In the 18th century, the body snatchers who grubbed up coffins and sold exhumed corpses for medical research were ghoulishly nicknamed “resurrection men”. Carmen Callil, whose motives are a good deal nobler, is a resurrection woman: after a decade spent delving in archives and visiting nameless graves, she has unearthed her family’s past in a book that is both a heartfelt outpouring of pity and sorrow and an irate demand for restitution.
Callil’s antecedents were sweated labourers in the Midlands, the “busy insects of the early Industrial Revolution”. Hunger drove these paupers to commit petty crimes and some of them, when caught, had the good fortune to be shipped out to Australia. That punishment was what Callil calls their “happy day”: the new world allowed them to fill their bellies, bronze their skins and shed their fetters. Callil’s many-stranded narrative concentrates on three clans from Leicester and Lincolnshire whose misery was alleviated by migration to Melbourne. There, they intermarried and after a few generations, cross-pollinated by a Christian immigrant from Lebanon with the patronymic Kahlil (for a while experimentally anglicised as Kelly), they produced little Carmen.
She, however, reversed the family’s history and in her 20s sailed back to the country that expelled her ancestors. Sustained by “the disputatious Australian personality” and the national “lack of deference”, she founded Virago Press in 1973 and began a lifelong campaign to challenge Britain’s snotty imperial delusions. Her new book completes that endeavour, denouncing the 19th-century ruling class along with the predatory swindlers who still mismanage the country.
Oh Happy Day has a precursor in Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, which followed the transported convicts on a journey that unexpectedly led from hell to heaven: the penal colony, intended as a place of infernal suffering, turned out to be a balmy, unspoilt Eden. Hughes modelled The Fatal Shore on sacred epics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost; Callil’s more domestic narrative takes its cue from the social novels of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. She deftly reconstructs the household conditions that oppressed her female forebears – lice-infested and incestuously congested beds, stinking privies, meagre rations and the rattle and bang of rickety looms installed in the cramped cottages where they knitted stockings that were destined, as Callil snarls, to adorn “the wealthier male leg”. The heroine of Oh Happy Day, reared in this “excretal miasma”, is Callil’s great-great-grandmother Sary Lacey, who bore three children to various mates, professed piety whenever she needed a charitable hand-out and periodically changed her surname to confuse officialdom; at last, she escaped to Melbourne and attained respectability as the wife of a goldminer. Sary is an antipodean Mother Courage, a downtrodden battler rather than a feisty cultural warrior like her great-great-grand-daughter.
When Callil tracks the parallel journey of the canal navvy George Conquest, one of Sary’s impregnators, transported for seven years after filching hemp, she laments the anguish of the men who were maimed by the penal system. In one incredulous chapter, she examines the rituals of flogging, sickened by the surgical precision with which the jailers tallied the damage they did. “Blood effused slightly at the sixteenth lash,” says the documentary record of one whipping: the finicky verb has a ghastly frisson. Another note-taker smirks as a victim’s skin ruptures at the eighth stroke, then gloats when, eight lashes later, it is “decidedly flayed off”. What maniacal kink, Callil asks, made the British such devotees of flagellation?
As the book’s subtitle implies, “those times” are not so very different from “these times”. The “social pyramid” that crushed Sary or George is still intact and the charred sentinel of Grenfell Tower, which overshadows Callil’s house, is a daily reminder of the lethal inequality she condemns. Perhaps she exaggerates when she suggests that universal credit has revived the hated Victorian Poor Laws, but her claim that refugees and asylum seekers are our equivalent to the convicts is only too plausible. With Australia no longer available for the dumping of human flotsam, Priti Patel fancies opening an offshore “processing centre” for these stateless wretches on Ascension Island.
By contrast with Callil’s angry political salvos, her evocations of Australian nature ache with homesickness. She likens the birds to “flying jewellery”, smiles at their babbling coloratura and gazes in rapture at the high blue dome that replaces the dank, discoloured English sky. She also admires the succinct cartography of the indigenous people, whose maps were wiped clean by the colonial invaders. Yackandandah, she remarks, is “a wonderfully short word for ‘one boulder on top of another at the junction of two creeks’.” Looking back, Callil perhaps regrets her early choice of expatriation.
Dickens, who sent two sons and a dozen of his disreputable characters to be enriched and/or redeemed in Australia, has frequent walk-ons in Callil’s story. Her subtitle alludes to Hard Times, set in the brutally mechanised industrial Midlands, and she borrows the chapter titles of her first section from that novel. By the end, her characters almost qualify as Dickens’s collateral offspring; attributing the survival of Sary, George and the rest to their talent as “rich fibbers” or “wonderfully inventive liars and fabricators”, Callil shows them to be as gloriously incorrigible as Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit or Micawber in David Copperfield. In its often tearful compassion, its eloquent rage and its vengeful delight in proletarian snook-cocking, Oh Happy Day deserves to be called Dickensian.
• Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times by Carmen Callil is published by Cape (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
