often private, if not secret. But secrecy and privacy produced intimacy as much as protected it. In sharing secrets, intimacies are built – sharers ‘know’ each other better, and open themselves up to vulnerability; Vincent uses gossip to make this point.Footnote ³⁵ Cohen, Vincent, and Szreter and Fisher all indicate the ways in which understanding the history of privacy is important to understanding other aspects of intimate life. Work on privacy suggests that what constitutes intimacy cannot be taken as given. Adopting intimacy as a category of analysis involves examining its shifting and historically contingent boundaries, as well as its contents as constituted by intimate practices, as will be discussed below.

More has been written about love than about any other form of intimacy.Footnote ³⁶ In modern British studies, two works in particular, Marcus Collins's Modern love and Claire Langhamer's The English in love, stand out as important.Footnote ³⁷ Collins charts the rise and fall of the idea of ‘mutuality’ – ‘the notion that an intimate equality should be established between men and women through mixing, companionate marriage and shared sexual pleasure’ – from around the First World War to the end of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁸ This is a conceptual history, in which pre-war ‘separate spheres’ ideology was replaced by mutuality, which, challenged by feminists and their opponents, was in turn succeeded by the ‘individualism’ of the 1990s. Langhamer similarly places the middle decades of the twentieth century as a significant moment in the history of modern love, in which greater emphasis was placed on authentic emotional connections and the ability of love to transform the self. Langhamer's ‘emotional revolution’ is intended to make us question the idea of a sexual revolution, and for her it is the new emphasis on the emotional significance of sex that makes it particularly significant to married life in this period. Despite approaching a similar set of questions, and arriving at a similar chronology of change, there are, as Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones have pointed out, important differences between Collins's and Langhamer's readings of the history of modern love.Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps most significantly here, Collins is primarily interested in concepts, whereas Langhamer is more concerned with experience. Like the work of other scholars, such as Szreter and Fisher, Langhamer's account of the history of modern British love, emphasizing practices, experiences, and emotions, suggests the usefulness of intimacy as a category of analysis without explicitly using it. Thinking more consciously about the interconnectedness of types of intimacy allows greater conceptual precision; the idea of an emotional revolution, for example, might have much to tell us about how changes in romantic love can be mapped onto changes in norms of friendship or family.

Indeed, the interlinkings of intimacy are nowhere more evident than in families, which can be understood as complex networks of relationships, the parameters and bounds of which have shifted significantly across time and in different contexts.Footnote ⁴⁰ Much of the existing historical literature deals with the development of professional experts and state bureaucracies that sought to shape modern parenthood and the family, and the complex and various ways in which parents responded to these developments.Footnote ⁴¹ But the history of emotions also poses new questions to historians of the family; as Emma Griffin has recently noted, the literature continues to emphasize ‘the transhistorical and constant nature of parental love’, despite ‘the burgeoning literature on the history of the emotions’.Footnote ⁴² Much of this literature is attentive to the relationship between familial intimacy and selfhood.Footnote ⁴³ As Leonore Davidoff points out, the importance of childhood to the development of the self necessarily means that relationships between children and adults are of central importance; ‘taking on an identity’, she observes, ‘implies intimacy’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Julie-Marie Strange likewise points to ‘the importance of family, in all its formations, as a site for the constitution of the self’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The implications of this relationship between intimacy and selfhood will be discussed further below, but here it is important to note the significance of the family not just as a unit of analysis, but as fundamentally connected to other forms of intimacy; studies of courtship, marriage, and parenting are studies of the same individuals at different stages and in different roles. Perhaps we are constrained here by a focus on the role played rather than on the individual in a life-course. A recent intervention by Laura Tisdall examines elite, expert discourses of child-centred education in post-war England, and is especially notable for its attention to the ways in which age is a relational category.Footnote ⁴⁶ Historians need to reflect more upon age as a category of historical analysis; the role of intimate relationships both within and beyond family structures in an individual's navigation of growing up and adopting and adapting a range of social roles is under-examined. Thinking about this in terms of intimacy allows us to conceptualize these different intimate roles together.

Intimacy as a category of analysis, then, already exists in a nascent form within the historiography of modern Britain. Szreter and Fisher, for example, highlight the importance of privacy in their history of sex; histories of privacy are promising not only for what they might tell us about sex, but also about love, family life, and privacy as a form of intimacy in itself. Histories of sexuality, influenced by queer theory, often take the intimate, rather than the sexual, as their centre of focus. These existing literatures should be seen simultaneously as rich fields in their own right, and as part of a history of intimacy as a broader field; thinking in terms of intimacy is one way in which to encompass both these individual forms and the broader ways in which they are inter-related. This move between forms of intimacy and their inter-relations can, as the already existing literatures that moves across the boundaries of subfields suggest, be useful. Developing intimacy as our category of analysis, by thinking about the practices that constitute it and the ways in which its boundaries are conceptualized, grants greater conceptual clarity to the existing archipelago of subfields. The great strength of this way of thinking lies in the ability to account for intimacies that fall between particular types. Far from being too capacious to be useful, thinking in this way about intimacy has much to offer not just historians of sexuality, the emotions, and the family, but to historians of modern Britain more broadly.

II

According to the OED, an older meaning of ‘intimacy’, now obsolete, is ‘inner or inmost nature; an inward quality or feature’. This is appropriate, because the history of intimacy is deeply imbricated with the history of the self.Footnote ⁴⁷ As has been noted, the family is an intimate site for the shaping of the self. But it is not the only one. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that a characteristic feature of modernity is the historically unusual importance of friendship, rather than ‘traditional’ familial connections. ‘More than family, kin or faith’, argues Mark Peel in Barbara Caine's edited collection on the history of friendship, ‘friendship was the social glue of modernity.’Footnote ⁴⁸ The reason for this shift, Peel suggests, is the modern conception of selfhood, viewing people as ‘relatively autonomous and mobile individuals who understand themselves as changeable, and as having the right to pursue choices’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Here, we see how the histories of selfhood and intimacy are related in complex ways – intimacy is important in the construction of the self, and ideas of selfhood shape our intimate interactions.

Recent developments in the histories of selfhood and emotions indicate ways in which, using intimacy, we might focus on how relationships shape the self. Particularly helpful here is an important essay by Monique Scheer, which argues that emotions are a kind of practice.Footnote ⁵⁰ The essay seeks to offer conceptual clarity to historians of emotion troubled by the problem of experience versus expression. Peter and Carol Stearns proposed the neologism ‘emotionology’ to allow historians to avoid claiming that they are describing emotions (emotional experiences) when in fact they are describing emotional standards (‘emotionology’).Footnote ⁵¹ William Reddy proposed an alternative neologism with different implications – ‘emotives’, emotional speech-acts, have effects on feeling; this focuses attention onto the language of emotion.Footnote ⁵² Scheer builds on Reddy's insights to go beyond speech and make a case for emotions as practices. She suggests that emotions are embodied practices – things that are done – located in social, cultural, and historical contexts. The problem of experience versus expression which Scheer addresses is familiar to historians of selfhood.Footnote ⁵³ As Elwin Hofman points out, Scheer's methodological contribution to the history of emotions has much to offer historians of the self.Footnote ⁵⁴ The self in Scheer's analysis must be understood in terms of practices, actions, and doings. Hofman moves from this starting point to argue that study of ‘the practices by which the self was formed may help us to take the history of the self to a new level’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Intimacy as a category of analysis has much to offer this way of thinking about practices. After all, if emotions and selfhood are thought of in terms of practices, those practices were often – though not always – enacted in the context of interpersonal relations.Footnote ⁵⁶ The intimacy of touch cannot be ignored if we think about practices as embodied. The intimacy of privacy or secrecy was often important to the expression of emotions and selfhood; for Scheer, ‘naming’ as an emotional practice, coterminous with Reddy's emotives and analogous to what Hofman identifies as ‘self-talk’ as a practice of self, is dependent on ‘socially situated usage’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thinking about intimacy thus becomes important in thinking about the histories of emotions and selfhood in terms of practices.

The second step I wish to take with Scheer's work is to think about intimacy in terms of intimate practices; touch and ‘self-talk’, to take the examples already given, can clearly be seen as such. A recent book by Sally Holloway on courtship in Georgian England suggests the ways in which Scheer's methodological insights might be put into conversation with intimacy.Footnote ⁵⁸ Holloway is interested both in courtship ritual and in the material culture associated with it, and is alert to the ways in which these were made possible by broader social, cultural, and technological change. Increased literacy, the development of a professionalized postal service, and the expansion of the luxury trade are key to Holloway's situating of her account at a ‘transitional period in the modernization and commercialization of romantic customs’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Holloway argues that ‘rituals of gazing at, caressing, kissing, and smelling love tokens worked to cultivate particular feelings, summoning fond memories of loved ones and inspiring love letters and romantic poetry’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus, drawing on Scheer, Holloway is able to construct an analysis of Georgian courtship which incorporates emotions, material cultures, and the history of the senses. The writing and reception of love letters certainly cultivates feeling; at the same time, further to this, we might also read these practices as intimate, and as creating intimacy. An emphasis on practices, as is beginning to be developed by historians of emotion, is one way in which we might think of ‘doing’ the history of intimacy.

As has been noted, historicizing the body, for Scheer, is an important methodological step in understanding the history of emotions.Footnote ⁶¹ It is useful, then, to consider touch, ‘the most intimate and illusive of the human senses’, as Santanu Das puts it, as a case-study in the inter-relationship between histories of the senses, the self, the emotions, and intimacy, and a test of what a history of intimate practices might look like.Footnote ⁶² For Das, ‘working at the threshold between the self and the world, touch can be said to open up the body at a more intimate, affective level, offering fresh perspectives on certain issues that repeatedly surface in war writings and have become central to contemporary cultural thinking’; thinking about touch in First World War literature allows Das to construct ‘an intimate history of human emotions in times of crisis – to explore the making and unmaking of subjectivity through the most elusive and private of the senses’.Footnote ⁶³ With Joanna Bourke, Das argues that ‘the norms of tactile contact between men changed profoundly’ in the trenches, the physical, psychological, and emotional conditions of modern warfare creating ‘a new level of intimacy’ amongst men desperately far from home.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, for example, men ritually reconstructed the affections of missed mothers and sweethearts in proxy kisses and tender moments.Footnote ⁶⁵ We ought also to think here about the ways in which physical or mental injury sustained in the war altered the forms of intimate practices which historical subjects could enact; this is one way in which we might think about the ways in which the boundaries of intimacy were defined, including in exclusionary and disciplinary ways. With Scheer we might think of touch as an emotional practice, with Hofman as a practice of self. We can also see it as an intimate practice. The changing ‘norms of tactile contact’ in conditions of trench warfare – to take one example – suggest that an emphasis on intimate practices is a useful way in which to think about the constitution and reconstitution of the intimate.

Touch as an intimate practice, implicated in the construction of the self, allows us to think about the relationship between body, self, and space. The intimacy of the railway carriage, for example, raised the fear among nineteenth-century commentators that women travelling alone were disruptive of the gender order, and liable either to become victims of sexual violence, or false accusers of their male co-passengers.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Robin J. Barrow notes, nineteenth-century railway carriages ‘were intimate yet public spaces’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In building a history of touch on the London Underground, Simeon Koole puts forward a nuanced analysis of the practice of personal space, seen not as something given but rather as something constantly negotiated.Footnote ⁶⁸

We might think about other spaces in similar terms – the modern British bedroom, for example. In the nineteenth century, overcrowded slums in which working-class families and unrelated tenants slept in a single room led to moral panic about the dangers of incest and promiscuity.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Peter Scott suggests, the ideal separation of bedrooms between parents and children of different genders continued to be governed by different ideas of ‘decency’ into the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ The material transformation of the modern home was also a transformation of the possibility of forms of intimate practices.Footnote ⁷¹ At the same time, thinking seriously about intimacy should prompt us to reflect on the ways that the boundaries of intimacy were enforced in contexts of close spatial and physical proximity; as Joanna Bourke puts it, ‘proximity did not necessarily breed intimacy’.Footnote ⁷² As in the constant negotiation and renegotiation of personal space described by Koole, proximity established new boundaries to intimacy.

Intimate practices were also shaped by technology and forms of communication.Footnote ⁷³ Holloway draws our attention to the ways in which courtship practices were enabled and shaped by the professionalization of the Georgian postal service. A recent article by James Baker and David Geiringer considers encounters with personal computers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and argues that changes to practices of textual production, ‘an intimate, personal process of self-fashioning’, in turn ‘recalibrated the processes through which the late-modern self was constructed’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Modes of work, shaped by technology, also produce intimacies. Industrial employment created forms of working-class male homosociality that have only recently begun to be examined by historians, comparable to the changes in intimate practices in the trenches of the First World War.Footnote ⁷⁵ Domestic service was ‘the most everyday and intimate realm in which individuals of different social classes confronted each other’, and shaped norms of physical interaction and privacy within the domestic sphere.Footnote ⁷⁶ New histories of work informed by the history of emotions are a promising new departure among historians of modern Britain.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thinking about intimate practices, shaped by space and technology, offers a useful tool to this new labour history, incorporating both the embodiment of work and the social relationships created in workplaces. Again, it is important to think here about the ways in which intimate practices at work existed alongside the policing of the boundaries of intimacy – workers could find themselves in frequent, close proximity to one another in various forms of employment, and spent large amounts of time with workmates and bosses usually not of their own choosing. While space, technology, and work create new possibilities for intimate practices, they also call into existence new boundaries of intimacy and practices of enforcing them.

III

Taking intimacy as a category of analysis promises to be useful, and part of this usefulness ought to be provoking new questions. Importantly, we need to historicize the terrain of the intimate itself, not assuming that what was intimate was fixed. Just as Koole shows that ‘personal space’ was negotiated and never settled in a clearly defined way, so what was considered intimate must also be historicized.Footnote ⁷⁸ Understanding intimacy means understanding how and why understandings of intimacy changed over time. This article has approached the literature on intimacy in modern Britain, and we ought to ask what, if anything, was peculiarly or particularly modern about intimacy in this period. As has been mentioned, Vernon's attempt to breathe new life into the concept of modernity includes an argument that the ‘modern social condition…engendered new forms of intimacy, affection, and self-knowledge’.Footnote ⁷⁹ While Vernon has been critical of the small histories which interest in intimacy often leads us into, it is worth considering the ways in which intimacy was related to broader themes such as modernity. We should also consider what intimacy as a category of historical analysis does to our sense of periodization and chronology; how do we map the different stories of social change to be found in literature on love, family, sexuality, and friendship onto one another, and what is revealed in the process of doing so? This historiographical review has not sought to answer these questions, but rather to prompt them, and to suggest methods by which they might be addressed.

Using intimacy as a category of analysis requires us to think about how the boundaries of the intimate were shaped, policed, and altered, and how what constitutes intimacy was enacted in practices. The work of Monique Scheer, which has been particularly important to historians of emotions and which offers a great deal to histories of the self, indicates a useful way in which to think about intimate practices. This is a step which provides a way of looking at the relationship between intimacy, emotions, and selfhood, but also helps to give greater depth to the idea of intimacy as a usable category of historical analysis. It suggests one way – though I do not wish to suggest the only way – in which to ‘do’ the history of intimacy.

Rather than risking losing meaning through its capaciousness, thinking in this way makes possible description of relationships while allowing for the unstable, the unknowable, and the queer. Historical subjects were always imbricated in complex networks of intimacy – explorations limited to single relationships can only ever be partial. It matters that the parents a child reacts against in their own romantic life, for example, were once young lovers themselves. The relationships between siblings ought to interest historians as much as the relationship between parents and children. Sex is important, but touch is too. The history of intimacy, already nascent in inter-relations between subfields, is complicated and methodologically challenging. But thinking about intimacy is a useful step in conceptualizing this inter-relatedness and accounting for the indeterminate; it offers a revealing category of analysis to historians of modern Britain.