Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788-1875, by Hilary Carey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875 by Hilary Carey Ann Curthoys (bio) Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875, by Hilary Carey; pp. xii + 359. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $34.99 paper, £75.00, £26.99 paper. Hilary Carey’s Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875 provides a fresh, detailed perspective on British and colonial [End Page 458] debates over convict transportation. The notion of Britain’s transportation system and its penal colonies as a hell on earth was a powerful one in the period and retains considerable hold today. In tracing the political, religious, and cultural contexts of the system’s creation and dissemination, Carey unsettles a good deal of popular understanding and academic scholarship. The 1780s to the 1870s saw intense, troubled debates in Britain and its penal colonies over how lawbreakers should be punished, with varying views on the role and effectiveness of physical punishment, the penitentiary, and transportation. Entwined with debates over the advantages of one system or another was the question of what purposes punishment should serve. Should it be designed primarily to deter further crime? Was it best seen as a necessary form of retribution and justice? Or should it aim to reform the offender? Supporters and opponents of transportation could emphasize its horrors: the former so that fear of transportation would deter further crime, and the latter to secure reform or, increasingly, abolition of the system altogether. With religious figures and ideas prominent among both the architects and opponents of transportation, religion becomes in Carey’s hands an excellent lens through which to rethink the history of British convict transportation. Carey’s detailed study begins with Anglican Evangelicals who thought imprisonment should aim to reform the offender. These Evangelicals could be found among both opponents and supporters of transportation. Evangelical members of Parliament joined with Whig and Liberal reformers to form the Prison Discipline Society in 1816, which campaigned against transportation and for improved prison discipline. Yet one of the chief managers and defenders of transportation, George Arthur, was also an Anglican Evangelical. As governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1823 to 1837, he firmly believed that transportation could achieve reform and, under his regime, clergy participated in the reforming project. As a penal administrator, Carey writes, Arthur was “scrupulous and fair-minded” (57) and much admired by two visiting Quakers, James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, who were “travelling under concern” in the Australian penal colonies (80). Quakers figured variously in the debates over punishment; while those who had visited the colonies generally supported transportation, those campaigning in Britain, such as Elizabeth Fry, sought and to some degree achieved prison reform at home. In the early 1830s, Governor Arthur engaged in a major dispute over transportation with the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whateley, a dispute that Carey characterizes as “the intellectual high point in religious debate” on transportation (71). Whateley strongly disagreed with Arthur’s view that religion had a role to play in reform of the convict through transportation and wanted the system abolished entirely. Transportation’s chief purpose, deterrence against further crime, was undermined, he argued, by the uncertainty and slowness of the system and the fact that, for the poor, it was less something to be feared than a chance for a new life. Another important figure, Reverend William Ullathorne, Roman Catholic Vicar General of New South Wales, originated the term the “horrors of transportation” after a visit to a Norfolk Island penal settlement in 1834 (148). Appalled by what he witnessed, Ullathorne became an eloquent opponent of the system, characterizing convicts as slaves without earnings and magistrates as having far too much power over convict lives. He was, in Carey’s view, exceptional [End Page 459] for his absence of contempt for the culprit; he asked that the convict be “imagined not as a social outcast but as a penitent whose physical torments recalled the suffering body of Christ” (142–43). One valuable chapter in Empire...