Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict, by Dorice Williams Elliott

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict by Dorice Williams Elliott Jan-Melissa Schramm (bio) Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict, by Dorice Williams Elliott; pp. xii + 289. Athens: Ohio University Press, $80.00. The figure of Magwitch is crucial to Dorice Williams Elliott's Transported to Botany Bay: Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict, a lively study of Australian convict culture in nineteenth-century literary texts. Charles Dickens's compelling portrait of the sacrificial outcast—named Abel, in contrast to the many villainous Cains of London's underworld—asks crucial questions about the ethics of transportation in Victorian penal policy while also probing the dynamics of narrative expulsion. In his moving first-person account of his descent into crime, Magwitch complains that he was treated by the state as a chattel—of no more account than a "silver tea-kettle" (Great Expectations [Penguin, 1985], 364)—and while Dickens does not launch a full-scale attack on a legal system that vilified poverty, he nevertheless recognizes the interdependence of the wealthy and those who labor for others: in Magwitch's words to Pip, "I lived rough, that you should live smooth" (343). Historians recently have described eighteenth-century criminal law as a form of class war: during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, almost 250 offenses against property were made capital under the terms of the Bloody Code, and as Elliott describes here, another 160,000 men, women, and children were punished with shipment to the ports of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) between 1787 and 1867. Many died on the way out, in prison, or in exile, but [End Page 279] others found prosperity and a chance of social redemption. Elliott is alert to the ways in which Britain's attempts to slough off its surplus of working class criminals became the foundational narrative of a new nation, and how that process of identity formation had to negotiate the original sin and social stain of convict transportation. Elliott situates Magwitch's plight alongside articles in Household Words (1850–59) that illuminate Dickens's wider exposure to, and attitudes toward, nineteenth-century penal policy. She notes, rightly, that narrative treatment of the convict serves as a test case for nineteenth-century practices of sympathy: on the one hand, convicts deserve compassion for their sufferings (especially if sentenced to the centers of secondary correction, such as the dreaded Port Arthur, where flogging was inflicted regularly); on the other hand, the judgment of the law could not be questioned—hence the oft-repeated plot device in which convicts could only be treated as fully human if they were the innocent victims of wrongful accusation, as in Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (serialized from 1870 to 1872). Elliott brings Dickens's work into conversation with broadsheets and ballads that also addressed crime against property and the aptness of punishment, concluding that "most of the extant English transportation broadsides uphold the notion of a just and ideal nation." Crimes and punishments "are portrayed as aberrations that actually reinforce the justice provided by the English state, an important function in incorporating the working classes into the notion of a national subject" (71). Much of the novelty of Elliott's study lies in her careful illumination of lesser-known texts by convicts: James Hardy Vaux's Memoirs (1819), for example, as well as the only two known novels published by convict authors, Henry Savery's Quintus Servinton (1831) and James Tucker's The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh (1844–45). She also considers Victorian novels depicting convicts—Charles Reade's It Is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and Richard Cobbold's The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl (1845)—by placing them in dialogue with canonical works by Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. Hetty in Adam Bede (1859) is a female Magwitch, sacrificed that others may learn "there's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for" (George Eliot, Adam Bede [Penguin, 1994], 507). Elliott describes the...