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Dorice Williams Elliott (International) assertion Dorice Williams Elliott i(A93450 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 Transported to Botany Bay : Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides Dorice Williams Elliott , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Victorian Literature and Culture , June vol. 43 no. 2 2015; (p. 235-259) 'The speaker of this ballad (circa 1828) laments the fact that, though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” a popular name for Australia. Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. Like this fictional speaker, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder – but mostly theft – were transported to one of the new British colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while other felons were sentenced for fourteen years to life for more serious crimes. While non-fictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales were published in Britain almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes. Since books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied considerably, few of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. Several descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return. But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people.' (Publication abstract)
1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels Dorice Williams Elliott , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Victorian Settler Narratives : Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature 2011; (p. 23-40)

'The genteel society Vidal depicts is composed primarily of former tradesmen and shabby gentry from England who have managed to increase their fortunes in Australia and aspire to gentility, along with the convict or former convict servants who work for them and serve as signs of that gentility. A key aspect of Trollope's Harry Heathcote is that, as we have seen, it includes the reconciliation of a genteel squatter with a free-selector, albeit an exceptionally gentlemanly one. The squatter novels may well have contributed to this process of presenting white Australians, especially their leaders, as positive and capable figures in the English imagination. It is thus reasonable to argue that squatter novels such as Trollope's Harry Heathcote and Vidal's Bengala were part of the cultural work of creating a united Australian gentry that in turn provided both political and moral leadership for white Australians generally.'

Source: Abstract.
1 Convict Servants and Middle-Class Mistresses Dorice Williams Elliott , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Literature Interpretation Theory , vol. 16 no. 2 2005; (p. 163-187)
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