Charles Dickens' Australia: Selected Essays from Household Words 1850-1859

Charles Dickens is little celebrated as a journalist, yet his career spanned nearly 40 years. Starting as a court reporter, parliamentary newspaper columnist and theatre critic, he developed an instinct for injustice, humbug and charade. For 20 years he edited his own weekly journal, Household Words, later known as All the Year Round, publishing articles and stories designed to be interesting, entertaining and educational.

Dickens had a keen interest in Australia and fortuitously began publishing the periodical at a transitional moment, just before the heady days of the 1850s gold rush set the world ablaze. The discovery of gold drove a period of mass immigration and expansion into the hinterlands, and caused radical economic and social changes in an emerging nation.

Of the nearly 3,000 articles published in Household Words, some 100 related to Australia and have been collected in this anthology. Dickens saw Australia as offering opportunities for England's poor and downtrodden to make a new start and a brighter future for themselves; this optimism is reflected in many of the articles.

The stories have been grouped into five volumes: Convict Stories, Immigration, Frontier Stories, Mining and Gold and Maritime Conditions.

This volume contains stories on the experiences of convicts. Beginning with court processes and sentencing in Britain, the stories provide an insight into the conditions of prisoners on board ships to Australia and in prisons, and the range of treatments received by convicts until their conditional or final pardon.

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.

Margaret Mendelawitz is a graduate in history and anthropology from the University of Western Australia. She currently works as a mediator.

Foreword
Introduction

1. Among the shallows
2. Chip: the antecedents of Australia
3. Going circuit at the Antipodes
4. Convicts in the gold region
5. Norfolk Island
6. Transported for life: part one
7. Transported for life: part two
8. Chip: transported for life
9. The new colonists of Norfolk Island
10. An illustrious British exile
11. A special convict
12. Baron Wald
13. Three celebrities
14. Kate Crawford
15. Miss Saint Felix

Contributors to Household Words
Bibliography

‘It is a genuinely fascinating piece of Australiana that has been edited and collated by Margaret Mendelawitz. Many pieces demonstrate Dickens’ enduring commitment to social change and moral uplift.’

Sydney Morning Herald, 2–3 July 2011

 

Format: paperback
Size: 210 × 148 × 16 mm
212 pages
8 b&w illustrations
Copyright: © 2011
ISBN: 9781920898670
Publication: 03 May 2011