Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
Transported to Botany Bay
Series in Victorian Studies
Series editors: Joseph McLaughlin and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835
Rebecca Rainof, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity
Erika Wright, Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, editors, Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics
Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell, editors, Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts
Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier
Dorice Williams Elliott, Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict
Melisa Klimaszewski, Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals
Transported to Botany Bay
CLASS, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE LITERARY FIGURE OF THE AUSTRALIAN CONVICT
DORICE WILLIAMS ELLIOTT
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2019 by Ohio University Press
All rights reserved
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
Cover art: “Convicts embarking for Botany Bay,” by T. Rowlandson.
Courtsesy National Library of Australia
Cover design by Beth Pratt
Printed in the United States of America
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elliott, Dorice Williams, 1951- author.
Title: Transported to Botany Bay : class, national identity, and the literary figure of the Australian convict / Dorice Williams Elliott.
Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, [2019] | Series: Series in Victorian studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058620| ISBN 9780821423622 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446690 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: English fiction--18th century--History and criticism. | Exiles in literature. | Prisoners in literature. | Penal colonies in literature. | Australia--In literature.
Classification: LCC PR858.E97 E45 2019 | DDC 823/.509--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058620
To Brooke, Jane, and Colin
CONTENTS
Convict Transportation to Australia
National Identity and Social Class
The Transported Convict as a Guarantor of Ideal Englishness
Imagining an Australian Identity
The Literary Figure of the Convict in Australia
ONE: Dickens and the Transported Convict
TWO: Englishness and the Working Class in Transportation Broadsides
The Cultural Work of the Broadsides
Broadside Ballads and Their Tunes
The Visual Impact of the Broadsides
Full-Sheet Broadsides and Levels of Literacy
The (Mistaken) Land of Exile
THREE: Writing Convicts and Hybrid Genres
The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux
Convict-Authored Novels
Quintus Servinton
Ralph Rashleigh
FOUR: The Transported Convict Novel
The English Convict Novel as a Genre
The Working-Class Woman Convict: The History of Margaret Catchpole
G. P. R. James’s The Convict: A Tale
Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend
FIVE: Convict Servants and Genteel Mistresses in Women’s Convict Fiction
George Eliot’s Adam Bede
Mary Vidal and “The Convict Laundress”
Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow
Eliza Winstanley’s For Her Natural Life
SIX: After Transportation: Three Approaches
Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life
Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life
Anthony Trollope’s Harry Heathcote of Gangoil