'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.'
