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book review - Hancox
Sep. 16th, 2014 07:33 amSo I've lately been reading a book called Hancox, by Charlotte Moore, and have absolutely loved it, so wanted to talk about it a bit.
Hancox is the story of a family - no, the history of a family, Moore's own family. The author Charlotte Moore lives at Hancox, an old Tudor farmhouse in East Sussex; her children are the 5th generation of the same family to live in the old house since it was purchased back in the 1880s by a single young woman named Milicent, who was just 20 years old at the time, independent enough and determined enough to set out to run the house and work the farm herself – a far cry from the stereotypical image of the upper middle-class Victorian maiden! Moore is in the fortunate position of coming from a family with a habit of never throwing anything away, which means she is sitting on a veritable goldmine of social history - thousands of letters, journals, sketches, account books, notebooks, postcards, family magazines, school reports, photo albums and the like, from which it is possible to piece together a remarkably full picture of several generations of extended family through the 19th and into the 20th century. Moore makes the point in her introduction that this is the best-documented age in human history, at least among this particular class, who were both highly literate and had sufficient leisure to write, copiously. And so, in Hancox, Moore has pulled together a book that could almost be calculated to tick my boxes - family history, social history, a story about people and personalities, real lives placed within the context of the world in which they lived.
Hancox is full of vivid personalities, drawn from the pages of their correspondence: the bold explorer uncle with a worrisome fondness for young women; the passionate early suffragette who worked tirelessly for women's rights, the querulous lesbian aunt whose lover was accepted as part of the family; the dirt-poor Irish lad who rose to the top of the medical profession; the beautiful young wife who spiralled into insanity which could neither be adequately diagnosed nor treated in the 1860s; the dignified general who refused to shut his insane young wife away but strove for years to keep her at the centre of their family; the lively young lad who joined the army to please his girlfriend only for WWI to break out later that year and see him shot dead within weeks, leaving his family bereft. There's a cousin whose eccentricities would be diagnosed as autism today, while women in successive generations developed what was euphemised as 'the family taint' but would today be diagnosed as mental illness (often triggered by post-natal depression). Moore deftly pulls together the strands of all these interwoven lives to spin a tale as compelling as any novel - maybe more so, because this is not fiction but a biography of real people, lives separated from ours by the passage of time, belonging to an entirely different age, and yet instantly relatable. From the pages of their letters and journals we can trace the issues they had to deal which, not so different from the issues we deal with today: mental health, learning disorders, family arguments, star-crossed lovers divided by disapproving parents, infidelity, friendship, love, loss, loyalty, betrayal - it's all in there, told via the distinct voices of the individuals concerned.
I'm rather fond of this snippet, written in 1920 of an elderly aunt: "[On Bella's wedding day] Aunt Nanny seemed quite cheerful and it was only as the bride and bridegroom were leaving the house that her brow darkened; she had caught sight of a bag of golf clubs. Though severe, she was also sentimental and she expected, I felt sure, that honeymoon couples should do nothing but hold each others' hands; it had shocked her to think they might play golf!"
Anyhoo, I've rambled on long enough – suffice to say that I really enjoyed this book and thoroughly recommend it!
Hancox is the story of a family - no, the history of a family, Moore's own family. The author Charlotte Moore lives at Hancox, an old Tudor farmhouse in East Sussex; her children are the 5th generation of the same family to live in the old house since it was purchased back in the 1880s by a single young woman named Milicent, who was just 20 years old at the time, independent enough and determined enough to set out to run the house and work the farm herself – a far cry from the stereotypical image of the upper middle-class Victorian maiden! Moore is in the fortunate position of coming from a family with a habit of never throwing anything away, which means she is sitting on a veritable goldmine of social history - thousands of letters, journals, sketches, account books, notebooks, postcards, family magazines, school reports, photo albums and the like, from which it is possible to piece together a remarkably full picture of several generations of extended family through the 19th and into the 20th century. Moore makes the point in her introduction that this is the best-documented age in human history, at least among this particular class, who were both highly literate and had sufficient leisure to write, copiously. And so, in Hancox, Moore has pulled together a book that could almost be calculated to tick my boxes - family history, social history, a story about people and personalities, real lives placed within the context of the world in which they lived.
Hancox is full of vivid personalities, drawn from the pages of their correspondence: the bold explorer uncle with a worrisome fondness for young women; the passionate early suffragette who worked tirelessly for women's rights, the querulous lesbian aunt whose lover was accepted as part of the family; the dirt-poor Irish lad who rose to the top of the medical profession; the beautiful young wife who spiralled into insanity which could neither be adequately diagnosed nor treated in the 1860s; the dignified general who refused to shut his insane young wife away but strove for years to keep her at the centre of their family; the lively young lad who joined the army to please his girlfriend only for WWI to break out later that year and see him shot dead within weeks, leaving his family bereft. There's a cousin whose eccentricities would be diagnosed as autism today, while women in successive generations developed what was euphemised as 'the family taint' but would today be diagnosed as mental illness (often triggered by post-natal depression). Moore deftly pulls together the strands of all these interwoven lives to spin a tale as compelling as any novel - maybe more so, because this is not fiction but a biography of real people, lives separated from ours by the passage of time, belonging to an entirely different age, and yet instantly relatable. From the pages of their letters and journals we can trace the issues they had to deal which, not so different from the issues we deal with today: mental health, learning disorders, family arguments, star-crossed lovers divided by disapproving parents, infidelity, friendship, love, loss, loyalty, betrayal - it's all in there, told via the distinct voices of the individuals concerned.
I'm rather fond of this snippet, written in 1920 of an elderly aunt: "[On Bella's wedding day] Aunt Nanny seemed quite cheerful and it was only as the bride and bridegroom were leaving the house that her brow darkened; she had caught sight of a bag of golf clubs. Though severe, she was also sentimental and she expected, I felt sure, that honeymoon couples should do nothing but hold each others' hands; it had shocked her to think they might play golf!"
Anyhoo, I've rambled on long enough – suffice to say that I really enjoyed this book and thoroughly recommend it!
