The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens. Steve Harris
was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment; another boy, William Burnett, only had to wait five minutes for the jury, after ‘evidence…tedious and uninteresting’, to find him guilty of house-breaking and theft of £17, for which he was sentenced to seven years transportation. Nineteen boys appeared that morning, their guilt and punishment all decided in just two hours, with eight sentenced to be transported for seven or fourteen years.24
Even among under-sized boys, Charles Campbell stood out. He was just 4 feet (122 cm) tall with a shock of red hair barely visible behind the dock railing. He was charged with Alexander Boynes of breaking and entering another house, this time in Shiprow, the street running from the harbour to the heart of the town, and stealing three cotton shifts.
Campbell was warned pre-trial that if he confessed, or was found guilty, he ‘ought to be punished with the pains of the law to deter others from committing the like crimes’.25As Campbell and Boynes could not write, a sheriff prepared a statement on which they put their mark, ‘accepting’ the charges and pleading guilty that each, ‘or one or the other of you’, had ‘wickedly and feloniously’ broken into a widow’s room and stolen a cotton shift from her, and two other shifts owned by another woman.26
Campbell told the court he believed he was eleven or twelve years old. He was a native of Aberdeen but had been ‘absent’ for three months, perhaps a sly reference to his time in the House of Correction, and had only been in the city one night, with no place of residence, when arrested. The truth of his birthplace is unclear, but he was later listed in Tasmanian convict records as having been born in Dublin, and been a ‘cotton spinner’, with a broken finger.27 Thousands of Irish families and individuals did move to England and Scotland to escape the 1831–32 cholera pandemic or in pursuit of work in cotton mills and textile factories, where boys’ small fingers were applied to dangerous machine tasks, 5am to as late as midnight, for perhaps a sixpence or a shilling. Whatever their background, unsurprisingly many boys saw street thieving as safer, more rewarding and exciting.
Witnesses told the court they had seen Campbell and Boynes lingering in the Shiprow building. A Mrs Mitchell said Boynes ‘came to my door asking for charity, but got nothing, I desired him to go to work’.28 She then saw him outside the room of widow Margaret Grant, who had locked her garrett room before returning to find a chair at her door and some boards removed from above the door.
Perhaps in a protective ruse, or mere brazenness, Campbell was also seen going to another room again ‘asking for charity’, with ‘his coat buttoned and something bulky below it…some white cloth sticking out below his coat’.29
Out in the street, Campbell’s number was up when a sailor overheard him tell Boynes ‘I winna tell if you dinna tell’, to which Boynes responded ‘and I winna tell if you dinna tell’. The sailor could see something stuffed underneath their jackets and enjoined a fellow sailor at Trinity Quay to follow the boys and apprehend them. Spotting the sailors, Campbell ‘made off at a quick pace’, while Alexander declared ‘it was not me who did it but that boy’ before running off himself. When Campbell was seized he reciprocated, saying, ‘it was not me who stole them, it was that boy running away,’ pointing to Boyne.30
Questioned at Aberdeen police station each boy continued to blame the other. Notwithstanding their ‘dinna tell’ compact, a sergeant said Boyne told him they ‘had been on the outlook all that day in Shiprow to steal something at Campbell’s suggestion to enable him to procure pies in the evening’.31 He maintained Campbell went into the widow’s room and emerged with the cotton shifts, giving him one to wear or sell in which case ‘he would get a sixpence for it’.32
The ‘it wasn’t me it was him’ ploy was oft-used among street-wise juvenile pickpockets and thieves hoping it would help their chances if they could create doubt or convincingly point to the real ‘baddin’. But the police were not persuaded by Campbell’s efforts to pin the crime on Boynes, or his cunning argument that he had not broken into the garret room because its door was not locked, and knew Campbell ‘to be by habit and repute a thief’, convicted three times under the names of Charles Campbell, George Hendry Henderson/Campbell, and George Campbell.33
When the jury foreman duly announced the charge unanimously found proven, Campbell’s final ‘chance’ rested with Lord Medwyn, a Scottish Episcopalian who had edited a new edition of the catechism: ‘Thoughts concerning Man’s Condition and Duties in this Life, and his Hopes in the World to Come’.
Medwyn initially said ‘in consequence of their youth, [he had] felt inclined to a lenient sentence’ but the boys’ crime was ‘heinous’. He sentenced Alexander Boynes to eighteen months imprisonment, but obviously felt Charles Campbell was the real ‘baddin’: ‘Theft, especially when committed by means of house-breaking and by a person who is by habit [sic] and repute a thief, and who has been previously convicted of theft, is a crime of a heinous nature and severely punishable.’34
It was futile to send his like to a prison which turned young petty offenders into ‘more expert thieves and more hardened criminals’,35 so he ‘could not propose a sentence less severe than transportation’.36
A boy of eleven or twelve who wanted to steal some cotton shifts in order to buy a pie was to return to Aberdeen prison, an ancient tower which reformer Elizabeth Fry described as ‘a scene of unusual misery’,37and wait to be ‘transported beyond seas for the period of seven years’.
Beyond seas for seven years. This was an unimaginable journey and duration for young boys like Charles Campbell and Henry Sparkes. It had been a punishment since Queen Elizabeth, frustrated at the continued crimes of poor street folk despite whippings and burning of a 1 inch (2.5 cm) hole in their right ear, declared such ‘rogues’ ought to face death or be transported with the letter ‘R’ branded on their bodies as ‘incorrigible and dangerous rogues’ to a colony overseas. Two centuries on and England was still looking to rid itself of ‘rogues’ through exile, even if they were victims of hunger or homelessness like Charles Campbell and Henry Sparkes.
No amount of tears or fears could elicit any mercy. After hearing one boy’s mournful plea — ‘I never knew what it was like to have the attentions of a father and mother…I was cast abroad…at a very early age’ — and how he would rather die than be transported, a judge sentenced him to be transported ‘for the term of your natural life’ with a stern warning38:
You speak as if this life were all. Remember, that this life is inconsiderable; it is nothing at all to what is to come after; and if you were to shorten your term of existence by any act of violence, or if you fail to employ the days yet allotted you in penitence for your crimes and preparation for another state, all that you have been suffering for is but nothing as to what you will suffer for eternity.39
Lawmakers and judges saw boy thieves like Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell as criminals unchecked by irresponsible parents, unwilling to stay on a path of honesty, and unable to be ‘corrected’. One House of Correction governor, George Chesterton, told a House of Commons select committee reformation was ‘utterly hopeless’, as ‘boys brought up in a low neighbourhood have no chance of being honest, because on leaving a gaol they return to their old haunts and follow the example of parents or associates’40 who ‘wait round a prison gate to hail a companion on the morning of his liberation, and to carry him off to treat him and regale him for the day’.41 So the judgment was that ‘they go to a place where they must suffer disgrace and hardship, and where they must lose that which is the most painful to a human being to lose – all hope of liberty’.42
For Sparkes and Campbell, such a place was Van Diemen’s Land. After the North American revolution closed Britain’s dumping ground across the Atlantic, it scanned its remaining empire and chose the Great Southern Land, formerly ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ or ‘the great unknown land’, as its place of exile. Reached only by long and perilous journey and surrounded by ocean at the very bottom of the known world, Van Diemen’s Land was its own perfect island for the condemned, and a hitherto untried system of a government transporting convicted men, women and children to seed a new colony.
Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell had probably never seen a map that showed their destination, as close to the icy