Uncommon History

Alison Light’s Common People, the History of an English Family is uncommon history of the highest order. Light binds together thinking with feeling as she toggles between small and big; inside and out; the intimate and the impersonal; literature and history; the local, the national and the global. Common People reworks a venerable tradition of social history that reclaims the lives of humble people, like her own ancestors, who made nails, saddles, and stays; who laid bricks and sailed the seas. Roads and highways count as much as factory floors, needle-making and bricklaying as much as textile manufacture in Light’s highly original account of the mobile women and men who made industrial capitalism.

Light puts into productive conversation the psychosocial uses of how families remember stories about their past – ‘tall tales’ – with social-historical detective work about what actually happened. ‘Secrets and lies’, Light avers, are ‘a staple ingredient of family history.’ (p. 128) Her aim is not to prove them false, although she often does. Instead, she explains the affective logic that led people to bequeath to future generations ‘tissue[s] of fabrications’ (p. 128) passing for memories. ‘Tall stories are emotional truths as revealing as the census’, she astutely observes. (p. 130) Her grandfather’s romantic stories of suffering disinheritance for marrying beneath him, Light learns, were a fiction meant to soften the more painful reality of his downward social mobility into the pinched squalor of a scruffy Portsmouth terrace house packed with ten children.

A poignant chronicle of Light’s own family across two centuries of unremarkable anonymity, Common People builds on her two groundbreaking previous monographs in gracefully trespassing disciplinary boundaries. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (1991) put women, their households and their desires at the centre of ‘conservative modernity’ in the aftermath of World War One’s dislocations. Using democratized middlebrow literature such as Agatha Christie’s mysteries and Jan Struther’s ‘Mrs. Miniver’ newspaper columns, Light elaborated the ‘emotional economy’ (p. 212) that made feminine, domestic and inwardly ‘English’ idioms so compelling. The longings of suburban housewives reveal more than the flamboyant rebellious acts of newly enfranchised flappers about the temper of the 1920s and 30s. The household with its intimate inequalities and interdependencies is also the site of Mrs Woolf and the Servants, an Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008). Light compels readers to see in new uncomfortable ways that most beloved icon of British feminism, Virginia Woolf. She reckons with the unpaid debts of Woolf and literary modernism to the labours of servants, who washed their clothes, cleaned and cooked for them, and tended their bodies in sickness and in health. Woolf’s degrading diary entries about her servants mark the limits of her radicalism. Refusing Woolf’s claim that her sort ever monopolized ‘all the generous feelings’, (p. 143) Light focuses on Woolf’s servants, among them Nellie Boxall, Lottie Hope, and Sophie Farrell. Tracking these women through stray photographs, census and parish records, charitable institutions, birth and death certificates honed Light’s remarkable sleuthing skills as a family historian, so inventively put to work in Common People.

Common People uses Light’s own family history to recast the big narratives of modern Britain about class formation, industrial capitalism, gendered poverty, working-class conservatism, and communities bound by faith and toil. It is also a book about the disappointments and delights of producing history out of the fragments of the past and the deep impulse to know ourselves by knowing where we have come from. Light writes herself into every page of this history. She turns her own responses to what she does – and does not – find into an archive of affect embedded within the myths and memories of her own childhood. She is disappointed, for example, that her Baptist ancestors sought salvation while ‘what mattered to me is social justice’. (p. 117) ‘There is no “closure” in family history, only the reverberation of a life’, she explains. In families...