Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
to return to England to see his family but encourages them to come out to Australia: “[T]his is just the country where we can end our days in peace and contentment when we meet,” he tells his wife (HW, 1.1:24). Here is no nostalgia for England or claim to Englishness but rather a willingness to belong to the new country: “Dear Wife this is a fine Country and a beautiful climate it is like a perpetual Sumer [sic], and I think it will prove congenial for your health” (24). The only concern of the convict who writes the letter is that his family not reveal that they are going out to join a convict: “[Y]ou must come out as emigrants, and when you come ask for me as an emigrant and never use the word Convict or the ship Hashemy on your Voyage never let it be once named among you, let no one know your business but your own selves, and When you Land come to my Masters a [sic] enquire for me and that’s quite sufficient” (24). His concern indicates the prejudice against convicts—the convict stain—which, according to Great Expectations, cannot be erased, in England or Australia. The letter reveals the fluidity of social distinctions in Australia; as long as he and his family do not reveal that he is a convict, he can pass as a respectable, prosperous citizen who is able to support his wife and family in a way he could not do in England. He is one of the many recommended to go “from places where they are not wanted, and are miserable, to places where they are wanted, and can be happy and independent” (24). It could hardly be said more clearly: England does not want the poor and miserable. The article suggests that sending them as emigrants before they have reason to commit crimes rather than after would be better.
“An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” written by well-known emigration promoter Samuel Sidney, focuses in more detail than any of the Household Words articles mentioned so far on the actual details of a convict’s story and his life in Australia. Big Jem, whom the gentleman-narrator meets when he goes to a large cattle station to learn the business, is “a very good fellow,” and the two strike up a friendship as they work and travel together (39). “Living in the Bush,” the narrator tells us, “there is not the same distance between a master and well-behaved man, although a prisoner, as in towns” (39)—or, we might add, as in England. While riding together, Jem tells his story to the narrator. A prize-winning ploughman, Jem lost his job when his master decided suddenly to leave his estate. Jem, married young to a woman he loves, inadvertently fell in with some machine breakers who were caught at that moment, and he was transported along with them. Because he is an excellent ploughman, he is in great demand in Australia, where such skilled workers are relatively rare, but his assigned master invents infractions to keep the ploughman from getting a ticket-of-leave and becoming his own master. Jem notes the possibilities for hard-working convicts who work out their sentences: “I saw so many who had been prisoners riding about in their carriages, or driving teams of their own, as good as the ’Squire’s” (42). Failing to achieve this kind of social mobility despite his marketable skills and hard work, he becomes so frustrated that he indulges in theft and is sentenced to three years’ hard labor. Luckily, his term is shortened by a year for “rescuing a gentleman from a bushranger” (42) and he immediately reforms and is assigned to a better master. He tries twice to bring his wife out but is swindled out of his money, until on the third try the narrator arranges for her emigration. The result is what one would expect in this typical Australian tale: he and his wife “have now a station and farm of their own; they are growing rich, as all such industrious people do in Australia, but they have not forgotten that they once were poor” (43). Now that they have given up their English identity, their son is poised to be “a native Representative in an Australian Parliament” (42). Ejected from England for resisting his place in the social hierarchy, the ploughman has not only disappeared from the social system he tried to resist but also, through “honest, sober labour” (42, emphasis in original), has become rich and respectable, marked by the fact that he is now addressed as “Mr. Carden” instead of “Big Jem.”
Thus, Dickens unquestionably knew about transported convicts who succeeded in Australia and did not return to trouble England and its social hierarchy as Magwitch and most of the other convicts do in his novels. Litvack concludes that Dickens could have given more detail about Magwitch’s experiences in Australia but that his point was to objectify the convict and to focus on “the drama of the tale, with its sheer human tragedy and passion; any great attention to detail would have marred the overall effect” (II:117, 123). I would suggest, rather, that having Magwitch return to disrupt the story of the new English national subject, the bourgeois gentleman, shows how crucial it was for those who had defied the social structure with its sacrosanct rules about property and hierarchy to be not only removed from England to Australia but also to stay there. By 1859, readers would have known that convicts could and did prosper there, which assuaged the national conscience, but those banished could not be permitted to return to disturb England’s own class system, however rich they might have become. Pip himself has already done enough of that.
Besides the articles about working-class convicts succeeding—or potentially succeeding—in Australia, there were many other stories about transported convicts in Household Words.33 Some of these, as discussed above, focused on the punishment side of transportation; there was a special fascination with Norfolk Island, the most notorious of the secondary penal settlements, where brutal and sadistic tortures were reportedly meted out to prisoners for minor infractions and escape was almost impossible. Located in remote locations, the public had no access to these sites; thus, they were virtually invisible. A two-part series contributed to Household Words by William Moy Thomas, titled “Transported for Life,” portrays the severe treatment imposed on convicts at the most dreaded and isolated of the penal stations and sheds some light on what went on there. Describing his arrival at the settlement, the narrator sums up his eventual experience there: “I was prepared to meet great hardships; but I did not expect the horrors which awaited me. In happy ignorance, my feelings were rather of an agreeable kind as I first set foot on that paradise; which, changed by the wickedness of man, has been since termed, ‘The Ocean Hell’” (V.123:464). The article leaves no doubt that transportation to such a place was a severe punishment, physically and mentally. Ken Gelder makes a direct connection between the dreaded penal settlements and the genre of gothic literature because of the purported atrocities and the fact that prisoners from the settlements rarely emerged alive (386). This is one of the few stories in Household Words that share the generic tropes of the gothic with Great Expectations.
Thomas’s story, which he introduces as having “been taken down from the lips of the narrator,” is based on the experience of a historical transported convict, William Henry Barber, who was falsely convicted and eventually pardoned (V.123:455). Barber, unlike the other convicts discussed above, was a gentleman. Thomas has his character portray the torments of transportation in first person to make the story of the infamous Norfolk Island more convincing, especially because readers would trust a narrator who was both innocent, with no heinous crime to hide, and a gentleman, who is assumed to be trustworthy by virtue of his position—he is thus doubly punished by being sent to Norfolk Island.
Such stories of genteel convicts were regularly featured in Household Words. Thomas’s articles about Barber’s experience at Norfolk Island are related in some detail, partly because of their gothic appeal and partly because it demonstrates that the worst convicts in Australia were behind the scenes in secondary penal settlements, appropriately punished and essentially invisible to the other inhabitants of Australia. In Thomas’s story, however, starting from the time the narrator is convicted, through the journey to Australia and his time in confinement, the chief punishment for him is not physical suffering but degradation. As soon as the trial is over, for instance, he is “chained leg to leg with a man who had been twice convicted of burglary” (V.123:455). He laments “the strange destiny which had cast [him] among such companions,” while constantly seeking convicts of good character and especially savoring conversation with other gentlemen, such as the surgeon, the chaplain, and the officers (V.124:482). He most abhors being assigned the job of “wardsman,” which entails cleaning up after the other convicts while they are at hard labor, as demeaning and humiliating. Always maintaining both his innocence and his gentility, this convict, who would have been treated as a “special” in an earlier era of transportation history, is portrayed as suffering more than working-class convicts merely because he is forced to intimately associate with them. Some writers argued, in