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.
