directly from the Anglo-Saxons, their putative racial ancestors. Krishan Kumar notes that nineteenth-century English society featured an “‘improving’ aristocracy and a dynamic entrepreneurial middle class” rather than “an oppressive feudal aristocracy,” but when some of the writers I discuss trace this “improving” aristocracy to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, they tend to ignore the “oppressive” part (Making, 155). Patrick Brantlinger comments on the tendency of Victorians to categorize themselves as the “conquering, colonizing, but supposedly humane ‘Anglo-Saxons’” (Taming, 19).
It is because so many writers thought of the contemporary English social hierarchy in terms of feudal relations, especially those of the Anglo-Saxons (though some are willing to include the Normans), that I use the term pseudofeudal to describe the hierarchy of ordered ranks with interlocking duties, loyalties, and responsibilities that supposedly characterized England’s agricultural past, as Raymond Williams has famously described in The Country and the City.24 This ordered and supposedly ancient hierarchy is the idealized notion of social class relations that was built into many English people’s sense of national identity and that the figure of the transported convict worked to reinforce. In this imagined system, both those who owned the land and those who worked on it and contentedly, even proudly, filled their allotted place in the hierarchy were English: all subject to the same laws with the same basic rights of safety, independence, property, and justice, which were protected by the state, as well as connected to the geography and landmarks that characterized the island and its purportedly ancient culture. The convict disrupted this system and so had to be expelled from it.25
Although I am talking about imagined social communities, the state was necessarily part of the community during the period I discuss, if for no other reason than that it was the state that transported convicts. Scholars differ on what constitutes a state, a nation, and a nation-state. I use the term state here as the legal, penal, legislative, and bureaucratic systems in place in the first half of the nineteenth century. The bureaucratic systems, especially, grew larger and more influential later in the century, when many say the English nation-state and actual nationalism came into existence. Elias suggests that people, especially the lower classes, did not identify with the state until the rise of the Labour Party and the welfare state (206), but for my purposes, acknowledging that there was a British state in the first half of the nineteenth century is important; of course, those who still believed in the “timeless” pseudofeudal hierarchy saw the state’s role primarily as supporting that system.26 In this period, middle-class people generally assumed the state was working to protect what they did identify with (national sentiments together with traditional class relations), as did many in the working classes, though some of the latter were more ambivalent about it, as some of the broadsides indicate.
By the nineteenth century, of course, the agrarian economy in which this idealized social hierarchy was based was in tension with new urban and industrial economies in which the older pseudofeudal social model seemed no longer to fit (if it ever did). It is because, as Homi Bhabha reminds us, of the “metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities” (202) that I use the prefix pseudo in front of the more common feudalism. The social model that I argue was a crucial part of national identity for many English people of all classes is a metaphor, not a historical reality. In fact, historians long ago abandoned the concept of feudalism to describe medieval relationships, let alone nineteenth-century ones, yet it still held power in many English people’s imaginations because of its suggestion of a connection with a long-distant past.
Certainly, a nineteenth-century revival of interest in feudalism idealized and romanticized the medieval age and its supposedly paternalistic relationships between the classes. This was done most famously by Benjamin Disraeli and the “Young England” party in the 1840s. The “belief in vertical personal relations, in mutual obligation and loyalty, in control and independence,” as historian Boyd Hilton puts it (49), was by no means unique to this short-lived and somewhat naïve movement but was a vital premise shared by most Tories, the High Church, and much of English society;27 indeed, it was so widespread that it can be called part of the typical English person’s sense of national identity, even if any individual person did not actually advocate a return to a medieval past as the Young England movement essentially did.28 Richard Faber claims that throughout the century Toryism had a “popular appeal” that was “not confined to the upper classes” and that some of Young England’s principles would have been influential in politics even if there had been no Young England movement (257).29 Fundamentally, however, I would argue that the imagined community of the majority of English people is not a historical one but a literary one; most of the transported convict literature I discuss here, whether written by English or white Australian authors, associates a pseudofeudal model with Englishness, while a more socially mobile and egalitarian society is envisioned in the Australian colonies.
The prototypical national subject in the pseudofeudal hierarchy, as represented in most of the literature I look at, was the gentleman-citizen, along with his partner and counterpart, the gentlewoman or lady, the creator of the domesticity that guaranteed the respectability of both. The gentleman was distinguished not only by his ownership of property, or his economic capital, but also by his social and cultural capital—his breeding, his manners, his education, and his honor, as well as his relatives and social peers, as Bourdieu has theorized. As Poon puts it, “Bourdieu explains how seemingly insignificant details about appropriate conduct, bearing, carriage, and taste have in effect great symbolic importance” (15). As many have noted, of course, the position of the gentleman in nineteenth-century England was expanding to include most middle-class men, many of whom were not technically involved in the agrarian paternalist relations I am calling pseudofeudal. Nonetheless, few, even among the newcomers to the category of gentleman and lady, would have contested this model, which gave them both power and status. Importantly, the existence of this system, of which the gentleman was the linchpin, required a large working class, not only to do the work that supported the genteel classes but also to define gentility by its difference from those who did not have it. To be content with their subordinate place in this system, however, the working classes needed to feel that they too belonged to the national community; the respectable working classes were, in this idealized version of a stable social system, characterized as sturdy, independent, home-loving, hard-working, and respectful of their superiors—and thus also recognized as quintessentially English.
Thus, like Disraeli and the Young England party, many English writers also tried to map the land-based model of pseudofeudalism onto the new urban industrial working class, imagining the workers as respectable English peasants turned to another kind of work.30 At the same time, they show the new industry-based and professional middle classes adopting many of the values of the aristocratic gentleman and lady, attempting to acquire the social and cultural capital to match their new wealth, and thus stepping into the role of the benevolent patriarchy of pseudofeudalism through charity and, in some cases, political reform. Because of the imposition of a supposedly ancient model of social relations on a new kind of society, tensions inhered not only in actual social relationships but also in the popular imagination of the relations between classes. For those who adhered to the pseudofeudal model, such tensions could be represented by the “Chartists” and criminals who refused to accept their place in the ideal stable social hierarchy of reciprocal bonds and loyalties, whether by striking and rebelling or by violating the sacred laws of property, because they threatened the imagined harmonious hierarchy that ensured social stability and constituted an important tenet of England’s conception of itself.31 Applying a model devised by Mary Poovey for another context, one could say that the English subject counted on social harmony as part of what defined national identity. However, the urbanization and industrialization of England constituted a source of perceived danger to that identity, which thus created an often unarticulated anxiety. This anxiety in turn generated narratives that filled the role of Freudian protector by featuring convicts safely banished (Poovey, “Structure,” 155).
In Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, historian Linda Colley convincingly argues that the Napoleonic Wars created a cross-class national identity like the one I am describing; my argument does not contradict hers but adds transported convict narratives as another factor that contributed to this process.