in such articles can be significant, implying that unruly convicts will not affect those who travel or emigrate to Australia. Those articles that do mention convicts almost always portray only reformed, respectable emancipists, who would not threaten the safety or morality of potential emigrants. An 1852 article by W. H. Wills in the miscellaneous column Chips in Household Words, for instance, claims that “a large portion of convicts sentenced to transportation consist of men not inferior in any respects to the average of the working-classes. They have been led by sudden or temporary temptation into crime; but, after undergoing the system of prison discipline now in force, prove, when removed to another part of the globe, well-conducted and useful settlers” (5.110:155).32 Notably, such convicts, however reformed they may be by penitentiary discipline, “prove . . . well-conducted and useful” only “when removed to another part of the globe.” Thus, even reformed convicts need to be expelled from England and sent as far away as possible. Somewhat strangely, one brief article from 1854 by a “Mr. Irwin,” again in Chips and titled “The Antecedents of Australia,” summarizes Australia’s convict past as if readers had never heard anything about it before, simultaneously calling up the convicts and implying that they have become only an interesting historical footnote to contemporary Australian society, which is prosperous and respectable (Irwin, HW 8.199).
Articles in Household Words that focus on crime and punishment in England frequently express regret that the Australian colonies would not take England’s rebels and criminals anymore, thus leaving England with a social problem that threatened its harmonious social fabric. While England had once been able to count on “Botany Bay” as a solution, the inhabitants of Australia had come to “refuse disdainfully to have anything to do with British scum” (Sala, 86). James Payn’s 1857 article, titled “The Deodorisation of Crime” and advocating the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society, likewise expresses anxiety about the “fatal contagion of crime” and worries that with transportation “done away with,” “hundreds of criminals [would be] yearly loosed upon a world that will not receive them, and of necessity yearly returning to confinement” (612). Even the working classes, he points out, would not work side by side with ticket-of-leave or freed convicts, reinforcing that convicts were no longer part of the English polity, even if they had expiated their rebellion against its principles (613). An 1858 satire by John Holingshead, “The Pet of the Law,” goes so far as to imply that too much justice (read, lenity) was accorded to convicts who would formerly have been transported to Australia, as the father of the putative narrator was. The speaker, a successful professional thief, invokes Englishness, domesticity, and “the liberty of the subject” as applying to the thief at least as much as to the working-class family, ironically signaling that which the transported convict lost by being sent to Australia—though it could be regained there if the convict was willing to abjure his English national identity and be content in Australia.
Other articles in Household Words follow the transported convict to Australia and show him respectable and happy there, choosing voluntary exile after fulfilling his sentence. Two articles, both from 1850, feature convicts who contentedly accept Australia as their home. One of them appears in “A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters,” published in the very first number of Household Words in an article written by Dickens, though the letters were provided by Caroline Chisholm. The article advocates for the Family Colonisation Loan Society, which Chisholm founded to subsidize loans for families, including families of transported convicts, to emigrate. Dickens claims that in Australia “no man who is willing to work hard (but that he must be, or he had best not go there), can ever know want” (HW, 1.1:20). The last letter in the “bundle” is supposedly from an actual convict. This unnamed convict has no desire to return to England to see his family but encourages them to come out to Australia: “[T]his is just the country where we can end our days in peace and contentment when we meet,” he tells his wife (HW, 1.1:24). Here is no nostalgia for England or claim to Englishness but rather a willingness to belong to the new country: “Dear Wife this is a fine Country and a beautiful climate it is like a perpetual Sumer [sic], and I think it will prove congenial for your health” (24). The only concern of the convict who writes the letter is that his family not reveal that they are going out to join a convict: “[Y]ou must come out as emigrants, and when you come ask for me as an emigrant and never use the word Convict or the ship Hashemy on your Voyage never let it be once named among you, let no one know your business but your own selves, and When you Land come to my Masters a [sic] enquire for me and that’s quite sufficient” (24). His concern indicates the prejudice against convicts—the convict stain—which, according to Great Expectations, cannot be erased, in England or Australia. The letter reveals the fluidity of social distinctions in Australia; as long as he and his family do not reveal that he is a convict, he can pass as a respectable, prosperous citizen who is able to support his wife and family in a way he could not do in England. He is one of the many recommended to go “from places where they are not wanted, and are miserable, to places where they are wanted, and can be happy and independent” (24). It could hardly be said more clearly: England does not want the poor and miserable. The article suggests that sending them as emigrants before they have reason to commit crimes rather than after would be better.
“An Australian Ploughman’s Story,” written by well-known emigration promoter Samuel Sidney, focuses in more detail than any of the Household Words articles mentioned so far on the actual details of a convict’s story and his life in Australia. Big Jem, whom the gentleman-narrator meets when he goes to a large cattle station to learn the business, is “a very good fellow,” and the two strike up a friendship as they work and travel together (39). “Living in the Bush,” the narrator tells us, “there is not the same distance between a master and well-behaved man, although a prisoner, as in towns” (39)—or, we might add, as in England. While riding together, Jem tells his story to the narrator. A prize-winning ploughman, Jem lost his job when his master decided suddenly to leave his estate. Jem, married young to a woman he loves, inadvertently fell in with some machine breakers who were caught at that moment, and he was transported along with them. Because he is an excellent ploughman, he is in great demand in Australia, where such skilled workers are relatively rare, but his assigned master invents infractions to keep the ploughman from getting a ticket-of-leave and becoming his own master. Jem notes the possibilities for hard-working convicts who work out their sentences: “I saw so many who had been prisoners riding about in their carriages, or driving teams of their own, as good as the ’Squire’s” (42). Failing to achieve this kind of social mobility despite his marketable skills and hard work, he becomes so frustrated that he indulges in theft and is sentenced to three years’ hard labor. Luckily, his term is shortened by a year for “rescuing a gentleman from a bushranger” (42) and he immediately reforms and is assigned to a better master. He tries twice to bring his wife out but is swindled out of his money, until on the third try the narrator arranges for her emigration. The result is what one would expect in this typical Australian tale: he and his wife “have now a station and farm of their own; they are growing rich, as all such industrious people do in Australia, but they have not forgotten that they once were poor” (43). Now that they have given up their English identity, their son is poised to be “a native Representative in an Australian Parliament” (42). Ejected from England for resisting his place in the social hierarchy, the ploughman has not only disappeared from the social system he tried to resist but also, through “honest, sober labour” (42, emphasis in original), has become rich and respectable, marked by the fact that he is now addressed as “Mr. Carden” instead of “Big Jem.”
Thus, Dickens unquestionably knew about transported convicts who succeeded in Australia and did not return to trouble England and its social hierarchy as Magwitch and most of the other convicts do in his novels. Litvack concludes that Dickens could have given more detail about Magwitch’s experiences in Australia but that his point was to objectify the convict and to focus on “the drama of the tale, with its sheer human tragedy and passion; any great attention to detail would have marred the overall effect” (II:117, 123). I would suggest, rather, that having Magwitch return to disrupt the story of the new English national subject, the bourgeois gentleman, shows how crucial it was for those who had defied the social structure with its sacrosanct rules about property and hierarchy to be not only removed
