seas for seven years. This was an unimaginable journey and duration for young boys like Charles Campbell and Henry Sparkes. It had been a punishment since Queen Elizabeth, frustrated at the continued crimes of poor street folk despite whippings and burning of a 1 inch (2.5 cm) hole in their right ear, declared such ‘rogues’ ought to face death or be transported with the letter ‘R’ branded on their bodies as ‘incorrigible and dangerous rogues’ to a colony overseas. Two centuries on and England was still looking to rid itself of ‘rogues’ through exile, even if they were victims of hunger or homelessness like Charles Campbell and Henry Sparkes.
No amount of tears or fears could elicit any mercy. After hearing one boy’s mournful plea — ‘I never knew what it was like to have the attentions of a father and mother…I was cast abroad…at a very early age’ — and how he would rather die than be transported, a judge sentenced him to be transported ‘for the term of your natural life’ with a stern warning38:
You speak as if this life were all. Remember, that this life is inconsiderable; it is nothing at all to what is to come after; and if you were to shorten your term of existence by any act of violence, or if you fail to employ the days yet allotted you in penitence for your crimes and preparation for another state, all that you have been suffering for is but nothing as to what you will suffer for eternity.39
Lawmakers and judges saw boy thieves like Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell as criminals unchecked by irresponsible parents, unwilling to stay on a path of honesty, and unable to be ‘corrected’. One House of Correction governor, George Chesterton, told a House of Commons select committee reformation was ‘utterly hopeless’, as ‘boys brought up in a low neighbourhood have no chance of being honest, because on leaving a gaol they return to their old haunts and follow the example of parents or associates’40 who ‘wait round a prison gate to hail a companion on the morning of his liberation, and to carry him off to treat him and regale him for the day’.41 So the judgment was that ‘they go to a place where they must suffer disgrace and hardship, and where they must lose that which is the most painful to a human being to lose – all hope of liberty’.42
For Sparkes and Campbell, such a place was Van Diemen’s Land. After the North American revolution closed Britain’s dumping ground across the Atlantic, it scanned its remaining empire and chose the Great Southern Land, formerly ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ or ‘the great unknown land’, as its place of exile. Reached only by long and perilous journey and surrounded by ocean at the very bottom of the known world, Van Diemen’s Land was its own perfect island for the condemned, and a hitherto untried system of a government transporting convicted men, women and children to seed a new colony.
Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell had probably never seen a map that showed their destination, as close to the icy edges of Antarctic as London to Rome. They might have heard of it as ‘Van Demon’s Land’, or that it was somewhere near where Gulliver’s Travels’(1726) author Jonathan Swift had placed Lilliput, his place of greatest imaginable isolation, but leaving the courts of Nottingham and Aberdeen, Sparkes and Campbell could not possibly imagine what lay ahead.
4
A FLOATING BASTILLE
Even if he has been wicked, think how young he is; think that he may never have known a mother’s love, or the comfort of a home; that ill-usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have driven him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. For mercy’s sake, think of this before you let them drag this sick child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his chances of amendment.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Before Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell could be transported beyond seas they first had to be transported beyond their known world of Aberdeen and Nottingham to Britain’s first national prison: Millbank Penitentiary, a yellow brown mass of brickwork on the marshy banks of the Thames between Westminster and Chelsea.
Some boys saw Millbank as an esteemed badge of honour. They had grown up coming to regard ‘pluck’ or daring as the greatest virtue in life, their ‘trickery or ‘artful dodges…the highest possible exercise of the intellect’, because honesty was ‘monotonous and irksome’.1 Those who laboured for a living were ‘in plain English, fools’2 when the road of vice was ‘full of boundless joy’, as the House of Lords was told.3
In their own unique code, the greater the risk and crime, the higher the sense of manhood, self-esteem and superiority. Boys like Campbell and Sparkes inhaled their apparent importance and cleverness, pleased with themselves that their court appearances were attended by judges and barristers in wigs and gowns, pressmen taking notes and spectators sometimes paying a shilling. And that, despite their small size, they were held in such dread that society had to place them ‘behind huge massive bars which ten elephants couldn’t pull down’.4
In the fraternity and ‘flash patter’ of the street, there was a clear hierarchy or aristocracy: at the bottom were the ‘pudding snammers’, boys who only stole from bakeries to feed their stomachs; ‘files’ who picked pockets of watches and jewellery were rated higher than those who merely thieved handkerchiefs; ‘sneaks’ who robbed a shop till; ‘snakes’ who wriggled their way into small spaces for house burglaries; ‘bouncers’ who stole while pretending to be bargaining; and the ‘swell mob’ who dressed respectably to camouflage their criminality. Boys transported for life were of ‘greater consequence than the boy who is sentenced to seven years, while the lad whose sentence is a short imprisonment is not deemed worthy to associate or converse with’.5
Dickens visited Newgate not long before Sparkes and Campbell arrived in London, and observed of the young pickpocket boys behind bars:
There was not one redeeming feature among them, not a glance of honesty, not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks…as to anything like shame or contrition, that was out of the question. Every boy…actually seemed as pleased and important as if he had done something excessively meritorious in getting there at all…worth the trouble of looking at.6
Even if they were motivated otherwise, it was almost impossible to avoid old haunts and habits. ‘Where else can we go?’ one said, ‘we cannot for our ‘pals’ would torment us to return’.7 Another said: ‘I do not want to thieve if I can get money honestly, but how am I to get it? Will you employ me? Will anybody be fool enough to employ me? Just out of gaol and with no character, just think of that sir, and tell me if I must not thieve!’8
William Miles, who interviewed dozens of boys like Sparks and Campbell in prisons and prison hulks as part of a report to the House of Lords in 1835, concluded: ‘[They] have no sense of moral degradation; they are corrupt to the core; they are strangers to virtue even by name…they are in a state of predatory existence, without any knowledge of social duty; they may lament detection, because it is an inconvenience, but they will not repent their crime. In gaol they will ponder on the past, curse their ‘evil stars’ and look forward…to their release, but their minds and habits are not constituted for repentance.’9
Their only ‘social duty’ was their own ‘artful dodge’. Society had its laws, watchmen and police, but food and thievery trumped starvation and honesty, and boys marched to a ‘we beat you’ drum10 in a life of taking chances. The chances of finding something to rob, being seen and detected, being prosecuted, being convicted, and a modest sentence. Chance was their anthem, with ‘every hour of their freedom…uncertain…in a kind of lottery adventure’.11
In this lottery of life it was merely ‘evil stars’ and bad luck if they were detected and punished, imprisonment ‘merely another step in the ladder of their sad destiny’.12 For Sparkes and Campbell their ‘evil stars’ saw them moving up the juvenile aristocracy from houses of correction to Millbank, a premier college of criminality
