Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times - Hardcover

Callil, Carmen

 
9780224090308: Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times

Inhaltsangabe

Carmen Callil explores her roots in a book that is a miracle of research and whose writing is fuelled by righteous anger – a story of Empire, migration and the poverty and injustice of nineteenth-century England

In this remarkable book, Carmen Callil discovers the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her great-great-grandmother Sary Lacey, born illegitimate in 1808, 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 and the father of one of Sary’s children. George was sentenced – for stealing a piece of hemp – to seven years’ transportation to Australia, where he faced the extraordinary brutality of convict life. Meanwhile, Mary Ann Brooks and her father John, a silversmith, travel across the seas from Lincolnshire to escape the Workhouse and life as a skivvy.

But for George, as for so many destitute and disenfranchised British people like him, Australia turned out to be his Happy Day. He survived, prospered and eventually returned to England, where he met Sary again, after nearly thirty years. He brought her out to Australia, and they were never parted again.

Carmen Callil not only reclaims from obscurity the lives of these ordinary men and women who were sent to Australia as convicts or domestic servants, but also draws telling parallels for our own times. Oh Happy Day is a moving story of poverty, social injustice, Empire and migration.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carmen Callil was born and raised in Melbourne, 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, also remaining Chair of Virago until 1995, when she retired from both publishing houses. She co-edited, with Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950, and her first book, Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award.

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9780224090315: Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0224090313 ISBN 13:  9780224090315
Verlag: Jonathan Cape, 2020
Softcover