Alison Light - Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors

ALISON LIGHT is a writer and critic and the author of the acclaimed Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. She was born in Portsmouth, studied English at Churchill College, Cambridge and was awarded a PhD from Sussex University. She is Honorary Professor in the Department of English at University College, London, has lectured at Royal Holloway College, and also has worked at the BBC and in adult education. She is a contributor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the British press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Copyright Alison Light, 2014

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-33094-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-33113-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226331133.001.0001

First published in 2014 by the Penguin Group.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Light, Alison, 1955 author.

Common people : in pursuit of my ancestors / Alison Light.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-33094-5 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-226-33113-3 (ebook)

1. Light, Alison, 1955Family. 2. Light family. 3. Genealogy. I. Title.

CS439.L527 2015

929.1dc23

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Common People

In Pursuit of My Ancestors

ALISON LIGHT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago

Praise for Alison Lights Common People

Light writes beautifully. With such colour and with perception and lyricism she clads the past.... Common People is part memoir, part thrilling social history of the England of the Industrial Revolution, but above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.

Melanie Reid, The Times Book of the Week

This book is a substantial achievement: its combination of scholarship and intelligence is, you may well think, the best monument you could have to all those she has rescued from times oblivion.

Gillian Tindall, Financial Times

[A] short and beautifully written meditation on family and mobility.

Roger Clarke, The Independent

Intellectually sound and relevant... a refreshingly modern way of thinking about our past.

New Statesman

Light [is skilled] in probing dark corners of her ancestry and exposing their historical meaning... packed with humanity.

John Carey, Sunday Times

Exquisite.... Barely a page goes by without something fascinating on it, betraying Lights skill in winkling out the most relevant or moving aspects of her antecedents lives, which echo through the generations.

Lesley McDowell, The Independent

A brilliant portrait of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.... [Light is] informed, deft and purposeful.

The Guardian

Evocatively written... a thrilling and unnerving read.

Ben Highmore, The Observer

Intelligent... admirably organised... deeply absorbing.

The Spectator

Alison Lights excellent and humane exploration of her family tree... confirms her as the pre-eminent exponent of a new kind of public family history.

The Evening Standard

Extraordinary.... Family history, thanks to the internet, has become a hugely popular pastime. Common People, with its fine sense of nuance, raises the game for everyone.

The Economist

This is by turns mesmeric and deeply moving: a poetic excavation of the very meaning of history.

Sinclair Mackey, Daily Telegraph

A deeply researched and fascinating double story.... Light hopes the books will encourage others to write their family history as public history, a feat she pulls off brilliantly. It is a hard act to follow.

Sunday Telegraph

Common People is not costume drama but the real thing dirty, tragic but joyous, too.

Mail on Sunday

A moving meditation on the role of family history and on the nature of history itself.... Few historians can match Lights ability to see a subject anew and explore it with imagination and humanity.

Times Higher Education

An exploration of an English family tree the like of which has never been made before.

Claire Tomalin

A remarkable achievement and should become a classic, a worthy successor to E. P. Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class. It is full of humanity.

Margaret Drabble

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Alison Light makes her family speak for England.

Jerry White, author of London in the Eighteenth Century

Contents

List of Illustrations and Credits

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to rectify in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

FIVE GENERATIONS

WHITLOCK

Note to reader: I have simplified these family trees for the purpose of identifying the people mentioned in the chapters.
Dates before 1832 are generally those of baptism not birth.

DOWDESWELL

LIGHTS OF SHREWTON

LIGHTS OF PORTSMOUTH

Two branches of the paternal line

HOSIER/HILL

SMITH

MURPHY/MILLER

HEFFREN

Preface

I began this book because I realized I had no idea where my family came from. Of course I knew things about my parents, and some stories about my grandparents. But I knew very little, and what I did know was not part of a bigger picture. Our family history was especially truncated. My mothers mother was an orphan; my mothers father left his family behind when he joined the navy. The Smiths, my mothers family, ten brothers and sisters, were a universe unto themselves; they had no roots, it seemed, except in the immediate past. On my fathers side, things were equally amputated: his mother died when he was four and nothing much was known about her. His family had then moved across Britain, and lost touch with any cousins or aunts and uncles, had they ever existed. My grandfather Light had died when I was still a baby. I had dabbled in checking births and marriages for my last book, when I researched the women who worked for the writer Virginia Woolf, and had begun an embryonic family tree for my fathers seventieth birthday. I hoped that a family history would bridge the gap between the official records and the felt loss of the person who had really lived, a man or woman who had once been known and cared for.