Uncommon History

Alison Light’s Common People, the History of an English Family is uncommon history of the highest order. Light binds together thinking with feeling as she toggles between small and big; inside and out; the intimate and the impersonal; literature and history; the local, the national and the global. Common People reworks a venerable tradition of social history that reclaims the lives of humble people, like her own ancestors, who made nails, saddles, and stays; who laid bricks and sailed the seas. Roads and highways count as much as factory floors, needle-making and brick-laying as much as textile manufacture in Light’s highly original account of the mobile women and men who made industrial capitalism. Light puts into productive conversation the psychosocial uses of how families remember stories about their past – ‘tall tales’ – with social-historical detective work about what actually happened. ‘Secrets and lies’, Light avers, are ‘a staple ingredient of family history.’ (p. 128) Her aim is not to prove them false, although she often does. Instead, she explains the affective logic that led people to bequeath to future generations ‘tissue[s] of fabrications’ (p. 128) passing for memories. ‘Tall stories are emotional truths as revealing as the census’, she astutely observes. (p. 130) Her grandfather’s romantic stories of suffering disinheritance for marrying beneath him, Light learns, were a fiction meant to soften the more painful reality of his downward social mobility into the pinched squalor of a scruffy Portsmouth terrace house packed with ten children.

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Conversation · Feeling · Literature · Political science · Romance · Social history (medicine) · Sociology · Australian History and Society · History · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Short Stories in Global Literature · Social Psychology