such that a new genre—or at least a subgenre—of convict novels arose in midcentury England. These novels assimilate existing novelistic conventions with new ones unique to this genre or subtype, and these new conventions convey meanings that further emphasize the interrelation of social class with national identity. Although a large body of unpublished convict narratives exists, mostly located in Australia, I focus on those that saw print and thus are arguably a part of print capitalism, because I am interested more in the cultural work these texts accomplished than I am in documenting what the convict experience was like for those who experienced it.57 Thus, the literary form in which transported convicts appeared is a central focus of several of the chapters that follow.
Several notable scholars have addressed Australian convict literature, especially the novel. Coral Lansbury’s Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature was published in 1970 but is still relevant and often quoted. Lansbury shows how representations of Australia in English literature, including many works from or about the convict period, changed across the course of the century depending on the historical and cultural context, though her focus is not primarily on convicts. A. W. Baker’s Death Is a Good Solution: The Convict Experience in Early Australia (1984) treats convict literature specifically. The charts in his appendixes are especially useful because he carefully lists the plot conventions associated with convict narratives, both autobiographical and fictional. Noted Australian scholar Laurie Hergenhan’s Unnatural Lives: Studies in Australian Convict Fiction (1983) was the first book-length critical study of the convict novel. It considers in some depth a few of the major nineteenth-century convict novels, as well as several twentieth-century ones, although Hergenhan does not consider the cultural work these novels helped accomplish, especially in terms of class and national identity. A chapter (109–33) in Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1988) was the first major consideration of Australian convict literature in what could be called a postcolonial context, which Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra also do in their 1990 Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. These important books have provided the building blocks for my more-extensive study of published transported convict literature in a transglobal framework.
Since the 1970s, numerous articles dealing with individual novels or other works featuring transported Australian convicts have been published by Australian critics, especially on the most famous nineteenth-century convict novel, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life, as well as Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. A good selection of Australian literary criticism, edited by Delys Bird, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee, appeared in 2001, though its focus is not so much on individual novels, especially convict novels. Most histories of Australian literature have a section or two on nineteenth-century novels about or written in Australia, though only a few focus on convict novels.58 Especially interesting is the work of scholars such as those in Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stuart’s edited collection Chain Letters (2001) and Ian Duffield and James Bradley’s Representing Convicts (1997). Both volumes have careful examinations of less traditional genres, including love tokens, tattoos, convict indents, and prison interviews. These studies, however, seek primarily to find authentic convict voices and to discover how Australia’s convict heritage has shaped contemporary Australian society. In this project, in contrast, I am looking not for authenticity or texts that record the actuality of convict lives but rather at how literary representations of transported felons worked to shape social relations and national identity in both Australia and England.
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The organization of this book perhaps requires a little explanation. Because I discuss both canonical and little-known literary works, I have not followed a strict chronological pattern in examining them. In general, both in the order of the chapters in the book and within the chapters themselves, I begin with the most canonical work (if there is one) or with an explanation of the work of a genre, followed by a consideration of less well-known texts that add to or differ from it, in basically chronological order. Where I vary from this sequence, I explain why. Thus, I begin the numbered chapters with the most canonical convict figure in nineteenth-century literature, Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations, read in conjunction with Dickens’s Household Words. After that, I return to working-class broadsides that were printed from early to midcentury, working from there in roughly chronological order until the early 1880s, just before the political pre-Federation movement really began and after convict transportation to Australia had completely ended.
In Great Expectations, as well as a few of his other novels, Dickens deploys what had become a common nineteenth-century literary device of transporting temporarily unneeded characters to the “green room” of Australia (Litvack, I:26). I argue that the transported convict figure in Dickens’s writings did important ideological work and that he sets up in his novels and his midcentury journalism many of the issues discussed in this book. Great Expectations is something of an anachronism (as are most of the other convict novels) because it was published in 1861, at least a decade after transportation to the east coast of Australia and to Tasmania had been abolished. Great Expectations and some of his other novels portray transported convicts as returning to England, refusing therefore to be repressed and do the cultural work expected of them by the practice of exiling malcontents to the Antipodes. Dickens’s journalism, published in Household Words in the 1850s, calls attention to this anachronism by following many convicts to Australia and showing how they are integrated into Australian society and identity. With its pro-emigration stance, the journal generally works to show that Australia is no longer just a depot for convicts but is now a safe and desirable place for the working classes, and others who have failed to thrive in England, to prosper. Chapter 1, then, examines the way that Dickens’s novels imagine the convict as a sympathetic but discordant emblem of England’s social problems whom the legal system tries to banish but who almost always returns, refusing to be forgotten. While Dickens does not often directly represent the rural countryside with its Anglo-Saxon pseudofeudal hierarchy, he nonetheless assumes a traditional paternal model for class relations, frequently applied to an urban environment. He also addresses the issue of social mobility, especially in the character of Pip in Great Expectations, and how the changing notion of what constitutes the English gentleman is imbricated with the problem of the nonconforming members of the working class that transportation hoped to, but ultimately could not, rid the nation of, thus putting the harmonious social hierarchy of English national identity into question. The journalism, recognizing that transportation is no longer an option, attempts to solve the same social problems caused by industrialization and urbanization by encouraging voluntary transportation—assisting emigrants before their problems lead to felonies rather than after. Thus, the novels use transported convicts to reinforce English identity, while the journalism helps readers imagine an Australian identity. This distinction mirrors the historical trajectory of the works I examine in the succeeding chapters.
In the second chapter, I take up what many would consider a nonliterary genre, the popular broadside marketed primarily to working-class people in Britain. I use a selection of the broadsides that specifically address transportation to Australia to explain how they allowed the working classes to imagine themselves as part of a more-inclusive English national identity. The broadsides, which usually included not only text but also illustrations and tunes, reached both those who could read and those who were illiterate, thus extending the reach of the imagined community beyond that which Benedict Anderson describes. Broadsides that feature convicts transported to Australia simultaneously call up Australia and erase it, failing to envision it as an alternative identity but instead enabling the working-class “readers” to perceive themselves as part of the English nation. The form, as well as the contents, of the broadsides contributed in an essential way to this ideological project. The amalgamation of earlier broadsides about transportation to America with those about Australia also served to muddy the working classes’ imagination of Australia as a place or transportation as a punishment, instead reinforcing the desirability of an English national identity even if the readers themselves played a subordinate role in the social hierarchy.
In
