Читать книгу The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens - Steve Harris - Страница 8

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A MURDEROUS TYPE

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

— Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

RUHTRA TROP TA REDRUM.

To an unpractised eye it seemed an obscure Latin phrase, but not to those who spent their days in the alchemy of fonts, picas, stones, quoins and forms that formed a newspaper. The editors, printers and their ‘devils’, as apprentices were known, knew that only when the reverse type had been compressed, inked, and printed would it reveal to the world its true face.

And its meaning was even better understood by those among them who were amid almost 80,000 men, boys, women and girls born ordinary folk in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, whose circumstances and choices in the lottery of life put them on an extraordinary path to the other side of the world. Behind them were lives of impoverishment, abandonment and struggle to survive on the street by picking pockets, robbing orchards, burgling homes or counterfeiting coin, and the prejudice and panic of those who branded them a threat to the cradle of the British Empire. And so they were exiled to the world’s newest and most remote settlement 12,000 miles (19,000 km) away, condemned never to return.

Each had endured sentences of seven or fourteen years in this unique place called Van Diemen’s Land, where the ancient Aboriginal civilisation had been swept aside to enable, for the first time in the world, a foreign society establishing a new one on the backs of its unwanted. A settlement of conflict between Old and New worlds, man and nature, good and evil, hope and hell.

In a smoky printery, putting the final touches to the July 1843 edition of the Colonial Times, their convict irons and manacles were gone but the shadow and stain of convictism were immoveable, their past indelibly inked and readily cited. Their papers showed them to be free men, but they were living in an island run as Her Majesty’s gaol. A colonial and penal fiefdom where traditional English rights and liberties were seen as a threat, and colonial officers and convicts were equally familiar with the blurred lines of vice and virtue, and truth and justice — each in the eye of the beholder.

The governor and his loyal faction only wanted their truth and justice to prevail, lest there be any disruption to the dutiful and tyrannical imposition of regulations and punishment. Many under their rule self-servingly or meekly saluted but some resisted and pursued their own voice, marching to the typesetting beat of the Colonial Times; Hobart Town Advertiser; Courier; Austral-Asiatic Review, Tasmanian and Australian Advertiser; Britannia and Trades Advocate; Hobarton Guardian; Teetotal Advocate; Tasmanian and Austral Asiatic Review; True Colonist; Hobart Town Courier or Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle.

Some were founded by those who had been punished but survived and remained resilient enough to take up weapons of ink and paper. Henry Savery, a forger, ignored laws prohibiting convicts from writing to pen satirical newspaper articles and the country’s first novel, Quintus Servinton: A tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence (1831); Andrew Bent, a convicted burglar, started the colony’s first independent newspaper and printed the first literature, Michael Howe: The last and worst of the Bushrangers of Van Diemen’s Land (1818) by Thomas Wells. Robert Murray, a bigamist, wrote anonymous newspaper letters virulently critical of colonial administration, before turning to journalism and editing. They and their successors were willing to write and publish even under the threat of official closure, commercial and political bastardry, libel writs, damnation or even the challenge of a duel.

The Colonial Times’ masthead motto steadfastly proclaimed its mission: ‘What is it but a map of busy life in its fluctuations and vast concerns’. But one man appreciated, better than most, the enormity and importance of ‘mapping’ life and its fluctuations of truth and justice, casting his own shadow over Van Diemen’s Land without ever setting foot on Australian soil: Charles John Huffam Dickens.

As a boy he had personally lived the perils of severe British punishment and as a young reporter on The Mirror of Parliament, The True Sun and covering parliament for The Morning Chronicle, he had been appalled by parliamentary and judicial expediency and hypocrisy. He used his newspaper journalism and editing skills to pen powerful social observation and criticism on the journey of boys and men from petty crime to houses of correction, then gaols, prison hulks and convict ships to the colonies of Australia. Then, after his first novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836), better known as The Pickwick Papers, took off, Dickens began to inform and inspire readers around the world, his work translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Russian and Chinese. But nowhere did his work resonate more strongly than in faraway Van Diemen’s Land: the extreme outcome of the injustices and prejudices he exposed, the fate of those characters transported to Australian colonies in his novels, the real-life world for thousands of ‘artful dodgers’ like Oliver Twist and Jack Dawkins.

At the human stock exchange that was the Hobart Town docks, the unloading of British or colonial newspapers containing his Boz sketches of life in Britain’s streets, courts and gaols were eagerly sought out, as were any crates of his books or complete volumes of magazines containing his serialized work, such as Master Humphrey’s Clock, the ambitious weekly literary magazine he published himself.

This presence was fully realised in the numerous taverns of Hobart Town, such as the Pickwick Tavern in Liverpool Street. The Pickwick had opened in 1839, capitalising on the popularity of Dickens after a Launceston printer and entrepreneur sensationally published twenty-four serial parts of a pirated copy of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. It was at places such as the Pickwick where the likes of a coterie, who had traded chains for ink and type, convened to share their passion for the author and his work and bring their own Dickensian dissection to life in a penal colony. Convicts knew better than most about the elusiveness of justice, and convict-turned-newspaper men knew better than most about the elusiveness of truth: sometimes seen and sometimes unseen, or suppressed or dictated or ignored for so long its very meaning became questionable.

For those who had been evicted from life in their homeland to exile at the bottom of the world, Dickens was a welcome voice for those who were long denied one. His own father had been in prison, forcing Dickens to fend for himself, and through his own personal experiences and exposure as a reporter to the trials of the poor and the prejudice and hypocrisy of ruling classes, he became a welcome and influential companion.

Dickens’ Fagin, Sikes, Bumble and Dawkins characters were based on what he observed in the streets and courts of London, including some who were transported to Van Diemen’s Land such as young Samuel Holmes, thought to be the inspiration for Jack ‘the artful dodger’ Dawkins. And publicity about the London trial of infamous receiver Isaac ‘Ikey’ Solomon – who was transported to Port Arthur before running a tobacco shop in Hobart Town and helping the drive to build Australia’s first synagogue – was widely thought to have inspired Dickens’ pickpocket gang boss Fagin in Oliver Twist, the novel whose very name was a Dickens nod to the potential fate of all young criminals: to twist on the end of a hangman’s noose.

In February 1843 Hobart Town debated the merits of a ‘new domestic drama’ based on Barnaby Rudge 1841, Dickens’ first historical novel, at the Royal Victoria Theatre just down the street from the Campbell Street barracks. Described by the Courier ‘as amusing as the late favourite Nicholas Nickleby’,1 Barnaby Rudge touched a nerve with its portraits of ordinary individuals swept up in social crisis amid the contrast of aristocracy and underbelly, revealing how impoverishment and family circumstance could change one’s life forever, and how moral pursuits and panic could lead to dangerous and unintended consequences.

These were the underlying themes of the lottery of life and convictism, the basis of many a discussion in taverns like the Pickwick, where more than one observed that law makers and the lawless alike were engaged in the same contests and motivations of power, rivalry, self-interest, deceit and fear. As Dickens observed in 1837 in Oliver Twist, there were men who ‘acquire peculiar value and dignity’ from their cloaks of office, be it the uniform of a governor or soldier, silk gowns of lawyers and judges, or the apron of a bishop, but also that virtue ‘shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen’.2 Strip the ‘uniform’ away, as Dickens asked, ‘what are they? Men, mere men’.3

Every ‘mere man’, convict or free, was pursuing his own survival, sense of truth, justice and entitlement. In an article reprinted from Bentley’s Miscellany on the effects of circumstance on character, the publication’s founder Dr William Maginn alluded to Dickens, his first editor, and Shakespeare:

In the best of us all there are many blots, in the worst many traces of goodness. There is no such thing as angels or devils in the world….all our virtues close border on vices, and are frequently blended…people do not commit wicked actions from the mere love of wickedness, there must always be an incentive of precisely the same kind as that which stimulates the noblest actions – ambition, love of adventure, passion, necessity.4

Early Hobart Town. Hunters Island, Hobart Town, illustration, 1829. Image courtesy Libraries Tasmania, NS1013/1/1876.

No man, woman or child in Van Diemen’s Land was born an angel or devil, but each was uniquely compressed in a place out of sight and out of mind, each with his or her own ambition, passion or necessity.

This reality was powerfully driven home on a winter’s day, Tuesday 18 July 1843. The Colonial Times’ publisher, John Macdougall was transported for life for ‘sinking a ship’ in a commercial insurance dispute before being given a pardon after serving fourteen years but was now a free man and ready to print his latest edition. He called an end to ‘finishing day’ and ordered the pumping of the iron press.

His printers and editors probably ended their finishing day’s work by ambling to the Pickwick or their latest tavern of choice absorb and dissect the freshly printed pages, the paper still slightly damp but warm, the ink still willing to leave an imprint. Amid the tightly compressed lines of small type, eyes quickly went to the Domestic Intelligence column on Page 3. Many sensed these were the first words of what would be an immediate sensation in the colony, and perhaps well beyond when the newspaper found its usual way across the seas to London to the Colonial Office and the Jerusalem Coffee House subscription room and possibly London’s Garrick Club, where Dickens sojourned with other ‘gentlemen of refinement and education’.

What a printer’s devil had typeset as RUHTRA TROP TA REDRUM now revealed its true face: MURDER AT PORT ARTHUR. Then: ‘Two youths have been conveyed from Port Arthur to this city, charged with the murder of a free overseer by striking him on the head with a stone hammer.’

Close by was a brief summary of the matters listed for Supreme Court trial that day before his Honour the Chief Justice, eleven cases in total ‘including those of two lads for murder at Port Arthur’.5

A ‘Murder at Port Arthur’ headline was nothing remarkable in a colony born of criminality, where reports of violence and manhunts for convict ‘bolters’ or bushrangers and hangings ‘at the usual hour’ were part of the everyday, and Port Arthur was frequently painted as a ‘Gomorrah — Earthly Hell’6 of incorrigibles whose repeat crimes meant they had to be isolated even in a land of exile. But a murder involving two lads was not part of the everyday. Young convicts were known to be insolent, profane, thieving and dishonest, but none had been seen as boys capable of murder. Until now.

Those former convicts familiar with settlements of punishment would have quickly sensed the Colonial Times’ headline was probably not entirely correct: if two lads were involved, then the murder would not have been at Port Arthur, but another place even more isolated, even more extraordinary: Point Puer. A place where some 3000 young boys, real life Oliver Twists, Charles Bates and Jack Dawkins, were exiled between 1834 and 1849 in the British Empire’s most desperate and boldest social experiment: to rid the Old World of its unwanted poor and criminal children, be they more victim or villain, by transporting them to the New World.

The proclaimed intent was to suppress what was becoming known as juvenile delinquency, to ‘save’ boys as young as nine or ten from a lifetime of poverty-induced criminality by transporting them in prison ships to exile on the other side of the world to serve out long sentences under armed guard in the world’s first prison created exclusively for boys.

Many convicts first heard it as Point ‘Pure’, until someone explained Puer was a Latin word for ‘boy’. But others knew it as also a term used for the dog faeces collected from the streets and hand-rubbed into hides at the leather tanneries in Bermondsey, or a French word for stink or a Roman term for sex slave. Those who survived Point Puer might have come to their own definition of a place which was portrayed as a chance for a boy to escape an old life, and some did, but others could not see the chance or did not want to take it.

Whatever the true meaning of its name, the story of the juvenile Port Arthur was the stuff of a Dickens novel, a Boys Town created by prejudice and justice at the heart of a rich and mighty Empire, its most remote outpost housing a generation of boys stolen away from whatever passed for their childhood and families. Here they were expediently despatched out of mind and sight to the last inhabited landform before Antarctica where, off-limits to anyone but a few approved visitors, the chain of Her Majesty’s justice would employ severe discipline and punishment to perhaps ‘save’ some and set them on the ‘right path’.

The author would have been drawn to the conflict of colonial administrators and their supporters lauding Point Puer as one of humanity’s ‘most successful and gratifying’ experiments, while others boldly denounced it as a cruel and failed expediency. What might he make of this murder story within a bigger convict story which was part of a bigger British society story? Would he see Point Puer boys as cold-hearted killers or as sad victims of a cold-hearted world? How would he judge the world’s greatest empire delivering unwanted children to exile on the other side of the world? Where was the true wickedness? Might he paint a picture that, like pieces of printing type, the true face of ‘mere men’ or ‘mere boys’ were only ever revealed when they were compressed together?

The judgment of Dickens would never be written, but in the taverns of Hobart Town and the salons of the colony’s administrators an unanticipated truth had revealed itself: despite the averred salvation hopes of government and colonial officers in Whitehall and Van Diemen’s Land, Her Majesty’s Boys Prison at Point Puer had seen the head of an overseer smashed in.

Perhaps this first boys’ murder and pending trial was the final chapter of a story that even Dickens himself could not have imagined in the lottery of life’s circumstances and choices. But in the days to come, the editors and printers of the Colonial Times and other papers in the colony would tell the story of what happened on a murderous day at Point Puer, and whether two boys would soon be hanging by the neck until dead. For now, as an icy air began to drape the Hobart Town darkness, its residents had the same simple question on their minds: How could the lives of two little boys come to this?