Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors

by Alison Light

Overview

"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring.

Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne'er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we'd hoped. That didn't stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father's life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is a clear-eyed, fascinating, frequently moving account of the lives of everyday people, of the tough decisions and hard work, the good luck and bad breaks, that chart the course of a life. Light's forebears--servants, sailors, farm workers--were among the poorest, traveling the country looking for work; they left few lasting marks on the world. But through her painstaking work in archives, and her ability to make the people and struggles of the past come alive, Light reminds us that "every life, even glimpsed through the chinks of the census, has its surprises and secrets."

What she did for the servants of Bloomsbury in her celebrated Mrs. Woolf and the Servants Light does here for her own ancestors, and, by extension, everyone's: draws their experiences from the shadows of the past and helps us understand their lives, estranged from us by time yet inextricably interwoven with our own. Family history, in her hands, becomes a new kind of public history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226420851
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/11/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alison Light is the author of the acclaimed Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. She is a contributor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the British press. Common People was shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize in Non-fiction and was a Book of the Year in the Times, Telegraph, Financial Times, Spectator, History Today, and the Scottish Herald.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Credits
Family Trees
Preface
 
Prologue: A Child’s Sense of the Past
 
Part One: Missing Persons
1. Evelyn’s Grave
2. Hope Place
 
Part Two: Tall Stories
3. The Road to Netherne
5. Albion Street
 
Postscript
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Common People tells the story of Alison Light's own experience of looking for her ancestors: a quest for origins, explanations and the filling of absences. It is also a moving meditation on the role of family history and on the nature of history itself. . . . The results are inspiring. Few historians can match Light's ability to see a subject anew and explore it with imagination and humanity."
-- "Times Higher Education"

"Above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom."
-- "Times (UK) Book of the Week"

"By turns mesmeric and deeply moving: a poetic excavation of the very meaning of history."-- "Daily Telegraph"

"I read Common People with a mixture of admiration, awe and sorrow. . . . It is a remarkable achievement and should become a classic, a worthy successor to E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. It is full of humanity."--Margaret Drabble

"Professional historians tend to regard family history as a poor cousin of the history of societies or nations. But as Alison Light shows in this meticulous, moving study of her antecedents, 'once the branches proliferate, families become neighborhoods and groups, and groups take shape around the work they do and where they find themselves doing it.' The personal is always public. . . . Ms. Light's book is full of moments where the public and the personal intersect to quietly devastating effect."-- "Wall Street Journal"

"Remarkably gifted at investing bare archival facts with emotional valence, Light delivers a history-from-within that makes readers care deeply about a great-grandmother who enters the world as a workhouse baby and leave s it as a pauper lunatic, about a great-great-grandfather who suffers an ineluctably downward trajectory in employment that finally lands him in a workhouse. Readers do learn about the larger historical dynamics driven by the Industrial Revolution, British imperialism, and two world wars, yet the individual never disappears from view. A cross-grained family history that transcends its genre."--Booklist-- "Booklist"

"This is a richly peopled book. . . . Common People is a great deal more than a family history. Light is a literary historian, and her talent here has been to use her skills not just to pursue individuals through the thickets or record offices and county archives, but to set them within their historical era. . . .The achievement of Common People is its triumphant demonstration of the interplay between individual lives and the somber backcloth of economic circumstance. . . . The effect of Common People is to make you aware of the hidden network of anyone's ancestry. In illuminating her own, Light serves up the most powerful family history I have ever read."--Penelope Lively "New York Times Book Review"

From the Publisher

I read Common People with a mixture of admiration, awe and sorrow. . . . It is a remarkable achievement and should become a classic, a worthy successor to E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. It is full of humanity.

Margaret Drabble

Remarkably gifted at investing bare archival facts with emotional valence, Light delivers a history-from-within that makes readers care deeply about a great-grandmother who enters the world as a workhouse baby and leave s it as a pauper lunatic, about a great-great-grandfather who suffers an ineluctably downward trajectory in employment that finally lands him in a workhouse. Readers do learn about the larger historical dynamics driven by the Industrial Revolution, British imperialism, and two world wars, yet the individual never disappears from view. A cross-grained family history that transcends its genre.”—Booklist

Booklist

By turns mesmeric and deeply moving: a poetic excavation of the very meaning of history.

Daily Telegraph

"This is a richly peopled book. . . . Common People is a great deal more than a family history. Light is a literary historian, and her talent here has been to use her skills not just to pursue individuals through the thickets or record offices and county archives, but to set them within their historical era. . . .The achievement of Common People is its triumphant demonstration of the interplay between individual lives and the somber backcloth of economic circumstance. . . . The effect of Common People is to make you aware of the hidden network of anyone’s ancestry. In illuminating her own, Light serves up the most powerful family history I have ever read."

New York Times Book Review - Penelope Lively

Common People tells the story of Alison Light’s own experience of looking for her ancestors: a quest for origins, explanations and the filling of absences. It is also a moving meditation on the role of family history and on the nature of history itself. . . . The results are inspiring. Few historians can match Light’s ability to see a subject anew and explore it with imagination and humanity.”

Times Higher Education

"Professional historians tend to regard family history as a poor cousin of the history of societies or nations. But as Alison Light shows in this meticulous, moving study of her antecedents, 'once the branches proliferate, families become neighborhoods and groups, and groups take shape around the work they do and where they find themselves doing it.' The personal is always public. . . . Ms. Light's book is full of moments where the public and the personal intersect to quietly devastating effect."

Wall Street Journal

“Remarkably gifted at investing bare archival facts with emotional valence, Light delivers a history-from-within that makes readers care deeply about a great-grandmother who enters the world as a workhouse baby and leave s it as a pauper lunatic, about a great-great-grandfather who suffers an ineluctably downward trajectory in employment that finally lands him in a workhouse. Readers do learn about the larger historical dynamics driven by the Industrial Revolution, British imperialism, and two world wars, yet the individual never disappears from view. A cross-grained family history that transcends its genre.”—Booklist

Booklist

Light is a literary historian, and her talent here has been to use her skills not just to pursue individuals through the thickets of record offices and county archives…but to set them within their historical era…the achievement of Common People is its triumphant demonstration of the interplay between individual lives and the somber backcloth of economic circumstance. People and what they do—what they have had to do—illuminate the gray narrative of history…Read Common People and you will emerge knowing something about needle-making in the 19th century, about bricklaying, about the history and significance of the Baptist movement, about the cod fishing industry, the Victorian workhouse, Portsmouth's naval dockyards, the press gangs, cholera…You will discover something of the variety and intricacy of laboring life in the past, of the laws of supply and demand that determined how people had to live and work…The effect of Common People is to make you aware of the hidden network of anyone's ancestry. In illuminating her own, Light serves up the most powerful family history I have ever read.

The New York Times Book Review - Penelope Lively

07/06/2015
Light (Mrs. Woolf and the Servants), an English writer and critic, promotes the rewards of genealogy as she seeks her roots from Norfolk to Wales to the South Coast. Taking her cue from the BBC celebrity series Who Do You Think You Are?, Light acknowledges that the “Internet produces its own version of ‘archive fever,’” and that “people want to know where they came from.” She opens Part One with her father’s death and digs into the mysterious origins of her paternal grandmother, discovering that her grandfather, who came from a long line of bricklayers, had a hand in building the pubs of Portsmouth. Part Two focuses on Light’s mother’s background, with her maternal grandmother supplying the “foundation” of her family. Light’s maternal grandmother, likely an illegitimate child and dropped off at a Portsmouth workhouse at age 10, became a matriarch and looming familial presence. Ancestors from both sides spent much time in workhouses, a Victorian institution that provided material for Charles Dickens and became, by default, Light’s “ancestral home.” As the self-appointed family detective, she ends up compiling eight intertwined family trees that date back to 1640. While someone else’s family history may mean “more to the teller than the listener,” there is ample Victorian history to engage the keen Anglophile. 31 halftones. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.”

Times (UK) Book of the Week

"Professional historians tend to regard family history as a poor cousin of the history of societies or nations. But as Alison Light shows in this meticulous, moving study of her antecedents, 'once the branches proliferate, families become neighborhoods and groups, and groups take shape around the work they do and where they find themselves doing it.' The personal is always public. . . . Ms. Light's book is full of moments where the public and the personal intersect to quietly devastating effect."

Wall Street Journal

2015-07-25
A British nonfiction writer and critic explores the story of her family's past and its place within the larger narrative of 19th- and 20th-century British history. Light (Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury, 2008) began the quest to discover her roots when her father was ill with cancer. With one parent's death imminent, the author became alarmingly aware of both the passage of time and her own ignorance about a family past that had left few tangible traces. She began her research with visits to parish registers and other local and national archives. As Light became acquainted with her ancestors, she also sought to contextualize their lives. The more data she acquired, the more she realized that "without local history to anchor it, family history is adrift in time." The picture that emerged on both sides of her family tree was of working-class men and women whose migrations across England had been "shaped and limited" by the Industrial Revolution. Light's forebears—most of whom worked as bricklayers, needle-makers, servants, farmers, and sailors—were among the most impoverished in Britain. Yet some branches of her father's family, for example, managed, through a combination of fortunate personal choices and historical timing, to rise into the middle classes and prosper as businessmen and respected members of the clergy. Light's research also led to the discovery of secrets hidden within family tall tales that masked the realities of shame and failure. One of the most dramatic involved a great-grandmother who was "born in the workhouse; died in a madhouse." A product of impoverished circumstances she could not control, this ancestor's life also told a story of some of the policies and practices—such as the British Poor Laws—that defined English society at the time. Light's book not only offers an insightful account of her proverbial "travels through time." It also provides a new, more historically nuanced way of thinking about family history. An intelligent, thoughtfully researched memoir.

Kirkus Reviews