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

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

Grace Moore, author of Dickens and Empire

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

Philip Steer, coeditor of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

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

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

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