The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens. Steve Harris
put a stop to it…[it] is in no way discountenanced by those in command’.24 As a dismissive Sir John Carter, mayor of the convict shipping centre of Portsmouth, declared: ‘such things ever must be.’25
The Euryalus’ management of boy convicts was ripe for condemnation. Thomas Wontner declared, ‘If there be any regular and established schools for teaching crime, the ship Euryalus is the place,’26 and William Miles put to Parliament that, ‘however criminal they might have been before their commitments…previous to their imprisonment in that accursed hulk…they were comparatively innocent.’27
Edward Brenton, a former naval captain turned philanthropist who wrote the Naval History of Great Britain, denounced the Euryalus as ‘cruel and vindictive, and I challenge any man to come forward and justify it’. He described a regime where ‘children [are] in iron cages, who should have been in a nursery garden; children pining in misery, where the stench was intolerable; where the human mind is more rapidly brutalized, and where every feeling of humanity is more speedily destroyed, than could be done by any other process whatever’.28
An MP with a strong interest in crime and punishment reform, George Holford, who oversaw the design and construction of Millbank, similarly complained that hulks saw young offenders listen ‘with amazement’ to the sins and outrages of others, ‘but soon familiar grows with every crime’. ‘Let justice rather strike her victim dead,’ he wrote in verse, than send them to a hulk which hardened and corrupted the heart. ‘’t’were better doom him the lion’s den than to this curs’d abode of [the] wicked.’29
But as with Houses of Correction and Millbank, those in charge of the hulks continued to dutifully, and self-servingly, report complete ‘satisfaction’ in a chain of superiors all the way to Whitehall. By the time Campbell and Sparkes were leaving the hulk, chaplain Henry John Dawes was pleased to report to John Henry Capper, Esq., the Superintendent in Charge of Ships and Vessels Employed for the Confinement of Offenders under the Sentence of Transportation, that, ‘the boys continue to behave remarkably well’, lauded their ‘orderly conduct and attention in the Chapel’ and cited the ‘excellent conditions’ provided by the ship’s commandant. Capper in turn duly reported to his Home Department secretary, Marquess of Normanby Constantine Henry Phipps, that the boys ‘have conducted themselves properly and been instructed and employed at those trades as the limited means on board a ship will admit of being put into effect’.30
Despite officials’ best efforts, the truth of Euryalus was becoming clear. It was only teaching boys ‘to curse more bitterly that country which gave them birth, and to whose laws they owe their ruin’ 31 and when Naval historian Captain Brenton asked those running Euryalus whether any boy was likely to be reformed: ‘I am told none ever have been, and I infer that none ever will be.’32
Hospital nurse Thomas Dexter was unequivocal. Asked whether any boy on Euryalus had been reformed, he replied with feeling:
I should most certainly say not; and frequently when I have seen it in a Newspaper that a Judge has sentenced a Boy out of Mercy to him to the Hulks, I have made the Observation that was it a Child of mine I would rather see him dead at my Feet than see him sent to that Place.33
Pioneering social and economic reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, described the hulks as ‘the most brutalising, the most demoralising, the most horrible’ of all places of confinement in British history.34 Even in Hobart Town, on the other side of the world, convicts’ final British ‘address’ was well known as a ‘school of vice and iniquity…an abode of wretchedness’ where boys have ‘grown and ripened in crime and infamy, and may be truly compared to the fungi of vegetation that grows and flourishes where everything that is beautiful and delicate fades, droops and dies’.35
The wretched lives of boys like Sparkes and Campbell were frequently characterised in newspapers and parliamentary debates in education terms: their progress from a ‘nursery of crime’ on the streets, to the ‘preparatory schools’ of Houses of Correction, to the ‘felony academy’ at Millbank Prison and then seven months at the Euryalus ‘school of vice’ or ‘college’ of crime, as even some of the prisoners called it. Now Sparkes and Campbell were to be sent to the other side of the world to a ‘university of the wicked’ known as Van Diemen’s Land.
Travelling with them was the report card of their lives, just twelve or thirteen years long.
Henry Sparkes, prisoner 2434.
Crime: Stealing a halfpence, Nottingham.
Convicted: 31 December 1838.
Sentence: Seven years.
Received Chatham: 6 February 1839.
Status: Single.
Read or write: Neither.
Gaoler’s report: Character very bad, thrice in prison, a natural propensity to steal.
How disposed of: VDL. 28 September 1840.36
Charles Campbell, prisoner 4012.
Crime: House-breaking, Aberdeen.
Convicted: 25 September 1840.
Sentence: Seven years.
Received Chatham: 15 November 1840.
Status: Single.
Read or write: Neither.
Gaoler’s report: Convicted before. Character bad. Very bad disposition. Disorderly.
How disposed of: VDL. 21 June 1841.37
The final column spoke a severe truth: Britain’s unwanted children were being ‘disposed of’. A rich and powerful country with deep-seated traditions of government, religion, charity, education and philosophy had concluded it could do no more than despatch them to an infant colony on the other side of the world. As Archbishop Richard Whatley caustically told the House of Lords, men in power were often ‘naturally disposed to…any suggestion or hope that may justify them in withdrawing their attention from an unpleasant subject,’38 and delinquency was such an unpleasant subject that Prime Minister Lord Melbourne advised young Queen Victoria not to read the serialization of Oliver Twist because it was ‘all among the workhouses…and pickpockets…I don’t like those things; I don’t like them in reality and I don’t want them represented’.39
One of the men in power, Colonial Secretary Lord John Russell, may have been comforted by odious delinquents being rightly removed out of sight and out of mind, but privately discomforted by the boys’ fate:
Is it reasonable that virtuous England should find her vicious pollution suddenly transmuted into patterns of virtue and innocence the moment they breathe the pure atmosphere of Australia? There is no magic in transportation. The vicious will remain vicious unless adequate means are provided for their reformation.40
No magic in transportation, but Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell were among thousands now being ‘disposed of’, hustled from the Euryalus hulk to a convict ship at Sheerness, in north Kent, for a long and dangerous voyage of more than 14,000 miles (22,000 km) across unfamiliar and perilous seas to an unfamiliar and perilous destination.
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