Queen Victoria has a lot to answer for

Abstract

In penetrating the legal maze enveloping the question of privacy, solicitor Melville-Brown recalls how a case involving Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was perhaps the germinal start of it all: "Private etchings made by the royals for their own gratification, of which surreptitious copies were taken at the shop they had been sent to for impressions to be made, gave rise to this early claim. An enterprising chap proposed to exhibit the copies, publicising the exhibition in a catalogue. A distinctly unamused monarch sent her husband off to deal with the fellow (after all, one does not want one's private etchings gawped at by one's subjects) and the dutiful husband was granted an injunction in confidence against the entrepreneur's 'sordid spying into the privacy of domestic life' in respect of both catalogue and exhibition. This action similarly protected material of a confidential nature, imparted in circumstances importing an obligation of confidence, and where there had been a misuse of that information to the detriment of the person communicating it..." And she concludes: "At present, there appears to be an uneasy truce between those demanding privacy protection and those defending free speech. There is a Faustian pact at play here: celebrities need the media to make them celebrated; the public wants the press to entertain and educate them; the media wants to serve them both to serve itself. While free speech and privacy continue to fight it out for supremacy like two naughty children, time only will show whether that pact will survive.