The horrors of convict life: British radical visions of the Australian penal colonies

Cultural and Social History

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 481-495

  Reid, Kirsty ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Australia; Chartism; Convict; Masculinity; Punishment; Radicalism; Sexuality

Indexed keywords

EID: 59849089146     PISSN: 14780038     EISSN: 14780046     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/147800408X341677     Document Type: Article

References (106)

1. The People's Paper (hereafter PP), 13 September 1856, claimed that a million people attended but the numbers were disputed.
2. The Times claimed just 20,000 marched and at least one old Chartist remembered the day as a disappointment.
3. W. E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (New York, 1968), p. 198.
4. PP, 20 September 1856.
5. PP 30 April 1856;
6. John Frost, The Horrors of Convict Life (Hobart, 1973), p. 16;
7. John Frost, A Letter to the People of Great Britain and Ireland on Transportation Showing the Effects of Irresponsible Power on the Physical and Moral Conditions of Convicts, by John Frost, Late of Van Diemen's Land (London, 1857), p. 22.
8. Frost published several versions of his account of convict life. The first, produced while he was still in America awaiting a full pardon was entitled John Frost, A Letter to the People of the United States showing the Effects of Aristocratic Rule (New York, 1855).
9. The content of one of his earliest lecture appearances on return to Britain then appeared in autumn 1856 as The Horrors of Convict Life: Two Lectures (London, 1856).
10. A reworked version of this was published in two editions, both of which were printed in 1857, as John Frost, A Letter to the People of Great Britain and Ireland on Transportation showing the Effects of Irresponsible Power on the Physical and Moral Conditions of Convicts, by John Frost, Late of Van Diemen's Land (London, 1857). (Hereafter Frost, Letter). Lengthy- verbatim passages from Frost's pamphlets, as well as from the lectures, were also published in the People's Paper.
11. Frost, Letter, pp. 6-7.
12. Frost, Horrors, pp. 28, 25.
13. Ibid., p. 30.
14. Frost, Horrors, pp. 30-1;
15. Frost, Letter, p. 9.
16. Frost, Horrors, pp. 34-6;
17. PP, 5 July 1856.
18. Frost, Horrors, p. 16.
19. See, for example, Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1788-1868 (London, 1987), pp. 403-4, 530.
20. Although transportation to New South Wales had ended in 1840 and to Van Diemen's Land in 1853, transportation to Western Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar continued until 1868. However, during 1856 transportation had once again become a subject of major political debate and of yet another British parliamentary select committee.
21. For a more detailed discussion see Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire. Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2007), especially chs 5 and 6.
22. James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CA, 2003), p. 116.
23. There are nevertheless exceptions, including, for example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000).
24. Epstein, In Practice, pp. 116-25. For a different reading of the meanings of America in Chartist culture see James Bronstein, 'From the Land of Liberty to Land Monopoly: The United States in a Chartist Context', in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 1999), pp. 147-70.
25. Epstein, In Practice, p. 122.
26. According to Rudé, 1,793 protesters were transported from Britain, 2,495 from Ireland and 154 from Canada in the period from 1788 to 1868. George Rudé, Protest and Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 9-10.
27. On the role of the state in Chartist defeat see John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987).
28. Frost, Horrors, pp. 43, 45.
29. Ibid., p. 19.
30. PP, 11 October 1856.
31. PP, 25 October 1856.
32. PP, 2 August 1856.
33. PP, 30 August 1856.
34. Frost, Letter, p. 1.
35. PP, 30 April 1856.
36. PP, 4 October 1856, 30 August 1856.
37. Frost, Horrors, pp. 29-30;
38. PP, 27 September 1856.
39. Frost, Letter, pp. 5, 22.
40. Ibid., p. 3.
41. Ibid., p. 1.
42. PP, 30 August 1856. Ernest Jones's poem 'The prisoner to the slaves', written while he himself was in prison in the early 1850s, drew a similar link: 'From my cell, I look back on the world - from my cell/ And think I am not the less free/Than the serf and the slave who in misery dwell/In the street and the lane and the lea./What fetters have I that ye have not as well,/Though your dungeon be larger than mine?/ For England's a prison fresh modelled from hell.' Peter Scheckner (ed.), An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class, 1830s-1850s (London, 1989), pp. 205-6.
43. Northern Star (hereafter NS), 27 January 1838.
44. The Pioneer; or Trades' Union Magazine, 12 April 1834.
45. William Ashton, A Lecture on the Evils of Emigration and Transportation (Sheffield, 1839).
46. For more on Ashton see John Knott, 'A Chartist's View of Australia, 1838', Push from the Bush, 13 (1982), pp. 2-13.
47. Ashton, Lecture, p. 6.
48. Ibid., pp. 5-6, 9, 22-3.
49. Ibid., p. 23.
50. Ibid., p. 7.
51. Pioneer, 26 April 1834.
52. Pioneer, 28 September 1833.
53. PP, 30 August 1856.
54. NS, 18 December 1841.
55. Voice of the West Riding, 1 June 1833, 31 August 1833.
56. NS, 11 December 1841. Chartist views on emigration and the colonies were, however, contradictory and shifting. See Alan Beever, 'From a Place of "Horrible Destitution" to a Paradise of the Working Class: The Transformation of British Working-class Attitudes to Australia, 1841-1851', Labour History, 40 (1981), pp. 1-15.
57. NS, 3 February 1838.
58. NS, 7 March 1840, 1 May 1841.
59. Frost, Letter, p. 1.
60. Frost, Horrors, pp. 30-1;
61. Frost, Letter, p. 9.
62. George Loveless, The Victims of Whiggery; Being a Statement of the Persecution Experienced by the Dorchester Labourers; Their Trial; Banishment & c. Also Reflections upon the Present System of Transportation; with an Account of Van Diemen's Land, Its Customs, Laws, Climate, Produce and Inhabitants (London, 1838), p. 36.
63. Frost, Horrors, p. 30.
64. Frost, Letter, p. 9.
65. For an almost identical argument about flogging, see Loveless, Victims, p. 36.
66. Convict narratives, among other sources, suggest that some men experienced flogging as a state of intense powerlessness and as a physically degrading and profoundly humiliating act which penetrated and debilitated their bodies. Raymond Evans and William Thorpe suggest that some men may even have experienced it as akin to rape. Raymond Evans and William Thorpe, 'Commanding Men: Masculinities and the Convict System', Journal of Australian Studies, 56 (1998), pp. 17-34,
67. and Raymond Evans and WilliamThorpe, 'The Last Days of Moreton Bay: Power, Sexuality and the Misrule of Law', Journal of Australian Studies, 53 (1997), pp. 59-77.
68. Frost, Letter, p. 2;
69. Frost, Horrors, p. 35.
70. Frost, Letter, p. 38.
71. Ibid., p. 39.
72. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995).
73. On melodrama and sensationalism see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994).
74. Seduction narratives belonged to a broader array of ideas linking 'sexual danger' with political misrule. See, for example, Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992),
75. and Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (London, 1995).
76. See, for example, Clark, Struggle, esp. ch. 8.
77. Pioneer, 5 October 1833.
78. Kelly Mays, 'Subjectivity, Community and the Nature of Truth-telling in Two Chartist Autobiographies', in Ashton et al., Chartist Legacy, esp. pp. 223-4.
79. PP, 6 September 1856.
80. PP, 30 April 1856.
81. PP, 19 July 1856, 26 July 1856.
82. NS, 20 June 1846.
83. PP, 19 July 1856.
84. For a fuller discussion see Mays, 'Subjectivity',
85. and also Kelly Mays, 'Slaves in Heaven, Laborers in Hell: Chartist Poets' Ambivalent Identification with the (Black) Slave', Victorian Poetry, 39, 2 (2001), pp. 137-63.
86. NS, 9 May 1846.
87. NS, 20 January 1838, 3 February 1838.
88. Likewise, those who failed to be moved to protest by the plight of Frost and the other Newport men had been denounced as individuals who had sunk 'lower than ... eunuchs' who were consequently no longer fit to 'be called men'. NS, 10 April 1841.
89. See, for example, PP, 4 October 1856.
90. Frost, Letter, p. 1.
91. Ibid., p. 2.
92. PP, 30 April 1856. For a more detailed discussion of these themes see Karen Halttunen, 'Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture], American Historical Review, 100 (1995), pp. 303-34.
93. Frost, Letter, pp. 14-15.
94. Frost, Horrors, p. 12.
95. Ibid., p. 50.
96. Ibid., p. 52.
97. On the attempts in these decades to commemorate and represent transported radicals through other means, including statues, see Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrell (eds), Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-century Britain (Aldershot, 2004).
98. Pioneer, 9 November 1833, emphasis in original.
99. On nineteenth-century ideas about masculinity and citizenship see Anna Clark, 'Manhood, Womanhood and the Politics of Class in Britain, 1790-1845', in Laura Frader and Sonya Rose (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 263-79.
100. PP, 19 July 1856, 6 September 1856.
101. PP, 11 October 1856.
102. PP, 30 August 1856.
103. PP, 6 September 1856.
104. PP, 20 September 1856 (emphasis added).
105. PP, 26 July 1856, 2 August 1856.
106. PP, 6 September 1856.