wretched lives of boys like Sparkes and Campbell were frequently characterised in newspapers and parliamentary debates in education terms: their progress from a ‘nursery of crime’ on the streets, to the ‘preparatory schools’ of Houses of Correction, to the ‘felony academy’ at Millbank Prison and then seven months at the Euryalus ‘school of vice’ or ‘college’ of crime, as even some of the prisoners called it. Now Sparkes and Campbell were to be sent to the other side of the world to a ‘university of the wicked’ known as Van Diemen’s Land.
Travelling with them was the report card of their lives, just twelve or thirteen years long.
Henry Sparkes, prisoner 2434.
Crime: Stealing a halfpence, Nottingham.
Convicted: 31 December 1838.
Sentence: Seven years.
Received Chatham: 6 February 1839.
Status: Single.
Read or write: Neither.
Gaoler’s report: Character very bad, thrice in prison, a natural propensity to steal.
How disposed of: VDL. 28 September 1840.36
Charles Campbell, prisoner 4012.
Crime: House-breaking, Aberdeen.
Convicted: 25 September 1840.
Sentence: Seven years.
Received Chatham: 15 November 1840.
Status: Single.
Read or write: Neither.
Gaoler’s report: Convicted before. Character bad. Very bad disposition. Disorderly.
How disposed of: VDL. 21 June 1841.37
The final column spoke a severe truth: Britain’s unwanted children were being ‘disposed of’. A rich and powerful country with deep-seated traditions of government, religion, charity, education and philosophy had concluded it could do no more than despatch them to an infant colony on the other side of the world. As Archbishop Richard Whatley caustically told the House of Lords, men in power were often ‘naturally disposed to…any suggestion or hope that may justify them in withdrawing their attention from an unpleasant subject,’38 and delinquency was such an unpleasant subject that Prime Minister Lord Melbourne advised young Queen Victoria not to read the serialization of Oliver Twist because it was ‘all among the workhouses…and pickpockets…I don’t like those things; I don’t like them in reality and I don’t want them represented’.39
One of the men in power, Colonial Secretary Lord John Russell, may have been comforted by odious delinquents being rightly removed out of sight and out of mind, but privately discomforted by the boys’ fate:
Is it reasonable that virtuous England should find her vicious pollution suddenly transmuted into patterns of virtue and innocence the moment they breathe the pure atmosphere of Australia? There is no magic in transportation. The vicious will remain vicious unless adequate means are provided for their reformation.40
No magic in transportation, but Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell were among thousands now being ‘disposed of’, hustled from the Euryalus hulk to a convict ship at Sheerness, in north Kent, for a long and dangerous voyage of more than 14,000 miles (22,000 km) across unfamiliar and perilous seas to an unfamiliar and perilous destination.
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