Oh Happy Day

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 tene...