His Natural Life and Natural Rights An Inquiry into Philosophical, Literary, and Legal Themes

SANDRA ROBINSON

Introduction IS NATURAL LIFE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED as a serial in the Australian Journal (March 1870–June 1872). Month by month, its H author, Marcus Clarke, described how the British penal system sub- jected convicts to “a hideous debasement, futile for good and horribly powerful for evil.”1 Some of his readers objected to the portrayal of colonial officials abusing their power: Clarke responded, not by relenting in his depiction of cruelty, but by adding an appendix listing documentary sources for all “the more startling assertions concerning convict discipline and adventure made in the novel.”2 Several years later, when His Natural Life was published in book form, English critics again found it hard to look beyond the work’s shocking historical truths to appreciate its serious moral purpose. One critic wrote that it seemed “scarcely worth while to give an exaggerated picture of [the horrors of transportation] for the delectation of readers of sensational novels.”3 Clarke’s book, with its treatment of Australia’s colonial origins, was dismissed, over- looked or downplayed, labelled untrue, unpalatable, and irrelevant.4 Clarke

1 Marcus Clarke, quoted in Brian Elliott, Marcus Clarke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958): 162. 2 Lurline Stuart, “Introduction” to Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, ed. Stuart (1874; Academy Editions of ; St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001): xxii. 3 Stuart, “Introduction,” xli. 4 Ian Henderson also noted that for decades Clarke’s book was seen as standing for Australia’s convict history only. His article explores how the book is “a work of Victorian modernity, interested as much in contemporary issues of international significance – issues like the ‘marriage’ question and the place of spirituality in modern life – as it is in reconstructing Aus- tralia’s convict past.” Henderson, “‘There Are French Novels and There Are French Novels’: and the ‘Other’ Sources of Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life,” JASAL: Journal of the 184 SANDRA R OBINSON  never gained due recognition for his book before he died in poverty at the age of thirty-six. Marcus Clarke’s book deserves to be more widely appreciated interna- tionally, and not just pigeonholed as merely “a landmark of the colonial period [...] of Australia’s literary development.”5 One factor which contributed to the book’s being underestimated and misunderstood was the new title English publishers gave it in 1882, several years after Clarke’s death: His Natural Life became known as For the Term of His Natural Life, the phrase used by English judges to pronounce the sentence of transportation to the colonies. No doubt the publishers thought their title better conveyed the idea that the book is about the hopeless suffering of felons in far away Australia, but they thus con- veyed the mistaken impression that the book is of provincial, historical interest only. Clarke’s original version, His Natural Life, has wider and more significant resonances, and it is the key to understanding the book’s timeless, universal interest and value. His Natural Life explores philosophical questions about a man or woman’s ‘natural life’ in a ‘state of nature’. Clarke applies the hypo- thetical constructs of theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean–Jacques Rous- seau to the early Australian penal settlements, isolated as they were from ‘civili- zation’. The vagueness of Clarke’s title begs the question: whose natural life? In fact, the reader is led to believe that the book could be about any man or woman’s ‘natural life’. Clarke was seeking to find a general, fundamental under- standing of human nature – beyond just British imperialism. Is the ‘natural’, uncorrupted life of a man or woman found away from society? Or is the reverse true: does corruption come when individuals are isolated from the wider world? Is ‘human nature’ instinctively humane in a state of nature? Clarke’s characters give a range of answers to this question: their ‘natural’ lives differ. The internationalist value of His Natural Life emerges from the ‘conversa- tions’ it has with other novels and philosophical works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Clarke was a prolific reader of English, French, German, and American literature. Although he was born and educated in England, he was a fluent speaker of French and particularly loved French literature. Exiled from England at the age of sixteen, Clarke seems to have de-centred an English perspective from his thinking, and to have taken from French writers different values, applying them to the emerging nation of Australia. The lives of Clarke’s

Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1 (2002), http://www .nla.gov.au/openpublish /index.php/jasal/article/view/7/11 (accessed 6 November 2014). 5 Anon., http://biography.yourdictionary.com/marcus-andrew-hislop-clarke (accessed 23 Oc- tober 2014).