Out of Egypt and into England: Secrecy and the State in Samuel Pratt’s Family Secrets

Though unfamiliar to many students of the period, Samuel Pratt’s Family Secrets (1797) explores themes common to the eighteenth-century novel in a narrative that marries the domestic to the Gothic. True to the title of his novel, Pratt entangles each of the major characters in a web of secrecy, rendered emphatic by his use of Gothic elements, such that his narrative creates in miniature a culture of secrecy within this extended family romance. Pratt contrasts legitimate (alphabetical or modern) secrecy with illegitimate (Egyptian or dated) secrecy, and he re-enacts the broader tensions that define the history of secrecy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These differences, I contend, play a key role in the formation of a modern British state, already steeped in secrecy (reason of state), which in turn governs the fortunes awaiting individual characters.