The Victorians cherished privacy and detested secrecy. What consenting adults did in private was their own affair. ‘The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society,’ John Stuart Mill said, ‘is that which concerns others.’ What was done in secret was another matter. ‘Everything secret,’ Lord Acton said, ‘degenerates.’
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| — | John Pemble, “Gaslight and Fog,” a review of Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective, Oxford, 2011, London Review of Books, 26 January 2012, page 21. “Nothing is hidden,” according to Dogen Eihei. |
