Ten Generations

Piecing together the story of more than one hundred of his ancestors across the British Isles and beyond from the 1650s to the 1950s, Mark Lowcock presents an extraordinary piece of social and family history in his new book Ten Generations: A Family Story from Rags to Riches.

They were ordinary people: barmen, carpenters, coal miners, dockers, domestic servants, dressmakers, glass blowers, labourers, sailors, shop assistants and textile workers. Ten Generations documents their gradual escape from grinding poverty and oppression through the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and the wild oscillations of the first half of the twentieth century, to a position of relative prosperity and freedom.  

Ranging widely across food, clothes, education, living conditions, healthcare, work, religion, rights and social mores, travel, sex and entertainment, Ten Generations is a compelling depiction of the joys and strains of life and how it changed for the better for ordinary people as the centuries passed.