The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.

Despite the boost it gave to settler colonialism, Thomas Hodgkin and the Aborigines’ Protection Society initially supported colonization on the ‘systematic’ principles advocated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This chapter examines the society’s engagement with three systematic colonization schemes: South Australia; ‘Australind’ in Western Australia; and New Zealand. The systematic colonizers recognized the strength of contemporary humanitarian sentiment: they couched their plans in philanthropic language and courted the support of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. However, evidence quickly emerged of the systematic colonizers’ indifference to and violation of indigenous rights, yet the Aborigines’ Protection Society continued to advocate new systematic colonization schemes into the 1840s. This chapter explores humanitarian dissatisfaction with existing vectors of indigenous protection; desperation for a solution to the emigration crisis; growing disillusionment with imperial inquiries and imperial authorities; the charismatic force exerted by Wakefield; and the allure of a ‘systematic’ plan to protect indigenous rights.

We can only understand the positions that British parties adopted in respect of Aboriginal interests in land of grasp that this matter arose only incidentally and that those positions were a product of political contestation between these players. Furthermore, there are no sound historical reasons for suggesting that the Colonial Office’s senior officials sought to uphold native rights of property in land in the colony of South Australia. They made vague and formulaic references to the possibility that there might be native peoples who had native title to land, but they did so in trying to rein in the colonisation proposed by the South Australia Colonisation Commission. It is naïve to suggest that their position on the native people’s interests in land was a product of a commitment to some high-minded religious, moral or legal principles. While they held that they had a duty to protect the interests of the native peoples, they were convinced that there were very real political limits to any attempt to uphold any rights that Aboriginal people might have. This conviction owed a good deal to their perceptions of the relative power of the imperial and colonial government, the settlers and the Aboriginal people.

This chapter offers a new genealogy of Victorian character by tracing the development and influence of two prominent theories of subject formation that emerged out of the application of political economy to distinct forms of settler imperialism. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of “systematic colonization” posited a stadialist model of spatial organization as the means of replicating British character, while Alexander Maconochie’s “Mark System” for convict reformation was derived from the temporal logic of bourgeois financial discipline. Their contrasting impacts on the novel demonstrate the complexity and depth of the settler empire’s influence on Victorian culture. Wakefield’s prominent theories spurred a general imaginative expansion of British identity beyond Britain, but the impact of Maconochie’s ideas occurred through more intimate networks of influence. After Charles Dickens adopted the Mark System for his ambitious and long-running philanthropic experiment, Urania Cottage, I argue that it came to infuse his conception of character formation in Great Expectations (1861), notably in the portrayal of Pip, its metropolitan protagonist.

This chapter offers a concluding series of brief reflections on Victorian studies and settler colonialism, and on the methodologies and influences that shaped the argument of this book. It emphasizes the role of “located thinking” in the development of its argument, and considers the mixed nature of the influence of British world histories on the project.