Late Victoriana
A London Family. By M. V. Hughes. (Oxford University Press. 15s.)
MRS. HUGHES' trilogy, A London Child of the Seventies, A London Girl of the Eighties and A London Home in the Nineties is now given us in one volume, and it is nothing short of miraculous that she succeeds in holding our sympathetic attention for some 60o pages. The books are devoted to the detailed life of herself and her family between the years 1870 and 19oo, and the miracle lies in the fact that this family neither was, did nor said anything out of the ordinary. It is this very uneventfulness, this monotony of living broken by modest ups and downs, these purely personal joys and griefs, indeed this similitude to our own lives that gives Mrs. Hughes' book an almost hypnotic charm.
Because she makes no effort to colour her chronicle in any way, we feel we have before us an accurate photograph, rather than a picture, of her time ; a time when travelling was difficult, books expensive, sanitation primitive, Sundays sepulchral, fogs impene- trable and families dependent on their own resourcefulness. Her youth was of a simplicity no child could stomach nowadays, con- sisting, as it chiefly did, of running upstairs to fetch things for her four older brothers, and watching them go off on jaunts from which she was excluded. Obviously as bright as a button, she went from school to Cambridge, and from there via various teaching posts and two trips abroad to marriage and four-children.. Neither bluestock- ing, schoolmarm nor feminist, wherever she went she found pleasure in people and things—ordinary people and ordinary things—and guided by her eye we see how valuable these can be.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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