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

by Dorice Williams Elliott

Overview

Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined.

Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for those who didn’t fit into the prevailing national image. In analyzing novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire. The events and incidents depicted as taking place literally on the other side of the world, she argues, deeply affected people’s sense of their place in their own society, with transnational implications that are still relevant today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821446690
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Series:	Series in Victorian Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Dorice Williams Elliott is associate professor and Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor at the University of Kansas in the Department of English. In addition to her 2002 book, The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England, she has published articles on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, servants in literature, gift theory, and other topics.

Table of Contents

Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Convict Transportation to Australia National Identity and Social Class Imagining an Australian Identity The Literary Figure of the Convict in Australia One: Dickens and the Transported Convict Great Expectations Household Words Two: Englishness and the Working Class inTransportation Broadsides The Cultural Work of the Broadsides Broadside Ballads and Their Tunes The Visual Impact of the Broadsides Full-Sheet Broadsides and Levels of Literacy The (Mistaken) Land of Exile Three: Writing Convicts and Hybrid Genres The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux Convict-Authored Novels Quintus Servinton Ralph Rashleigh Four: The Transported Convict Novel The English Convict Novel as a Genre The Working-Class Woman Convict:The History of Margaret Catchpole G. P. R. James’s The Convict: A Tale Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend Five: Convict Servants and Genteel Mistresses in Women’s Convict Fiction George Eliot’s Adam Bede Mary Vidal and “The Convict Laundress” Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow Eliza Winstanley’s For Her Natural Life Six: After Transportation:Three Approaches Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life Anthony Trollope’s Harry Heathcote of Gangoil Epilogue Introduction Chapter 1: Dickens and the Transported Convict Chapter 2: Englishness and the Working Class in Transportation Broadsides Chapter 3: Writing Convicts and Hybrid Genres CChapter 4: The Transported Convict Novel Chapter 5: Convict Servants and Genteel Mistresses Chapter 6: After Transportation Epilogue Selected Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

In this nuanced study of literature by and about convicts in the nineteenth century, Dorice Williams Elliott makes a major contribution to the fields of Victorian studies and Australian literature. She paints a vivid and fascinating picture of convict life and how it was perceived in Australia and Britain that will be useful to academics, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates.”—Grace Moore, author of Dickens and Empire


“By bringing Australian and British literary treatments of convict transportation into one frame, Transported to Botany Bay invigorates the burgeoning scholarship on the transnational dimensions of Victorian literature. Elliott ranges far beyond the usual texts that dominate the discussion of Australia in Victorian studies, most notably in juxtaposing novelistic treatments with the corpus of transportation broadsides, thus helpfully broadening our critical horizons.”—Philip Steer, coeditor of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

From the Publisher