Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family

If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to whom history belongs and how we’ve chosen to define it. Well into the modern era, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s definition of the subject as ‘the biography of great men’, seems to endure. Most remember their school history lessons as a force-fed diet of monarchs’ names, battles and key dates, or as a narrative about palace-dwelling elites whose experiences seemed utterly removed from reality. It is undoubtedly why the subject in its most uncut Victorian form can seem so unpalatable to the general public.

Conversely, it also goes a long way to explaining the popularity of the BBC hit series Who Do You Think You Are?, now in its 17th season. While the programme’s success can partly be attributed to the celebrity pedigrees laid out for inspection, the power of the series’ subversive message shouldn’t be underestimated: no matter who one is or what one’s origins, history has played a role in shaping all of our lives. Removed from its mountain top and presented in this form, grass-roots history on a micro level can be everything we believed history wasn’t — personal, intimate, surprising and, dare one even suggest it, exciting.

If ever there was a time for Carmen Callil’s pensive and lyrical telling of her family’s humble history it is now. Oh Happy Day! masquerades as a small narrative about Callil’s impoverished ancestors, but unfolds into an epic examination of the Victorian era, its corrosive mores, oppressive rules, its well-intentioned ideologies and punitive institutions. We are taken through the industrial slums of the Midlands, into the mouldering hovels of cottage workers who toiled through sickness and starvation.