good and evil, hope and hell.
In a smoky printery, putting the final touches to the July 1843 edition of the Colonial Times, their convict irons and manacles were gone but the shadow and stain of convictism were immoveable, their past indelibly inked and readily cited. Their papers showed them to be free men, but they were living in an island run as Her Majesty’s gaol. A colonial and penal fiefdom where traditional English rights and liberties were seen as a threat, and colonial officers and convicts were equally familiar with the blurred lines of vice and virtue, and truth and justice — each in the eye of the beholder.
The governor and his loyal faction only wanted their truth and justice to prevail, lest there be any disruption to the dutiful and tyrannical imposition of regulations and punishment. Many under their rule self-servingly or meekly saluted but some resisted and pursued their own voice, marching to the typesetting beat of the Colonial Times; Hobart Town Advertiser; Courier; Austral-Asiatic Review, Tasmanian and Australian Advertiser; Britannia and Trades Advocate; Hobarton Guardian; Teetotal Advocate; Tasmanian and Austral Asiatic Review; True Colonist; Hobart Town Courier or Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle.
Some were founded by those who had been punished but survived and remained resilient enough to take up weapons of ink and paper. Henry Savery, a forger, ignored laws prohibiting convicts from writing to pen satirical newspaper articles and the country’s first novel, Quintus Servinton: A tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence (1831); Andrew Bent, a convicted burglar, started the colony’s first independent newspaper and printed the first literature, Michael Howe: The last and worst of the Bushrangers of Van Diemen’s Land (1818) by Thomas Wells. Robert Murray, a bigamist, wrote anonymous newspaper letters virulently critical of colonial administration, before turning to journalism and editing. They and their successors were willing to write and publish even under the threat of official closure, commercial and political bastardry, libel writs, damnation or even the challenge of a duel.
The Colonial Times’ masthead motto steadfastly proclaimed its mission: ‘What is it but a map of busy life in its fluctuations and vast concerns’. But one man appreciated, better than most, the enormity and importance of ‘mapping’ life and its fluctuations of truth and justice, casting his own shadow over Van Diemen’s Land without ever setting foot on Australian soil: Charles John Huffam Dickens.
As a boy he had personally lived the perils of severe British punishment and as a young reporter on The Mirror of Parliament, The True Sun and covering parliament for The Morning Chronicle, he had been appalled by parliamentary and judicial expediency and hypocrisy. He used his newspaper journalism and editing skills to pen powerful social observation and criticism on the journey of boys and men from petty crime to houses of correction, then gaols, prison hulks and convict ships to the colonies of Australia. Then, after his first novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836), better known as The Pickwick Papers, took off, Dickens began to inform and inspire readers around the world, his work translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Russian and Chinese. But nowhere did his work resonate more strongly than in faraway Van Diemen’s Land: the extreme outcome of the injustices and prejudices he exposed, the fate of those characters transported to Australian colonies in his novels, the real-life world for thousands of ‘artful dodgers’ like Oliver Twist and Jack Dawkins.
At the human stock exchange that was the Hobart Town docks, the unloading of British or colonial newspapers containing his Boz sketches of life in Britain’s streets, courts and gaols were eagerly sought out, as were any crates of his books or complete volumes of magazines containing his serialized work, such as Master Humphrey’s Clock, the ambitious weekly literary magazine he published himself.
This presence was fully realised in the numerous taverns of Hobart Town, such as the Pickwick Tavern in Liverpool Street. The Pickwick had opened in 1839, capitalising on the popularity of Dickens after a Launceston printer and entrepreneur sensationally published twenty-four serial parts of a pirated copy of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. It was at places such as the Pickwick where the likes of a coterie, who had traded chains for ink and type, convened to share their passion for the author and his work and bring their own Dickensian dissection to life in a penal colony. Convicts knew better than most about the elusiveness of justice, and convict-turned-newspaper men knew better than most about the elusiveness of truth: sometimes seen and sometimes unseen, or suppressed or dictated or ignored for so long its very meaning became questionable.
For those who had been evicted from life in their homeland to exile at the bottom of the world, Dickens was a welcome voice for those who were long denied one. His own father had been in prison, forcing Dickens to fend for himself, and through his own personal experiences and exposure as a reporter to the trials of the poor and the prejudice and hypocrisy of ruling classes, he became a welcome and influential companion.
Dickens’ Fagin, Sikes, Bumble and Dawkins characters were based on what he observed in the streets and courts of London, including some who were transported to Van Diemen’s Land such as young Samuel Holmes, thought to be the inspiration for Jack ‘the artful dodger’ Dawkins. And publicity about the London trial of infamous receiver Isaac ‘Ikey’ Solomon – who was transported to Port Arthur before running a tobacco shop in Hobart Town and helping the drive to build Australia’s first synagogue – was widely thought to have inspired Dickens’ pickpocket gang boss Fagin in Oliver Twist, the novel whose very name was a Dickens nod to the potential fate of all young criminals: to twist on the end of a hangman’s noose.
In February 1843 Hobart Town debated the merits of a ‘new domestic drama’ based on Barnaby Rudge 1841, Dickens’ first historical novel, at the Royal Victoria Theatre just down the street from the Campbell Street barracks. Described by the Courier ‘as amusing as the late favourite Nicholas Nickleby’,1 Barnaby Rudge touched a nerve with its portraits of ordinary individuals swept up in social crisis amid the contrast of aristocracy and underbelly, revealing how impoverishment and family circumstance could change one’s life forever, and how moral pursuits and panic could lead to dangerous and unintended consequences.
These were the underlying themes of the lottery of life and convictism, the basis of many a discussion in taverns like the Pickwick, where more than one observed that law makers and the lawless alike were engaged in the same contests and motivations of power, rivalry, self-interest, deceit and fear. As Dickens observed in 1837 in Oliver Twist, there were men who ‘acquire peculiar value and dignity’ from their cloaks of office, be it the uniform of a governor or soldier, silk gowns of lawyers and judges, or the apron of a bishop, but also that virtue ‘shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen’.2 Strip the ‘uniform’ away, as Dickens asked, ‘what are they? Men, mere men’.3
Every ‘mere man’, convict or free, was pursuing his own survival, sense of truth, justice and entitlement. In an article reprinted from Bentley’s Miscellany on the effects of circumstance on character, the publication’s founder Dr William Maginn alluded to Dickens, his first editor, and Shakespeare:
In the best of us all there are many blots, in the worst many traces of goodness. There is no such thing as angels or devils in the world….all our virtues close border on vices, and are frequently blended…people do not commit wicked actions from the mere love of wickedness, there must always be an incentive of precisely the same kind as that which stimulates the noblest actions – ambition, love of adventure, passion, necessity.4
Early Hobart Town. Hunters Island, Hobart Town, illustration, 1829. Image courtesy Libraries Tasmania, NS1013/1/1876.
No man, woman or child in Van Diemen’s Land was born an angel or devil, but each was uniquely compressed in a place out of sight and out of mind, each with his or her own ambition, passion or necessity.
This reality was powerfully driven home on a winter’s day, Tuesday
