I am currently reading a book called The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. It is a true story of the mystery behind the gruesome murder of a child in a quiet family house in Wiltshire during 1860. The crime in fact inspired the classic Victorian detective novel.

The following quote appears towards the beginning of the book and I found it rather interesting. It it is from an article in the Morning Post (10th July 1860). The article was arguing that the security of all homes rested on solving the murder case, which would involve violating a sacred place – an Englishman’s home.

Every Englishman is accustomed to price himself with more than usual complacency upon what is called the sanctity of and English home. No soldier, no policeman, no spy of the Government dare enter it… Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an English house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses an indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold. He defies everybody below the Home Secretary; and even he can only violate the traditional security of a man’s house under extreme circumstances, and with the prospect of a Parliamentary indemnity. It is with this thoroughly innate feeling of security that every Englishman feels a strong sense of the inviolability of his own house. It is this that converts the moorside cottage into a castle. The moral sanctions of an English home are, in the nineteenth century, what the moat, and the keep, and the drawbridge were in the fourteenth. In the strength of these we lie down to sleep at night, and leave our homes in the day, feeling that a whole neighbourhood would be raised, nay, the whole country, were any attempt made to violate what so many traditions, and such a long custom, have rendered sacred.

How times have changed!