The writer and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee has an extraordinary family history. Her maternal great-grandfather and a renowned classical scholar, Gilbert Murray, was the inspiration for Adolphus Cusins in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara.
Her grandfather, Arnold Toynbee, was a world-famous historian who appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Another relative gave his name to Toynbee Hall, a radical charity in London’s East End aiming to eliminate poverty.
The central tension in An Uneasy Inheritance stems from Toynbee’s family trying to reconcile the privileges of their class with the social reforms they espoused. The sense of “moral inadequacy” that beset her liberal, middle-class ancestors, she argues, is intrinsic to the political system.
“To live on the left side,” Toynbee writes, “is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions forever destined to fall short of ideals.”
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In the book, the extreme consequences of this position are embodied by Toynbee’s great-grandfather, Harry. At 46, the strain of his campaigning work induced a mental breakdown. He spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital.
The strongest part of Toynbee’s memoir is her excavation of her family’s singular lineage. Her digressions into class in contemporary Britain can feel like a distraction.
She quotes George Orwell’s diagnosis of England as “the most class-ridden country under the sun” but perhaps Orwell’s description of his background as “lower-upper-middle class” better underlines the country’s preoccupation with social gradations.
Toynbee’s life is imbued with the reforming zeal and contortions of her predecessors. Deported from Rhodesia for her political activism, she won a scholarship to Oxford (a place of “conceits and arrogances”) before quitting and working in various factories. Experience of menial jobs taught Toynbee that a middle-class background granted her repeat chances that typically denied her working-class colleagues.
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Written over 10 years, Toynbee’s occasionally rambling memoir is marked by its compassion, humour and elegiac tone. Frank about her family’s struggles with alcoholism, depression and suicide, the author is scathing of her “obnoxious grandmother” whose cruelty warped Toynbee’s father’s life.
She’s frequently derided by critics as a “champagne socialist” and Boris Johnson characterised her as the “high priestess of political correctness”. Through its family lens, however, An Uneasy Inheritance reaffirms Toynbee’s unshakeable belief in the transformative power of liberal values.
