she was not treated as a special. She did have the good fortune, though, to be assigned as a needlewoman to a Mr. and Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Preston being described as “a lady of aristocratic birth and breeding” (“Miss St. Felix,” 614). Annie proved herself so superior to other servants that she became almost part of the family, and when Mrs. Preston died, Mr. Preston married her. He eventually obtained a free pardon for her so that they could return to England to take possession of a large property that he inherited. Thus, because of her extraordinary domesticity, the female special convict regained her appropriate station in life, including returning to the metropole and taking on a new English identity, supposedly even better than her former Irish one. Kate Crawford, in contrast, convicted of horse stealing (though she only “borrowed” the horse from a neighbor who prosecuted her because of a quarrel with her father), after some suffering in the colony, received a grant of land. Although “she did not cease to be what the vulgar call ‘a fine lady,’” Lang’s informant tells us, “she made herself a woman of business, and a shrewd one too” (“Kate Crawford,” 600). Never marrying, Kate Crawford amassed her own fortune, totaling “as nearly as possible half a million sterling” in Australia, an opportunity that would have been extremely rare for a single woman in England. Adopting her new identity as an Australian thus offered her both economic rewards and independence. Interestingly, despite these two portraits of historical special convicts, fictional genteel women convicts (as I discuss in chapter 5) are more likely than male convicts to suffer persecution and early death. In those representations, Australia is a place where they can have no identity once their class status is lowered by becoming convicts. In Household Words, however, genteel women convicts do have a chance to redeem themselves and rebuild a national identity, be it English or Australian.
In short, while there is considerable variety in the representation of transported convicts in Dickens’s Household Worlds, almost all of the articles portray Australia as a safe and promising place for free emigrants, willing to transport themselves out of England voluntarily. They are assured that if they work hard, they can succeed beyond what is possible in England. If they are working-class emigrants, though, they will have to become like convicts in giving up their English identity. If they are genteel emigrants, they can exploit Australia’s resources and return to England with their fortunes gained or replenished, thus repairing the ravages of social and economic change on English identity. Convicts are depicted as appropriately punished if very wicked or enabled to restore or gain respectability and prosperity once they have completed their terms if they are hardworking and well behaved. This message differs from that of Dickens’s fiction, which focuses on the threat of the working-class convict who returns to England to disrupt and destabilize its social hierarchy and its sense of itself as a civilized and eminently respectable nation. However, as in Great Expectations, Australian money may subsidize the rise of the bourgeois gentleman, the paradigmatic English national subject. Also, the journal articles reassure English and potential Australian emigrants that the worst convicts have been truly punished. In the articles about specials, the journal shows that they were punished just by having to associate with ordinary convicts; but really dangerous convicts are isolated at the penal stations, while specials have mostly been able to find a life in Australia even despite their crimes. Associating with them would not threaten anyone’s respectability.
* * *
Although there is a discernible difference in purpose between the figure of the transported convict in Dickens’s fiction and the transported convicts shown in the various articles in Household Words, which he supervised and condoned even when he did not write them, even in the fiction he is basically sympathetic toward the criminal who reforms and is penitent. While transported convicts are supposed to disappear and take their challenge to the English social hierarchy with them, the ones who return are allowed repentance; what they inevitably lose is their English national identity. By returning they sacrifice a potential new identity as Australian, leaving them without any real we-identity. Without that, all they can do is become literally without identity—they die. Thus, challenging the English social structure is a very serious matter. Transporting convicts may be a convenient plot device, mirroring a historical practice that was a handy way of getting rid of social deviants, but as Dickens’s oeuvre shows, the transported convict as represented in literature was complicated and diverse enough to figure crucial social dilemmas and imagine solutions for them. The issues that Dickens’s various works raise are present in a variety of other literary texts of the era, which I explore in the remaining chapters.
TWO
Englishness and the Working Class in Transportation Broadsides
Come all young men of learning a warning take by me,
I’d have you quit night walking and shun bad company,
I’d have you quit night walking or else you’ll rue the day
When you are transported and going to Botany Bay.
THE speaker of this ballad (circa 1828) laments the fact that though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” the popular name for nineteenth-century Australia (H. Anderson, 62). Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. While nonfictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales began to be published in England almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes.1 Because books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied, not many of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. A few descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return.2 But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people as the convict broadsides were.
I take up the subject of the ephemeral literary form known as the broadside next for two reasons. One is that the broadside is arguably the first fiction published about convicts transported to Australia. The other is that this street literature was produced primarily for the working classes in both London and the provinces of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (though I focus on broadsides published in London). While Dickens’s novel Great Expectations is a highly canonical text with hundreds of critical interpretations and his journal Household Words is drawing increasing commentary, few people have noticed the important form of the broadside, especially the convict broadside, of which the epigraph to this chapter is an example. Yet the convict broadside helped define English national identity and its relation to social class by claiming the antipodal continent as a defining Other of England, while at the same time representing it as only a blank space that could not be imagined by English people, especially the working classes from which most of the transported convicts came. That is, the broadside was a literary-figural form that did not—and was not intended to—convey information, though it could have a definite ideological message.
Because broadsides were printed on cheap and flimsy paper, relatively few of them have survived, but of the thousands of different broadsides and ballad sheets published and distributed in the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, there are over 140 extant that directly address convict transportation.3 These broadsides, which circulated widely in the streets of urban centers and in the rural districts as well, are among the few means we have to guess how working-class people in England imagined the newly discovered continent of Australia and the role this played in their conception of their own place as English national subjects. The broadsides demonstrate that English
