Every town has its Rawlinson report, its grim accounts of filthy streets and wretched, overcrowded hovels. Why dwell on such details? In Britain most of us doing family history will find that our ancestors were poor by our standards; their lives were harder, shorter; they lived in accommodation we could hardly stomach, on streets whose stench would make us gag; their diseases were more terrible and unchecked; their morality wayward and improvised; their accidents crippling. They coped; they put up with it; they died of it. From the perspective of much of the documentation of the period, my ancestors were merely part of what one local historian of Portsmouth calls ‘the perennial inescapable problem of poverty’. But much of it was escapable. Why go back to the past only to feel washed by an amorphous pity? Anger is more bracing. Nor is this merely a matter

Ec Why dwell on such details? In Britain most of us doing family history will find that our ancestors were poor by our standards; their lives were harder, shorter; they lived in accommodation we could hardly stomach, on streets whose stench would make us gag; their diseases were more terrible and unchecked; their morality wayward and improvised; their accidents crippling. They coped; they put up with it; they died of it. From the perspective of much of the documentation of the period, my ancestors were merely part of what one local historian of Portsmouth calls ‘the perennial inescapable problem of poverty’. But much of it was escapable. Why go back to the past only to feel washed by an amorphous pity? Anger is more bracing. 

A. Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (2014), loc. 3,479