A London Child of the 1870′s

Several years ago, roughly the same time I first heard of Persephone Books, I read Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York. For those who aren’t familiar with him (and if you’re not, you should really rectify that), Gopnik wrote Paris to the Moon about the experience of living in Paris with his wife and small son while working as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. Through the Children’s Gate soon followed, with Gopnik’s return home to raise his children in Manhattan. While the first book is obviously about being an outsider looking in at a different country and culture, the second isn’t really that different; as a parent, he’s still somewhat of an outsider, observing his children growing up in a constantly changing city and culture of internet speak, wheeled shoes, and play dates. In many respects, it’s a world apart from the childhood of Molly Hughes, but it’s because of Gopnik’s essays on his family life that I first heard of A London Child of the 1870′s and her remarkable family:

Out of the blue, a letter arrives from the granddaughter of Molly Hughes: I’ve been asked to write a new preface to A London Child of the 1870′s. I’m stunned. It has been years since I thought of Molly. When Martha and I first came to New York, we lived for three distant, disquieting, and now very long-ago-seeming years in that tiny basement room, nine feet by eleven feet, whose only conventional attraction was that its high-up window looked past a playground onto the back of the stained-glass windows of the Church of the Holy Trinity on Eighty-eighth Street. In that room, only blocks away from this room where I write now, Molly Hughes’s book had become our favorite, our only, reading. It tells the story of an ordinary family in London from the 1870s to World War I, as related by the one daughter – Molly – in the 1930s. I read it out loud to Martha every night in those first couple of New York years.

Naturally, I was intrigued and made plans to get the book the next time I was in London. But the next-time-I-was-in-London turned out to be madly busy and I couldn’t fit in a trip to Persephone, so it remained the top on my list of books to buy. (Speaking of which, am I the only reader who numbers and renumbers their Persephone wishlist with each new catalog?) But I was lucky enough to have a good friend visiting from the UK after Christmas, and she brought me both A London Child of the 1870′s and A London Home in the 1890′s. She kept the second book in the trilogy, A London Girl of the 1880′s, a move I more than understood after reading it, but I found a used copy on the web and spent several happy days immersed in Molly’s story.

Molly Hughes was the only daughter of a very close middle-class family living in London at the end of the 19th century. She had four older brothers, an unconventional mother, and a father she clearly adored. She started the book by stating, “I hope to show that Victorian children did not have such a dull time as is usually supposed.” I’m not entirely convinced – the broom of a sweep emerging from a chimney while she lay in bed may have seemed magical to her, but I’m sure the grubby urchin plying it probably had quite a different take on the dullness of life. But quibbles aside (quibble quibble), the book does describe what sounds like a truly happy and liberal childhood. She grew up without a nurse or governess, was encouraged to read and paint and explore, and while her early education seems to have been slotted between her mother’s housework and watercolor painting, she did share an adult-free study with her brothers and access to a library of books. Molly appears to have been aware of how isolated her life was, with few companions beyond her family, but it seems to have been enough. She was content, and her brothers occasionally took her for trips to the theatre, to explore the upper decks of the omnibus, and she walked each Sunday through the streets of London to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, playing a version of I-spy for points along the way.

But the best bit of the book is set in Cornwall, where Molly’s family goes to visit relations and get away from London. Along with her brothers and numerous cousins, she played outdoors, ate fresh food, and hid in trees to avoid having to spend time with dull callers. It’s extraordinary how fresh and vivid her recollections of her time in the country remain, and fascinating to see how her life opened up with the freedom to run and explore as she liked:

A churn was never seen at Reskadinnick. it had been heard of, and actually used by my aunt who lived up in the town, but Tony, my golden aunt of Reskadinnick, tossed her head at the idea. She had her own ritual of butter-making, and many a time I used to curl up in the corner of the kitchen window-seat to watch it. Her hands had to be elaborately washed first, and dipped in cold water to be cool. The wooden tub with the cream in it had to be held at a special angle on her lap. With fixed eye and stern mouth she then began to swirl the cream round, and you mustn’t speak to her till the butter ‘came’. One day I was allowed as a great treat to make a little butter all by myself, with no one even watching. When it ‘came’, behold, it was very good, and the joy of creation was mine.

The book ends sadly, as Molly said it would on the first page. But there’s something indomitable about Molly, and it’s impossible to pity her. Adam Gopnik wrote, “As Martha and I neared the end of the trilogy, we realized that Molly had written all three books as an old lady, living alone in the 1930s in a cottage in the country, though she had kept to the end all the clarity and mischief of a happy child. I suppose there is something sentimental in Molly’s writing, but sentimentality in such circumstances seems a way of organizing harsh and perplexing experience, as worthy and admirable as classical stoicism or medieval chivalry or modern irony.”