For over sixty years, eastern Australia was a destination for British criminals. Between 1787 and 1853, some 160,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania). More of them shipped out during the 1830s than in any other decade. But at the end of that decade, transportation came under assault within Britain as an arbitrary and immoral mode of punishment. In the face of this assault, while transportation to Van Diemen's Land continued, it was brought to an end in New South Wales in 1840—to the chagrin of many colonists there. By the late 1840s, metropolitan and colonial opinions on transportation had flipped. In Britain, there emerged broad support for a new-modeled transportation that was supposed to moralize and rehabilitate the convict. In eastern Australia, however, transportation had come to be seen as a moral plague that debilitated Van Diemen's Land and threatened to spread its noxious influence to the mainland. Colonial distaste took formidable shape in a rapidly growing antitransportation movement. The imperial government fought a rearguard action to save transportation. But in 1853 the Colonial Office finally surrendered, and the last convict ship set sail for Van Diemen's Land. To the anxiety of many Britons, now even violent criminals would need to be punished and released at home.

There are three points I wish to make in this article about the death throes of convict transportation. All three reflect the ethical dilemmas of empire in the waning days of what Boyd Hilton has memorably called the Age of Atonement.Footnote ¹ The first point is that the quarrel over transportation shows the double-edged nature of the moral critique of empire that was prevalent in the early Victorian era. The metropolitan criticism that brought an end to transportation to New South Wales in 1840 had its roots in the same effort to moralize the empire that can be seen in the almost contemporaneous assault on slavery and apprenticeship. But transportation was deemed too convenient a means of getting rid of criminals for Britons safely to do without it. So, from 1840, Van Diemen's Land became the sole depository for transported felons. The influx of convicts that followed prompted the free settlers there to fashion their own moral critique of transportation as a plague upon the land, and of Britain as a mother country that sinned against its children by shipping its dregs to them. The second point is that the Whig government of 1846–52 sought to save transportation by moralizing the convict before shipping him off. Henceforth transportees were to be rehabilitated through separate confinement and hard labor at home, and only then sent to the colonies. There, it was thought, they stood a much better chance of employment and redemption than they did in Britain. But by this stage, the moral objections to transportation in the colonies had become so strong as to make untenable this moralistic Whig plan. The third point is thus that colonial opposition to transportation had become so adamant by the early 1850s that the British government was left with no choice but to replace it with penal servitude at home. The domestic debate over crime and punishment that played out over the next decade revealed an abiding nostalgia for transportation and a waning of faith in convict rehabilitation that manifested itself in a harsher prison regime.

These three points underline a more basic one: that in this instance, the empire forced a dramatic change in penal policy on a deeply reluctant metropole. The end of transportation to eastern Australia and the rise of penal servitude in Britain are already well-told stories.Footnote ² My claim to a novel argument here is in suggesting that the latter story would be virtually inconceivable without the former one—that resistance in the colonies brought about a new set of penal policies at home that few Britons desired or welcomed. It has of course become a scholarly truism that empire mattered at home in a great many ways, and the broadest claims for how the mid-Victorian empire mattered at home tend to be staked in the realm of culture.Footnote ³ To the more limited extent to which those claims are extended to the realm of metropolitan politics, they have thus far tended to cluster around the issue of parliamentary reform and citizenship. But, as Miles Taylor has convincingly argued, the empire occasionally exerted a significant impact on the question of policy making at home (what the government actually did), and not simply on the question of parliamentary reform (whom the government was supposed to represent). It did so, he has claimed, even during the decade between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Indian Rebellion—during the decade, that is, when the empire might plausibly be said to have mattered less to high and popular politics in Britain than it did in any other decade of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴ Taking a cue from Taylor, and pursuing in depth one example he briefly discusses, my most basic point here is that the transition from transportation to penal servitude shows that the empire mattered very much indeed to the reshaping of British penal policy in the mid-Victorian era.

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The 1830s featured a sustained effort to root out putative corruption not only at home, but in the empire as well. Fired by an ethical impulse that had twisted roots in evangelicalism, utilitarianism, whiggery, and popular radicalism, reformers of various stripes launched assaults on a wide variety of time-honored institutions ranging from pocket boroughs at home to sati in India and slavery in the West Indies. Like these other institutions, convict transportation was now weighed in the moral balance and found wanting. But, unlike them, transportation was ultimately deemed too serviceable to the metropole to be dispensed with altogether. The half measures taken by the imperial government to reform but retain transportation led to a conspicuous reversal of the moral critique against it. In 1840, it was the metropolitan indictment of transportation's corrupting influence that led to its reform. A decade later, it was colonial criticism of the corrupting influence of transportation that paved the way for its demise.

By the late 1830s, Whigs and radicals at home were condemning transportation as ineffective while at the same time oppressive and arbitrary—a weak deterrent that nevertheless had the potential to reduce the convict to slavelike servility. Over earlier decades, the assignment of convicts to masters had evolved into the central premise of transportation. As revisionist historians pointed out in the 1980s, transportation was not simply a mode of punishment; it was also a rational and efficient means of supplying an emigrant workforce for the developing Australian colonies half a world away.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, the global system of British transportation did much to develop an infrastructure of roads, bridges, and harbors in several British possessions—not only in Australia, but also in Bermuda, Gibraltar, Mauritius, Bencoolen, Penang, Malacca and Singapore, and the Burmese provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim.Footnote ⁶ In eastern Australia, labor-hungry settlers were eager to take advantage of a cheap and bonded labor source that was heavily subsidized by the imperial government; indeed, for several decades, convict labor was essential to the growth of the pastoral economies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. While under the assignment system Australian masters had a property right in their convicts' services, those convicts were not chattel slaves.Footnote ⁷ They were assigned to those masters not in perpetuity but only for the duration of their sentences, had the right to petition, and could take their masters to court for ill usage.Footnote ⁸ In the age of emancipation, however, British reformers nevertheless likened the wide authority that the law gave masters over transportees to the arbitrary power of slave masters. A flogging master could subject convicts to a living hell, while a kindly one might make for them lives far better than the ones they had led at home. This unpredictability fatally compromised transportation in the eyes of British legal reformers, who now insisted that effective deterrence and indeed justice itself rested on the certainty and uniformity of punishment, not on “a mere lottery, in which there are both many prizes and many blanks.”Footnote ⁹

The metropolitan assault reached its peak in the 1837–38 Select Committee on Transportation, chaired by the avid colonial reformer Sir William Molesworth. Its remarkably biased report damned transportation as an arbitrary and ineffective deterrent, but as all too efficient in further corrupting convicts in an environment in which “there is free interchange of every kind of vicious instruction.”Footnote ¹⁰ According to the committee's handpicked witnesses, the most heinous form of corruption was sodomy, which was allegedly rife among convicts who had access to few women and much unsupervised access to each other.Footnote ¹¹ Citing this evidence, the Molesworth Committee concluded that it was past time to put an end to an institution that was responsible for “the curious and monstrous evil of calling into existence, and continually extending societies, or the germs of nations most thoroughly depraved, as respects both the character and degree of their vicious propensities.”Footnote ¹²

In sympathy with this line of criticism, the Whig government of Lord Melbourne abolished transportation to New South Wales in 1840. It also rejected the petitions of the free settlers of New South Wales, who were outraged by the aspersions cast upon the colony in the Molesworth Committee's report and many of whom wished to preserve transportation as the most efficient means of providing themselves with a cheap workforce.Footnote ¹³ Transportation survived, but only in Van Diemen's Land, and assignment was abolished altogether. The government hoped that in the long run the number of convicts shipped to Van Diemen's Land could be reduced by sending a significant number of the thousands of criminals annually convicted in Britain and Ireland to prison hulks in Bermuda, Gibraltar, and some of the home ports, as well as to the new Pentonville prison in London, authorized by the Melbourne government and opened under Robert Peel in 1842.Footnote ¹⁴ But Van Diemen's Land was obliged to take the vast majority of convicts for the foreseeable future. Once there, transported convicts were to serve up to two years of probationary hard labor in gangs under government supervision, after which they were eligible for hire by private employers and, ultimately, for a ticket-of-leave conditional on good behavior.

British authorities had long considered Van Diemen's Land an ideal depository for convicts. It did not attract nearly as many free settlers as the (much less rugged) New South Wales, especially after the customary practice of free land grants came to an end in the early 1830s. Limited agricultural expansion over the rest of that decade led to a glutted labor market and falling wages in Van Diemen's Land, though the dearth of free settlers ensured that convict labor was all the more needed for building the roads and bridges that might enhance the colony's economic value in the future. But depression hit Van Diemen's Land just as it was being flooded by the 25,000 convicts who poured into the colony in the first half of the 1840s. Joblessness plagued most of the convicts who graduated from gang labor; some of them resorted to hunger crimes, and keeping the rest from starving nearly bankrupted the colonial treasury.Footnote ¹⁵ The many convict work gangs themselves became a source of growing alarm among the free settlers of Van Diemen's Land. These gangs, scattered about the island in undersupervised groups of two hundred or more, were assumed to be hotbeds of every vice imaginable, and of sodomy in particular. Vandiemonian officials came to Westminster to testify to a select committee that “unnatural practices” were rife, that “new forms of bestiality have been invented in Van Diemen's Land,” and that “there was no chance for the moral improvement of the convicts as long as they were herded together in gangs; it was an utter impossibility.”Footnote ¹⁶

From late 1845, free settlers started petitioning the imperial government for an end to transportation. They deeply resented that “in thus converting a flourishing British colony into an immense gaol the free inhabitants had no voice, that their consent to an alteration so fatal to their most important interests was never obtained nor ever asked.” If any more convicts were “added to the unbounded number of criminals already in Van Diemen's Land,” petitioners warned, “this island and the neighbouring colonies, among which they must ultimately be diffused, will exhibit a spectacle of vice and infamy such as the history of the world cannot parallel.”Footnote ¹⁷ Only six years earlier, members of Parliament had damned convict transportation as a vice to which the Australian colonies were addicted and from which the metropole had to save them. Now, the sole Australian colony to which convicts were still being sent was beginning to damn convict transportation as a vice to which the metropole was addicted and from which Van Diemen's Land needed to be delivered. Some of the island's larger landowners, it is true, still welcomed convicts as a source of cheap labor. But by 1850, most Vandiemonians were eager to press their claims to recognition as a free colony of virtuous British stock, particularly the residents of Hobart and Launceston (the urban centers that had come to look and feel very much like English county towns), and of the eastern midlands between them. In pursuit of these claims, settlers had already divested themselves of bushrangers and of Van Diemen's Land's indigenous inhabitants. Most of the former had been killed off in the 1820s, and most of the latter by the early 1830s, with the few Palawa who survived the Black War banished to Flinders Island where they faced extinction by neglect.Footnote ¹⁸ Convict shepherds and ex-convict settlers on the fringes of the bush had done much of the killing of Aboriginal people, making them easy scapegoats for free settlers eager to deflect the criticism of British humanitarians while they quickly turned former Aboriginal hunting grounds into sheep pastures.Footnote ¹⁹ Now most of those free settlers were ready to cleanse themselves of the “convict taint” as well, and in the process refashion the image of Van Diemen's Land away from a wild, lawless, and sinful outpost of empire to a “little England.”Footnote ²⁰

Even British officials were beginning to admit that the antitransportationists had a point, and that, in the interest of posterity, the time had come to eliminate the flow of convicts. “The time is not, perhaps, very remote,” noted Sir James Stephen, permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, “when the Australian colonies of Great Britain will exercise a preponderating influence over the greater and more populous regions of the southern hemisphere.” As such, “it might be justly regarded as a signal calamity to mankind that the original elements of any of those communities should, to a considerable extent, be tainted by vices alike degrading to their immediate victims, and pestilent in their contaminating influences.”Footnote ²¹

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Alive to these concerns, Lord John Russell's Whig government that took office in 1846 sought to save transportation through a new scheme to moralize convicts at home before sending them abroad. It likewise sought to save Van Diemen's Land by scattering those convicts around the empire. Thus, the administration saw penal servitude at home and transportation abroad as complementary modes of dealing with criminals and sought to strike a balance between them. The broader penological trend away from transportation and toward long-term imprisonment was already well established. Over the previous fifty years, penal reformers from John Howard to Jeremy Bentham had repeatedly insisted that imprisonment at home was a much better alternative to transportation for serious criminals. In the penitentiary, they argued, discipline could be made uniform and consistent rather than arbitrary. By the 1830s, a number of penal reformers, notably Whitworth Russell and William Crawford, who in 1835 became centrally appointed inspectors of prisons, were extolling the reformatory virtues of the model American prisons, especially Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. There, through an initial course of solitary confinement in separate cells followed by hard labor, inmates could be made to dwell on their moral shortcomings. It was also hoped that over time, through the ministrations of the prison chaplains and schoolmasters, they would confess their sins and endeavor to overcome them. At the same time, hard labor would punish inmates bodily in a more rational and less brutalizing way than did corporal punishment. Indeed, just as transportation with assignment was being abolished in New South Wales, separate cellular prisons were gaining official sanction as the best means of deterring and (it was hoped) of reforming most offenders. The separate system's greatest monument, Pentonville, opened in 1842. Over the course of the 1840s, other new centrally administered prisons in Britain were built along Pentonville's cellular lines, and dozens more were at least partly retrofitted. By 1850, Sir Joshua Jebb, surveyor-general of prisons, presided over a far-flung separate regime, for which he served as an ardent apostle.Footnote ²² Jebb's victory, however, was hardly complete. Justices of the peace and ratepayers tended to balk at the expense of conversion to separate cells, so the county jails that still held most prisoners only slowly and partially adopted the separate system.Footnote ²³ Still, by the late 1840s it was widely assumed that solitary confinement followed by hard labor in central prisons offered the best promise of rehabilitating serious criminals.

The separate system emerged as a complement to transportation in the 1840s rather than as a substitute for it. The vast initial outlay required for the building of cellular prisons made it unlikely that the penitentiary would completely supplant transportation in the heyday of “cheap government.” Quite apart from questions of cost, prison and legal authorities remained convinced that transportation still provided too effective a deterrent for them to feel comfortable dispensing with it altogether. Thus in 1847, after interviewing virtually every judge in the land, a House of Lords select committee concluded that it would be “extremely unwise to abandon” transportation altogether, because the social death of banishment from friends and family struck a “salutary terror” in the minds of hardened criminals that imprisonment alone could not achieve.Footnote ²⁴ “[A] sort of shudder pervades the court when it is passed, and I am told by the County Magistrates that there is a great dread of it amongst the lower orders,” Mr. Justice Coltman testified.Footnote ²⁵ “Spectators, and the fraternity of criminals, are chiefly struck by the sudden and utter disappearance of the convict,” Lord Cockburn added, “and by the certainty that he is living, at an unapproachable distance, in some way of which the particulars are unknown to them, but of which they are sure that it is not in a state of either liberty or comfort.”Footnote ²⁶ Thus, the Lords committee concluded, “all are agreed that the punishment of transportation cannot safely be abandoned; that it has terrors for offenders generally which none other than Death possesses; that no such fear attends imprisonment, especially for hardened offenders; [and] that no hope exists of Imprisonment being so far rendered more formidable as to supply in all respects the place of Transportation.”Footnote ²⁷

The two cousins responsible for the Whig reform of convict transportation, Home Secretary Sir George Grey and Colonial Secretary the third Earl Grey, concurred with this assessment. Rather than abandon transportation completely, they suspended it to Van Diemen's Land for two years starting in late 1846. They then took steps to ensure the good order and discipline of transportees before shipping them out to the colonies, and they sought to relieve an overburdened Van Diemen's Land by securing an Order in Council in September 1848 that named New South Wales and the Cape Colony as well as Van Diemen's Land as places to which convicts might be transported. All convicts slated for transportation were henceforth subjected to an initial period of solitary confinement and religious instruction at Pentonville, and then to a period of gang labor in the government dockyards either at home or at Bermuda or Gibraltar. In these first two phases of their confinement, the Greys reasoned, convicts would be inculcated with the religious and work discipline that would prepare them to be useful members of society in the colonies. Only after thus being properly disciplined would convicts be sent overseas as “assisted exiles.” Once they reached their assigned colonies, they would be granted tickets-of-leave, revocable under strict terms, to help ensure their continued good behavior. The Greys' assumption was that these “exiles” would be far less likely to return to a life of crime overseas than they were in Britain, where ex-convicts would have difficulty finding work in a tight labor market and where it would be all too tempting for them to return to their old haunts and associates. The notorious gang system in Van Diemen's Land had made it painfully clear that the colonies were not proper places “for carrying into effect the strictly penal part of the sentence inflicted upon convicts,” Earl Grey noted. But overseas colonies nevertheless “possessed the highest advantages for the reception of criminals whom it is desirable both for their own sake and for that of society to remove, after their punishment has been completed, from the danger of bringing again into a criminal course of life in this country by the difficulties and temptations to which they are unavoidably subject but from which these colonies are in a great measure exempt.”Footnote ²⁸ Thus, the metropolitan government's hope was that a reformed transportation system might provide some relief to Van Diemen's Land by scattering a better-disciplined cohort of convicts around the empire.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, Earl Grey was so optimistic that other colonial outlets could be secured that he quickly informed Lieutenant Governor Sir William Denison that it was “the intention of Her Majesty's Government to abandon altogether the transportation of male convicts to Van Diemen's Land.”Footnote ³⁰

Grey was soon obliged to eat his words, however. There was such moral stigma attached to transportation by the late 1840s that the Whigs could find virtually no takers even for convicts who had first been subjected to rigorous prison discipline at home. Earl Grey managed to induce the Legislative Council of New South Wales to take some convicts by promising them in the fall of 1847 that an equal number of free emigrants would be shipped out at British expense. But Grey reneged on this deal in September 1848, when he went ahead and sent convict ships to New South Wales even after a cash-strapped Treasury refused to grant an immigration subsidy. This provoked colonial outrage, and when the first of the convict ships, the Hashemy, entered Sydney Harbor in June 1849, it was greeted by a protest meeting at Circular Quay. The several thousand people assembled there heard Robert Lowe (then a Sydney lawyer and politician, later Gladstone's chancellor of the exchequer) lament that “the stately presence of their city, the beautiful waters of their harbor, were this day again polluted with . . . the moral degradation of a community—the picked and selected criminals of Great Britain.”Footnote ³¹ Four more shiploads followed, and most of the 1,400 convicts who landed in New South Wales were quickly hired by pastoralists looking for cheap labor. Nevertheless, the mass opposition in Sydney and Melbourne prompted Grey sulkily to conclude that “it is impossible to continue sending convicts to N[ew] S[outh] Wales, though I think the apprehensions of the colonists as to being demoralized by convicts are not a little visionary & that the danger would be rather that even the worst of our convicts would find they had something to learn from the speakers at the public meeting[s] in despising truth & decency.” Thus, after much stalling, Grey finally informed Governor Fitzroy in November 1849 that no more convicts would be sent to New South Wales.Footnote ³² With New South Wales now permanently off limits to convicts, Grey's assistant undersecretary at the Colonial Office, Thomas Frederick Elliot, felt there “appear[ed] too much reason to conclude V[an] D[iemen]'s Land cannot and all other colonies will not, receive any more convicts.”Footnote ³³

Elliot had good reason to reach this conclusion, for Grey had no better luck elsewhere. The already far-flung network of convict labor was one imperial network that the colonies refused to extend any farther, despite the wishes of the Colonial Office.Footnote ³⁴ The governor of Ceylon told Grey that he “should hesitate exceedingly to recommend that any class of persons of that description should be introduced into a tropical country comparatively little advanced in civilization, and in which they would necessarily form an isolated class of society not capable of absorption into the general community.”Footnote ³⁵ The lieutenant governor of Mauritius warned Grey that the attempt to introduce British convicts would create a furore.Footnote ³⁶ The mere rumor that New Zealand might be asked to take British convicts was enough to provoke petitions from free settlers, who expressed “their extreme surprise, as well as their deep regret, that such a measure should ever have been contemplated, inasmuch as this colony was founded upon an express and positive guarantee that convicts should not be permitted to degrade the character of its settlements, or pollute its population by their presence.” Maori leaders were likewise dead set against convicts. “Behold, we say, let this not be done!” they implored Queen Victoria. “O Lady, we should be perplexed if the convicts were allowed to come here,” for “they would come to our villages and annoy us; they would demoralize our women, and teach their own evil ways to our men.”Footnote ³⁷

Grey did not foist convicts on these colonies against their will. But he did attempt to foist them on the Cape Colony, and his efforts ended in humiliating failure.Footnote ³⁸ Grey felt that the Cape should take convicts because its labor market could readily absorb a good many of them and because the £1 million that the imperial government had recently spent on frontier wars in southern Africa entitled it to expect the Cape's help in resolving the crisis in Van Diemen's Land.Footnote ³⁹ So in early 1849, Grey authorized the Neptune to sail to Cape Town after it picked up 289 convicts in Bermuda who had completed their terms of gang labor on public works there. The large majority of the Neptune's passengers were Irishmen. One of them was the Young Ireland leader John Mitchel, transported for his role in the 1848 rising and separated from the other convicts for fear he would rouse them to mutiny. Most of the rest had been convicted of hunger crimes during the Famine. Mitchel called them “the famine-struck Irish of the Special Commission; many of them who have not a word of English,” and most of them “shattered in constitution by mere hunger and hardship.” “[T]hey were born, these men,” Mitchel intoned,

Of course, Earl Grey's assessment of the Neptune convicts was dramatically different in tone from that of Mitchel. But Grey could agree that the convicts were luckless wretches rather than hardened criminals. “These men are in general peasants,” he explained to the governor of Cape Colony, Sir Harry Smith, “who under pressure of extreme want had committed depredations which, though they could not be passed over without punishment, yet implied comparatively little moral degradation.” They had been sent from Ireland to Bermuda, where “it was found that they were entirely unsuited to undergo the discipline and labour which are there enforced” because famine had physically compromised them and because there had been no fixed routine of regimented labor imposed on them in the vastly overcrowded Irish jails. Grey thought that sending them to the Cape provided them with by far their best chance at a better life.Footnote ⁴¹ Certainly, Grey and his cabinet colleagues felt that the Neptune's passengers deserved another chance. Sir George Grey admitted to his fellow members of Parliament that “he hardly knew why they should have been transported” for the hunger crimes most of them had committed.Footnote ⁴² The prime minister himself felt that “under ordinary circumstances,” such men “would never, probably, have been brought before a court of justice.” It was only “under the threat of famine” that they had “committed acts of theft.”Footnote ⁴³

The imperial government felt that the Neptune convicts deserved a decent welcome at the Cape. However, Grey made a major mistake in sending them out from Bermuda without first ascertaining how they would be received. Well before the Neptune arrived at Cape Town, Sir Harry Smith had warned Grey that this move would stir up a hornet's nest of opposition, which it did.Footnote ⁴⁴ An Anti-Convict Association was formed in June 1849, almost two months before the Neptune's early September arrival in Simon's Bay. Within a month, all the unofficial members of the Cape's legislative council had resigned in protest, and the men who agreed to succeed them were burned in effigy and had the windows of their houses broken.Footnote ⁴⁵ Anger was so great that Smith thought it would be dangerous even to permit the convicts to disembark, so they languished aboard the Neptune for almost half a year while it was anchored in the harbor. It was only with the greatest trouble that Smith could even provision the ship, because the shopkeepers of Cape Town had sworn a solemn covenant not to supply convicts and to shun anyone who tried to do so. Thus, the Neptune was placed in what Mitchel called a “moral quarantine.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, Cape citizens couched their protests in the language of morality, just as Governor Smith had done in his very public protests to Earl Grey. Civilizational progress in the Cape, and by extension all of Africa, they argued, was predicated on the Christian virtues of the white minority. Petitioners predicted disastrous results if that white minority were infected with convicts. Thus “infusing . . . the dregs of European civilization among the tribes of Southern Africa,” protested representatives of the Lutheran Church, “is not only a virtual abandonment of one of the most sacred duties ever undertaken by a Christian state, but a direct and palpable aggression on the moral condition, low as it is, of the numerous South African tribes.”Footnote ⁴⁷ If the Neptune convicts were allowed in, London Missionary Society petitioners feared, “all hopes of the evangelization and improvement of the native tribes, of saving them from utter confusion, and exterminating wars, would vanish; and Southern Africa, which appears to be the only gate . . . by which Christianity, with its attendant virtues and happiness, can penetrate the interior, under British auspices, would be closed forever.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The rhetoric of J. B. Ebden, chairman of the Anti-Convict Association, was even more apocalyptic. The admission of convicts, he insisted,

Month after month the Neptune convicts found themselves “still riding at anchor in this weary Simon's Bay” as the colonists' protests continued.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even before reaching Cape Town, the ship's surgeon-superintendent, J. M. Deas, reported that a scurvy outbreak had killed a few convicts “whose constitution had been prematurely debilitated by fever and starvation.”Footnote ⁵¹ Deas himself suddenly fell gravely ill shortly after the Neptune's arrival from an affliction “occasioned,” according to the ship's master, John Henderson, “by the serious responsibility which he considers attaches to him under present circumstances, and from the shock he has sustained by the conduct of the colonists in not making [available] the required supplies of fresh meat and vegetables &c for the use of the convicts in his charge.”Footnote ⁵² A few days later Deas was dead, a victim of “Lord Grey's colonial experiment,” according to John Mitchel.Footnote ⁵³ According to Grey himself, Deas was a “victim to the feelings of pain and surprise occasioned by the refusal of the inhabitants of the Cape to allow his people the refreshment indispensable to the preservation of their health.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Grey finally concluded that he had no choice but to give in, and in late February 1850, the Neptune left Cape Town for the only feasible destination remaining—Van Diemen's Land. Grey granted conditional pardons to the large majority of the Neptune convicts and told Lieutenant Governor Denison to “cause these men to be treated with all the humanity and the consideration due to them after the disappointment they originally met with, and after the sufferings and trials to which they have since been exposed.”Footnote ⁵⁵ On learning where they were headed, the convicts “expressed their disappointment in bitter terms,” the Neptune's religious instructor recounted. “[B]ut on due reflection, after I had taken the opportunity privately to speak with them on the additional advantages they were about to enjoy, tendered to them by Lord Grey, they are now in a great measure satisfied.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Seven more convicts died during the passage to Van Diemen's Land; most of the survivors were immediately discharged on conditional pardons.Footnote ⁵⁷

Van Diemen's Land was now once again the sole depository for British transportees. Having been obliged to absorb over 32,000 of them over the course of the 1840s, it was now made to absorb 2,000 to 3,000 more each year from 1850. In 1852, the last full year of transportation to Van Diemen's Land, more convicts were sent there than in any year since the height of the traffic in 1844.Footnote ⁵⁸ Vandiemonians' moral resentment at being thus singled out was now much sharper than it had been then. They were already alarmed that the flow of convicts had quickly resumed when the Whigs' two-year suspension came to an end in 1848, and Anti-Transportation Leagues had been established in Launceston and Hobart early in 1849. Antitransportationists in Van Diemen's Land readily agreed with Sir William Molesworth, that

Speakers at public meetings insisted it was high time to “follow the example of the Cape”Footnote ⁶⁰—“the Cape of Good Hope . . . will not have prisoners, and why should we?”Footnote ⁶¹

Henceforth, each convict ship that landed in Van Diemen's Land provoked protest meetings and petitions that rued the “unnatural” corruption, higher crime rates, as well as discouragement to free immigration that the convicts allegedly carried with them to the island, and lambasted Grey and his Whig colleagues for failing to make good on their seeming promise to bring transportation there to a halt. “There was something so discouraging in the conduct of the British ministry,” the antitransportationist leader Rev. John West told a Hobart meeting in December 1849. “They had said and written everything that the statesmen of a Christian Government could write and say in expressing sympathy for our condition, and in promises of relief,” and yet no relief had come.Footnote ⁶² Another speaker affirmed that Earl Grey had reneged on his promise to send free emigrants to Van Diemen's Land as a moral counterweight to the convicts. “The proposition was like offering food to a starving man, and telling him he shall not have it unless he takes a certain amount of poison with it.” The lesson was that “Lord Grey is not to be trusted. Only consent to receive convicts, and the emigrants will be kept back; he will withhold the food, but give you the physic, and that a large dose. (Loud cheers).”Footnote ⁶³ This accusation was not entirely fair. Grey had hoped to be able to offer inducements to free emigrants, but he had been stymied by the Treasury's parsimony and even more by the higher prevailing wages that the mainland Australian colonies offered to prospective immigrants.Footnote ⁶⁴ More just was the flurry of accusations that the Whig government had created false hope that it would bring transportation to Van Diemen's Land quickly to an end. The protesters repeatedly flung back at Grey and Russell the warnings they had uttered in Parliament in 1847 that if transportation continued unabated “Van Diemen's Land would be left . . . with no immigrants but a vast herd of criminals and their keepers”Footnote ⁶⁵ and that “we are bound, when we are planting provinces . . . to endeavour that they should not be merely the seats of malefactors and of convicts, but communities fitted to set an example of virtue and happiness; and not to make plantations . . . of the mere scum of the land.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet several years on, the Whig government was still shoveling convicts into Van Diemen's Land at the same rate as in the bad old days of the early 1840s. Pointing to this irony, the antitransportationist John Crookes told a Launceston meeting in August 1850 that there was “something very humiliating in the consideration that the mightiest and wealthiest nation in the whole world is not able to provide for the coercion of her own criminals without hawking them about, first here and then there, and at last pouring them in upon a helpless colony. (Hear, hear).” “I am unwilling to believe,” he concluded, “that England will ever permit it to be said that ‘in order to save herself she was compelled to pollute her colonies . . . with the scum of her population, until at length she sunk under the weight of her own corruption.’ A country that released her foreign possessions from the curse of slavery, will surely never submit to this.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Yet there was no relief in sight at the time Crookes spoke these words. Quite unlike the antislavery movement to which he alluded, there was no widespread metropolitan agitation against transportation. In the absence of serious opposition at home, Earl Grey managed to brazen out the attacks of the Anti-Transportation Leagues of Van Diemen's Land even after they morphed into a confederation that included chapters throughout the eastern and southern mainland.Footnote ⁶⁸ Grey's obduracy was greatly encouraged by Lieutenant Governor Denison, an ardent supporter of the system who made himself even less popular than Grey with the antitransportationists in Van Diemen's Land.Footnote ⁶⁹ Denison was a staunch ally of the big pastoralists, who continued to welcome the influx of convicts as a source of cheap labor. As late as August 1851, he insisted that “the convicts are more eagerly sought after than ever” and that “so long as the demand for labour exists to an extent which the ordinary means at the disposal of the colony are inadequate to supply, so long will it be for the benefit of the colony that transportation should continue.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Denison was correct insofar as convicts fresh off the ships were being hired in large numbers right up to the very end of transportation to Van Diemen's Land, chiefly to fill the yawning gap in the workforce created by the gold rush on the mainland, which lured droves of free settlers and expirees from Van Diemen's Land to Victoria.Footnote ⁷¹ But not content to base his arguments strictly on economic grounds, Denison went out of his way to insult the antitransportationists by insisting that they were lowborn hypocrites in his published dispatches to the Colonial Office. Thus, for instance, he passed on to Earl Grey an antitransportation petition with the prefatory remark that “the names attached to these documents are those of persons who have been raised from insignificance to comparative wealth by convict labour, and that some of them, even now, notwithstanding their professed ‘intensity of hatred to the system,’ have very large numbers of convicts in their employment.”Footnote ⁷² Deeming it insufficient to ridicule the antitransportationists of his own colony, he went out of his way to insult those of the mainland by publicly insisting that Van Diemen's Land, convicts and all, was still a conspicuously more moral place than New South Wales or South Australia, whose laborers spent their excessively high wages on drink and debauchery.Footnote ⁷³ While by August 1852 even Denison felt obliged to admit that the majority of Vandiemonians were hostile to transportation, he insulted that majority by affirming that the “respectable” colonists still supported it.Footnote ⁷⁴

With few British observers paying close attention to the growing crisis in Van Diemen's Land, Grey and Denison hoped to be able to stay the course. But the reformed system of transportation was breaking down from within even as it was under attack from without. Contrary to Grey's expectations, a good many convicts shipped out to Van Diemen's Land in the final years of transportation were not hardened criminals, and (despite Grey's efforts) they had not been subjected to solitary confinement or rigorous labor before their departure. Over a third of all convicts transported between 1848 and 1853 were sent from Ireland, proportionally a far higher percentage than at any other time during the long history of transportation.Footnote ⁷⁵ Far from being serial offenders, most of these Irish convicts, like those aboard the unfortunate Neptune, had been convicted of Famine crimes such as sheep stealing. Starvation and famine-related disease was so rife in the west of Ireland in the late 1840s that prisoners begged judges to sentence them to transportation as a means of escape.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, there was much truth in Denison's concern that, compared to the risk of starvation at home, at least some of the Irish convicts sent to Van Diemen's Land “do not look upon their removal to this country as a punishment.”Footnote ⁷⁷ It proved impossible for the Irish prison authorities to keep up with the volume of transportees. Some of them were subjected to solitary confinement in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin (opened in 1850), followed by gang labor at the convict depot on Spike Island in Cork harbor (opened in 1847).Footnote ⁷⁸ But overcrowding meant that most Irish convicts were shipped out without first doing gang labor, even after Mountjoy had opened its doors and despite the Colonial Office's insistence that they ought to be subjected to the same disciplinary procedures as their British counterparts.Footnote ⁷⁹ Grey underlined the “apprehensions I have repeatedly expressed as to the effect of sending convicts to Van Diemen's Land without previous punishment of a proper character,” and that “continuing to do so will . . . entirely defeat the whole policy which HM's Government has determined on to adopt.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The Irish prison authorities, in their turn, complained that Grey “does not seem to be aware of the extreme difficulty which exists with regard to carrying out in this country an effective course of probationary punishment owing to imperfection and deficiency of prison accommodation generally, & the unprecedented increase of crime consequent upon the destitution & sufferings endured by the lower classes during four consecutive years” of famine.Footnote ⁸¹ Denison sought to compensate for the lack of hard labor on the Irish side by extracting it from the convicts upon their arrival in Van Diemen's Land. After some initial reluctance, the imperial authorities permitted a “moderate number”Footnote ⁸² of Irish convicts to carry out their term of hard labor in Van Diemen's Land, because “as a body, they are not the vicious and demoralized men that are the subject of transportation in England” and because “there exists, also, a greater necessity for relieving Ireland from the pressure of numbers.”Footnote ⁸³

In the waning days of transportation to Van Diemen's Land, Denison was still bitterly complaining that the Irish convicts shipped to him were “incorrigibly idle” and blamed their idleness on the almost complete absence of compulsory labor in Irish prisons.Footnote ⁸⁴ But what Denison took for willful idleness was actually due to “the physical debasement of the lower orders” in Ireland, “the result of the famine” combined with demoralization brought on by the wretched state of the Irish prisons.Footnote ⁸⁵ Chronic overcrowding made solitary confinement virtually impossible. What little labor was compelled from prisoners was inadequately supervised. Irish prison diets were of the bread, water, and thin gruel variety. Prisoners had to make do with filthy clothing and bedding. In short, before the reforms initiated by the landmark Irish Prisons Act of 1854, the state of the Irish prisons was “as deplorable as it is possible to conceive.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It was small wonder, then, that when asked, Irish convicts testified that they had been ill prepared for the much harder work and tougher discipline to which they were subjected after their arrival in Van Diemen's Land (though they were thankful for better food).Footnote ⁸⁷ Such “reformatory” discipline as they received only came on the other side of the world, after they had spent months or years rotting in Irish jails. Many, probably most, were not the hardened criminals whom the Greys had had in mind when they hatched their reformed transportation scheme, but rather starvelings who had fallen foul of the law in their efforts to keep body and soul together.

Another systemic tension that plagued the imperial government's efforts to sustain transportation pitted the Home Office against the Colonial Office. The former simply wanted to ship off transportees as speedily as possible, while the latter understood that only the most careful balancing act could sustain transportation in the face of widening colonial hostility. The only place in the empire where transportees were now wanted was the nascent colony of Western Australia, which had petitioned to take convicts in 1846 in hopes that this cheap and subsidized workforce might build up its infrastructure. But the small number of free emigrants in Western Australia meant it could feasibly absorb only a tenth of the 2,000-plus convicts who had to be shipped out each year.Footnote ⁸⁸ As we have seen, the only alternative by 1850 was Van Diemen's Land, and while even two years later the eternally optimistic Denison felt his colony could continue to absorb 2,000 more convicts a year, the Colonial Office had long since concluded that Van Diemen's Land was “so full it can receive no more,” or at the very least that it could only absorb any more convicts with “great difficulty.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The Home Office regularly pressed the Colonial Office to permit shiploads of convicts to be sent out to Van Diemen's Land at intervals of a few months in order to prevent the overcrowding of convicted transportees in British prisons, while the Colonial Office equally as regularly sought to broaden those intervals out of deference to the growing political sensitivities.Footnote ⁹⁰ By 1852, virtually the only reasons the convict pipeline to Van Diemen's Land remained open were Grey's obduracy and Denison's optimism that transportation was indefinitely sustainable in the face of an opposition that he routinely belittled.

Once Grey left office along with the rest of the Russell government in February 1852, transportation was quickly brought to an end. The permanent officials at the Colonial Office wasted little time in telling Grey's successor, Sir John Pakington, that they did not think it was any longer sustainable. “I am confident you must feel the necessity of giving, ere long, a full consideration to the subject of Australian Transportation,” permanent undersecretary Herman Merivale wrote to him. The “colonists . . . all denounce the system as an arbitrary & unwarrantable exercise of tyranny, and though I believe that the colonists themselves will be the first, & eventually the greatest sufferers, England scarcely should” provoke them “into a furious opposition.”Footnote ⁹¹ Pakington wasted little time in acting on this advice. The last convict ship, the St. Vincent, sailed for Hobart in late 1852, and Pakington broke the news to Denison before the year was out that the imperial government would end transportation to Van Diemen's Land. Pakington openly declared that it had been killed off by colonists' lively sense of the “moral injury” that transportation had caused them, combined with the gold rush in the brand-new colony of Victoria. Within a year of the richest of the strikes at Ballarat in September 1851, some fifty thousand people were working the Victoria gold diggings.Footnote ⁹² “It would appear a solecism,” he told Denison, “to convey offenders, at the public expense, with the intention of at no distant time setting them free, passage to the immediate vicinity of those very gold fields which thousands of honest labourers are in vain striving to reach.”Footnote ⁹³ As Pakington later noted in the House of Commons, “[I]t became obviously impossible that this country should send her convicts for punishment to those auriferous regions whither a large part of her population were hurrying with the idea of enriching themselves.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Henceforth, the only outlet for transported convicts was Western Australia, but the modest flow of a few hundred convicts a year was permanently stanched in 1867 at the request of the other Australian colonies, which feared they might be infected by escaped or expired convicts traveling eastward.

■ ■ ■

That Earl Grey would fail to find sustainable colonial outlets for convicts who had been subjected to rigorous prior discipline at home was clear practically from the start. The “inevitably” corrupting effect of convict transportation was a metropolitan—not a colonial—assumption in the late 1830s. But by the late 1840s, this assumption had become such a commonplace one everywhere but Western Australia that colonial opposition made it impossible to sustain even the “moralized” form of transportation that Grey had to offer. Of course, from a metropolitan perspective, the “grand object” of transportation, as the former lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's Land Sir George Arthur bluntly put it, was to “rid the country of a polluting spring, which is year after year extending its corrupting streams.”Footnote ⁹⁵ But there was no longer any getting rid of the “polluting spring,” and this fact was a source of chronic anxiety during the 1850s and well into the 1860s. As W. R. Greg anonymously wrote in the Edinburgh Review shortly after the end of transportation to Van Diemen's Land, “[T]here can be no doubt that the periodical restoration to the general population of such a vast mass of criminality, much of it of the most heinous description—the re-absorption, as it were, into the system of such a vast amount of poison annually . . . is, indeed, one of the most grave and urgent dangers with which we have to contend.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Now, colonial resistance was forcing Britain to imprison and eventually release at home some 90 percent of the convicts who in the past would have been shipped off to Australia. The metropolitan penal regime that evolved to supplant transportation was the target of chronic and widespread criticism for a decade. That criticism revealed not only nostalgia for the good old days when the worst criminals could be expelled from the land but also a loss of confidence in the civilizing mission at home. By the early 1860s, the conviction had become widespread that serious criminals were simply not redeemable. The early Victorians had expressed hope in the rehabilitative powers of the penitentiary. The mid-Victorians saw it as little more than a place of punishment.Footnote ⁹⁷

The Penal Servitude Acts of 1853 and 1857 provided the framework for long-term imprisonment as the substitute for transportation for all but the 300 criminals a year who could still be sent to Western Australia. There remained some 2,500 additional convicts a year who in the past would have been shipped off but now had to remain incarcerated and then released at home.Footnote ⁹⁸ Five- or ten-year prison sentences, unheard of before the 1850s, were suddenly a commonplace. After four to six months of solitary confinement at Pentonville, prisoners who in the past would have been sent to Australia were now removed to one of several centrally administered public-works prisons, notably Dartmoor, Chatham, or Portsmouth, where they were set to work dredging marshes, quarrying stone, or building breakwaters.Footnote ⁹⁹ After serving two-thirds of their sentences, penal-servitude convicts were released “on license” via ticket-of-leave, a form of primitive parole. The ticket-of-leave had its origins in New South Wales and later Van Diemen's Land, where it had been used as a means of allowing long-sentence transportees to work for private employers by subjecting them to recall if they broke the terms of their conditional release. The version adapted to the British context was revocable if a ticket-of-leave man was convicted of another crime, if he associated with “notoriously bad characters,” if he led “an idle and dissolute life,” or if he had “no visible means of obtaining an honest livelihood.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Just about every facet of the new penal-servitude regime came in for widespread criticism, but none more so than the ticket-of-leave, a documentary reminder that even violent criminals would now be released at home rather than packed off to the colonies and thus “a bugbear in the eyes of the country.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Anxiety was amplified by the police and the press, who demonized ticket-of-leave men as the leaders of a criminal class responsible for an outsized share of Britain's serious crimes. Such men, Sir Archibald Alison, sheriff of Lanarkshire, told a select committee in 1856, were “the most talented, the most dangerous, and the most formidable class of depredators” and were at “the centre of all the great crimes that have been committed in Scotland” within the last few years.Footnote ¹⁰² There was no statistical justification for this assumption. Indeed, nobody really knew how much crime ticket-of-leave men were responsible for, because in the early years of penal servitude nobody kept close tabs on them.Footnote ¹⁰³ Sir Joshua Jebb, who as surveyor-general of prisons was the chief architect of the penal-servitude regime, periodically insisted that recidivism rates among ticket-of-leave men were quite low.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the absence of registration and formal police surveillance, however, there was little hope of “proving” Jebb's low numbers. There was no more hope of “proving” the (probably wildly exaggerated) claim of James Stuart, police superintendent in Glasgow, that there might be as many as eighty ticket-of-leave men prowling his city at any given time, and indeed that “dozens of them turn up in a night.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Home Office and some judges insisted that the widespread fears of a serious crime spree touched off by ticket-of-leave men were greatly exaggerated. There was obviously nothing new about “convicts being returned again to society”; thousands of short-time prisoners were released at home each and every year.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, it had long been standard practice to release most of those sentenced to seven years' transportation at home after they had served half their sentence in prison hulks.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The difference now, however, was that a serious offender who in the past would have been shipped to Australia on fourteen years' transportation for, say, robbery with violence, was now to be released at home once he became eligible for a ticket-of-leave. Moreover, the legal authorities had hoped that “the power of revoking that license, without assigning any cause whatever, at the pure pleasure of the Crown, would hang in terrorem” over ticket-of-leave men and thus “hold out the very strongest possible inducement to them to conduct themselves properly.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In practice, however, tickets-of-leave were very seldom revoked, not least because their holders went about unregistered and were subject to no formal system of police surveillance.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ So while the architects of penal servitude could take it on faith that ticket-of-leave men were for the most part behaving themselves, its critics could take it on faith that they were not. Neither side could point to much solid evidence to back up its hunches.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Both sides, however, could agree that known ticket-of-leave men were stigmatized. For apologists of the system such as Jebb, this was a compelling reason for not subjecting them to closer surveillance, because the more familiar they were to the police, the more likely the police were to harass them and to snitch on them to prospective employers. The chief problem with the ticket-of-leave, according to Jebb, was that “it marks” its holders “as a class, and it is that mark as a class which has interfered with the prospects of many” in finding work. “In a penal colony it would be quite different,” he added, “but here we cannot maintain the superintendence of the police over them without effectually preventing their obtaining employment.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Ticket-of-leave men themselves forcibly made this argument in a series of London meetings organized by Henry Mayhew to call attention to their plight. “How can we hope to get employment from any tradesmen,” one of them asked, “if the policemen persist in telling who we are?”Footnote ¹¹² Critics of penal servitude, in contrast, assumed that most ticket-of-leave men would likely revert to a life of crime because prospective employers would never knowingly hire ex-convicts if they could avoid it. In the crowded British labor market, employers could readily avoid doing so, and in any case, the prospective employer and indeed the public more generally had a right to know if a man was on ticket-of-leave. Indeed, such critics were inclined to see the difficulty that known ticket-of-leave men had in finding honest work as the most compelling argument for abandoning penal servitude and reviving transportation.Footnote ¹¹³

The argument that transportation gave criminals a much better chance to mend their evil ways and make honest lives for themselves was of course a hardy perennial among its advocates. If a serious malefactor was released at home, this argument went, “pernicious association will be prolonged to the end of his life.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Transportation, by contrast, “removes the offender from his old habits and associates, and, if properly dealt with abroad, introduces new habits and new ideas, under the influence of which reformation may take place.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ “The habits of a people are formed by the circumstances in which they are placed,” proponents of transportation continually insisted. “[T]he same convicts, who, in England, would be discharged from prison again and again, to a repetition of crime” might “enter upon a new life of industry and hope” if sent off to the colonies.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Judges and policemen hostile to the new penal-servitude regime often cited this argument.Footnote ¹¹⁷ On balance, transportation almost certainly did provide an atmosphere more conducive to a convict's rehabilitation than imprisonment followed by release at home.Footnote ¹¹⁸ There was some truth in what Daniel Ritchie, surgeon-superintendent aboard the Pestonjee Bomanjee, told his convict charges as they sailed toward Van Diemen's Land in the waning days of transportation: “Man in a state of society such as exists in those young and vigorous colonies to which our prow is directed, owes his standing to no old associations, no family ties, but solely to his own energy and talents, sustained by the impressions those acquainted with him receive of his honesty of purpose and character.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ One irony of the demise of transportation is that the third Earl Grey shared Ritchie's opinion. Grey's tenure at the Colonial Office is usually (and accurately) represented as marking the abandonment of the humanitarian impulse that was a marked feature of colonial policy under his predecessor, Baron Glenelg, in the late 1830s.Footnote ¹²⁰ This abandonment was most prominently on display in Grey's firm insistence on free trade in sugar, which tarnished Britain's antislavery credentials by giving a boon to the slave sugar of Cuba and Brazil at the expense of the free sugar (and ex-slaves) of the British Caribbean.Footnote ¹²¹ But Grey genuinely felt that his abortive “assisted exile” scheme was a humanitarian project that sought to facilitate convicts' redemption by giving them a fresh start overseas.

Of course, this redemptive argument was also a convenient one for those who were chiefly nostalgic for transportation not so much because it might reform convicts but because it most assuredly got rid of them. Nostalgia for transportation on this score was a long time dying. Throughout the 1850s and into the 1860s, there was repeated speculation about whether and where transportation might be reestablished. Sir Joshua Jebb was virtually the only government official who enthusiastically favored penal servitude over transportation in all cases.Footnote ¹²² Others were a good deal more ambivalent, simply resigning themselves to the fact that transportation was no longer a viable means of getting rid of serious criminals however much they might have wished to retain it. “The colonies must be considered shut to us,” Palmerston declared in his usual blunt manner in 1853, “and it was needless to inquire whether it was desirable or not that offenders should be released under certain conditions at home.”Footnote ¹²³ Other statesmen took longer to resign themselves. As late as 1856, Horatio Waddington, permanent undersecretary at the Home Office, still felt it was “most highly desirable” that a new penal colony should be established, because otherwise if and when Western Australia was closed off as an outlet, “we would have to retain in the country all our worst offenders.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The problem was that no such alternative outlet was deemed feasible. Labrador was “just as objectionable from being too cold, as are several others which have been thought of from being too hot; you can hardly create an English Siberia; and there is the further objection that this also would be very dear.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The Red River territory and the Falkland Islands were dismissed because it was deemed impossible to attract enough free settlers to such remote places to create a demand for convict labor.Footnote ¹²⁶ The Gulf of Carpentaria at the very top of Australia was nixed because it would be almost impossible to attract free settlers, and because sending convicts to a place where they “would have passing almost in sight of them a trade of immense value, which goes through the Torres Straits,” would simply be “creating a nest of pirates.”Footnote ¹²⁷ More and more public men reluctantly came to agree with Thomas Frederick Elliot's conclusion that “if we were merely to send discharged offenders into vacant territories, we should have a perfect pandemonium.” A relatively large free population willing to employ convicts was essential, Elliot elaborated. It was only the introduction of the merino sheep, the rapid pastoral expansion stimulated by cheap convict labor, and the alienation of vast swathes of potentially profitable Crown land that had created the proper conditions for the transportation experiment to work in eastern Australia. It was naïve to think that anything like this happy scenario could be replicated elsewhere.Footnote ¹²⁸

Judges, magistrates, respectable folk who wrote letters to the editor, and indeed newspaper editors themselves, however, were much more reluctant to conclude that the days of transportation were over. They damned penal servitude and praised transportation as the only safe alternative every time there was a crime scare, and never more pointedly than during the London garotting panic of late 1862 and early 1863. These months saw a wave of muggings (notably that of Member of Parliament Hugh Pilkington) in which two or three perpetrators acting together put their victims in strangleholds and then robbed them. The widespread but unfounded assumption was that most of the garotters were ticket-of-leave men who in former days would have been prowling the streets of Sydney or Hobart rather than London.Footnote ¹²⁹ Since its inception in 1853, the penal-servitude regime had come sporadically under attack for a variety of reasons. Humanitarians argued that the length of the initial period of solitary confinement was so long as to be mentally debilitating (that length was pared down accordingly, from a maximum of eighteen to six months) and that the preponderance of ex-army and navy men among the prison guards had the effect of militarizing civil punishment. Disciplinarians, by contrast, felt that prisoners sentenced to penal servitude were treated too well. A series of assaults on guards and labor strikes at Dartmoor and Portland in the 1850s, and a riot at Chatham in 1861 that required 500 troops to suppress, they contended, were proof that the prisoners needed to be put more firmly in their place. They argued that such inmates ate better and worked shorter hours than some honest slum-dwellers and agricultural laborers, when strict justice dictated that prison diets and prison labor be made “less eligible”—even “less eligible” than workhouse diets and labor. They likewise objected that remission of sentence to penal servitude had evolved from a privilege earned through good conduct to a right lost only by strong evidence of bad conduct. Stricter standards for the earning of remission and other privileges needed to be defined and implemented along lines pioneered in Ireland after the 1854 Irish Prisons Act and in contrast to the elaborate system of incentives that had evolved in the British system. Critics assailed the latter as a series of bribes rather than privileges earned through hard work and self-discipline. The mastermind of the reformed Irish prison system, Sir Walter Crofton, became the darling of the authoritarians, who dismissed Sir Joshua Jebb as a misguided milksop.Footnote ¹³⁰

Disgust with the putative shortcomings of Jebb's penal-servitude regime reached a high point during the garotting scare of 1862–63 and prompted a wave of nostalgia for transportation. “Punishment has become a mockery” under the Jebb system, railed The Times, and a series of letter writers agreed with the headline writers.Footnote ¹³¹ The “Thunderer” had called for the end of transportation to Van Diemen's Land as early as 1851, and it periodically reiterated that call until transportation's demise in 1853.Footnote ¹³² But now it praised the salutary terror of transportation as a much better alternative to the Jebb system, in which “nothing is inflicted on the offender beyond a certain amount of tedium, compensated by excellent diet, comfortable lodging, and the prospect of early liberation.”Footnote ¹³³ It was not enough to ensure that in the central prisons “the labour will be made more distasteful, the food will be less nutritious, and a pious demeanour in the presence of the chaplain will be henceforth only its own reward.”Footnote ¹³⁴ It was past time “that the convict should be transferred to a sphere in which, even if he does himself no good, he can do society no harm.”Footnote ¹³⁵ All that was needed was “to select a spot for the purpose—a promising site for a new colony.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Helpful readers wrote in with their own suggestions. The renowned explorer Richard Burton thought that the Cameroon Mountains and Amboise Bay in West Africa would fit the bill nicely, while the captain of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, favored the Falklands.Footnote ¹³⁷

Most commentators on the garotting outrages shared the Saturday Review's lamentation that “our moral sewage is neither deodorized nor floated out to sea but remains in the midst of us . . . poisoning our own air.”Footnote ¹³⁸ But not all agreed that the revival of transportation was the only solution to this vexing problem. A recurring line of argument during the long public debate on penal servitude was that it would be wrong for Britons “to cast our moral filth beyond the range of our sensibilities” even if transportation should again become politically feasible.Footnote ¹³⁹ The influential Birmingham jurist Matthew Davenport Hill argued as early as 1853 that transportation was a “lazy and selfish resource” that Britain should no longer foist on its colonies.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Several years later, Henry Mayhew and his associate John Binny declared that “it is unworthy of a great and wise nation to make a moral dust-bin of its colonies, and, by thrusting the refuse of its population from under its nose, to believe that it is consulting the social health of the people at home.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Some influential observers continued to embrace this argument even in the wake of the garotting outrages. “No country has a right to pollute the shores of another with its crime,” affirmed the prison reformer Mary Carpenter.Footnote ¹⁴² The likes of Hill and Carpenter could agree that the moral solution was not the revival of transportation but the dramatic tightening up of a lax penal-servitude regime that gave criminals too much food to eat, too little work to do, and too much remission of sentence merely for keeping out of trouble while in prison.Footnote ¹⁴³

Members of Parliament were no less offended than their constituents by the garotting outrages in the heart of the empire. But by 1863, most of them had come to agree with the Home and Colonial Offices that the broadening of transportation beyond the strict confines of Western Australia was simply not a viable option, even if some of them might have wished it had remained one. They had to settle for a feasible alternative, and thus over the next few years they took several steps to make penal servitude much harsher than it had been in the 1850s. The way was paved by C. B. Adderley, then a Liberal backbencher, who had long felt that transportation “was detestable as a punishment, by which governments sought to get rid of the responsibility of their criminals by removing them out of sight, and by placing on their colonies the burden for which they themselves ought to provide.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The moral and manly way for Britain to deter hardened criminals was not to transport them but to abandon “our mawkish sentiment about corporal punishment.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ “[N]o absurd sentimentality” should bar the use of flogging, Adderley insisted, for there was “a large class of criminals who had become so degraded as to be insensitive to any higher motive than that of the fear of pain.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In response to the garotting outrages, a majority of Adderley's fellow members of Parliament were prepared to take up the cat o' nine tails—hitherto associated not with English prisons but with notorious Australian penal stations such as Norfolk Island, Macquarie Harbour, and Port Arthur. In a conspicuous departure from the long penal trend away from corporal punishment, the 1863 Garotters' Act, sponsored by Adderley and denounced by Sir George Grey as “panic legislation after the panic had subsided,” made robbery with violence punishable by whipping in addition to prison.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Thus, the violent fantasy that Punch set to verse at the height of the garotting scare quickly made its way into public policy:

The revival of corporal punishment was only the most dramatic example of the more draconian penal-servitude regime of the 1860s. Most members of Parliament were now in agreement with the Earl of Carnarvon that it was time to reform a system that “was marked by undue leniency, and under which, in fact, felons in prison enjoyed greater comforts than many people out of it.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Carnarvon had chaired the landmark 1863 Select Committee of the House of Lords on Gaol Discipline, and the 1864 Penal Servitude Amendment Act based on its recommendations set a five-year minimum for first offenders sentenced to penal servitude and a seven-year minimum for repeat offenders. It also required ticket-of-leave holders to report to the police each month. This last provision was a significant nod toward closer police surveillance along lines already well established in Ireland and which Sir Walter Crofton and other critics of Jebb's penal-servitude system had frequently recommended for England.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Jebb had insisted that while police surveillance was acceptable in Ireland, where the labor of ticket-of-leave men was in demand in a country that had been depopulated by famine, it was inappropriate for England, “where, instead of there being an urgent demand for the service of ticket-of-leave holders, they are well-nigh a proscribed race.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ But Jebb died in 1863, and this argument died with him. So did the relatively generous terms of incarceration that he had established during his long reign as prison tsar. The Prisons Act of 1865 paved the way for harsher terms of separate confinement and hard labor, as well as dietary restrictions that reduced prisoners' daily caloric intake by 20 percent. For a quarter century after his appointment as surveyor-general of prisons in 1869, Sir Edmund Du Cane presided over a grim system in which inmates were hungrier, colder, harder worked, less likely to earn significant remission of sentence, and considerably more liable to flogging or bread-and-water punishment for misbehavior than they had been during Jebb's regime.Footnote ¹⁵² Finally, the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 (the terms of which were made even stricter via the 1871 Prevention of Crimes Act) subjected repeat felons to a seven-year period of police supervision, during which time they were liable to summary conviction solely on police testimony for a broadly defined series of offenses that did not even constitute criminal acts if committed by nonconvicts. The bark of this legislation may well have been worse than its bite; the number of convicts on license who were convicted under its terms never exceeded one hundred in any given year.Footnote ¹⁵³ But it is symbolically important for its targeting of what its sponsor H. A. Bruce, home secretary in Gladstone's first government, called “the hopelessly irreclaimable.” Bruce's bluntly stated goal was “to hunt them down without mercy.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴

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To the very end of the transportation system in 1867, one of its proponents' main arguments was that it offered not only exemplary punishment through the social death of exile but also a chance for a new life in the empire. By this same time, in contrast, the space for rehabilitation within the prison system at home had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. The mid-Victorians had come to view repeat offenders as an incurable species that had to be brought to heel, but could not be brought to moral health. The notion that urban Britain was plagued by a “criminal class” was nothing new. Indeed, during the turbulent 1830s and 1840s, the colossal growth of the metropolis and of the industrial cities of the north and the simultaneous proliferation of criminal statistics prompted an “urge to collectivize and criminalize the whole of the non-respectable poor.” But as employment levels and real wages rose while crime rates and the prison population fell during the 1850s and into the 1860s, commentators tended to narrow their idea of a “criminal class” to a hard core of some 100,000 people routinely living by crime—the “irreclaimable” as against the “reclaimable” in Bruce's parlance, or the “hopeless” as against the “hopeful” in the language of George Laval Chesterton, longtime governor of Coldbath Fields Prison, or “habitual” as against “casual” criminals, in Henry Mayhew's phrase.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

What Martin Wiener has convincingly described as the “coercively activist face of Victorian Liberalism” set itself against reclaimable, hopeful, and casual miscreants as well as irreclaimable, hopeless, and habitual ones.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The former might be coerced into at least a modicum of self-sufficiency and respectability through the reduction of Poor Law outrelief, tighter licensing laws, and the dramatic accretion of magistrates' summary powers to combat public drunkenness and other types of “disorderly” behavior.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The latter, however, the “internecine enemies and spoliators” of Victorian society, were thought to require far stricter management.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Even relatively sympathetic observers such as Mayhew and Binny thought it a very good thing that “we have rapidly advanced towards the establishment of a kind of criminal quarantine in order to stay the spread of that vicious infection which is found to accompany the association of the morally disordered with the comparatively uncontaminated.” In the absence of such effective countermeasures, they reasoned, “a criminal epidemic—a very plague, as it were, of profligacy” would continue to “diffuse itself among the people with as much fatality to society as even the putrid fever or the black vomit.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

The chief argument of this essay has been that colonial resistance forced a dramatic and unwelcome shift in metropolitan penal policy by permanently closing off the empire as a venue for the “criminal quarantine” of serious offenders. In this basic matter of law and order, British public opinion was obliged to give in to Australian opinion. Since British convicts could neither be relocated via transportation nor reclaimed in any other way (as it was now assumed), the only option remaining was to wall them off in prison for a very long time indeed.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ By the mid-1860s, crises such as the Indian and Jamaican rebellions were causing the mid-Victorians to lose their parents' faith in the improvability of the subject peoples of the empire.Footnote ¹⁶¹ At the same time, the penal-servitude crisis showed their loss of faith in the improvability of the “criminal class” in the heart of that empire—a “class” that the colonies now adamantly refused to take off their hands.