Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
work of scholars such as those in Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stuart’s edited collection Chain Letters (2001) and Ian Duffield and James Bradley’s Representing Convicts (1997). Both volumes have careful examinations of less traditional genres, including love tokens, tattoos, convict indents, and prison interviews. These studies, however, seek primarily to find authentic convict voices and to discover how Australia’s convict heritage has shaped contemporary Australian society. In this project, in contrast, I am looking not for authenticity or texts that record the actuality of convict lives but rather at how literary representations of transported felons worked to shape social relations and national identity in both Australia and England.
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The organization of this book perhaps requires a little explanation. Because I discuss both canonical and little-known literary works, I have not followed a strict chronological pattern in examining them. In general, both in the order of the chapters in the book and within the chapters themselves, I begin with the most canonical work (if there is one) or with an explanation of the work of a genre, followed by a consideration of less well-known texts that add to or differ from it, in basically chronological order. Where I vary from this sequence, I explain why. Thus, I begin the numbered chapters with the most canonical convict figure in nineteenth-century literature, Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations, read in conjunction with Dickens’s Household Words. After that, I return to working-class broadsides that were printed from early to midcentury, working from there in roughly chronological order until the early 1880s, just before the political pre-Federation movement really began and after convict transportation to Australia had completely ended.
In Great Expectations, as well as a few of his other novels, Dickens deploys what had become a common nineteenth-century literary device of transporting temporarily unneeded characters to the “green room” of Australia (Litvack, I:26). I argue that the transported convict figure in Dickens’s writings did important ideological work and that he sets up in his novels and his midcentury journalism many of the issues discussed in this book. Great Expectations is something of an anachronism (as are most of the other convict novels) because it was published in 1861, at least a decade after transportation to the east coast of Australia and to Tasmania had been abolished. Great Expectations and some of his other novels portray transported convicts as returning to England, refusing therefore to be repressed and do the cultural work expected of them by the practice of exiling malcontents to the Antipodes. Dickens’s journalism, published in Household Words in the 1850s, calls attention to this anachronism by following many convicts to Australia and showing how they are integrated into Australian society and identity. With its pro-emigration stance, the journal generally works to show that Australia is no longer just a depot for convicts but is now a safe and desirable place for the working classes, and others who have failed to thrive in England, to prosper. Chapter 1, then, examines the way that Dickens’s novels imagine the convict as a sympathetic but discordant emblem of England’s social problems whom the legal system tries to banish but who almost always returns, refusing to be forgotten. While Dickens does not often directly represent the rural countryside with its Anglo-Saxon pseudofeudal hierarchy, he nonetheless assumes a traditional paternal model for class relations, frequently applied to an urban environment. He also addresses the issue of social mobility, especially in the character of Pip in Great Expectations, and how the changing notion of what constitutes the English gentleman is imbricated with the problem of the nonconforming members of the working class that transportation hoped to, but ultimately could not, rid the nation of, thus putting the harmonious social hierarchy of English national identity into question. The journalism, recognizing that transportation is no longer an option, attempts to solve the same social problems caused by industrialization and urbanization by encouraging voluntary transportation—assisting emigrants before their problems lead to felonies rather than after. Thus, the novels use transported convicts to reinforce English identity, while the journalism helps readers imagine an Australian identity. This distinction mirrors the historical trajectory of the works I examine in the succeeding chapters.
In the second chapter, I take up what many would consider a nonliterary genre, the popular broadside marketed primarily to working-class people in Britain. I use a selection of the broadsides that specifically address transportation to Australia to explain how they allowed the working classes to imagine themselves as part of a more-inclusive English national identity. The broadsides, which usually included not only text but also illustrations and tunes, reached both those who could read and those who were illiterate, thus extending the reach of the imagined community beyond that which Benedict Anderson describes. Broadsides that feature convicts transported to Australia simultaneously call up Australia and erase it, failing to envision it as an alternative identity but instead enabling the working-class “readers” to perceive themselves as part of the English nation. The form, as well as the contents, of the broadsides contributed in an essential way to this ideological project. The amalgamation of earlier broadsides about transportation to America with those about Australia also served to muddy the working classes’ imagination of Australia as a place or transportation as a punishment, instead reinforcing the desirability of an English national identity even if the readers themselves played a subordinate role in the social hierarchy.
In the third chapter, “Writing Convicts and Hybrid Genres,” I focus on the earliest published memoir written by a convict while under sentence, along with two autobiographical novels, Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton (1830) and James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh (written around 1845 but not published until 1920), also both written by actual convicts. Although historically all three ended their lives in Australia, two of them certainly and possibly all three still convicts under sentence, they used their literary productions to maintain their difference from other, working-class convicts and to maintain their English identity. Employing conventions of autobiography, all three of these convict writers used their texts to establish themselves as men who, though they made mistakes, were still unquestionably not only English but gentlemen. They did this by capitalizing on and displaying the cultural capital of knowing the literary conventions that enabled them to write books for publication, as well as by stressing the ideal of domesticity that characterizes the English middle-class subject.
Chapter 4 defines the new genre of the transported convict novel, placing its form and the cultural work it accomplishes in relation to other forms such as travel narratives and ethnography. The chapter examines three novels by popular English novelists: G. P. R. James’s The Convict: A Tale (1847), Richard Cobbold’s Margaret Catchpole (1845), and Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), all with transported convicts as protagonists. The discussion shows how these novels portray an idealized pseudofeudal social class hierarchy as the stable base of an English national identity that is threatened by nonconforming working-class convicts. Whether portrayed as dissidents or common criminals, these convicts need to be expelled to maintain a stable hierarchy back home in England. At the same time, each of these novels portrays working-class convicts reforming in Australia and consciously taking on a new Australian identity—one that involves a measure of social mobility. Thus, this chapter shows that those who called themselves gentry clung to their English national identity, while those who were convicts or tainted with convictism had to accept their Australian identity.
In chapter 5, “Convict Servants and Genteel Mistresses in Women’s Convict Fiction,” I take up the role of female convicts, who were almost always assigned to domestic service in Australia, in forming a new identity for a potential new Australian nation. These female convicts appear in philanthropic reform narratives, tales for servants, and novels, all by middle-class female authors, who had their own agendas for writing about their criminal sisters. The works I discuss in this chapter include George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859); Mary Vidal’s short story, “The Convict Laundress” (1852); Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow (1859); and Eliza Winstanley’s For Her Natural Life (1876). Although the female convict is usually portrayed by these English women writers as both sympathetic and reformable, her main function is to serve as the sign of her Australian mistress’s social position as part of the dominant class in