Abstract
As mass digitization brings new opportunities for analysing criminal and convict records, this article considers how we can recover the personal histories of the convicted. It proposes ‘intimate reading’ as a complementary approach to large-scale data mining and distant reading methods currently being developed to analyse large prison cohorts. Immersive reading, integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis of multiple sources, permits investigation of specific individuals, their interaction with others, and their engagement – however unequal – with the record-makers. It helps us detect the agency of those who have left few traces of personal testimony but whose lives were captured in abstract information garnered by officialdom.The article focuses on male convicts who served time at Great Yarmouth in the 1830s and 1840s and were transported to Van Diemen’s Land where arrivals were interrogated on their offending histories, occupations and family ties, and their bodies inspected for distinguishing characteristics. Comparing convict records with other documentation on their former lives allows us to explore what exiles revealed and concealed from the authorities about their past. Social profiling of this group exposes patterns in employment, family and social networks that are not so readily apparent when reading fragmentary evidence of individual lives. Small-scale data analysis enables us to decode the more personal testimony unwittingly preserved by the penal authorities when they transcribed the convicts’ tattoos. The article concludes with an intimate reading of the elaborate tattoos of one Yarmouth convict that spectacularly depicted the man he felt himself to be.
Highlights
As mass digitization brings new opportunities for analysing criminal and convict records, this article considers how we can recover the personal histories of the convicted
The article focuses on male convicts who served time at Great Yarmouth in the 1830s and 1840s and were transported to Van Diemen’s Land where arrivals were interrogated on their offending histories, occupations and family ties, and their bodies inspected for distinguishing characteristics
Small-scale data analysis enables us to decode the more personal testimony unwittingly preserved by the penal authorities when they transcribed the convicts’ tattoos
Summary
On 11 November 1839, John King (aged seventeen) and William Tunmore (eighteen), were picked up in a hayloft and, deemed by the magistrate to be rogues and vagabonds intent on stealing, were sentenced summarily to three months hard labour in the House of Correction at Great Yarmouth.[10]. Attention has turned not just to the imaginary of nineteenth-century observers but to cultural narratives deployed by the convicted in their keepsakes and tattoos, stories and memoirs.[29] Far from dismissing offenders as ‘incurable romancers’, historians have begun to show how romancing itself might constitute a form of evidence which illuminates the cultural strategies prisoners used to convey, interpret and trade on their past.[30] Ian Duffield, for example, has viewed the records of convict interrogation on arrival in Van Diemen’s Land as ‘forced narratives’ that, contain arresting first-person voices. The first-person pronoun was expunged from the record and the convict’s identity reduced to his crimes and utility to the colonial labour force, as when the clerk entered John King as ‘Fisherman’ and noted his stated offence, ‘Stealing 2 stone 11 of old canvass pr [prosecutor] Cullenthorpe of Yarmouth’.32 In order to recover King’s statement as an ‘action narrative’, and those of the vast majority interrogated by the Superintendent of Convicts, we need to return to the scenes of their ‘crimes’ and the circumstances that led to their exile
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