- Paperback: 148 pages
- Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks; New edition edition (1 May 1977)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0192812165
- ISBN-13: 978-0192812162
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.2 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 862,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Book Description
'We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistiguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people.' Thus Molly Hughes in her Preface to one of the great classics of autobiography, A London Child of the 1870s that she wrote in 1934.
Molly Thomas, as she was then, had been brought up in Islington as the youngest of a large, characterful family. There was not a great deal of money and their life was indeed 'ordinary' but Molly Hughes gives the everyday existence of herself, her four elder brothers and her parents, a universality which makes this book quite unforgettable.
In 1977 Benny Green observed in the Spectator, when this book was first reprinted, that although London had utterly changed in a hundred years â€" 'the cobbles which Molly Hughes trod, the skylines she contemplated, the upholsteries which bolstered her, the very air she breathed, all are locked away from us for all time' â€" yet the reader is given 'an account of life so thorough, so felicitous, so unselfconscious, that vital details will be thrust into the foreground which we never quite thought of in that way before.'
A few years later, in an 'Enthusiasms' column in The Times, Sir Roy Strong called A London Child a classic account of a class and an era: in it 'there is an abundance of happiness and innocent fun; a truthfulness and a directness, together with an acceptance of life, its ups and downs, as seen from the viewpoint of a mid-middle class Victorian family living in a semi-detached house in the suburbs of north London.' As he says, it is Molly's pictures of everyday life which most stick in the mind: travelling by bus from Islington to the West End, making toffee in the afternoon, going to Cornwall on holiday, walking from Canonbury to St Paul's on Christmas Day, playing games with her brothers.
But it was not at all an easy life. 'The cradle rocks above an abyss' (remarks Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker in his Persephone Preface, quoting Nabokov) 'and the middle-class nursery is perched above a chasm of debt and dread...People who look at Molly's work as narrowly nostalgic, or who imagine that she provides a view that is in some way "comfortable" miss the desperation of her subjects, or their real grace in the face of it. There is much that is comforting in Molly Hughes's writing, but nothing that is comfortable.' In his profound and touching Preface Adam Gopnik reflects on returning to the book nearly twenty years later when 'my own ambitions, since those early years when Molly's writing reassured me so much, have narrowed enough to make me, in an irony I could not have imagined in those world-devouring days, hope to be no more than a faithful chronicler of another middle-class world and family life in another great and precarious city... I read Molly now not merely as a metaphysical occult "Other"...but as an end to be achieved, a writer to be imitated, a pattern to apply... Molly's book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but still finer as writing. Here is an ordinary life rendered truly, and joyfully, with a voice at once so self-abnegating yet so gay and funny and precise that we are reminded, in the end, of the one truth worth remembering, that there are no ordinary lives.' We are in complete agreement with Benny Green's verdict that A London Child of the 1870s is 'full of literary control: it is a work of art with the completeness which that phrase implies'. An ordinary-seeming book about ordinary lives is yet a work of art, a masterpiece. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Molly Thomas, as she was then, had been brought up in Islington as the youngest of a large, characterful family. There was not a great deal of money and their life was indeed 'ordinary' but Molly Hughes gives the everyday existence of herself, her four elder brothers and her parents, a universality which makes this book quite unforgettable.
In 1977 Benny Green observed in the Spectator, when this book was first reprinted, that although London had utterly changed in a hundred years â€" 'the cobbles which Molly Hughes trod, the skylines she contemplated, the upholsteries which bolstered her, the very air she breathed, all are locked away from us for all time' â€" yet the reader is given 'an account of life so thorough, so felicitous, so unselfconscious, that vital details will be thrust into the foreground which we never quite thought of in that way before.'
A few years later, in an 'Enthusiasms' column in The Times, Sir Roy Strong called A London Child a classic account of a class and an era: in it 'there is an abundance of happiness and innocent fun; a truthfulness and a directness, together with an acceptance of life, its ups and downs, as seen from the viewpoint of a mid-middle class Victorian family living in a semi-detached house in the suburbs of north London.' As he says, it is Molly's pictures of everyday life which most stick in the mind: travelling by bus from Islington to the West End, making toffee in the afternoon, going to Cornwall on holiday, walking from Canonbury to St Paul's on Christmas Day, playing games with her brothers.
But it was not at all an easy life. 'The cradle rocks above an abyss' (remarks Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker in his Persephone Preface, quoting Nabokov) 'and the middle-class nursery is perched above a chasm of debt and dread...People who look at Molly's work as narrowly nostalgic, or who imagine that she provides a view that is in some way "comfortable" miss the desperation of her subjects, or their real grace in the face of it. There is much that is comforting in Molly Hughes's writing, but nothing that is comfortable.' In his profound and touching Preface Adam Gopnik reflects on returning to the book nearly twenty years later when 'my own ambitions, since those early years when Molly's writing reassured me so much, have narrowed enough to make me, in an irony I could not have imagined in those world-devouring days, hope to be no more than a faithful chronicler of another middle-class world and family life in another great and precarious city... I read Molly now not merely as a metaphysical occult "Other"...but as an end to be achieved, a writer to be imitated, a pattern to apply... Molly's book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but still finer as writing. Here is an ordinary life rendered truly, and joyfully, with a voice at once so self-abnegating yet so gay and funny and precise that we are reminded, in the end, of the one truth worth remembering, that there are no ordinary lives.' We are in complete agreement with Benny Green's verdict that A London Child of the 1870s is 'full of literary control: it is a work of art with the completeness which that phrase implies'. An ordinary-seeming book about ordinary lives is yet a work of art, a masterpiece. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
There's nothing quite as attrractive as a family who all adore each other. That is why Molly Hughes's A London Childhood is a lovely book. It provides an authentic view of a particular class of people, not so high on the modern class scale, but who come from wonderful old houses in Cornwall and Wales, houses with books and nooks, and much room for children to experience the mysteries of life and have a good romp and even go boldly into danger. All in a day's living, so to speak. When Molly is born, her father and mother are living in London. She is the only girl, with four older brothers, so we get a good view of the lives of both boys and girls. The household is jolly--that is a prime word in Molly Hughes's mind. Peoiple are also unsentimental. Thus a living tableau of the best British values emerges quite naturally from the string of anectodes and descriptions that make up the book. And Molly is a great writer: she tells you what people eat, how things smell, what a quiet afternoon in a London suburb in 1875 feels like. Mrs Hughes grew up to be a ground-breaking educator of girls, fell in love, married and had four children. Hers was thus a complete life, and true plenitude fills her pages. Another very English aspect of this book is the traditional sense of taste: good taste is what is solid and pleasing and works well and never harms anyone or anything unnecessarily. Finally, that essential ingredient of life, the shadow that sets off the life, is not absent either. People die, quite suddenly. But Molly Huighes, true to her commitment to storytelling, carries right on over her grief. Dwelling on things in our rather revolting contemporary way, that was not for her! She was too busy taking walks, teaching, reading books and above all, having a good laugh--that's the supreme value. The book is of particular interest for girls, for it will give them an excellent perspective on history; for Molly Hughes was in advance of her time, and the very limited lives women were expected to lead, only a hundred and some years ago, appear as hedges to be leapt over, not immutable fences. Yet she never loses her deep sense of propriety. Rarely have I enjoyed and admired any author as much as Molly Hughes.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If nothing else, this memoir of cheerful, jolly family life belies the fact that a Victorian childhood was dull and that children in starched pinafores and button boots were too repressed to be naughty. Molly's exceedingly naughty brothers got up to all kinds of pranks and, except for having to suffer a long sermon every Sunday, seem to have enjoyed rather more fun and mischief than most children today. Their father sends out for a pound of the grocer's 'worst' butter so he can make toffee with his offspring and Mother is sanguine about cricket balls and broken windows, even about the 'human sacrifice' of Molly's big wax doll.
Molly has a way of describing London life that makes it comes vividly alive; when she finally gets to ride upstairs on an omnibus we feel every jolt and shake of those horse-drawn buses that you can still see in London's Transport Museum today; how much better than riding in the stuffy, velvet-lined interior where Mother sat. And try to imagine the despair of Mother when a little brother gets lost in the park ... in those days before telephones and efficient police communication, it was days before the missing child was reunited with his parents. How wonderfully, too, Molly describes food so that you can taste it with her ... a Cornish farmhouse tea (not forgetting how to make apple cake) and Christmas punch with brandy and rum (even for children!)
Molly's family is perhaps not quite as suburban and ordinary as she makes out; her mother, as a girl, had travelled quite adventurously off the beaten track. However, as the preface points out, Victorian middle-class life was often built on precarious finances. (When the gas is cut off, they hope that visitors leave before dusk.) Molly's father was a stockdabbler, his income unsettled. Her cheerful, sunny memoir ends on a sad note ... but she has censored the real tragedy of her childhood's end. The truth was that Father committed suicide, having lost his money in one of those great Victorian scandals beloved of Trollope (and Dickens and Mrs Gaskell).
I suppose it is very 21st century of me to wish that Molly had told the story warts and all!
Molly has a way of describing London life that makes it comes vividly alive; when she finally gets to ride upstairs on an omnibus we feel every jolt and shake of those horse-drawn buses that you can still see in London's Transport Museum today; how much better than riding in the stuffy, velvet-lined interior where Mother sat. And try to imagine the despair of Mother when a little brother gets lost in the park ... in those days before telephones and efficient police communication, it was days before the missing child was reunited with his parents. How wonderfully, too, Molly describes food so that you can taste it with her ... a Cornish farmhouse tea (not forgetting how to make apple cake) and Christmas punch with brandy and rum (even for children!)
Molly's family is perhaps not quite as suburban and ordinary as she makes out; her mother, as a girl, had travelled quite adventurously off the beaten track. However, as the preface points out, Victorian middle-class life was often built on precarious finances. (When the gas is cut off, they hope that visitors leave before dusk.) Molly's father was a stockdabbler, his income unsettled. Her cheerful, sunny memoir ends on a sad note ... but she has censored the real tragedy of her childhood's end. The truth was that Father committed suicide, having lost his money in one of those great Victorian scandals beloved of Trollope (and Dickens and Mrs Gaskell).
I suppose it is very 21st century of me to wish that Molly had told the story warts and all!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Lively, touching, informative and a delight to read
4 Sep 2005
Format:Audio CD
Mary Hughes was born Mary Vivian Thomas in October 1866, and in 1870 she and her parents and four older brothers moved to a house in Canonbury, north London, where they lived for nine years. They were a moderately well-off family; they did not feel themselves rich, though they had a couple of servants.
Hughes tells the story of those years with wit and interest. She's a great story-teller, and has a naturally cheerful outlook; coupled with happy memories that would have been enough to make this an entertaining book. But she is also sharp and insightful, and has strong powers of observation. The result is a fascinating view of a child's life one hundred and thirty years ago. I love history for all sorts of reasons, but I got more pleasure from this book (and its sequels) than from many history texts I've read, because at the end of it I felt I not only knew and liked Mary Thomas, but I knew what it felt like to be a child in Victorian London.
Hughes talks about every little detail: wooden playing blocks, window-shopping, walking in the neighbourhood, visiting cousins in Cornwall, learning Latin at home, favourite books, religious aunts, children's games, and much more. It's an enchanting read.
The book is also strong in feeling. There are tragic deaths in the book, and I found these more affecting than any fiction, feeling as I did that the family were now friends of mine.
Highly recommended.
Hughes tells the story of those years with wit and interest. She's a great story-teller, and has a naturally cheerful outlook; coupled with happy memories that would have been enough to make this an entertaining book. But she is also sharp and insightful, and has strong powers of observation. The result is a fascinating view of a child's life one hundred and thirty years ago. I love history for all sorts of reasons, but I got more pleasure from this book (and its sequels) than from many history texts I've read, because at the end of it I felt I not only knew and liked Mary Thomas, but I knew what it felt like to be a child in Victorian London.
Hughes talks about every little detail: wooden playing blocks, window-shopping, walking in the neighbourhood, visiting cousins in Cornwall, learning Latin at home, favourite books, religious aunts, children's games, and much more. It's an enchanting read.
The book is also strong in feeling. There are tragic deaths in the book, and I found these more affecting than any fiction, feeling as I did that the family were now friends of mine.
Highly recommended.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Autobiography: a warm family story and riveting read!
4 May 1999
Format:Paperback
An autobiography of Molly Hughes who grows up in 1870s north London. Family life and early schooldays. Lots of period detail about London life and a fascinating read. The first of a series (later books deal with her education at North London Collegiate School, her training as a teacher in the very early days of teacher training colleges, her marriage, and her work as an inspector of schools. The books were first published by Oxford University Press in the 1930s and 40s, appearing as very popular OUP paperbacks in the 1980s. The paperbacks frequently appear in the secondhand market. Highly recommended.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Life in another time, another place
28 Jun 2010
Format:Paperback
One of the greatest joys of reading is being able to experience people, places and times that are so alien to our every day modern lives that our understanding of life itself is broadened. Molly Hughes, with her wit, intelligence and sensitivity, guides the reader from the age of jet planes, instant communications and massive creature comforts into a very different time and zeitgeist. It would be patronizing to call the latter part of the 19th century as a "simpler age." It only seems that way to us, who take great pride in what we deem our busy and complicated lives. But Molly's life was busy and complicated, too, and full of the same joys and pains common to life in any age, in any circumstance.
I don't believe this book -- the series, collectively titled "A London Family 1870-1900" -- has been contaminated by Hollywood's eternal attempts to translate literature into visual (and extremely narrow) presentations. That is a blessing. When we read (as opposed to viewing), we populate the story with creatures from our imaginations, created along the lines of the author's description. Incidents recounted by the author remind us of family stories or tales from other books and memories of people we have known and these color and enrich our experience of the story at hand. Molly was blessed with a happy nature and deeply influenced by a mother who was an unfailing optimist. Throughout the trials of her life we see what an advantage this environment of love and optimism gives her in terms of strength of character.
As a child, her entertainments were reading, playing the piano, dancing, sketching, walking and hiking, and visiting. "Long afternoons I spent in my room alone," she writes, "while the boys were at school. Drawing and painting took most of the time, but there was also the curious occupation of cutting perforated cardboard, sticking them on a piece of couloured ribbon, and inflicting them on some aunts as a Bible bookmark...Music I made for myself with broken nibs stuck into the edge of my table. The tinkle was cheering but no tune could I achieve..."
Her delight in visiting her aunt's country home in Cornwall ("With the last curve of the drive the house came in sight, facing a large lawn, bordered by wooded banks and dotted with huge elms," the train trip across England ("we used to hail Exeter as being 'almost there'") and the attending adventures ("The difficulty on arriving from London was to know where to begin enjoying oneself") are related with a remembrance of childhood wonder. Looking at the "delights" of modern life -- computer games, television, movies, etc. -- it's hard to imagine that adults in the future will have similar memories to warm their days. And to press on with the point, it becomes a bit frightening to imagine a similar description of life in another 100 years if the present is any indication of the future!
This book can take you back in time to a life that seems more intense because of a lack of modern amenities and distractions. Try to forget what you know and read with the intent of experiencing life with oil lamps and horse-drawn transportation "But in 1878 the traffic was laughably simple, and the only likelihood of an accident was a horse slipping on a wet road," Christmas trees lit by candles and food preparation without the benefit of refrigeration. Imagine icy winters by the fire ("the November of 1879 was cold and dark with fogs far worse than ever happen now," and hot summers without air conditioning. And through it all, you'll find the same experiences of love and loss we all know, whatever our individual circumstance.
I don't believe this book -- the series, collectively titled "A London Family 1870-1900" -- has been contaminated by Hollywood's eternal attempts to translate literature into visual (and extremely narrow) presentations. That is a blessing. When we read (as opposed to viewing), we populate the story with creatures from our imaginations, created along the lines of the author's description. Incidents recounted by the author remind us of family stories or tales from other books and memories of people we have known and these color and enrich our experience of the story at hand. Molly was blessed with a happy nature and deeply influenced by a mother who was an unfailing optimist. Throughout the trials of her life we see what an advantage this environment of love and optimism gives her in terms of strength of character.
As a child, her entertainments were reading, playing the piano, dancing, sketching, walking and hiking, and visiting. "Long afternoons I spent in my room alone," she writes, "while the boys were at school. Drawing and painting took most of the time, but there was also the curious occupation of cutting perforated cardboard, sticking them on a piece of couloured ribbon, and inflicting them on some aunts as a Bible bookmark...Music I made for myself with broken nibs stuck into the edge of my table. The tinkle was cheering but no tune could I achieve..."
Her delight in visiting her aunt's country home in Cornwall ("With the last curve of the drive the house came in sight, facing a large lawn, bordered by wooded banks and dotted with huge elms," the train trip across England ("we used to hail Exeter as being 'almost there'") and the attending adventures ("The difficulty on arriving from London was to know where to begin enjoying oneself") are related with a remembrance of childhood wonder. Looking at the "delights" of modern life -- computer games, television, movies, etc. -- it's hard to imagine that adults in the future will have similar memories to warm their days. And to press on with the point, it becomes a bit frightening to imagine a similar description of life in another 100 years if the present is any indication of the future!
This book can take you back in time to a life that seems more intense because of a lack of modern amenities and distractions. Try to forget what you know and read with the intent of experiencing life with oil lamps and horse-drawn transportation "But in 1878 the traffic was laughably simple, and the only likelihood of an accident was a horse slipping on a wet road," Christmas trees lit by candles and food preparation without the benefit of refrigeration. Imagine icy winters by the fire ("the November of 1879 was cold and dark with fogs far worse than ever happen now," and hot summers without air conditioning. And through it all, you'll find the same experiences of love and loss we all know, whatever our individual circumstance.
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