Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
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ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 1. “Farewell to Judges and Juries,” from Hugh Anderson, Farewell to Judges and Juries
FIGURE 2. “The Affectionate Transport,” from Hugh Anderson, Farewell to Judges and Juries
FIGURE 3. “The True Convict Maid,” from Hugh Anderson, Farewell to Judges and Juries
FIGURE 4. “The Trial and Sentence of Mary Arnold,” #7 in Broadsides on Murder
FIGURE 5. “Farewell to Your Judges and Juries,” from Martha Vicinus, Broadsides of the Industrial North
FIGURE 6. “The Unhappy Transport; or, The Sufferings of William Dale, Son of a Farmer and Gardener . . . ,” #57 in Broadsides on Murder
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Because I ventured into a new field (for me) for which many of the resources and much of the advice I needed were on two different continents, this book has taken longer than usual and I am obliged to many people for helping me bring it to fruition. Librarians at the National Library of Australia and the Mitchell Collection at the State Library of New South Wales were extremely kind and helpful; I could not have completed this project without their help and the wonderful resources of those libraries. I am also indebted to the people involved in the University of Sydney online project SETIS, which is now part of AustLit. Much of the research on the broadsides was completed at the British Library, where I wish especially to acknowledge Timothy Pye, Raika Wokoeck, and Marcella Leembruggen, who became almost as excited about finding convict broadsides as I did. Early research was conducted at the Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University and much of the later work at the Watson Library of the University of Kansas, where the librarians were also unfailingly patient and helpful.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to many other people, some of whom I will probably forget to acknowledge. My apologies to anyone I have inadvertently omitted. My students, especially the students in my Australian Convict Literature classes, were very enthusiastic and filled with creative ideas, and I gained many insights from the graduate students in my Victorian Literature and Empire seminars. I am especially appreciative of the work of the various graduate assistants who aided in my research, including Brigette Bernagozzi, Sarah Boyd, Greg Brister, Heather Emge, and Teresa Fernandez. For guidance and for reading and commenting on various chapters, I am grateful to many colleagues, including Hugh Anderson, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Patrick Brantlinger, Sara Danger, Elaine Hadley, Linda K. Hughes, Gail Huston, and Tamara S. Wagner, as well as the anonymous readers for Ohio University Press. Among my colleagues at the University of Kansas, I want especially to thank Ann Rowland, Ann Schofield, Victor Bailey, my colleagues in the Hall Center for the Humanities British Seminar, my writing group in the English Department (led by Misty Schieberle), and many others who have given much-needed advice and encouragement. In addition, Cheryl Lester and Jonathan Lamb have provided listening ears and good counsel at critical stages. For help in preparing the manuscript, I thank Lori Whitten, Kate Nygren, and Pam LeRow. I could not have asked for a better editor than Rick Huard at Ohio University Press, as well as the editors of the Victorian Studies series, Joe McLaughlin and Liz Miller. I also want to thank indexer Eileen Quam, Sally Welch, Nancy Basmajian, Sally Bennett Boyington, Beth Pratt, and Samara Rafert, as well as others at Ohio University Press who helped turn my manuscript into a book.
I owe a special debt to my friend and colleague Anna Neill for her unfailing generosity and sympathy, as well as her astute comments on several chapters. My biggest debt of all is to my husband and colleague, Robert Elliott, who read the entire manuscript and offered useful comments and skillful editing more times than I can count. Without his reassurance and support, both personal and professional, I could not have finished this project. I also want to thank my parents, to whom rightfully I should have dedicated this book, but unfortunately they are no longer around to appreciate it. Finally, I thank my children, to whom the book is dedicated; this project has been a constant presence for many of their growing-up years. Their support and pride means a lot to me.
Support for this work was provided by the University of Kansas General Research Fund, the Hall Center for the Humanities Research Fellowships and travel grants, and KU’s Office of International Programs international travel grants. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the publishers who have given me permission to reprint parts of this book. An earlier version of chapter 2 first appeared as “Transported to Botany Bay: Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides,” Victorian Literature and Culture 43, no. 2 (2015): 235–59. Chapter 5 was derived in part from an article published in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 16, no. 2 (2005): 163–87.
Introduction
AT a climactic moment in Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations (1861), the reader, along with the protagonist, Pip, learns that the benefactor who has provided the working-class boy with a gentleman’s education and the promise of a fortune is actually a transported Australian convict named Abel Magwitch. Although we never actually see this iconic nineteenth-century convict in Australia, he has become wealthy there in a way he could not have managed in England. That an exiled convict like Magwitch could be represented as reformed and successful in Australia but not in England has important implications for notions of social class and national identity in both nineteenth-century England and Australia. Dickens’s portrayal of Magwitch and the transformation of Pip can be read as a metaphor for the way the figure of the transported convict in nineteenth-century literature helped construct an English national identity that could include both the English gentleman and the respectable working classes. To do this, though, figures like Magwitch, who rejected or deviated from their assigned role in the imagined British polity, had to be banished. This book explores such interconnections between the English metropole and the Australian colonies in terms of social class negotiations and national identity in published narratives about English convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868.
Most of my past research has focused on various issues related to social class in the long nineteenth century in Britain and British colonies. In this project, I take up the issue of how social class worked in conjunction with the continuing process of forming national identity in both England and Australia. All of the settler colonies formed their identity specifically in relation to immigrants who left England because they were not successful there in some way. Relatively few aristocrats or gentry emigrated—and those mainly were younger sons, had financial troubles or limited capital, or were disgraced in some way. All of the settler colonies ended up with societies that were more democratic in their class systems than the parent country. Australia is unique even among the settler colony/nations, though, because its first settlers were the absolute rejects of Britain—most of them the very lowest in class position of any British citizens because of their status as convicted felons. This makes literature about Australia a good place to examine social class in relation to national identity.
The idea for this project came to me when I saw a performance of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, which is a dramatic version of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker. Not only did Wertenbaker’s play feature a cast of convicts transported on the First Fleet and recently landed on the virtually unknown continent of Australia, but it also foregrounded the use of literature to bring about a more cohesive society among these felons and their warders. The plot concerns a group of convicts, organized and directed by one of the officers in charge of them, putting on a play for the king’s