there, which assuaged the national conscience, but those banished could not be permitted to return to disturb England’s own class system, however rich they might have become. Pip himself has already done enough of that.
Besides the articles about working-class convicts succeeding—or potentially succeeding—in Australia, there were many other stories about transported convicts in Household Words.33 Some of these, as discussed above, focused on the punishment side of transportation; there was a special fascination with Norfolk Island, the most notorious of the secondary penal settlements, where brutal and sadistic tortures were reportedly meted out to prisoners for minor infractions and escape was almost impossible. Located in remote locations, the public had no access to these sites; thus, they were virtually invisible. A two-part series contributed to Household Words by William Moy Thomas, titled “Transported for Life,” portrays the severe treatment imposed on convicts at the most dreaded and isolated of the penal stations and sheds some light on what went on there. Describing his arrival at the settlement, the narrator sums up his eventual experience there: “I was prepared to meet great hardships; but I did not expect the horrors which awaited me. In happy ignorance, my feelings were rather of an agreeable kind as I first set foot on that paradise; which, changed by the wickedness of man, has been since termed, ‘The Ocean Hell’” (V.123:464). The article leaves no doubt that transportation to such a place was a severe punishment, physically and mentally. Ken Gelder makes a direct connection between the dreaded penal settlements and the genre of gothic literature because of the purported atrocities and the fact that prisoners from the settlements rarely emerged alive (386). This is one of the few stories in Household Words that share the generic tropes of the gothic with Great Expectations.
Thomas’s story, which he introduces as having “been taken down from the lips of the narrator,” is based on the experience of a historical transported convict, William Henry Barber, who was falsely convicted and eventually pardoned (V.123:455). Barber, unlike the other convicts discussed above, was a gentleman. Thomas has his character portray the torments of transportation in first person to make the story of the infamous Norfolk Island more convincing, especially because readers would trust a narrator who was both innocent, with no heinous crime to hide, and a gentleman, who is assumed to be trustworthy by virtue of his position—he is thus doubly punished by being sent to Norfolk Island.
Such stories of genteel convicts were regularly featured in Household Words. Thomas’s articles about Barber’s experience at Norfolk Island are related in some detail, partly because of their gothic appeal and partly because it demonstrates that the worst convicts in Australia were behind the scenes in secondary penal settlements, appropriately punished and essentially invisible to the other inhabitants of Australia. In Thomas’s story, however, starting from the time the narrator is convicted, through the journey to Australia and his time in confinement, the chief punishment for him is not physical suffering but degradation. As soon as the trial is over, for instance, he is “chained leg to leg with a man who had been twice convicted of burglary” (V.123:455). He laments “the strange destiny which had cast [him] among such companions,” while constantly seeking convicts of good character and especially savoring conversation with other gentlemen, such as the surgeon, the chaplain, and the officers (V.124:482). He most abhors being assigned the job of “wardsman,” which entails cleaning up after the other convicts while they are at hard labor, as demeaning and humiliating. Always maintaining both his innocence and his gentility, this convict, who would have been treated as a “special” in an earlier era of transportation history, is portrayed as suffering more than working-class convicts merely because he is forced to intimately associate with them. Some writers argued, in fact, that having to consort with working-class felons was punishment enough for anyone who had been a gentleman in his previous life. Because Barber was a gentleman-convict, however, when he was pardoned he was allowed to return to England and resume his English middle-class identity, losing the convict stain and turning his back on Australia—beautiful though he found it. As an innocent gentleman, Barber does not endanger England’s social hierarchy or England’s sense of itself as a harmonious and humane nation, nor does he need the new start that becoming Australian could give him. Telling his story is one way of reassuring English readers that the really bad convicts are made invisible at the penal stations, not appearing on the streets of Australia. Almost the only way of revealing their much-deserved and horrible punishment is by having a special convict such as the one whose story Thomas recounts do the telling, since he is one of only a few to have experienced the penal stations in person.
Another series of articles that focused on the experiences of special convicts, those who were not punished by being sent to penal stations as Barber was, ran in Household Words throughout 1859, just before the serial publication of Great Expectations beginning in 1860. The series was written by John Lang, who sent many of his contributions to Household Words from Australia and also penned several novels, including two about Australian convicts (The Forger’s Wife and Botany Bay). Special convicts, explains Lang, “were gentlemen by birth and education, who had been convicted of offences which, however heinous in a legal point of view, did not involve any particular degree of baseness” (“Special,” 489). Such crimes included what we would call “white collar crimes,” such as forgery and passing fictitious bills, and “crimes of passion,” including murder to avenge a sister’s seduction and dueling. Each of the articles portrays a different special convict, two of them women, and their experiences in Australia, in the voice of an “informant (an old lady who had been the wife of a government official in New South Wales).” All but one of these special convicts came under the administration of Lachlan Macquarie and were not treated like common thieves and receivers of stolen property, but with great consideration. If they were not emancipated immediately on their arrival, they were suffered to be at large, without the formality of a ticket of leave. They were, in short, treated rather as prisoners of war on their parole, than as prisoners of the Crown in a penal settlement. Grants of land were not given to them while they were in actual bondage, but they were permitted to locate themselves on any unoccupied pieces of land in the vicinity of Sydney (Lang, “Special,” 489). Seemingly these special convicts were of interest to the Household Words audience not only because they were unusual, going against the stereotype of transported convicts, but also because they were more like the readers themselves; thus, readers might identify and commiserate with these convicts, while also feeling reassured that the presence of convicts in Australia did not necessarily make it an unattractive place to which to emigrate if one needed to recoup one’s fortunes by “going out.” A respectable emigrant would not be “punished” as specials were by having to interact socially with working-class felons, except perhaps to have them as servants. Any special convicts living around such emigrants could be imagined as respectable despite their unfortunate official status as convicts. Even the publication of this series about specials indicates the audience’s interest in convicts of a higher class. Historically there were so few of them that devoting this much attention to their stories is wildly out of proportion to the number of specials vs. regular convicts.
Some of the specials to whom the reader was introduced in Lang’s series were titled, including Baron Wald of Germany and Sir Henry Hayes, an Irish baronet who “took a prominent part in the rebellion” (“Special,” 490). The latter, says Lang’s informant, “was surrounded by every comfort that money could purchase, and he was always glad to see persons of whom he was in the habit of speaking as ‘those of my own order’” (490). The paradox that Australia presented in such cases, in which a convict could be of inherently higher status than his free peers, could be read as titillating to those Australians who had already raised their class status in the colonies’ more open society and to those English readers who imagined themselves doing so if they emigrated.
The two female specials introduced in Lang’s series are particularly worthy of notice because their eventual fates demonstrate the possibilities for social mobility available to women convicts in Australia. Annie St. Felix, featured in the May 28 issue, was an Irishwoman transported for her role in the murder of a man in revenge for betraying her cousin and destroying the reputation of her brother, who was hanged for the crime. Miss St. Felix had the misfortune to be transported during Sir
