Polly Toynbee’s great-grandfather Gilbert Murray, the finest classical scholar of the early 20th century – and, like so many in Toynbee’s family, an activist for what are now called progressive causes – eventually despaired of his hope for the future. “My greenness was unbelievable,” he wrote in a passage Toynbee quotes. “I believed passionately in the progress of man. It was perhaps not quite inevitable, but it only needed the removal of a few selfish and reactionary old people to make the world a new Garden of Eden, with more scientific gardening.” This faith in human improvement is the chief family trait that Toynbee delineates and wrestles with in her heartfelt memoir, An Uneasy Inheritance. It is a book that places her, and her eminent and unusual family, in the context of their time and tries to reckon with what this means in our own.
Toynbee probably needs little introduction to most readers of this paper. A columnist for the Guardian for many years, she was formerly the BBC’s social affairs editor and her journalism has won many awards, including the Orwell prize. She is under no illusions, however, that this contemporary renown guarantees any memorial: most of the people she considers here, so well regarded in their day, are largely forgotten in the 21st century. Not only Murray, but her grandfather, historian Arnold Toynbee, who believed his 12-volume magnum opus, A Study of History, would be a permanent monument; her grandmother, the ferociously unpleasant Rosalind, who churned out melodramatic novels she was convinced would bring her enduring fame. Of her writer father Philip she notes that his “name is barely known now, cropping up here and there in footnotes and anecdotes in other people’s biographies”. Yet part of the pleasure of this volume is the way in which she reanimates their striking lives.
But her project is not simply to glorify her family’s past. This is an investigation of the meaning of privilege in Britain, of whether the brutal inequalities of what George Orwell called “the most class-ridden country under the sun” could ever be transcended. The stories she tells of her childhood are not hopeful. She longed to play with local girls in Suffolk when she stayed at weekends with her father and stepmother, only to be greeted with cries of “Here she comes, Miss La-di-da!” or told plainly, “You’re not my type.” Yet her father’s “posh” cottage had no electricity; the houses of the girls who dismissed her had all mod cons. That, writes Toynbee, is the “damned subtlety” of class, mysterious and yet perfectly apparent to those fixed in place by its immovable pins.
Polly Toynbee is not expecting anyone to feel sorry for her. She is deeply aware of how lucky she is, her talent eclipsed by the sheer luck of being born in the time and place she was. Breezing into Oxford despite her lack of qualifications, she was able to do the same at the Observer, sliding into a job, as she puts it, in 1968. Asking around for writing work, she discovered that a temp was needed as cover on the Pendennis column; when that stint ended, the page editor, Anne Chisholm, simply added her to the payroll. “If I were starting out now I would never get near a newspaper job,” she acknowledges. I wonder, however, whether that’s true, as it seems to me that those judged to be the right sort still slide into jobs denied to those better qualified but with fewer connections.
This is a book of secrets and sorrows. Hers was always a family committed to social justice, yet there was a price to be paid for this commitment: “Liberal ancestors agonised over the excruciating moral embarrassments of social class.” Her paternal great-grandfather, Harry Toynbee, was one. His charismatic elder brother was the namesake of Toynbee Hall , still a cornerstone of reforming zeal in London’s East End; Harry, however, toiled in the trenches of charity administration and was, in the end, broken by his efforts, ending his days in a psychiatric hospital. He was torn between his need to earn a living to support his family and his need to do good work: “That rift may have cost him his sanity.”
The same might be said of Toynbee’s father, Philip, who turned his home into a commune with disastrous results. Knowing he was unsuited for such a life, he took it on anyhow, as a kind of punishment for his privilege; as his daughter writes: “To live on the left side is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions forever destined to fall short of ideals, social concern never enough.”
The stories Toynbee tells are compelling and moving; the book has a freeform style, anecdotal and confiding, sometimes a little disorganised (there are section headings such as “Pause here for Roy Jenkins’ social class”). She is well aware that she may well be preaching to the converted. In these pages is a tale she’s told before, of encountering the infant Boris Johnson, who would later say of the author that “she incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending, schoolmarminess of Blair’s Britain… Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness.” She is ready to be sneered at for her perceived hypocrisy: “Rightwingers may loathe us as morally smug, but so be it: we stand instinctively with the underdog.”
Yet what Gilbert Murray described as his “greenness” persists in the convictions of his great-granddaughter. Her family believed in a better future; so does she. Her memoir is a testament to the endurance – and sometimes the cost – of that belief.
• An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals by Polly Toynbee is published by Atlantic (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
