would have contested this model, which gave them both power and status. Importantly, the existence of this system, of which the gentleman was the linchpin, required a large working class, not only to do the work that supported the genteel classes but also to define gentility by its difference from those who did not have it. To be content with their subordinate place in this system, however, the working classes needed to feel that they too belonged to the national community; the respectable working classes were, in this idealized version of a stable social system, characterized as sturdy, independent, home-loving, hard-working, and respectful of their superiors—and thus also recognized as quintessentially English.
Thus, like Disraeli and the Young England party, many English writers also tried to map the land-based model of pseudofeudalism onto the new urban industrial working class, imagining the workers as respectable English peasants turned to another kind of work.30 At the same time, they show the new industry-based and professional middle classes adopting many of the values of the aristocratic gentleman and lady, attempting to acquire the social and cultural capital to match their new wealth, and thus stepping into the role of the benevolent patriarchy of pseudofeudalism through charity and, in some cases, political reform. Because of the imposition of a supposedly ancient model of social relations on a new kind of society, tensions inhered not only in actual social relationships but also in the popular imagination of the relations between classes. For those who adhered to the pseudofeudal model, such tensions could be represented by the “Chartists” and criminals who refused to accept their place in the ideal stable social hierarchy of reciprocal bonds and loyalties, whether by striking and rebelling or by violating the sacred laws of property, because they threatened the imagined harmonious hierarchy that ensured social stability and constituted an important tenet of England’s conception of itself.31 Applying a model devised by Mary Poovey for another context, one could say that the English subject counted on social harmony as part of what defined national identity. However, the urbanization and industrialization of England constituted a source of perceived danger to that identity, which thus created an often unarticulated anxiety. This anxiety in turn generated narratives that filled the role of Freudian protector by featuring convicts safely banished (Poovey, “Structure,” 155).
In Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, historian Linda Colley convincingly argues that the Napoleonic Wars created a cross-class national identity like the one I am describing; my argument does not contradict hers but adds transported convict narratives as another factor that contributed to this process. Colley implies that the national identity she attributes to the working classes may not have continued after the wars were over (289–325), while convict narratives were written throughout the century and after. Also, contrary to Colley’s argument about British national identity, my argument is about a specifically English or Anglo-Saxon identity. Given the fact that convicts were sent to Australia in large numbers from Scotland, Wales, and especially Ireland, some may wonder at my use of the term English, rather than British, national identity. Though many, especially in Scotland and Ireland, would disagree, Kumar claims that “English” was often used by those actually residing in England as a “short-hand expression for the whole of the United Kingdom and its inhabitants” (Making, 186), and Simon Gikandi argues that this is still the case (xi). Almost all of the literary materials I have been able to gather for this project, specifically those featuring the figure of the transported convict, were published in England, most of them in London.32 In addition, aside from a few of the broadsides, these literary works are set almost exclusively in England or Australia.
There are other reasons for using the term “English identity” as well. Colley argues that the various wars with France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries worked to unite the identities of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as British by their mutual definition of the French as the Other, making Britishness hybrid because it contained the other members of the United Kingdom as well as the other colonies belonging to the British Empire. However, Englishness, contends Ian Baucom, could be identified with Britishness but could also define itself “against the British Empire” by “privileging the English soil,” or “certain quintessentially English locales, as its authentic identity-determining locations” (12; emphasis in original). Virtually all the literary representations I examine similarly rely either on English soil or on the racial claim about the importance of Anglo-Saxon racial roots to identify Englishness as the island’s true national identity.33 Thus, whether they imagined locale or racial purity as the standard for national identity, the English tended to acknowledge their Britishness but insist on Englishness as their primary identity. Therefore, while the name British is more technically accurate, it does not reflect the way the English generally thought of themselves or imagined their identity, at least as represented in the literary texts I examine, and it was the English reader that most of the texts about convicts implicitly addressed, with Australian readers, in a sense, reading “over their shoulders.”
The reason for my focus on English identity and not Irish identity—given that approximately a third of the historical convicts transported to Australia were Irish—is that the literary representations I examine, with the exception of some of the broadsides, do not generally distinguish between English and Irish convicts. When they do, they tend to represent the Irish as the most brutal and least reformable convicts, with only a few exceptions. Irish identity, given that island’s already colonized status and the distinct economic and political conditions there, was decidedly different and more complicated not only in Ireland but also in Australia, where the Irish often congregated together, when possible, to maintain their Irish identity separate from the other convicts or former convicts. There is considerable historiography on Irish convicts but not much literary discussion of Irish identity in Australia.34 Like the authors of the texts I analyze, I focus on English identity in relation to Australia, though, as in the literary texts, Irish people may occasionally appear as yet one more marginalized group fighting for an identity.
THE TRANSPORTED CONVICT AS A GUARANTOR OF IDEAL ENGLISHNESS
Because dissidents and criminals demonstrated that social relations between the ranks of the social hierarchy were not always harmonious and accepted by all, they posed not only an actual threat to property and peace but also an ideological challenge to the association of what I am calling pseudofeudal class relations with English national identity. The quickest and easiest way to meet both challenges without having to consider changes to the traditional social or economic systems was to get rid of these resistant members of society. Hence, in 1800 there were over two hundred capital crimes that, in theory, permanently disposed of such deviants. However, actually executing the majority of criminals and rebels was not consistent with England’s notion of itself as a just, humane, and civilized society.35 Transportation, or forced exile, to the American colonies (and a few other places) had been an alternative since the seventeenth century but had, of course, become unavailable to the English after the American colonies declared their independence in 1776.36 Because transportation had the advantage of being a way to remove undesirables from England without killing them and even offering them a potential second chance at a new life, English penal officials were hesitant to abandon it. Thus, transportation to Australia replaced earlier methods of disposing of those who jeopardized its supposedly harmonious social relations. This worked to preserve both England’s peace and its national conscience—as long as the convicts agreed to give up their Englishness and stay in Australia.
The English belief that transportation could reform criminals poses something of a challenge to Foucauldian readings of criminality and discipline that are relatively easy to map onto the penitentiaries and separate-and-silent prisons that coexisted with and later replaced transportation.37 Writing on policing and prisons, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee mentions that in the nineteenth century “the source of crime [needed to be] inside the individual”; if not, it “negated the possibility of reforming him though punishment” (93; emphasis in original). The penitentiaries and separate-and-silent prisons aimed to work on the criminal’s psyche and turn him or her to penitence (hence the name penitentiary) and thus to abandoning crime and becoming law-abiding citizens. Michel Foucault says it succinctly: “[I]n penal justice, the prison transformed the punitive procedure
