Abstract
The unprecedented influx of French emigrants into Britain during the 1790s was the mirror image of another forced migration: the groups of convicts transported to Botany Bay, Britain’s first imperial venture instituted solely as a means of containing and punishing its criminal classes. After American independence ended transatlantic transportation, a backlog of convicts in the 1780s overcrowded gaols where disease and alarms over prisoner uprisings were endemic. This problem assumed even greater urgency in the 1790s, when authorities came to see the lower orders in general as poised to move against their betters and duplicate the French revolutionary experiment at home. The solution for disposing of the criminals created by economic and political crisis in the later eighteenth century became Australia; as historian Frank McLynn notes, “The fleet that sailed for Botany Bay in 1788 took with it the prisoners who had been in limbo since 1784, men not dangerous enough to hang but too much of a social menace to pardon. Some were veterans of the Woolwich hulks like George Barrington, who had fulfilled the direst prophecies about future recidivism by graduating from petty pickpocketing to the more skilled variety at racetracks” (293).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Douglas Hay explains the key role of pardons and the commuting of capital sentences in shoring up state authority in his landmark article, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law.”
It is impossible to determine conclusively what parts of A Voyage Barrington wrote and what was added by other writers. While Barrington may have been involved in the productions attributed to him after A Voyage to Botany Bay, scholars agree that his connection with them was minimal. For discussions of Barrington’s actual involvement in publications attributed to him, see Suzanne Rickard, 32–40; H. M. Green, 21; and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 62–63. J. A. Ferguson provides a complete list of works citing Barrington as an author.
A. W. Baker details the debts that many early stories of transportees owed to the British conventions governing criminal biography. Baker outlines a formula that had structured such writing in England throughout the eighteenth century, beginning with early life and the subject’s introduction to crime and concluding with either execution or transportation. The first Newgate Calendar appeared in 1728; there were subsequent editions in 1773 and 1809, and at least 8 more editions appeared after that.
Since Cook’s expeditions to the south Pacific, travel narratives about the area had been popular among Britain’s readers. For the widespread interest in the Bounty incident during the early and mid1790s, cf. Neil Rennie, 141–180.
This quote appears in the excerpt from Collins’ An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales reprinted in Peter Kitson’s Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770–1835.
This description appears in a passage of Collins’ chronicle that is not reprinted in Kitson’s volume; see Collins’s An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. . . .
Millett’s extensive personal collection of convict tokens is catalogued and some of the more outstanding examples visually reproduced in the volume he coedited with Michele Field.
Cf. Tom Gretton’s “Last dying speech and confession” in Convict Love Tokens, 39–46.
Barrington’s unparalleled success as a kind of social cross-dresser was central to his lasting fame during the nineteenth century. John Lang includes an apocryphal anecdote about Barrington wherein the pickpocket fools a woman in Sydney into thinking he is a gentleman through his good manners and elegant conversation. At the same time, he manages to divest her of her keys, her thimble, her pencil-case, and the earrings in her ears. The story ends with Barrington, again through his sheer charm, convincing his genteel victim not to turn him in after he reveals his deception and returns the pilfered items.
George Barrington, A Voyage to Botany Bay Together with his life and trial and the sequel to his voyage, 8. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Barrington. A considerably shorter version of this text, titled An Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, in New South Wales, appeared in late 1793 or 1794 and has been reissued recently and edited by Suzanne Rickard. In contrast, the work I am considering was published in 1795 and deals more fully with the issues under discussion here.
Such characters recur in Austen’s oeuvre: in addition to Mr. Elliot, there is Willoughby of Sense and Sensibility and Wickham of Pride and Prejudice. Though Wickham never pretends to come from an aristocratic family, he does succeed in fooling the usually perceptive Elizabeth Bennett that he has been cheated of a comfortable clerical living before he reveals his true nature by seducing the sixteen-year-old Lydia. Other literary representations of such men include Mr. Harrell in Frances Burney’s Cecilia, whose mounting debts finally lead him to commit suicide, and several of Maria Edgeworth’s characters, such as all of the men of the financially overextended Castle Rackrent and Mr. Vincent the gambler in Belinda.
From The Memoirs of George Barrington. . . .
The conservative theologian William Paley, no friend to convicts, concedes this same point. Since “. . . no one will receive a man or woman out of a jail, into any service or employment whatever,” he argues that the state is obliged to offer ex-convicts legitimate employment, perhaps on public works projects (545).
Barrington’s challenge to the legality of outlawry also recalls the agenda of French revolutionaries who sought to eliminate the lettres de cachet, which enabled the crown to indefinitely imprison its enemies without charging them with a specific crime.
Hughes notes that typhus was “the endemic disease of eighteenthcentury prisons” (37), and that overcrowding in the 1780s created conditions of crisis proportions. By 1790, the Hulks were taking in roughly 1,000 convicts per year: “Not only had the problem of security become acute, but typhus was by then endemic and the prospect of general infection terrified free citizens outside. The authorities would have done almost anything to get rid of the criminals their laws had created” (42). Chapter 3 of Lambert provides a detailed discussion of conditions in the early days of the Hulks.
For example, see Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease.
Dyer edited and annotated officer George Thompson’s notes written in New South Wales into Slavery and Famine, Punishments for Sedition.
John F. Bayliss has noted striking similarities between the writings of black American slaves and Australian convicts, most notably in their common participation in moralistic and picaresque literary traditions.
Lambert points out that Barrington’s account of his decisive involvement is not born out by other versions of the mutiny, which do not mention him. His contribution to suppressing the mutiny, if it happened at all, was probably minimal (198–199).
E. P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters and P. B. Munsche’s Gentlemen and Poachers describe the growing black market in illegal game during the eighteenth century, as well as the history of laws against poaching and deer stealing. For “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” see Howard Sergeant’s How Strong the Roots.
This is Barrington’s spelling (or the spelling adopted by his editors); current historians usually prefer to spell the name as “Bennelong, ” a name adopted for the piece of Australian coastline now known as Bennelong Point.
In her mix of seemingly incompatible qualities, Yeariana is presented by Barrington as typical of her environment. Commenting on how native animals bizarrely combine a variety of traits from other species, he remarks, “One would almost conclude from the great resemblance of
the different quadrapeds found here, that there is a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes of all those various animals” (62).
Timothy Brennan points out this relationship when he contends that European nationalism “flourished in the soil of foreign conquest. Imperial conquest created the conditions for the fall of Europe’s universal Christian community, but resupplied Europe with a religious sense of mission and self-identity that becomes universal (both within and outside Europe)” (58).
Philip Rawlings articulates the transitional nature of the penal colony somewhat differently, explaining that since “transportation was hidden from the public view . . . like imprisonment, it fitted uneasily into a criminal justice system whose other main forms of punishment for serious crime—hanging, whipping and the pillory—relied heavily on their roles as public spectacles” (81).
Copyright information
© 2009 Toby R. Benis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Benis, T.R. (2009). Beyond the Convict Taint: George Barrington and the Colonial Cure. In: Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés, British Convicts, and Jews. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622647_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622647_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37646-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62264-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)