The Shadows of London: A Young Dickens Observes Parliament

Night after night in the early 1830s, a young Charles Dickens sat in the strangers’ gallery of the House of Commons, recording speeches filled with empty promises and hollow rhetoric. The spectacle filled him with rage and pity. Hypocrisy was everywhere: temperance advocates soaked in brandy, abolitionists who decried slavery abroad while ignoring factory abuses at home, lawyers defending cruel punishments that lined their pockets. Among the debates that caught his attention was the future of transportation—the practice of exiling British convicts to Australia.

The system had been under scrutiny for years. As early as 1817, doubts had been raised about whether transportation truly deterred crime or reformed convicts. By the 1830s, reformers like Edward Gibbon Wakefield painted grim portraits of Australian penal colonies as places where criminals thrived rather than repented. A parliamentary committee in 1831–32 even suggested that transportation needed to be made harsher to serve as a proper deterrent.

Archbishop Whately’s Crusade Against Transportation

Into this debate stepped Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin. A frail but brilliant man, Whately had spent his life wrestling with moral questions. In 1832, he published Thoughts on Secondary Punishments, a scathing critique of transportation. He argued that the system failed to instill terror in criminals—instead, public executions and tales of convicts finding prosperity in Australia made transportation seem like an escape rather than a punishment.

Whately’s solution was pragmatic: transportation should be both formidable and humane, serving as a corrective without unnecessary suffering. His ideas sparked fierce debate. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) defended transportation as the best means of reformation, while others, like the fiery journalist Dr. Ross, dismissed Whately’s concerns as misguided.

The Moral Panic: Convicts and the Corruption of Australia

By the mid-1830s, reports from Australia painted a dire picture. John Thompson, a Sydney hospital inspector, described New South Wales as a “perfect earthly pandemonium.” Edward Macarthur, son of the influential wool pioneer John Macarthur, warned that convict labor was morally poisoning the colony. Even judges like William Burton lamented the “lamentable depravity” of Australian society, suggesting that free institutions could not thrive in such an environment.

The debate reached London’s corridors of power. James Mudie, a vengeful former settler, published The Felonry of New South Wales, portraying the colony as overrun by ex-convicts who corrupted everything they touched. Reverend John Dunmore Lang, a fiery Scottish preacher, called for an end to transportation, fearing Australia would become a “dunghill of the Empire.”

The Molesworth Committee and the End of Transportation

In 1837, the British government appointed a select committee, chaired by the radical MP Sir William Molesworth, to investigate transportation. Witnesses like Mudie and Lang testified about the moral decay of Australia, while James Macarthur argued that free immigration, not convict labor, was the colony’s future.

The committee’s 1838 report was damning. It declared transportation ineffective as a deterrent and morally corrosive to Australia. The system, it concluded, created “the germs of nations most thoroughly depraved.” Though transportation was not abolished immediately, the report marked the beginning of its end. By the 1850s, the gold rushes and free settlement had transformed Australia, and the last convict ships sailed.

Legacy: From Penal Colony to Nation

The debate over transportation shaped Australia’s identity. While the Molesworth report stigmatized early settlers, it also accelerated the push for self-government and free immigration. Figures like James Macarthur helped transition Australia from a penal outpost to a prosperous colony.

For Britain, the abolition of transportation reflected changing attitudes toward punishment and empire. The system had been born in the harsh penal codes of the 18th century; its demise signaled a shift toward reform over retribution.

And what of Dickens? His nights in Parliament’s gallery left him disillusioned with politics, but they also fueled his novels’ critiques of injustice. The convict debate—with its hypocrisy, moral outrage, and eventual reform—was a story he might have written himself. Instead, it became part of history, a chapter in the long struggle to reconcile punishment with humanity.