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ONE

Dickens and the Transported Convict

THOUGH it came in the middle of the century and midway in the history of the figure of the transported convict, the most famous nineteenth-century literary treatment of this character is without doubt Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861).¹ Dickens’s famous novel, like many other convict novels, was actually written several years after convict transportation had been abolished in all but the remote area of Western Australia. It was written during the decade in which Dickens was actively supporting emigration, or voluntary transportation, for the poor working classes in his journal Household Words. I call this “voluntary transportation” because it filled much the same purpose as convict transportation: emigration rid England of one of its most critical social challenges by sending the poor to Australia, where they could begin to develop an Australian national identity and not trouble England’s supposed social harmony—as long as they did not return. Given their central place in the history of convict literature, Dickens’s writings, especially Great Expectations, are a logical place to start exploring the issues of this book because even though none of Dickens’s novels or journalistic portrayals of the transported convict are the first chronologically, they are arguably the most influential.

The fact that by the 1850s Dickens was promoting voluntary transportation at the same time that Great Expectations was so successfully representing the figure of the transported convict or forced emigrant seems contradictory. Obviously he was not advocating the reinstitution of convict transportation as the solution to solving the English social problems caused by industrialization and urbanization, though some of the writers for Household Words do sound nostalgic about that previously abolished penal practice. Transportation got rid of the poor, particularly the discontented poor, by sending them halfway around the world, where they were to assume a new national identity and, if they behaved well, a chance at success they could not have in England. This would shore up the social class relations of pseudofeudalism in England. Thus, transportation was not a failure by British standards; it was the Australian colonies that refused to take any more convicts. Thus, for the Dickens who wrote novels with transported convict figures, transportation had done its job when the convicts stayed in Australia and failed only when they refused to give up their English identity and returned to England. The Dickens who was editing Household Words favored the voluntary emigration of the poor or discontented to solve the same social problems—before they resulted in felonies. In addition, he and his stable of journalists wanted to reassure both poor emigrants and those of a higher class with some capital that Australia was no longer merely “Botany Bay,” a depot for convicted felons. Instead, Australia was imagined in the journal as a place where English people, even former convicts, could reform, if necessary, and become respectable and successful—a place they could voluntarily adopt as their new home and identity.²

Although Dickens never visited Australia, he learned much about it from books and from people who had been there;³ in fact, he became so interested that in 1865 he supported the decision of his son Alfred to emigrate, and three years later he sent his youngest son Edward there as well. Much of Dickens’s knowledge about Australia came initially from Caroline Chisholm, a well-known promoter of Australian emigration schemes for working-class families and single women.⁴ Dickens first met Chisholm in February 1850, after which he wrote about the subject in the first number of Household Words, as well as other publications. In fact, claims Mary Lazarus, “Dickens must have been Mrs. Chisholm’s best publicist” (16). Besides Chisholm, Dickens knew and corresponded with many people who had been to or were still living in Australia, including some of his writers for Household Words, such as W. H. Horne, who would have given him firsthand testimony about life and conditions there as well as contributing to the journal (Lazarus, 19).

By portraying the fate of convicts once they had arrived in Australia, Dickens and the other Household Words authors could demonstrate to their reading audience that Australia was safe for free English people of all classes. In these representations, Australia becomes a place where all types of victims of the social and economic changes in England—those classed as failures in England because they could not support themselves or perhaps had committed social blunders and needed to repair reputations—could have a fresh start and a chance to succeed. By promoting emigration, the Household Words authors encouraged those who were not contributing to English social harmony to essentially transport themselves (sometimes with government or charitable assistance). In one way, at least, Great Expectations also shares this mission; even Magwitch has reformed and succeeded in Australia and is no longer a frightening figure who threatens either Australian or English identity.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Dickens, therefore, clearly knew that the colonies that would become the nation of Australia were growing larger and more independent from Great Britain.⁵ As Johannes Voigt puts it, “With the end of the huge wave of convicts and after the beginning of the wave of free immigration encouraged by England, shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century, a movement began to stir within the Australian colonies towards co-governing,” and in 1855 and 1856 the British government had allowed the various colonies to set up their own elected legislative assemblies (21). The new co-governing colonies were not going to agree to reinstate convict transportation, and Britain was not going to force it on them. With the one exception of Western Australia, which accepted convicts for the benefit of the free labor until 1868, transportation was over. So why publish a novel about it in 1860–61, when his journal had been actively supporting free emigration, or voluntary transportation, for the previous ten years? The answer lies partly in the issue of form, or genre. As a journal, Household Words tended to print informational material, even if heavily editorialized. It published many supposedly “true life” convict stories but no literary works that address this topic. As a novel, Great Expectations was doing something more complex.

Many critics have discussed Great Expectations, identifying it with several different literary genres. Writing in 1989, Thomas Loe identified the three most prominent genres of the novel as the bildungsroman, the novel of manners (which includes romance), and the gothic, which is the one he focuses on in his article. In contrast, I read the novel mostly as a social problem novel in which Dickens shows the effects of transportation on individual characters and how transportation was tied up with social mobility, in both England and Australia, and with defining national identity and social class, mostly in England. The effects of transportation in the novel are ambiguous at best; this demonstrates that a new system, such as the emigration or voluntary transportation being extolled in Household Words, needed to be encouraged.⁶ Like other critics since Loe, I am also interested in the way Dickens uses gothic elements in the novel.⁷ This important formal difference between Great Expectations and Household Words may offer another reason why Dickens prominently featured a transported convict in his novel in 1861, when the articles in his journal, which rarely feature gothic tropes, dealt with the current reality that convict transportation had been abolished.

Gothic elements figure in two main ways in Great Expectations. One is that the novel takes up some gothic conventions, such as the deserted churchyard, the chains hanging from the former gallows, the threatened cannibalism, and the violence of the fighting convicts. According to Tabish Khair, the appearance of Magwitch in the beginning of Great Expectations is “as ‘Gothic’ a scene in its resonances as any” (105). And of course, Miss Havisham, living in darkened Satis House dressed in her ragged yellowed wedding dress, reliving her long-past betrayal, is another key gothic aspect of the novel. Alexandra Warwick, in contrast, argues that these key scenes from Pip’s life that utilize easily recognizable gothic props for sensational effects actually serve to “empty out” the form and its traditional meanings (32). While “the narrative of Great Expectations promises an older conventional form of Gothic,” it “denies” that promise (Warwick, 32). Like the pseudofeudal social hierarchy that characterized English national identity and required the expulsion of the convict, the “still-feudal relations” that form the (relatively) secure environment of the young Pip are “hollowed out” and replaced with a new type of urban gothic, often associated with the sensation fiction of the 1860s (32). What this new form of gothic fiction represses, says Warwick, is money, but I would argue that Dickens’s “new” gothic convict novel also represses the deviant or rebellious individual who threatens those “still-feudal relations.” So when Magwitch, who is nothing if not the return of the repressed, which is the meaning most often associated with gothic forms,⁸ comes back to England, he represents not only the money that has ironically propelled Pip, the main character, into the ranks of the gentleman but also all Pip’s contacts with convicts throughout the novel. Julie Barst argues that for English gothic texts like Great Expectations, Australia’s function is to be “a space whereby repressed characters can hang in the balance, awaiting their opportunity for return, their chance to produce the uncanny and sensational” effects that are “typical of Gothic in both those [characters] who repressed them and the readers themselves” (6).⁹ By publishing a convict novel in 1861, Dickens doubtless appealed to a readership interested in gothic stories, especially modern ones, which are classified by many critics as sensation fiction like that popularized at the moment Dickens published Great Expectations (Horner, 108). What Dickens does not represent in his gothic/sensation novel is the return of what is still deeply repressed in English and even much Australian literature today—guilt for brutality toward and even eradication of the indigenous Australians. Neither do the journal writers, who are trying to repress the notion of the convicts as dangerous criminals and felons (as Pip at first assumes the returned Magwitch is) and to portray Australia as a safe and prosperous place. The Aborigines are repressed so deeply that they cannot be seen returning (or appearing) in these texts; the convicts, though they are supposed to be repressed, are still racially defined as white and thus can be portrayed as returning.

In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch the transported convict is paradoxically the most wealthy and the lowest socially of any of the characters portrayed. It is through him that Pip’s dreams of becoming a gentleman are negotiated, and the novel’s presentation of what it means to be a gentleman is thoroughly entangled with both social class and national identity through Magwitch. This is part of the cultural work accomplished by the novel. Pip’s desire to be a gentleman and not a blacksmith like Joe, which is vaguely suggested by his desire to learn to read and improve himself even before he receives his “expectations,” challenges the ideal social relationships of pseudofeudalism with its invocation of the self-made man.¹⁰ Thus, in Great Expectations, Australia signifies both as a place to get rid of the socially deviant, who are a threat to a cohesive national identity, and as a way to fund both the creation and the maintenance of the new gentleman as the essence of Englishness in an industrialized and urbanized age. The new-made gentleman and the convict are two sides of the same coin; both challenge the pseudofeudal hierarchy.

Sending problem characters to Australia via convict transportation had actually become a staple literary device by the time Dickens wrote Great Expectations. It was a convenient way to get rid of a character without killing him or her outright.¹¹ Many novelists, including some highly canonical ones, mention transportation, and numerous others, like Dickens, wrote novels featuring transported convicts after transportation had ended. (Many of these are discussed in later chapters.) In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch appears on the first page of the novel and is packed off to Australia by the end of chapter 5. The action of the novel, however, never moves to Australia, despite the fact that “the colony becomes a location from which the plot is directed” (Litvack, II:101). The only descriptions of it are given to us piecemeal as part of Magwitch’s recollections at various points near the end of the second volume, after he has reappeared. Yet even if Australia figures only as the novelist’s “green room,” as Leon Litvack calls it (I:26), its very existence out there somewhere works to create Englishness by serving as an Other in terms of both place and class. Additionally, Jonathan H. Grossman claims that Magwitch’s return instantiates the new global transport network that creates a sense of simultaneity for individual people (235), recalling Benedict Anderson’s linkage of print capitalism—such as novels—with the creation of a sense of simultaneity that works to generate national identity (Imagined, 25). The transportation broadsides aimed at the working classes (discussed in chapter 2) may portray Australia as a blank space or as a confused amalgamation of Australia and America, but they too create a sense of simultaneity that helps incorporate the respectable working classes into the English polity—as long as (unlike the convicts) they do not resist their place in the social system, of course. Even without actually appearing in the text, Australia thus helps reinforce both English national identity and existing class relations as an important part of it.

In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch is a paradoxical character who represents both a threat to the social harmony created through hierarchical class relations and a reinforcement of those distinctions. Before his conviction, he helps Compeyson break the heart of and obtain money from Miss Havisham, a gentlewoman, thus inherently disputing the security and naturalness of the social hierarchy; he does this at the insistence and according to the instructions of Compeyson, whom Magwitch believes is a gentleman.¹² Besides the Havisham scam, Magwitch also participates in general thieving and passing bad notes, both of which are threats to property. Magwitch challenges the social class system in another way by enabling Pip, an uneducated working-class boy, to rise to the status of English gentleman, a class to which he was not born and has no real claim.¹³ Yet viewed in another way, Pip’s rise reinforces that system by emphasizing the superiority and desirability of being a gentleman instead of a respectable working-class man. The fact that, at least before Magwitch returns, Pip is not a very exemplary gentleman works to undermine Magwitch’s notion that his money can successfully intervene in the social hierarchy. In fact, Janet C. Myers comments that Magwitch’s return makes “visible the challenge he and Pip present to the existing class system and to the traditions of primogeniture and inheritance,” linchpins of the pseudofeudal social hierarchy (82).

Magwitch the convict, though, actually does succeed in “creating” a gentleman. Even though Pip does not seem to become a very gentlemanly gentleman with the money Magwitch provides to fund his education and lifestyle, Pip does eventually acquire the qualities of an honorable gentleman. Ironically, these qualities show themselves more clearly once he finds out his rise has been funded by corrupted money and he feels morally required to reject it. He cannot give up his gentlemanliness at this point, because it has now become part of him—his body as well as his identity. His true gentlemanliness, in fact, is developed and proved by taking care of Magwitch/Provis unselfishly until Magwitch’s death. Recognizing Magwitch as a victim of English society’s desire for social harmony is part of Pip’s reform and assimilation into the category of real English gentleman, while Magwitch’s death neutralizes the convict as either a threat to or a meddling agent in class relations.

Of Magwitch’s time in Australia, we learn very little. “I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in the new world,” he says (344), and this is most of what we get about what has happened to him in the Antipodes. What we learn about Australia is mostly its almost unimaginable distance from England: it is “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from this” (344). Australia is thus brought into existence as an imagined space, but it is visible only in brief flashes. That is, Australia fluctuates through the course of this novel (and many other literary representations) between being a chimerical illusion and becoming an actual place. It is the absent referent for the term transported that occurs incidentally in so many nineteenth-century novels, along with the empty name Botany Bay, which Magwitch himself uses: “Nor yet I don’t intend to advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from Botany Bay” (357). Kirsty Reid links the imagined space of Australia directly to social class when she says that “Magwitch’s return to metropolitan space . . . undermines those notions of collective difference which supposedly separated ‘gentlemen,’ a class which claimed the right to possess every place, from the criminal exiles who had been sentenced to be forever without place” (“Exile,” 62; emphasis in original). Reid is right in pointing out how Magwitch’s return disrupts the binary between gentlemen and exiled criminals, but such exiles were not exactly “without place.” If Australia could be represented as a new or different location with its own identity, then it too was a place, one that was often thought of as specially designed for the rebellious or wayward. Many convict novels and other forms of literature, as well as Dickens’s Household Words, did focus specifically on portraying the land and (white) people of Australia. Although it happens only in Magwitch’s scattered recollections, even in Great Expectations Australia becomes at least a partially imagined place where someone we “know” has lived. In fact, Australia needs to be a place in order to define England and Englishness by its otherness.

Thus Great Expectations in effect produces Australia by having Magwitch, who has actually been there and experienced it as a real place, return to see the English gentleman he has created. Importantly, what Dickens’s novel does not engage is the possibility that, historically, someone like Magwitch could have become a gentleman in Australia. Although in the novel Magwitch has been stung by Australian settlers “with blood horses” labeling him “common” (348)—as Estella does to young Pip (95)—historically there were emancipated convicts who became not only wealthy but also respectable in New South Wales.¹⁴ This was especially true during the period in which the novel is probably set; according to Litvack, the most reliable dating of the action of the novel puts it in the tenure of Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1809–22), which was “a time of widening opportunity for transportees” (II:104). Some former convicts became so wealthy and powerful that they were even invited to Government House, considered the pinnacle of Australian society.¹⁵ Even among those who were not so fortunate as that, their newfound freedom and relative prosperity often allowed emancipists to become respected and respectable citizens among the middling classes in Australia. In other convict novels, emancipists become gentlemen who can afford “blood horses,” even if their own blood may be suspect in terms of English social class. Nineteenth-century Australian society was by no means classless, but movement between classes was often more fluid than it was in England, especially in individual terms. Class distinctions there were also more overtly based on money than in England, where birth, breeding, and manners counted as much as or more than wealth in traditional definitions of the gentleman.

When Dickens represents Magwitch as being unable to become a gentleman in Australia, then, he is not portraying Australia as it was historically: an actual place with at least the potential for social mobility and a new we-identity for working-class people who had been rejected by England. Instead, he depicts Australia as an imagined place that is just like England in its social system, except that it is inherently inferior. Even Magwitch, who comes from the lowest of social classes, knows that English gentlemen are better than Australian ones: “I’m making a better gentleman nor ever you’ll be!” says Magwitch, addressing in absentia the Australian gentlemen who scorned him (348). While the Australian gentleman may have more money than the English one—a man who can afford “blood horses” certainly has more economic capital than Herbert Pocket, perhaps the novel’s best exemplar of the gentleman—he can, according to the novel, never be as gentlemanly, because Englishness is part of the cultural and social capital, as Pierre Bourdieu describes them, of the gentleman (“Forms”). Being a colonial gentleman—especially in Australia, where one can only be a gentleman by distinction from convicts—is by definition to be a lesser version of a “real” gentleman.¹⁶

According to Andrew Sanders, Magwitch wants “to claim a vicarious place among the gentlemen in order to prove that their gentility is not innate but manufactured” (429).¹⁷ Sanders’s remark suggests that the class of gentleman was under stress in England itself, as Great Expectations reveals. Pip’s rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to London gentleman in some ways resembles the rags-to-riches rise represented in Samuel Smiles’s wildly popular Self Help (1859).¹⁸ Pip, of course, does rise from being a working-class boy to a London gentleman just as many of Smiles’s exemplary figures do. Such portraits of the socially mobile gentleman were in tension with the more traditional definition of the gentleman as a man of aristocratic or at least genteel birth, with education, manners, bearing, taste—and, ideally, property—appropriate to his status. Also, the traditional gentleman did not work, unless it was in one of the few genteel professions such as the clergy and the military. By contrast, the Smilesian gentleman was characterized by his occupation and his work ethic, which often included self-education and the acquiring of gentlemanly characteristics through diligent study, as well as inherently good character.¹⁹ The difference between these two gentlemanly ideals came down to the question of whether cultural and social capital could be acquired through wealth and instruction or whether the important traits were somehow innate in one’s birth and upbringing. Pip obviously becomes the newer, bourgeois kind of gentleman, though he does not gain his wealth in the typical Smilesian way.²⁰ Pip, as several critics have pointed out, is a “made man,” not a “self-made” one.²¹ The circles within which he moves in London are certainly not aristocratic, despite Mrs. Pocket’s and Drummle’s pretensions; these are bourgeois gentlemen and ladies.²²

Ultimately the only thing that separates the bourgeois gentleman like Pip or Herbert from the socially mobile Australian gentleman is his national identity; Pip and Herbert are English, even when they live in Egypt, while the Australian is not. Even for nonconvicts, Australianness is linked to the “stain” of convictism; in Great Expectations, so is Pip. However much he tries at first to dissociate himself from Magwitch, he cannot. There is no denying the connection between his acquired gentlemanliness and the convict stain, even after Magwitch’s money and property are forfeited to the English Crown. The convict stain that clings to Magwitch, as Reid points out, “is undoubtedly and repeatedly racially inscribed” (“Exile,” 58); being a convict becomes a metaphorical racial identity that could be said to displace the racial otherness of the actual Australian indigenous people who are never mentioned. The words stain and taint appear frequently in many different kinds of writing about convicts, likening them to the racial otherness marked by differences in skin color. Even so, in much of the nineteenth-century literature about Australia, the convict is a more threatening Other than the Aborigine simply because the convicts are more visible, both within Australia and on English streets (as with the many convicts Pip comes into contact with). Significantly, Pip feels himself contaminated by this otherness from the first chapter of the novel, even though it is not literally marked on his skin. He has many encounters with convicts throughout the novel; to his perception, even nature seems to share the convict taint by which he has been touched: the “flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom” (89). Of course, neither flowers nor convicts are actually marked by the convict stain, but the convict’s outsider status is so pronounced that it is naturalized as physical. This is not really surprising, since, as Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, by the 1860s social difference in England had come to be articulated in terms of race more often than class (Taming, 112).

Rebecca N. Mitchell also acknowledges that Pip feels a “visceral response to Magwitch” when he returns, but she attributes this to “Pip’s recognition of his own folly. He can now see, from his vantage of greater experience and exteriorized from the position of belief, how faulty Magwitch’s proposition is, how flawed the idea that any money, earned any way, may purchase station or class” (41). But despite the money’s origin in Australia and its connection to the othered, even racialized, convict, it has bought Pip the position of a gentleman; once educated, he is accepted among all his associates as a gentleman and an equal, even by the novel’s most aristocratic (if suspect) characters, Bentley Drummle and Mrs. Pocket. Pip has acquired the necessary cultural capital—not only possessions, which he loses, but also education, manners, and taste, which are finally part of him—to be considered a gentleman of the new bourgeois order by his new peers, good and bad. Dickens shows, says Robin Gilmour, “how much money and gentility, cash and culture, depend on one another” (“Class,” 109), and they are indeed intimately linked for Pip; but he remains a gentleman even after losing his property because in England gentility involves more than just money. Gilmour’s statement is even truer for Australian gentlemen than for English ones, as Great Expectations demonstrates. In Pip’s case, of course, it is mostly money that creates his English gentility—and that money comes from and is identified with an Australian convict and all that he represents.²³ What Pip (and Dickens) repress is not merely the racialization of the convict but the fact that for a convict like Magwitch or even a successful free emigrant, their newfound wealth is based on the erasure of the indigenous Australians.²⁴ Elaine Freedgood finds evidence of this repression, which she describes as “fetishistic,” in Magwitch mentioning “Negro head tobacco” three times in two chapters (83). Fetishizing this link to indigenous Australians, still called “blacks” in Australia, as Freedgood reminds us, “symbolizes the crime of Aboriginal genocide without requiring conscious acknowledgement of it, and therefore without forcing the reader to deny, repress, or oppose the fact of genocide” (84). Freedgood’s point that we have to look hard for signs of the “horror” that “circulates in Great Expectations” is an important one in a text like this that overtly raises the gothic horror of convicts but not the people who were abused, killed, and displaced in order for the convict system and colonial Australia to exist at all (82). Pip’s gentlemanliness comes at an even greater cost than he (and we) generally recognize.

Also, Pip is from the beginning closely associated with convicts sentenced to transportation and also, in a sense, to Australia as a place. The first scene of the novel, in which Pip meets Magwitch on the marshes, is set in a border space. The convict appears first in a church cemetery and then on the Battery, which used to be the place where cannon were put to defend England from attack from the sea. Rather like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Great Expectations is set near the Thames, the waterway leading to the world outside England, including its colonies such as Australia.²⁵ The river, of course, is also the mooring place for the Hulks, which house the convicts sentenced to transportation and serve as a transitional space between England and Australia. Thus, Pip’s origins involve an unspoken connection to otherness even before he meets the convict. Those origins, including the graves of his parents and little brothers, are linked both to convicts and to transportation to Australia.

Another instance of imagined similarity to the convict is the scene in which Pip goes to the Town Hall to receive his indentures and is mistaken by the bystanders for a young criminal.²⁶ This scene is very like an incident Magwitch later describes when as a child he too was called before a court and was subject to the gossip of the bystanders, who speculated about his crimes (138, 370–71). As Eiichi Hara has noted, Pip’s being bound as an apprentice has a story of crime already written into it from the popular criminal biographies, stretching back to William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century engravings of “The Idle Apprentice” (598). The apprentice who gets into bad company (often including a demanding bad woman), steals from his master, and is then transported was also a staple of the convict broadsides so widely consumed by the working-class public (see chapter 2). Here the tale is told to a more middle-class audience that feels no empathy with the renegade apprentice and instead needs to expel the bad apprentice from England to preserve Englishness. Pip, of course, is not an idle or criminal apprentice, but he is tempted by money and the promise of class mobility, as is the bad apprentice. Though he gets his money seemingly providentially rather than by stealing, in London he becomes an idle young gentleman with profligate associates (the Finches) who wants money to impress a woman (Estella). And though Pip does not steal his money, it turns out to have come from a transported thief. Pip also feels deep guilt at abandoning his “parents,” as the apprentices in broadsides and ballads almost always do. Further, although Pip is never exiled to Australia, his money and his expectations come from there. Thus, all the elements of the convicted apprentice tale are there; they are just rearranged. Pip’s desires for social mobility are therefore linked by the story with the kind of working-class people who threaten the sanctity of property and thus, along with machine breakers, Chartists, and other overt rebels, inherently pose a challenge to a vision of class harmony intimately associated with English national identity.²⁷ Pip’s story literally breaks down the difference between a gentleman and a working-class convict.

Great Expectations reveals the complicated way that Victorian anxieties and deep ambivalence about social mobility are projected onto the figure of the transported convict. The working-class Pip’s desires to become a gentleman are portrayed as only natural, reinforcing the centrality of the gentleman to English national identity, yet these desires end up linking him to a racialized convict and barring him from the kind of domesticity that would bring him happiness. Joe, in contrast, the paragon of working-class virtue, happily, even proudly, accepts his place in a social hierarchy that allows him domestic happiness, though still privileging the gentleman—bourgeois or aristocratic—as the norm for a modern English national identity created by establishing the pseudofeudal hierarchy in which everyone has a place and is contented with it. Magwitch, the working-class character who does not fit in this idealized paternal system, is expelled from England and then punished when he tries to reclaim an English identity instead of accepting a new Australian one. If, as Suvendrini Perera claims, “Magwitch’s resurrection from the unquiet grave of Australia in Great Expectations” is “a return that ends by implicating and incriminating every institution of the metropolis” (76), then he serves as a dangerous working-class ghost who threatens the very Englishness of the English.

Dickens generally follows a similar pattern for convicts in many of his novels, a pattern that is evident in Great Expectations but also presaged in several others.²⁸ In Dickens’s novels, convicts are almost always first abhorred as criminals and then transported; when they return, they are given a sympathetic history showing how they were victimized and not just deviant or rebellious. This is important because it shows that it is not an evil nature that caused them to commit crimes, but the social conditions into which they were thrust; by sending them to Australia, the social conditions change and they can reform. However, in Dickens’s novels they almost inevitably return to England, where they become penitent and die. Since they are eventually made sympathetic, however, their rebellion against social stability in England is basically obliterated and they become like other members of the English working class. But even when sympathetic and penitent, the transported convicts are stained so much by their transportation to Australia that they still cannot be reintegrated into English society and must totally disappear by dying. Reform is not enough to restore their Englishness, even a working-class version of it.

While my focus in this chapter is on English national identity and how social class was an essential part of constructing it in Dickens’s fiction, Australian readers also read Dickens avidly. Kylie Mirmohamadi and Susan K. Martin point out in Colonial Dickens that colonial Australians “carved out a subjectivity that involved being British and Australian; of being both from here and of there” (26; emphasis in original). Australian readers, Mirmohamadi and Martin suggest, read both England and Australia through Dickens (27–29). Thus, Dickens’s fiction played a complicated role in creating Australian identity, confirming its readers in their ties to England as “Home” but also, because most of those born in Australia would not have visited England, also emphasizing their difference from the “Old Country,” which they could only imagine through his words, the same way that English readers imagined Australia.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS

Although Dickens obviously did not write all of the articles published in the journal Household Words, he personally supervised and edited everything that went into its pages. The title page of each issue conspicuously bears the heading “conducted by Charles Dickens.” Thus, the content of the family-oriented journal can reasonably be viewed as passing his muster, even when he did not actually write it; as Anne Lohrli puts it, “Such principles as it had were the opinions that Dickens held” (4). The journal, which began its run on March 30, 1850, and ran until 1859 (when it became All the Year Round because of a dispute with the publisher), includes numerous articles considering transportation and portraying transported convicts, even though transportation had been mostly abolished in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land by that time. However, the journal’s and Dickens’s interest in transportation coincided with an uptick of curiosity about Australia among the English public as a result of a widespread push for free emigration to the colonies there. In general, the writers for Household Words tend to look at transportation with nostalgia as a desirable way of dealing with England’s criminals; they lament the loss of transportation to Australia, portraying transportation as a solution to one of England’s major social problems by offering both appropriate punishment and a chance to reform and become respectable for convicted English felons. Essays thus focus on Australia’s history, on the punishments inflicted there (especially at Norfolk Island, the notorious secondary penal station), and on transported convicts who have succeeded in Australia after finishing their sentences. These writers also try to reassure potential emigrants that Australia is no longer just a penal settlement and that it is a safe and respectable place to which to emigrate. Two series of articles deal with the stories of “specials,” or genteel convicts. Presumably, the middle-class reader would identify with and be titillated by the possibility of someone like him-or herself being transported, while also realizing that not all convicts are uncouth and debased.²⁹ The likeness yet difference of the special convict is one more way that the figure of the convict muddies national identities and confuses class distinctions.

Unlike Dickens’s novels, almost all of the Household Words articles about transportation feature supposedly historical transported convicts who stayed in Australia, giving up their Englishness in exchange for a chance at a new life, as more and more free emigrants were doing in the 1850s.³⁰ Portraying former convicts as good citizens who have adopted Australia as a home and achieved or regained respectability was a way to convince potential free emigrants that Australia was no longer primarily a den of thieves and that they need not be afraid to go there.³¹ This more positive view of Australia may seem to be at odds with the story of Magwitch and with Dickens’s other novelistic portrayals of transported convicts, but these articles suggest the other side of the same coin—the good things that can happen if convicts do not return to England and try to reclaim their English identity, which is much to England’s perceived advantage.

While some of the articles about Australia in Household Words are informational travel narratives, the inclusion of or failure to mention transported convicts 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 from England to Australia but also to stay there. By 1859, readers would have known that convicts could and did prosper 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 Ralph Darling’s administration, after Governor Macquarie had departed, and so she was not treated as a special. She did have the good fortune, though, to be assigned as a needlewoman to a Mr. and Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Preston being described as “a lady of aristocratic birth and breeding” (“Miss St. Felix,” 614). Annie proved herself so superior to other servants that she became almost part of the family, and when Mrs. Preston died, Mr. Preston married her. He eventually obtained a free pardon for her so that they could return to England to take possession of a large property that he inherited. Thus, because of her extraordinary domesticity, the female special convict regained her appropriate station in life, including returning to the metropole and taking on a new English identity, supposedly even better than her former Irish one. Kate Crawford, in contrast, convicted of horse stealing (though she only “borrowed” the horse from a neighbor who prosecuted her because of a quarrel with her father), after some suffering in the colony, received a grant of land. Although “she did not cease to be what the vulgar call ‘a fine lady,’” Lang’s informant tells us, “she made herself a woman of business, and a shrewd one too” (“Kate Crawford,” 600). Never marrying, Kate Crawford amassed her own fortune, totaling “as nearly as possible half a million sterling” in Australia, an opportunity that would have been extremely rare for a single woman in England. Adopting her new identity as an Australian thus offered her both economic rewards and independence. Interestingly, despite these two portraits of historical special convicts, fictional genteel women convicts (as I discuss in chapter 5) are more likely than male convicts to suffer persecution and early death. In those representations, Australia is a place where they can have no identity once their class status is lowered by becoming convicts. In Household Words, however, genteel women convicts do have a chance to redeem themselves and rebuild a national identity, be it English or Australian.

In short, while there is considerable variety in the representation of transported convicts in Dickens’s Household Worlds, almost all of the articles portray Australia as a safe and promising place for free emigrants, willing to transport themselves out of England voluntarily. They are assured that if they work hard, they can succeed beyond what is possible in England. If they are working-class emigrants, though, they will have to become like convicts in giving up their English identity. If they are genteel emigrants, they can exploit Australia’s resources and return to England with their fortunes gained or replenished, thus repairing the ravages of social and economic change on English identity. Convicts are depicted as appropriately punished if very wicked or enabled to restore or gain respectability and prosperity once they have completed their terms if they are hardworking and well behaved. This message differs from that of Dickens’s fiction, which focuses on the threat of the working-class convict who returns to England to disrupt and destabilize its social hierarchy and its sense of itself as a civilized and eminently respectable nation. However, as in Great Expectations, Australian money may subsidize the rise of the bourgeois gentleman, the paradigmatic English national subject. Also, the journal articles reassure English and potential Australian emigrants that the worst convicts have been truly punished. In the articles about specials, the journal shows that they were punished just by having to associate with ordinary convicts; but really dangerous convicts are isolated at the penal stations, while specials have mostly been able to find a life in Australia even despite their crimes. Associating with them would not threaten anyone’s respectability.

* * *

Although there is a discernible difference in purpose between the figure of the transported convict in Dickens’s fiction and the transported convicts shown in the various articles in Household Words, which he supervised and condoned even when he did not write them, even in the fiction he is basically sympathetic toward the criminal who reforms and is penitent. While transported convicts are supposed to disappear and take their challenge to the English social hierarchy with them, the ones who return are allowed repentance; what they inevitably lose is their English national identity. By returning they sacrifice a potential new identity as Australian, leaving them without any real we-identity. Without that, all they can do is become literally without identity—they die. Thus, challenging the English social structure is a very serious matter. Transporting convicts may be a convenient plot device, mirroring a historical practice that was a handy way of getting rid of social deviants, but as Dickens’s oeuvre shows, the transported convict as represented in literature was complicated and diverse enough to figure crucial social dilemmas and imagine solutions for them. The issues that Dickens’s various works raise are present in a variety of other literary texts of the era, which I explore in the remaining chapters.