Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
his previous life. Because Barber was a gentleman-convict, however, when he was pardoned he was allowed to return to England and resume his English middle-class identity, losing the convict stain and turning his back on Australia—beautiful though he found it. As an innocent gentleman, Barber does not endanger England’s social hierarchy or England’s sense of itself as a harmonious and humane nation, nor does he need the new start that becoming Australian could give him. Telling his story is one way of reassuring English readers that the really bad convicts are made invisible at the penal stations, not appearing on the streets of Australia. Almost the only way of revealing their much-deserved and horrible punishment is by having a special convict such as the one whose story Thomas recounts do the telling, since he is one of only a few to have experienced the penal stations in person.
Another series of articles that focused on the experiences of special convicts, those who were not punished by being sent to penal stations as Barber was, ran in Household Words throughout 1859, just before the serial publication of Great Expectations beginning in 1860. The series was written by John Lang, who sent many of his contributions to Household Words from Australia and also penned several novels, including two about Australian convicts (The Forger’s Wife and Botany Bay). Special convicts, explains Lang, “were gentlemen by birth and education, who had been convicted of offences which, however heinous in a legal point of view, did not involve any particular degree of baseness” (“Special,” 489). Such crimes included what we would call “white collar crimes,” such as forgery and passing fictitious bills, and “crimes of passion,” including murder to avenge a sister’s seduction and dueling. Each of the articles portrays a different special convict, two of them women, and their experiences in Australia, in the voice of an “informant (an old lady who had been the wife of a government official in New South Wales).” All but one of these special convicts came under the administration of Lachlan Macquarie and were not treated like common thieves and receivers of stolen property, but with great consideration. If they were not emancipated immediately on their arrival, they were suffered to be at large, without the formality of a ticket of leave. They were, in short, treated rather as prisoners of war on their parole, than as prisoners of the Crown in a penal settlement. Grants of land were not given to them while they were in actual bondage, but they were permitted to locate themselves on any unoccupied pieces of land in the vicinity of Sydney (Lang, “Special,” 489). Seemingly these special convicts were of interest to the Household Words audience not only because they were unusual, going against the stereotype of transported convicts, but also because they were more like the readers themselves; thus, readers might identify and commiserate with these convicts, while also feeling reassured that the presence of convicts in Australia did not necessarily make it an unattractive place to which to emigrate if one needed to recoup one’s fortunes by “going out.” A respectable emigrant would not be “punished” as specials were by having to interact socially with working-class felons, except perhaps to have them as servants. Any special convicts living around such emigrants could be imagined as respectable despite their unfortunate official status as convicts. Even the publication of this series about specials indicates the audience’s interest in convicts of a higher class. Historically there were so few of them that devoting this much attention to their stories is wildly out of proportion to the number of specials vs. regular convicts.
Some of the specials to whom the reader was introduced in Lang’s series were titled, including Baron Wald of Germany and Sir Henry Hayes, an Irish baronet who “took a prominent part in the rebellion” (“Special,” 490). The latter, says Lang’s informant, “was surrounded by every comfort that money could purchase, and he was always glad to see persons of whom he was in the habit of speaking as ‘those of my own order’” (490). The paradox that Australia presented in such cases, in which a convict could be of inherently higher status than his free peers, could be read as titillating to those Australians who had already raised their class status in the colonies’ more open society and to those English readers who imagined themselves doing so if they emigrated.
The two female specials introduced in Lang’s series are particularly worthy of notice because their eventual fates demonstrate the possibilities for social mobility available to women convicts in Australia. Annie St. Felix, featured in the May 28 issue, was an Irishwoman transported for her role in the murder of a man in revenge for betraying her cousin and destroying the reputation of her brother, who was hanged for the crime. Miss St. Felix had the misfortune to be transported during Sir Ralph Darling’s administration, after Governor Macquarie had departed, and so she was not treated as a special. She did have the good fortune, though, to be assigned as a needlewoman to a Mr. and Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Preston being described as “a lady of aristocratic birth and breeding” (“Miss St. Felix,” 614). Annie proved herself so superior to other servants that she became almost part of the family, and when Mrs. Preston died, Mr. Preston married her. He eventually obtained a free pardon for her so that they could return to England to take possession of a large property that he inherited. Thus, because of her extraordinary domesticity, the female special convict regained her appropriate station in life, including returning to the metropole and taking on a new English identity, supposedly even better than her former Irish one. Kate Crawford, in contrast, convicted of horse stealing (though she only “borrowed” the horse from a neighbor who prosecuted her because of a quarrel with her father), after some suffering in the colony, received a grant of land. Although “she did not cease to be what the vulgar call ‘a fine lady,’” Lang’s informant tells us, “she made herself a woman of business, and a shrewd one too” (“Kate Crawford,” 600). Never marrying, Kate Crawford amassed her own fortune, totaling “as nearly as possible half a million sterling” in Australia, an opportunity that would have been extremely rare for a single woman in England. Adopting her new identity as an Australian thus offered her both economic rewards and independence. Interestingly, despite these two portraits of historical special convicts, fictional genteel women convicts (as I discuss in chapter 5) are more likely than male convicts to suffer persecution and early death. In those representations, Australia is a place where they can have no identity once their class status is lowered by becoming convicts. In Household Words, however, genteel women convicts do have a chance to redeem themselves and rebuild a national identity, be it English or Australian.
In short, while there is considerable variety in the representation of transported convicts in Dickens’s Household Worlds, almost all of the articles portray Australia as a safe and promising place for free emigrants, willing to transport themselves out of England voluntarily. They are assured that if they work hard, they can succeed beyond what is possible in England. If they are working-class emigrants, though, they will have to become like convicts in giving up their English identity. If they are genteel emigrants, they can exploit Australia’s resources and return to England with their fortunes gained or replenished, thus repairing the ravages of social and economic change on English identity. Convicts are depicted as appropriately punished if very wicked or enabled to restore or gain respectability and prosperity once they have completed their terms if they are hardworking and well behaved. This message differs from that of Dickens’s fiction, which focuses on the threat of the working-class convict who returns to England to disrupt and destabilize its social hierarchy and its sense of itself as a civilized and eminently respectable nation. However, as in Great Expectations, Australian money may subsidize the rise of the bourgeois gentleman, the paradigmatic English national subject. Also, the journal articles reassure English and potential Australian emigrants that the worst convicts have been truly punished. In the articles about specials, the journal shows that they were punished just by having to associate with ordinary convicts; but really dangerous convicts are isolated at the penal stations, while specials have mostly been able to find a life in Australia even despite their crimes. Associating with them would not threaten anyone’s respectability.
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Although there is a discernible difference in purpose between the figure of the transported convict in Dickens’s fiction and the transported convicts shown in the various articles in Household Words, which he supervised and condoned even when he did not write them, even in the fiction he is basically sympathetic toward the criminal who reforms and is penitent. While transported convicts are supposed to disappear and take their challenge to the English