chapter, “Writing Convicts and Hybrid Genres,” I focus on the earliest published memoir written by a convict while under sentence, along with two autobiographical novels, Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton (1830) and James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh (written around 1845 but not published until 1920), also both written by actual convicts. Although historically all three ended their lives in Australia, two of them certainly and possibly all three still convicts under sentence, they used their literary productions to maintain their difference from other, working-class convicts and to maintain their English identity. Employing conventions of autobiography, all three of these convict writers used their texts to establish themselves as men who, though they made mistakes, were still unquestionably not only English but gentlemen. They did this by capitalizing on and displaying the cultural capital of knowing the literary conventions that enabled them to write books for publication, as well as by stressing the ideal of domesticity that characterizes the English middle-class subject.
Chapter 4 defines the new genre of the transported convict novel, placing its form and the cultural work it accomplishes in relation to other forms such as travel narratives and ethnography. The chapter examines three novels by popular English novelists: G. P. R. James’s The Convict: A Tale (1847), Richard Cobbold’s Margaret Catchpole (1845), and Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), all with transported convicts as protagonists. The discussion shows how these novels portray an idealized pseudofeudal social class hierarchy as the stable base of an English national identity that is threatened by nonconforming working-class convicts. Whether portrayed as dissidents or common criminals, these convicts need to be expelled to maintain a stable hierarchy back home in England. At the same time, each of these novels portrays working-class convicts reforming in Australia and consciously taking on a new Australian identity—one that involves a measure of social mobility. Thus, this chapter shows that those who called themselves gentry clung to their English national identity, while those who were convicts or tainted with convictism had to accept their Australian identity.
In chapter 5, “Convict Servants and Genteel Mistresses in Women’s Convict Fiction,” I take up the role of female convicts, who were almost always assigned to domestic service in Australia, in forming a new identity for a potential new Australian nation. These female convicts appear in philanthropic reform narratives, tales for servants, and novels, all by middle-class female authors, who had their own agendas for writing about their criminal sisters. The works I discuss in this chapter include George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859); Mary Vidal’s short story, “The Convict Laundress” (1852); Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow (1859); and Eliza Winstanley’s For Her Natural Life (1876). Although the female convict is usually portrayed by these English women writers as both sympathetic and reformable, her main function is to serve as the sign of her Australian mistress’s social position as part of the dominant class in a new social hierarchy. As in most mainstream English novels, the aberrant convict women usually die, though at least one minor female convict character is allowed to marry, assist in forming a successful business, and become part of this potential new and different nation. The female authors, taking on the role of the ethnographer exploring female convict life, are enabled not only to join but also to take a much more active role in political and social debates about Australia and the convict system through their writing.
Chapter 6, which looks at three very different post-transportation novels, focuses not on English identity but on the formation of a permanent Australian identity for their characters by either repressing or accepting former convicts. These novels can be characterized as Australian because two of them were written and published by authors born in or permanent residents of the colonies, and the third was based on personal experience of Australia and self-consciously written to a permanent Australian immigrant. All of them are about transportation but were written after all forms of transportation to Australia had ended, and all achieved popular success in both England and Australia. One of these is the most famous nineteenth-century Australian novel, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870–72; 1874). It includes fictionalized versions of many incidents in Australian convict history, as well as almost all the conventions of the convict novel, to locate the convicts securely in the past, leaving the future for a nonconvict Australian identity. Another important nineteenth-century Australian novel, Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881), represents the child of a former transported convict who literally has to lay to rest the convict past to create an Australian future in which she can achieve social mobility and participate as a respectable member of its new social hierarchy. The third, a novella by Anthony Trollope, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), teaches a young English gentleman-pastoralist that he must accept the presence of former convicts and treat them with a modicum of respect if he is to succeed in Australia. It is significant that of these later nineteenth-century convict novels, only the one by an Englishman can imagine integrating the acknowledged convict into an Australian identity.
What ties together all these different texts—beyond the figure of the transported convict—is the way that figure brings to the fore the centrality of assumptions about social class to both English and Australian national identities, both of which were contested and changing as a result of the imperial mission of Great Britain, as well as of industrial capitalism in the metropole. Because Australia was a settler colony, in some ways unique because of the large population of transported convicts, focusing on its nineteenth-century past reveals some of the contradictions inherent in that imperial project. Australia, like all the other British colonies, was represented both as fundamentally Other and as reproducing English notions and assumptions. That Australia began as a place designed for the rejected members of the working classes, however, complicated its relation to England and Englishness, foregrounding issues of class in ways that were almost as problematic as the more well-known problem of British subjection of the indigenous people. A key difference is that the convicts, despite being expelled, were still in some way English; thus they—or at least their children—could be reincorporated into a Commonwealth country, though not into England itself. As Australians, the convicts took their places in a new and different classed society, no longer filling the role of the rejected English residue.
ONE
Dickens and the Transported Convict
THOUGH it came in the middle of the century and midway in the history of the figure of the transported convict, the most famous nineteenth-century literary treatment of this character is without doubt Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861).1 Dickens’s famous novel, like many other convict novels, was actually written several years after convict transportation had been abolished in all but the remote area of Western Australia. It was written during the decade in which Dickens was actively supporting emigration, or voluntary transportation, for the poor working classes in his journal Household Words. I call this “voluntary transportation” because it filled much the same purpose as convict transportation: emigration rid England of one of its most critical social challenges by sending the poor to Australia, where they could begin to develop an Australian national identity and not trouble England’s supposed social harmony—as long as they did not return. Given their central place in the history of convict literature, Dickens’s writings, especially Great Expectations, are a logical place to start exploring the issues of this book because even though none of Dickens’s novels or journalistic portrayals of the transported convict are the first chronologically, they are arguably the most influential.
The fact that by the 1850s Dickens was promoting voluntary transportation at the same time that Great Expectations was so successfully representing the figure of the transported convict or forced emigrant seems contradictory. Obviously he was not advocating the reinstitution of convict transportation as the solution to solving the English social problems caused by industrialization and urbanization, though some of the writers for Household Words do sound nostalgic about that previously abolished penal practice. Transportation got
