A story of England and Britain, of Empire, migration; of poverty and rebellion in nineteenth-century England, in ‘Oh Happy Day’ Carmen Callil explores her roots and reclaims her ancestors from obscurity. Drawing telling parallels with our own times, Callil argues that social injustice in Britain today is a product of considerable misunderstanding of its history.
Oh Happy Day
Those Times and These Times
By Carmen Callil
Jonathan Cape / November 2020 / hardback / £18.99
In this remarkable book, writer and founder of Virago Press Carmen Callil unearths the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her great-great-grandmother Sary Lacey. Born illegitimate in 1808, Sary was an impoverished stocking frame worker in Leicestershire. Through detailed research, we follow Sary from slum to tenement and from pregnancy to pregnancy. We also meet George Conquest, a canal worker, sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia for stealing a piece of hemp - and then faced with the extraordinary brutality of convict life. In Lincolnshire we meet Mary Ann and John Brooks, skivvies and silversmiths. Their lives traverse workhouses, gaols, pregnancies and villainies – and escape across the seas.
But for George, as for so many destitute and disenfranchised British people like him, Australia turns out to be his Happy Day. He survives, prospers and eventually returns to England, where he meets Sary again, after nearly thirty years. He brings her out to Australia, and they are never parted again.
Carmen Callil not only reclaims her ancestors from obscurity but draws telling parallels for our own times in this moving story of poverty, entitlement, injustice, empire and migration.
TALKING POINTS
Has anything changed, fundamentally, in British society since the 19th century?
Austerity and Brexit are echoed in the battles the English fought amongst themselves over a hundred years ago.
How much do the British really know about the British Empire?
Has Britain been corroded by its Empire – how damaging is it to a society to misunderstand its own history?
An important account of English and British social and political history.
Illuminates the story of refugees and asylum seekers - migration then and migration now.
‘An absorbing account of empire, migration, the poverty of injustice and enduring love…The book bristles with Callil’s righteous anger at the injustices meted out to her forbears, and at the parallels for our own times.’ Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller (Editor’s Choice)
ABOUT CARMEN CALLIL
Carmen Callil was born in Australia but has spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973 and in 1982 became managing director of Chatto & Windus. Her first book, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award.
Carmen is available for interviews, features and events.
Selected praise for Bad Faith
‘A superb exploration of the fractured mind of French anti-Semitism’ - Simon Heffer, Literary Review
‘The story she has uncovered is so strange and powerful that it would be an unusual reader who was not profoundly moved’ - Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday
‘A work of phenomenally thorough, generous and humane scholarship....Callil understands anguish, and lays bare its causes with clarity and precision. Bad Faith exemplifies what Primo Levi called the 'continuous intellectual and moral effort' that is the only adequate response to the events described here’
- Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph
‘Bad Faith is a book of passion and anger which, nonetheless, manages to keep its head as a significant work of history’ - Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday
‘We cannot know what Anne Darquier would have thought of Callil's book, but my guess is that she would have been as moved, astonished and impressed as any other reader’
- Ruth Scurr, The Times
‘Extraordinary...touching... a masterpiece of lacerating satire’
- Peter Conrad, Observer
‘Bad Faith represents eight years of astonishing research...a remarkable book’
- Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph
‘A meticulous work of scholarship... [an] astonishing biography’
- Adam Thorpe, Guardian
‘Impeccably researched, Bad Faith is a work of great power and originality; Callil is to be congratulated on her achievement’ - Sunday Times