The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens. Steve Harris
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Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Praise for The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens
Steve Harris’ book brings to life a most bizarre social experiment and all its grotesqueness in engrossing form. It’s a very human, dramatic and authentic tale, written so comprehensively that it is a service to Australian and British readers.
— Tom Keneally, winner of the Booker Prize and Miles Franklin Award
History as suspenseful, vividly portrayed, affecting and moving as the best films and fiction.
— Robert Drewe, award-winning author
Steve Harris skilfully portrays one of the most sobering and saddest stories in Australian history.
— Professor Geoffrey Blainey, AC
A moving story of two boys, embedded in a penetrating and thorough study of a grim part of Tasmania’s history: the harsh treatment of boys transported for often minor crimes.
— Alison Alexander, award-winning author
The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens may be a history, but it reads like a novel — and an excellent one at that. Steve Harris’ rigorously researched book uses the case of two young boys who bashed their overseer to illuminate a corner of convict history which deserves more attention — the story of child convicts, and the inhumanity of the system they existed within. Moving, engrossing and at times confronting, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the causes of child crime and the effects of incarceration, both in the past and today.
— Meg Keneally, author Fled
Praise for Solomon’s Noose
Impressive research and a story that challenges the imagination — except that it’s true. — Les Carlyon, award-winning author of Gallipoli and The Great War
The haunting story of the convict who became the British Empire’s youngest executioner. Beware the shock of the true. — Andrew Rule, award-winning author/journalist
Intriguing story…captivating tale…a fascinating read. — The Australian
An illuminating look at the difficult birth of a nation through its darkest period. — SmithJournal
A chillingly real account…a vivid picture of Van Diemen’s Land in Australia’s formative years. — New Idea
The reader (will be) indisputably captivated…a moving and often poignant description of crime, life and death in colonial Tasmania.— Tasmanian Historical Research Association
Praise for the PRINCE and the assassin
It illuminates a fascinating but forgotten milepost in Australian history.— Professor Geoffrey Blainey, AC
A compelling account of one of the most controversial political crimes in Australian history, it shows how religious zealotry, bigotry and political over-reaction can bring a community to the brink of disorder…
All contemporary politicians and community leaders dealing with the continuing fallout from 9/11 should read it.— Professor Greg Woods QC, legal historian
Marvellous…A truly gripping tale, wonderfully researched. — Jane Ridley, author, Broadcaster and Professor of Modern History, University of Buckingham, United Kingdom
A gripping tale of royal debauchery, abandoned priesthood, mental infirmity and Irish rebellion, leading to the attempted assassination of Queen Victoria’s favourite son…This book has the excitement of a racy political crime thriller, backed by the most sound historical research. It gives the impression of an account written by an eyewitness. There are lessons for us today from the politicians’ overreaction to what was mistakenly viewed as an existential threat to Australian society. — Mark Tedeschi, AM, QC Senior Crown Prosecutor, NSW
…One and half centuries later, in an era of fresh anxiety about terrorism, Australia is again facing a test of character. This time it is Muslim Australians who bear the brunt of prejudice, suspicion and guilt by association. Harris’s book, a fascinating read at multiple levels, helps frame current anxieties in a deeper context.— Professor Greg Barton, Research Professor in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute (ADI), Co-Editor, Islam Christian Muslim Relations, Senior Fellow, Hedayah, Abu Dhabi
Harris aims to be more than simply a teller of history. He also wants us to learn from history and uses many quotes from the archives that are remarkably similar in tone and temper to the anti-foreigner, anti-Muslin language of today.— John Algate, The Weekend Australian
Steve Harris’s book The Prince and the Assassin has excavated from the past a little remembered incident that had huge implications at the time and still resonates to this day.— Ronan McGreevy, The Irish Times
For the golden chain that has been my mother and father.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens is non-fictional history, drawing on national and regional archives in Australia and the UK, 19th century British and Australian newspapers, British and Australian court records, British Parliamentary and Colonial Office records, the UNESCO recognised Van Diemen’s Land convict records, colonial and convict memoirs and correspondence, academic research, published history, biographies and the reportage of Charles Dickens.
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A MURDEROUS TYPE
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.
— Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
RUHTRA TROP TA REDRUM.
To an unpractised eye it seemed an obscure Latin phrase, but not to those who spent their days in the alchemy of fonts, picas, stones, quoins and forms that formed a newspaper. The editors, printers and their ‘devils’, as apprentices were known, knew that only when the reverse type had been compressed, inked, and printed would it reveal to the world its true face.
And its meaning was even better understood by those among them who were amid almost 80,000 men, boys, women and girls born ordinary folk in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, whose circumstances and choices in the lottery of life put them on an extraordinary path to the other side of the world. Behind them were lives of impoverishment, abandonment and struggle to survive on the street by picking pockets, robbing orchards, burgling homes or counterfeiting coin, and the prejudice and panic of those who branded them a threat to the cradle of the British Empire. And so they were exiled to the world’s newest and most remote settlement 12,000 miles (19,000 km) away, condemned never to return.
Each had endured sentences of seven or fourteen years in this unique place called Van Diemen’s Land, where the ancient Aboriginal civilisation had been swept aside to enable, for the first time in the world, a foreign society establishing a new one on the backs of its unwanted. A settlement of conflict between Old and New worlds, man and nature, good and evil, hope and hell.
In a smoky printery, putting the final touches to the July 1843 edition of the Colonial Times, their convict irons and manacles were gone but the shadow and stain of convictism were immoveable, their past indelibly inked and readily cited. Their papers showed them to be free men, but they were living in an island run as Her Majesty’s gaol. A colonial and penal fiefdom where traditional English rights and liberties were seen as a threat, and colonial officers and convicts were equally familiar with the blurred lines of vice and virtue, and truth and justice — each in the eye of the beholder.
The governor and his loyal faction only wanted their truth and justice to prevail, lest there be any disruption to the dutiful and tyrannical imposition