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