Learning to Be the Mistress: Convict Transportation, Domestic Service and Family Structure in 19Th Century Australia and America
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Learning to be the mistress: convict transportation, domestic service and family structure in 19th century Australia and America. This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of degree of Doctor of Philosophy, History and Classics, University of Tasmania. Alice Meredith Hodgson B.A. (Hons), M. Pol. Admin., Grad. Dip. Arts., PhD. September 2015 Declaration of originality This thesis contains no material which has been accepted fora degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background informationand duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best ofmy knowledge and beliefno material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material thatinfringes copyright. Sig Date: l'S"· q,1� ii Authority of access This thesis is not to be made available for loan or copying fortwelve months following the date this statement was signed. Following that time the thesis may be made available forloan and limited copying and communicationin accordancewith the CopyrightAct 1968. Signed: Date: 111 iv Contents Title Page Declaration of Originality i Authority of Access iii Contents v Abstract vii Acknowledgements ix Chapter One At the gates of Bleak House 1 Establishing the narrative strands 4 Travellers 6 Master: John Leake Esq 7 Mistress: Miss Leake of Rosedale 12 Maid: Eliza Williams, Vandemonian convict 17 number 935 Unfolding the narrative 23 Chapter Two Doors open, doors close 26 Expected and unexpected scribes 26 Life history 32 Telling stories 37 Reading the signs 41 At home 53 Chapter Three Paper 58 Private papers 58 Public parchments 63 Chapter Four Stone 68 The geography of servitude 71 Constructing the prison 79 Front of house 85 Back of house 89 The estate 95 v Chapter Five At home in the prison without walls 99 Rosedale’s house servants 108 The men 124 Chapter Six ‘... get away for a time’ 129 Miss Leake’s social world 129 Unerringly incarcerated 156 Chapter Seven The geography of improvement 160 Ticket to America 162 Made in Detroit 168 Chapter Eight Learning to be the mistress 188 From maid to mistress 189 The Rosedale legacy 193 Doors close, doors open 196 Appendix One Summary of selected characteristics of 199 Rosedale workers, 1852-1857 Appendix Two Biographical sketches 210 Appendix Three Transcriptions 253 Bibliography 263 vi Abstract Many thousands of women were transported to Britain’s colony Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) between 1803, when the colony was founded, and 1853 when transportation ceased. Some died at sea; some endured colonial lives of struggle, poverty or crime; many failed to form families and lived out their years without kith and kin to support them. Eliza Williams was one who prospered. Williams achieved security, status and wealth. Her legacy of letters allows a new assessment of the life, aspirations and opportunities of convict women. Williams, a young Irish woman convicted of theft from her London workplace, arrived in Hobart Town in 1852. By 1862 she was living in Detroit, married to Irishman George Hanley, and with her first child toddling at her feet. In the space of a decade she had travelled from Britain to Australia and back, then across the Atlantic to New York and on to Detroit. Three decades later she was firmly established in Detroit society, living in its premiere Yankee suburb. She had departed Tasmania with skills, knowledge and determination. Hers is a story of transformation: from servant to mistress. Williams served her sentence in the house of John Leake and his family. Leake was master to a household and estate workforce that was predominantly drawn from convict ranks. The Rosedale estate was an open prison. The way convictism shaped the lives of both master and worker is fundamental to this thesis. The original contribution of the research is an analysis of the impact on domestic life of the colonial convict experience. This is achieved by close examination of the lives of two nineteenth-century women, one a transported convict and the other her colonial employer. The thesis also explores how daily life in the private home was conducted and maintained. The research has exposed a neglected archive to detailed examination. The Leake Papers held by the University of Tasmania provided the means to give voice to a diverse community who inhabited a colonial estate and hitherto were silent in the record. vii Acknowledgements Tasmania has a rich culture of history writing and debate that emanates from both community and academic organizations. I have been able to present some of the ideas and perspectives arising from this research in formal presentations and informal discussions and my work has become more scholarly, thorough and tightly presented as a result. Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Dr Tom Dunning and Professor Philippa Mein-Smith have supervised this work. I would like to thank each of them for their dedication, perspective, encouragement and humour which have seen this work completed despite unpredictable obstacles and lengthy delays. Thank you also to Emeritus Professor Lucy Frost who has encouraged this work to its conclusion. There is a strong positive culture of discussion and research about colonial history in Tasmania. In particular, I have received support and ideas from both staff and postgraduate colleagues in History, University of Tasmania, and from my associates in the Female Convicts Research Centre. There have been a number of opportunities to explore the themes and preliminary conclusions of this research as they have developed. The annotated transcription of Sarah Elizabeth Leake’s journal was published with the generous support of a grant from the Plomley Foundation. I have presented unpublished papers on aspects of this work to the Australian Historical Association, British Scholar Society, Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Female Convict Research Centre, and Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath. Every one of these activities has enhanced the thesis through input from other scholars. Self-funded journeys to England, Ireland and the United States enabled research to be undertaken on the life of Eliza Williams both prior to her arrival in Tasmania and after her departure from Victoria. This work utilized genealogical sources and other primary materials and contributed to the research data on this topic prior to my enrolment at the University of Tasmania as a higher degree candidate. A period as Visiting Scholar at the Department of History and Interdisciplinary Studies of Detroit’s Wayne State University provided the opportunity for local genealogical and social history research related to Eliza Williams’ life and family. Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas, Ron Aronson, was instrumental in aiding this work and his personal support was much appreciated. In my search for viii descendants of Eliza Williams I was most fortunate to find Anastasia Pankiw Hanley, widow of Eliza’s youngest grandson. She had tried, unsuccessfully, to find out more of the life of Eliza Williams and was curious to learn more. The few conversations we were able to have were invaluable to me. A health care team has worked hard, with me, to bring this project to fruition. I had no idea that I would need such extensive specialist assistance. I am very grateful for their expertise and attention and without it I would not have remained physically afloat. Maybe the African proverb is indeed true: smooth seas do not make a skilful sailor. This is not a thesis about great men and great events. It is a contribution to the history of private domestic life. Eliza Williams, Charles Henry Leake and William Bell Leake cared enough for each other to exchange letters over many years. This affection, coupled with the Leake tradition of not discarding ephemera, gives quiet, private and respectful voice to the past. The thesis is dedicated to their memory. This, my second doctoral thesis, reflects shifts in my life: the capacity to pursue latent interests in retirement, new and renewed academic and research relationships with others, and a fresh sense of place for Tasmania’s history as my history. This thesis was one way for me to meet the challenge to bring archives to a wider readership. The intellectual process has been buoyed along by Dick Knoop who has made it possible for me to escape the isolation of the work. He happily crafts an alternative world of sea and sky for me to enjoy. Right now we’re going sailing. ix Chapter One: At the gates of Bleak House very wet did not go out in the afternoon Papa drove Lord Alfred Churchill out I remained in and read Bleak House1 The room where Sarah Leake wrote her journal was not bleak, even if the weather outside was desolate. She sat in the most fashionable parlour in the colony surrounded by the trappings of gentility and wealth. But she was effectively alone, as she was to remain for life. She would not have anticipated being scrutinized, more than a century and a half later, as she started to write a new volume of her journal. This thesis explores colonial Tasmanian domestic life and the lives of women in that setting. These women are largely out of sight. They are rarely counted as contributing to the physical infrastructure of the colony which was mainly built by convict men under the supervision and direction of free men. Land grants to women were uncommon. Women’s voices were not recorded in the pages of the legislative record or administrative instruction. Women were more prominent in the convict ledger than elsewhere. Yet this work is not only about women. It considers their lives in the context of social and family life, the opportunities and aspirations they may have harboured, and the means they had to be noticed and subsequently remembered.