This chapter analyses the diverse textual sources emanating from Norfolk Island, which were captured in colonial and imperial archives, to explore how metropolitan ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan inquiries, then circulated through imperial print culture. Ambitious and curious men such as Alexander Maconochie saw the Australian colonies as opportunities for personal advancement and intellectual endeavour. He experimented with prison reform in Tasmania, then was appointed as Commandant at Norfolk Island, where he both implemented and wrote his new ‘mark system’ of prison management. On his return to Britain, Maconochie produced multiple publications promoting his scheme. He appeared before governmental inquiries to defend his reputation and extend his influence; and in so doing inaugurated many of the foundational modern principles of penology. Maconochie also encouraged prisoners to write, and thus a rich archive of convict memoirs emerged from Norfolk Island, including those by James Lawrence and William Henry Barber. These connected with progressive publishers, such as Thomas Chambers, and writers such as Charles Dickens, who included convict voices and narratives in their metropolitan publications and built public support for the end of transportation.

This chapter explores the circulation and exchange of ideas about punitive mobility during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It opens with a discussion of European views on convicts and penal colonies before the 1850s, and then examines the background to the establishment of the International Penitentiary Congress in 1872 and the key concerns of its meetings. It foregrounds the tensions between the penal and economic ambitions of punitive relocation, the global influence of penal innovators such as Alexander Maconochie and Sir Walter Crofton, and the motivations and observations of global penal tours. It suggests that global discussions and tours were instigated by the desire to investigate and compare innovations in punishment, and as part of the long history of connecting convicts to political and territorial ambitions. These included Germany’s wish to expand its empire in Africa and the Pacific in the early 1900s, Russia’s desire to settle the Far East, and Britain’s hope that France would move to abolish transportation in the period between the two world wars.

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.