Australian narratives and Charles Dickens - retelling the history of the transport convict network
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The practice of exile reached its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the British Empire utilized transportation to remove criminal offenders elsewhere. From late 1787 to early 1788, the First Fleet sailed with more than 1,000 men, women, and children from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales. The transport convict network was romanticized in Dickens's Great Expectations; however, untold stories mostly absent from view fill in the gaps that are missing from Dickensian work. Using first-hand research obtained at The British Library and the State Library Victoria, this paper analyzes both convict narratives as well as Dickens's shift from portraying transportation as a necessary evil to his glowing reports from Australia in "Household Words."
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M.A.