My Dear Sir Charles, I take leave
to dedicate this work to you, not merely because your nineteen years of
political and literary life in Australia render it very fitting that any work
written by a resident in the colonies, and having to do with the history of
past colonial days, should bear your name upon its dedicatory page; but because
the publication of my book is due to your advice and encouragement.
The convict of fiction has been
hitherto shown only at the beginning or at the end of his career. Either his
exile has been the mysterious end to his misdeeds, or he has appeared upon the
scene to claim interest by reason of an equally unintelligible love of crime
acquired during his experience in a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn
the interior of a house of correction in England, and Victor Hugo has shown how
French convict fares after the fulfilment of his sentence. But no writer so far
as I am aware has attempted to depict the dismal condition of a felon during
his term of transportation.
I have endeavored in ‘His Natural
Life’ to set forth the working and the results of an English system of
transportation carefully considered and carried out under official supervision;
and to illustrate in the manner best calculated, as I think, to attract general
attention, the inexpediency of again allowing offenders against the law to be
herded together in places remote from the wholesome influence of public
opinion, and to be submitted to a discipline which must necessarily depend for
its just administration upon the personal character and temper of their
gaolers.
Your critical faculty will
doubtless find, in the construction and artistic working of this book, many
faults. I do not think, however, that you will discover any exaggerations. Some
of the events narrated are doubtless tragic and terrible; but I hold it needful
to my purpose to record them, for they are events which have actually occurred,
and which, if the blunders which produced them be repeated, must infallibly
occur again. It is true that the British Government have ceased to deport the
criminals of England, but the method of punishment, of which that deportation
was a part, is still in existence.
Book
Title: For the Terms of his Natural Life
File
Size: 2.54 Mb
Pages:
898
Language:
English
Format:
PDF
Written
By: Marcus Clarke
