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Bean, P., Melville, J., Lost Children of the Empire, London, Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Blackburn, G., The Children’s Friend Society: Juvenile Emigrants to Western Australia, South Africa and Canada, 1834-1842, Northbridge, WA, 1994.
Bradlow, E., The children’s friend society at the Cape of Good Hope, Victorian Studies, 1984, 27, pp. 155-177.
Budee, P., The Fate of the Artful Dodger, Perth, 1984.
Campbell, C., The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement, 1776-1857, London, Heritage Books, 1993.
Carlebach, J., Caring for Children in Trouble, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
Carpenter, M., Reformatory Schools for the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes and for Juvenile Offenders, London, C. Gilpin, 1851, repr. 1968.
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Cox, P., Shore, H., (Eds), Becoming Delinquent: European Youth, 1560-1960, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002.
Damousi, J., Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Driver, F., Discipline without frontiers? Representations of the mettray reformatory colony in Britain, 1840-1880’, Journal of Historical Sociology [Great Britain], 1990, 3, pp. 272-293.
Evans, R., Thorpe, W., Power, punishment and penal Labour: convict workers and Moreton Bay, Australian Historical Studies, 1992, 25, 98, pp. 90-111.
Fielding, J., Fielding, H., An Account of the Origin and Effects of a Police set on foot by his Grace the Duke of Newcastle in the year 1753, upon a plan presented to his grace by the late Henry Fielding, esq. To which is added a plan for Preserving those Deserted Girls in this Town, who become Prostitutes from Necessity, London, 1758.
Hadley, E., Natives in a strange land: the Philanthropic discourse of juvenile emigration in mid-nineteenth century England, Victorian Studies, 1990, 33, pp. 411-437.
Hanway, J., The Defects of the Police, the Cause of Immorality and the Continual Robberies Committed, Particularly in and about the Metropolis, London, 1775.
Heard, D., (Ed.), The Journal of Charles O’Hara Booth: Commandant of the Port Arthur Penal Settlement, Tasmania, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1981.
Hetherington, P., Child labour in Swan River Colony, 1829-1850, Australian Historical Studies, 1992, 25, 98, pp. 34-52.
Highmore, A., Philanthropia Metropolitana, London, 1822, pp. 519-574.
Hooper, F. C., The Point Puer Experiment: A Study in Penal and Educational Treatment of Juvenile Transportees in Van Diemen’s Land, 1830-1850, Med thesis, Univ. of Melbourne, 1954.
Hooper, F. C., Prison Boys of Port Arthur, Melbourne, F. W. Cheshire, 1967.
Hughes, R., The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868, London, Collins Harvill, 1987.
Humphrey, K., Objects of compassion: young male convicts in Van Diemen’s Land, 1834-1850, Australian Historical Studies, 1992, 25, 98, pp. 13-33.
Johnson, W. B., The English Prison Hulks, London, Christopher Johnson, 1957.
King, P., The rise of juvenile delinquency in England, 1780-1840: changing patterns of perception and prosecution, Past and Present, 1998, 160, August, pp. 116-166.
Kyle, A., Comment – Little depraved felons, Australian Historical Studies, 1992, 25, 99, pp. 319-324.
Lempriere, T., The Penal Settlements of Van Diemen’s Land, 1839, Royal Society of Tasmania, Northern Branch, Hobart, 1954.
Leonards, C., Border crossings: Care and the ‘criminal child’ in nineteenth century european penal congresses in Cox, P., Shore, H. (Eds), 2002, Becoming Delinquent: European Youth, 1560-1960, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 105-121.
MacFie, P., Hargreaves, N., The empire’s first stolen generation: the first intake at Point Puer, 1834-1839, Exiles of Empire: Tasmanian Historical Studies, 1999, 6, 2, pp. 129-154.
Magarey, S., The invention of juvenile delinquency in early nineteenth-century England, Labour History [Canberra], 1978, pp. 11-27.
Mahood, L., Policing Gender, Class and Family: Britain, 1850-1940, London, UCL Press, 1995.
Maxwell-Stewart, H., The Bushrangers and the Convict System of Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-1846, Ph.D, Edinburgh, 1990.
Maxwell Stewart, H., Convict workers, ‘Penal Labour’ and Sarah Island: Life at Macquarie Harbour, 1822-1834, in Duffield, I., Bradley, J., (Eds), Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1997, pp. 142-162.
May, M., Innocence and experience: The evolution of the concept of juvenile delinquency in the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian Studies, 1973, Sept., pp. 7-29.
McConville, S., A History of English Prison Administration, vol. I, 1750-1877, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Miles, W. A., Poverty, Mendicity and Crime, London, Shaw and Sons, 1839.
Nicholas, S., (Ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Philips, D., Storch, R., Policing Provincial England, 1829-1856: The Politics of Reform, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1999.
Philips, D., The royal bastard as policeman? William Augustus Miles and the Sydney police, 1841-1848, in Philips, D., Davies, S., (Eds), A Nation of Rogues? Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994, pp. 36-72.
Pinchbeck, I., Hewitt, M., Children in English Society, vol. 2: from the Eighteenth Century to the Children’s Act 1948, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Platt, A., The Child Savers: the Invention of Delinquency, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1969.
Radzinowicz, L., Hood, R., A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, V: the Emergence of Penal Policy, Oxford, Stevens and Sons, 1986, Oxford University Press edition, 1990.
Rush, P., The government of a generation: The subject of juvenile delinquency, Liverpool Law Review, 1992, 14, pp. 3-43.
Shaw, A. G. L., Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts of the British Empire, London, Faber, 1966.
Shore, H., The Social History of Juvenile Crime in Middlesex, 1790-1850, Ph.D, London, 1996.
Shore, H., Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London, Woodbridge (Suffolk), Boydell Press, 1999a.
Shore, H., The trouble with boys: Gender and the ‘invention’ of the juvenile offender in early nineteenth-century Britain, in Arnot, M. L., Usborne, C., Gender and Crime in Modern Europe, London, UCL Press, 1999b, pp. 75-92.
Wonter, T., Old Bailey Experience: Criminal jurisprudence and the Actual Working of our Penal Code of Laws… London, James Fraser, 1831.
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Notes
I would like to thank the following: Nigel Hargreaves for his generosity and advice on the Point Puer boys; Peter King for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this article; Hamish Maxwell-Stewart for both reading the article and suggesting some fruitful lines of enquiry.
Select Committee Report (hereafter SC), PP (1818), VIII, p. 171, evidence of Rev. H. S. Cotton, Ordinary of Newgate.
William’s response may have been shaped by the directions of his interviewers, or more probably by the fact that he was the victim of severe bullying by other boys on the Euryalus (the juvenile convict hulk, moored at Chatham). Public Record Office (hereafter PRO): HO73/16, loose papers, rough notebooks, vol. iv.
Hooper (1954, 1967); Budee (1984); Humphery (1992).
MacFie, Hargreaves (1999); Kyle (1992).
For juvenile offenders during the period of transportation see King (1998); Magarey (1978); May (1973); Radzinowicz, Hood (1990) esp. part. 3; Rush (1992); Shore (1999).
Humphrey (1992).
For a reliable account of penal developments in this period see McConville (1981), see particularly chapters 5-7.
This was a distinction made familiar by Mary Carpenter (1851).
This process was finalised in 1876 under the Education Act, which established day industrial schools and truant schools. Reformatory Schools Act, 17 & 18 Vict. c. 74; Reformation of Young Offenders Act (17 & 18 Vict. c. 86), Middlesex Industrial Schools Act [Local] (17 & 18 Vict. c. 169); 1855, Youthful Offenders Amendment Act (18 & 19 Vict. c. 87); Elementary Education Act, 39 & 40 Vict. c. 79 (1876). Separate institutional provision complemented the earlier Juvenile Offenders Act of 1847 which had confirmed the principle of summary trial for children up to the age of 14, this was extended to 16 in 1850. Juvenile Offenders Act, 10 & 11 Vict. c. 82 (1847); ‘An Act for the further Extension of Summary Jurisdiction in Cases of Larceny’, 13 & 14 Vict. c. 37 (1850).
For the general background to child emigration schemes see Bean, Melville (1989). For more specific discussion of the nineteenth century emigration schemes see Blackburn (1994); Bradlow (1984); Hadley (1990).
See Carlebach (1970, pp. 25-46); McConville (1981, pp. 204-210); Radzinowicz, Hood (1990, pp. 148-155).
Transportation Act, 4 Geo. I, c. II (1718). Even prior to this, from 1618, the Virginia Company had petitioned the Burghers of the City of London for their unwanted children. Duly a hundred such children were shipped acros the Atlantic. This practice apparently continued sporadically throughout the century. Bean, Melville (1989, p. 29).
Hooper (1954). Cited in Humphery (1992, p. 17). See also Shore (1996, pp. 180-183).
Clearly the terms juvenile and young offender were often used somewhat fluidly. In my own work I have used the definition of sixteen and under for juvenile, however, this is a limiting definition. For example, many of the boys transported were juvenile when originally sentenced, but over sixteen by the time of transportation. Suffice it to say the age-range of the boys of whom I am talking is between 13-18. Moreover, impressionistically at least, most juvenile offenders sentenced to transportation, seem to have had their sentenced carried through. Certainly, even the most cursory glance across the petition archive held at the Public Record Office at Kew, shows little evidence of successful petitioning. PRO: HO17/18, petition archives 1819-39, 1839-54; HO19, petition archive register.
In my own work, sampled from the Middlesex Criminal Registers, 84.6% of those transported were done so for larceny of one sort or another (this could range from petty larceny to the more serious larceny from the dwelling house). In the case of juvenile offenders larceny accounted for 94% of the crimes of those transported, Shore (1999, pp. 133, 169).
Old Bailey Sessions Papers (hereafter OBSP): Mary Tyler, 7th session, 1809, no. 634, pp. 403-404.
PRO: HO73/16, notebook no. 1, testimony of Robinson.
Campbell (1993, p. 129).
The Bellerophon was reserved for juveniles from mid-1824 until the end of 1825 when they were transferred to the Euryalus hulk, said to be ‘specially fitted for them’. In reality the hulk was beset by problems and attendant controversy for much of the decade or so that it was in use. For instance, in 1831 Thomas Wontner launched a blistering attack on the Euryalus in his book, Old Bailey Experience, prosaically pointing out that, ‘If there be any regular and established schools for teaching crime, the ship Euryalus is the place’, Wonter (1831, pp. 360-361). For information on the Bellerophon and Euryalus see Johnson (1957); Campbell (1993, pp. 129-140); Radzinowicz, Hood (1990, pp. 142-148).
SC, PP (1835), 4 & 5, XII, p. 508, evidence of Mr. William Augustus Miles.
See Nicholas (1988) for discussions of the economic agenda fuelling transportation. For a more recent critique see Evans, Thorpe (1992, pp. 90-111).
Report of the Committee for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis (Dove, London, 1816). See Highmore (1822, pp. 519-574).
Shore (1996, p. 60, n. 23).
For example, Hanway (1775), Fielding (1758), Colquhoun (1796) were all active in the reform debate in the eighteenth century.
See Carlebach (1970); Pinchbeck, Hewitt (1973). For similar movements in America see Platt (1969).
This ‘relationship’ however, was not to reach its peak until the mid-century, when institutions aimed at both delinquent and ‘at risk’ children predominated, Mahood (1995).
Leonards (2002).
SC Gaols and Houses of Correction, 1st Report, PP (1835), XI, p. 4, evidence of William Crawford, esq.
‘Report on the System and Arrangements of «La Colonie Agricole» at Mettray: presented to the Committee of the Philanthropic Society, St. George’s Fields, 19 August 1846’. Papers delivered by the Rev. Sydney Turner, see App. 8 in SC Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, PP (1852), VII, pp. 484-493. Captain Maconochie published an account of Mettray in The Athenaeum, in 1846, A. Maconochie, ‘Mettray’, The Athenaeum, March 21, 1846. See also Driver (1990).
For example see Report of the proceedings of a conference on the subject of preventative and reformatory schools, held at Birmingham, on the 9th and 10th December (London, 1851), repr. in SC Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, PP (1852), VII, app. 6, p. 443. International penitentiary congresses were held from 1846, the first in Frankfurt. See Leonards (2002).
Carpenter (1851, pp. 321-322). For Carpenter’s attacks on Parkhurst see Radzinowicz, Hood (1990, p. 169).
The juvenile prison hulk moored at Chatham, on the River Medway, in the 1830s. PRO: HO73/16, notebooks 1, 2, 3. For a detailed discussion of this source and for details of the boys experiences on the Euryalus, see Shore (1999, pp. 107-108, 125-126, 129-131, 155-157).
The interviews seem to have been conducted as part of the investigations into the constabulary in the late 1830s. Miles was a shadowy figure in British and Australian History. Miles had been close to Edwin Chadwick the main architect of the Constabulary Commission and during the 1830s developed an interest in poverty and crime, resulting in a book, Poverty, Mendicity and Crime (1839). David Philips has written extensively about Miles activities, both in Britain and Australia. D. Philips, ‘An Uneasy Moral Entrepreneur in England and Australia: William Augustus Miles on Police, Pauperism and Crime in the 1830s and 40s’ (Paper delivered at the Fifth Australian Modern British History Association Conference, University of Melbourne, November, 1987); and Philips (1994). Miles’ particular role in the Constabulary Commission is discussed in Philips, Storch (1999, pp. 116, 118-119).
Not all juvenile offenders were automatically sent to Point Puer. Of the nineteen boys that I am concerned with, all of whom were held on the juvenile hulk at Chatham, only eight spent time at Point Puer, the others were assigned to masters in various parts of Van Diemen’s Land upon their arrival. For this and other information on Point Puer, I am indebted to Nigel Hargreaves. See MacFie, Hargreaves (1999). The nineteen boys are: Frederick Arnold, no. 706, aged 18, assigned; Rowland Bassett, no. 2433, aged 16, assigned; Peter Conley, no. 2014, aged 16, assigned; William Cook, no. 1986, aged 16, assigned; John Darville, no. 1091, aged 16, assigned; Thomas O’Donnell, no. 1106, aged 15, Point Puer; Charles Downes, no. 1105, aged 15, Point Puer; Michael Driscoll, no. 1088, aged 15, assigned/Point Puer; James Edwards, no. 489, aged 15, assigned; James Gavagan, no. 1148, aged 13, Point Puer; George Hickman, no. 2059, aged 16, assigned; Samuel Holmes, no. 2078, aged 14, Point Puer; James Jones, no. 1044, aged 14, Point Puer; Philip Maine, no. 1426, aged 15, assigned; John Murphy, no. 1406, aged 16, assigned; George Reid, no. 1145, aged 16, assigned; Henry Underwood, no. 31, aged 16, Point Puer; George Webster, no. 2341, aged 15, Point Puer; Thomas White, no. 2071, aged 16, assigned.
A second set of interviews of juvenile offenders includes boys from Glasgow, Paisley, Manchester, Exeter, Nottingham and Wolverhampton. PRO: HO73/16, rough notebooks, iii, iv, v.
PRO, HO73/16, notebooks 1, 2, 3; HO73/16, rough notebooks iii, iv, v. See appendix 1 in Shore (1999, pp. 155-157) for a full description of these notebooks.
PRO: HO73/16, notebooks no. 1-3.
Archives Office of Tasmania (hereafter AOT): CON 31/21, 31/11, 31/21.
For a discussion of the conflict between masculinity/maturity and childishness/immaturity see Shore in Arnot, Usborne (1999, pp. 75-92).
PRO: HO73/16, notebook no. 1.
PRO: HO73/16, notebooks no. 3.
PRO: HO73/16, notebook no. 3.
Ibid.
PRO: HO73/16, notebook no. 2.
Hughes (1987, p. 400).
Lempriere (1954, p. 61).
‘Puer’ being from the latin for boy.
Radzinowicz, Hood (1990, pp. 140-141).
Humphrey (1992, pp. 19-25).
See Maxwell Stewart (1997, pp. 142-162). See p. 148 for comment on retraining.
See Blackburn (1994); Bradlow (1984); Hadley (1990).
SC Gaols and Houses of Correction, PP (1835), XI-XII, p. 508, evidence of W. A. Miles.
Charles O’Hara Booth, ‘Report on the Juvenile Establishment at Point Puer’, 24 July 1837. Cited in Bruce Rosen, ‘Victorian Childhoods and the Point Puer Boys’, p. 3, Point Puer Web Site (http://freehosting1.at… tpuer-webjump/child.htm).
SC Gaols and Houses of Correction, PP (1835), XI-XII, p. 509.
Heard (1981).
Hughes (1987, p. 412).
Heard (1981, pp. 50-51).
SC Transportation, PP (1838), XXII, app. B, no. 38, p. 220.
Ibid.
SC Gaols and Houses of Correction, PP (1835), XI-XII, p. 100, evidence of Mr. Charles Forss; p. 398, evidence of Mrs. Shaw.
Heard (1981, p. 222).
Point Puer was hardly unusual in its use of corporal punishment for boys. Joy Damousi has pointed to the violent physical behaviour that characterised the punishment of boys in the male orphan schools established for the children of convicts and poor children, Damousi (1997, pp. 136-137).
AOT: CON31/21.
AOT: CON31/11.
OBSP, 5th session, 1835, no. 853, p.846.
PRO: CRIM 4/5 no. 201; AOT: CON31/16.
AOT: CON31/16.
AOT: CON 31/11, 31/25, 31/44.
MacFie, Hargreaves (1999, p. 144).
AOT: CON 31/11, no. 1105.
AOT: CON 31/11, no. 1106.
SC Gaols and Houses of Correction, PP (1835), XI-XII, Ist report, p. 323.
PRO: HO 73/16, rough notebook iv, evidence of Harris in the name of Johnson. See Shore (1999, pp. 130-131) for a fuller description of this case.
PRO: HO 73/16, rough notebook v, evidence of Nicholas White.
Shore (1999, pp. 39-43).
See AOT/CON 18, Description Lists of Male Convicts, 1828-53. These lists contain details of the physical appearance of convicts.
Michael Driscoll, who died in May 1837 aged eighteen, was described as a ‘house lad’. AOT: CON31/11.
MacFie, Hargreaves (1999, p. 130).
Maxwell-Stewart (1990, pp. 149-150).
MacFie, Hargreaves (1999, p. 130).
AOT: CON27/2, appropriation lists of convicts, 2 vols; for Driscoll, CS01/851/17986, appropriation lists that date from 1823-1839.
Shaw (1966, pp. 199-200).
The material from AOT/CON 31/passim that I have used in this article. These books, compiled by a transported law stationer Edward Cook under the Superintendence of the Muster Master, Joseph Spode, gave the convict’s history before arrival and the details of his career in the colony.
AOT: CON 31/7.
PRO: HO73/16, notebook no. 1.
Ganged labourers accounted for 58% of all deaths recorded at the settlement in the period 1832-1843. MacFie, Hargreaves (1999, pp. 133, 144).
Maxwell-Stuart (1997, pp. 146-147).
MacFie and Hargreaves point out that boys at Point Puer were initially sent to work in labouring gangs (1999, p. 133).
AOT: CON 31/11.
‘An Act for establishing a Prison for Young Offenders’, 1 & 2 Vict. c. 82 (1838), ss. 3 & 4. Though from its inception Parkhurst was subject to criticism, particularly from Mary Carpenter. See Radzinowicz, Hood (1990, pp. 148-155).
Ibid., p. 154.
The most well-known and controversial of these being the Children’s Friend Society, established in the 1830s by Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, a farm-school in rural Hackney Wick was set up with the aim of training children for colonial emigration. See Blackburn (1994).
SC Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, PP (1852), VII, app. 1, p. 400.
Shaw (1966, p. 351).
In practise, of course, this desired end was not always achieved as the experience of the children sent to the Swan River Colony, and the later experience of children sent to various outposts of the empire, attests. See Hetherington (1992).
This phrase comes from Charles O’Hara Booth. Heard (1981, p. 27).
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