forgotten; convicts were not to return and Australia did not spark much interest, except for the occasional joke, until it became a focus of free emigration, which coincided with the inception of convict literature, especially the genre of the convict novel.14
NATIONAL IDENTITY AND SOCIAL CLASS
The amount of attention focused on national identity over the past four decades demonstrates that though it is a deeply divided and multiple term, with many different definitions, it is something that matters, that is part of people’s sense of themselves at every level of society, but it is always felt in relation to their class position as well. Thus, what needs unpacking is this relation between national identity and social class and the way the two concepts work together in creating subjectivity, for transported convicts, people of various classes in England, and free immigrants in Australia. This can be accomplished only by ignoring the existence of the indigenous Australians, who were considered to be outside of any social system and incapable of ever belonging in one.
Both national identity and social class, of course, are unstable, shifting, and highly malleable terms that have been defined differently by a host of scholars in multiple disciplines. Benedict Anderson’s still-famous 1983 definition of national identity as “imagined community” is especially useful for my purposes. Although Anderson’s Imagined Communities was published many years ago, more-recent scholars, such as John Breuilly (introduction, 4), have pointed out that all succeeding scholarship on national identity follows from Anderson’s book and from Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, published the same year. If, as Anderson’s title announces, a nation is an “imagined community,” then it makes sense to pay attention to imaginative literature as a source for and creator of the community that is imagined. Etienne Balibar, for instance, maintains that all social communities are imaginary because they are “based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative” (93) and Patrick Parrinder asserts that novels create this imagined community or collective narrative (14).
Other scholars from a variety of disciplines have used a bewildering number of related terms for national identity, sometimes loosely or antithetically defined.15 National identity is often also used as a synonym for nationalism, a term and concept used by so many writers, scholarly and not, that listing all or most of them would be almost impossible.16 Although national identity is often conflated with nationalism, as I use them they are separate terms and concepts. Nationalism, according to many scholars, arises in support of the formation of a nation-state and is dated by scholars of English history and culture at different times ranging from the Early Modern period to the Revolutionary period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the early twentieth-century rise of the welfare state to the aftermath of World War I.17 In contrast, I am not trying to identify an origin for the English nation or English nationalism per se. Instead, I am examining one facet of one moment in what Allen Carey-Web describes as “national identity formation in motion” (12). Likewise, the identity that gradually developed in nineteenth-century Australia was only an embryo of what later developed into something more like full-blown nationalism.
What I discuss in several examples of transported convict literature, then, is not strictly defined nationalism, which tends to be associated with political movements. Instead, the kind of national identity that I examine is an integral part of a person’s identity or sense of self, an emotion or affect that has more to do with the individual and how he or she identifies himself or herself in terms of geography, culture, and social relations than in terms of the state, though attitudes toward the state are part of it.18 Angelia Poon describes English national identity as “a model of national belonging and connection” wherein “Englishness appears less a conspicuously and self-consciously embraced political ideology, a list of political beliefs pertaining to nationhood, than a way of being and seeming that seeps and permeates the political, social and cultural domains” (5). Sociologist Norbert Elias’s term we-identity is useful in expressing this version of national identity, although Elias claims that the working classes in Europe and England did not have such an identity until the emergence of a nation-state, which he dates much later (205–6, 208).19 For Julia M. Wright, “The people belong to the land and the land belongs to the people, a sense of belonging rooted in affection that is emotionally powerful, intrinsic and embedded in their daily lives through language. To separate people from the homeland or ask them to reframe their affection for it is to violate their sense of self” (164). This sense of “belonging rooted in affection” that is part of the “sense of self” is why I use the term “national identity.” People who live in a country like England (plus many who do not) feel that they are English and assume that they share this feeling with a whole community of people (à la Benedict Anderson) that may be represented by the village or region in which they or their parents live (or have lived) but includes people around the world that they do not know personally but imagine as also being English. Such an identity, being imaginary, is of course varied and diverse and not, as Julian Wolfreys reminds us, “unified, absolute and written with the immanence of transcendence” (3) but it is rooted in language. It is in and through language that people develop a sense of themselves as individuals who have a certain place in the social order that is part of the nation with which they identify.
Anderson also maintains that “[f]rom the start, the nation was conceived in language, not in blood”; the particular form of language in which nations are conceived, he asserts, is print capitalism (Imagined, 145). For Anderson this means primarily newspapers and literary novels, but I argue that other texts such as broadsides and memoirs, as well as popular novels, were also important engines of print capitalism because they, too, could construct “a deep horizontal kinship” with imagined, rather than known, people (Imagined, 7). What is important about literature that prominently features the figure of the transported convict is that readers have to envision communities both in England and in Australia; the two identities build on and construct each other, and both are also imagined in terms of social class.
Many scholars have addressed the issue of social class in the nineteenth-century English novel. While most recognize that social class was involved in the formation of national identities, few have given the conjunction more than passing attention.20 Scholars often speak of national identity as a part of the self along with class, gender, sexuality, and so forth.21 Conversely, I argue that national identity is not separate from class; rather, class is included in national identity. Thus, what I demonstrate here is that imaginative literature of several types—including novels—helped people in both England and Australia to imagine themselves as part of a national community: not a fully fledged nation-state, not simply a national character, but a community of which social class relations were an essential component. The literature I have examined created this sense of community not just in the middle classes, where one might expect to find it, but in the lower ones as well, much earlier than many scholars have thought. Even though it is called a “national identity,” this sense of place and community looks different from different class positions, and the literature shows how it does so. In some ways these texts seem to create a class solidarity that appears to be in conflict with national identity. In the convict broadsides, for instance, some of the working-class speakers of the ballads clearly do not trust national institutions such as the law and the penal system. Most of these ballads nonetheless work hard to try to balance English national identity with class solidarity—admittedly an uneasy balance wherein the speaker may definitely identify as English but also mistrust the government and people with authority. For most of the writers from the English middle classes, social class fit more easily into national identity; not unexpectedly, they imagined a peaceful, obedient working class that identified itself as part of a harmonious English social hierarchy, thus ensuring obedience and loyalty to middle-class people as superiors. Most white writers in or from Australia, in contrast—even middle-class ones—often imagine a more egalitarian society as part of their emerging national identity. Thus, while national identity is differently defined and constructed by different theorists and historians, it may also be defined differently by the people living it according to their social class standing.
The
