Chapter 6, which looks at three very different post-transportation novels, focuses not on English identity but on the formation of a permanent Australian identity for their characters by either repressing or accepting former convicts. These novels can be characterized as Australian because two of them were written and published by authors born in or permanent residents of the colonies, and the third was based on personal experience of Australia and self-consciously written to a permanent Australian immigrant. All of them are about transportation but were written after all forms of transportation to Australia had ended, and all achieved popular success in both England and Australia. One of these is the most famous nineteenth-century Australian novel, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870–72; 1874). It includes fictionalized versions of many incidents in Australian convict history, as well as almost all the conventions of the convict novel, to locate the convicts securely in the past, leaving the future for a nonconvict Australian identity. Another important nineteenth-century Australian novel, Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881), represents the child of a former transported convict who literally has to lay to rest the convict past to create an Australian future in which she can achieve social mobility and participate as a respectable member of its new social hierarchy. The third, a novella by Anthony Trollope, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), teaches a young English gentleman-pastoralist that he must accept the presence of former convicts and treat them with a modicum of respect if he is to succeed in Australia. It is significant that of these later nineteenth-century convict novels, only the one by an Englishman can imagine integrating the acknowledged convict into an Australian identity.
What ties together all these different texts—beyond the figure of the transported convict—is the way that figure brings to the fore the centrality of assumptions about social class to both English and Australian national identities, both of which were contested and changing as a result of the imperial mission of Great Britain, as well as of industrial capitalism in the metropole. Because Australia was a settler colony, in some ways unique because of the large population of transported convicts, focusing on its nineteenth-century past reveals some of the contradictions inherent in that imperial project. Australia, like all the other British colonies, was represented both as fundamentally Other and as reproducing English notions and assumptions. That Australia began as a place designed for the rejected members of the working classes, however, complicated its relation to England and Englishness, foregrounding issues of class in ways that were almost as problematic as the more well-known problem of British subjection of the indigenous people. A key difference is that the convicts, despite being expelled, were still in some way English; thus they—or at least their children—could be reincorporated into a Commonwealth country, though not into England itself. As Australians, the convicts took their places in a new and different classed society, no longer filling the role of the rejected English residue.
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