A Victorian family

1870-1900

Plot

'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.