Earlier this month, I posted an excerpt from A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes.
Since then, I've been re-reading it and enjoying it greatly. It's a brief, rambling, and episodic little volume, sedately endearing and unpretentious.

Having enjoyed it, my plan for the next few days is to share that enjoyment with the rest of you. The excerpts I'll present have no particular rhyme or reason to them. They're just conveniently bite-sized anecdotes that I found amusing, or touching, or merely drenched in a pleasant surrogate nostalgia for "Merrie England".

Who knows? Perhaps you'll enjoy them enough that you'll hunt down your own copy. At any rate, best we begin at the beginning...

None of the characters in this book are fictitious. The incidents, if not dramatic, are at least genuine memories. Expressions of jollity and enjoyment of life are understatements rather than overstatements. We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people. It occurred to me to record our doings only because, on looking back, and comparing our lot with that of the children of to-day, we seemed to have been so lucky. In writing them down, however, I have come to realize that luck is at one's own disposal, that 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so'. Bring up children in the conviction that they are lucky, and behold they are. But in our case high spirits were perhaps inherited, as my story will show.