role in the imagined British polity, had to be banished. This book explores such interconnections between the English metropole and the Australian colonies in terms of social class negotiations and national identity in published narratives about English convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868.
Most of my past research has focused on various issues related to social class in the long nineteenth century in Britain and British colonies. In this project, I take up the issue of how social class worked in conjunction with the continuing process of forming national identity in both England and Australia. All of the settler colonies formed their identity specifically in relation to immigrants who left England because they were not successful there in some way. Relatively few aristocrats or gentry emigrated—and those mainly were younger sons, had financial troubles or limited capital, or were disgraced in some way. All of the settler colonies ended up with societies that were more democratic in their class systems than the parent country. Australia is unique even among the settler colony/nations, though, because its first settlers were the absolute rejects of Britain—most of them the very lowest in class position of any British citizens because of their status as convicted felons. This makes literature about Australia a good place to examine social class in relation to national identity.
The idea for this project came to me when I saw a performance of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, which is a dramatic version of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker. Not only did Wertenbaker’s play feature a cast of convicts transported on the First Fleet and recently landed on the virtually unknown continent of Australia, but it also foregrounded the use of literature to bring about a more cohesive society among these felons and their warders. The plot concerns a group of convicts, organized and directed by one of the officers in charge of them, putting on a play for the king’s birthday, ironically a celebration of English identity by those who had just been banned from there. This idea of a country whose earliest European population was composed of England’s rejects, and their achieving a measure of redemption through literature, fascinated me. The next day I went to the campus library to discover whether more literary texts existed about transported English convicts in Australia. I found—somewhat to my surprise, since the only one I had heard of was Great Expectations—that there were a quite a few of them and that our library had several on the shelves, plus online editions of others. As I began reading, I discovered that each of them, in one way or another, engaged the way that social class functioned in the gradual process of forming a national identity, not only in an evolving Australia but also in England.
Also intriguing to me was the way in which this convict past had been repressed. I knew that all of the settler colonies had violently displaced indigenous people to establish first colonies and then nations and that forming new nations involved repressing the violence done to these indigenous people. But in Australia there were two groups who had been repressed—the indigenous people and the convicts. I was vaguely aware that Australia had taken a lot of transported convicts once the American Revolution made it impossible to send them to Georgia or Maryland (as I had seen represented in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders). And I was, of course, familiar with Dickens’s Magwitch, though I had never thought about the Australian implications of the character or the novel. I was not alone in my lack of knowledge about the Australian convicts: when I later taught a course on Australian convict fiction, my exchange student from the United Kingdom was outraged: “Why have I never heard of this? I went through the entire British school system without every hearing a word about it! It’s a disgrace!”
The nineteenth-century novels I explore in this book, as I discovered when I visited Australia, seem not that familiar even in Australia, as suggested by their absence from the bookstores I visited in several areas of the country while trying to buy copies of some of them—though of course they can be found on library shelves and have been discussed by Australian literary critics. And they are not well-known in America, even by Victorianists. Thus, one of my intentions for this book is to introduce a new array of intriguing literary texts to a much wider international audience. But I also want to demonstrate how literary texts about nineteenth-century convicts transported to Australia were part of a significant transnational social experiment: creating a new society 10,000 miles away from the old one, out of the dregs of that old society.
Historically, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder—but mostly theft—were transported to one of the new English colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while more serious felonies brought sentences of fourteen years or life in exile. Literature featuring these transported convicts demonstrates how this figure could be deployed in the service of covering over English social problems related to class. This literature, of course, mirrored the way that convicts actually transported were banished from the nation. This left the ideal of a harmonious traditional system of class relations—part of England’s idea of itself—in place without having to confront the radical changes that were actually occurring in the “mother” country.1 For this “solution” to work, though, a new identity had to be developed in the Australian colonies that was somewhat more egalitarian so that the exiled convicts would be content to stay there and not return to England, as Magwitch does. Convicts who returned, in fact, would undo the social work that their banishment was supposed to accomplish.
When the convicts were transported from Britain to Australia, the new continent was to the British a desolate land populated only by the world’s most savage of savages. This combined those defined as the lowest people of England and the lowest of the world’s native races. Unimportant as both might have been deemed, though, they were part of a transnational negotiation that helped define both English and nascent Australian identity. Of course, the British defined themselves as civilized by their difference from indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. In Australia, though, even those British people who were rejected from England because their supposedly depraved natures threatened English social harmony were usually considered superior to the savages and could thus potentially be recuperated. Hence the convicts could both solve English social problems by being banished and be reformed by learning to be more civilized than indigenous Australians.
This banishment of convicts began during the Revolutionary period, when, as a result of the French and American Revolutions, some members of Britain’s working class began to question the naturalness of their subordinate positions in the traditional social hierarchy that characterized England and its early form of national identity. In addition, the transportation of British convicts to Australia roughly coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which resulted in the uprooting of many among the working classes from their long-established places in rural society and sent them to the cities or, if they stayed, condemned them to poverty in a capitalizing agricultural economy. Convict literature, which almost always included several working-class characters, tended to reinforce the social hierarchy and encourage working-class people to identify with it, even while the middle classes were successfully striving for a position of more respect, power, and wealth within a changing social system.2 People of both classes in the Australian colonies, meanwhile, were trying to find—or preserve—a national identity in a place that was not anchored to the geography and traditional social relations of England. In Australia, especially at first, the estrangement of Australian immigrants from England actually reinforced their identification with their homeland, in a process Benedict Anderson explains in “Long-Distance Nationalism.” In some of the literature I examine, especially the transportation broadsides, this distancing effect is fictional, with English readers imagining convicts looking back from Australia and thus reinforcing the Englishness of both convicts and readers. Gradually, however, a new and different national identity began to emerge in the Antipodes, one that was recognizably Australian yet definitely did not include the indigenous people. This need for a new national identity was especially true among those who had been officially expelled from England, and it happened decades before there was any real prospect of an Australian nation.3 Thus, transported convict literature filled somewhat different functions for English and Australian readers at different times.
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