Novel
Ralph Rashleigh; or, The Life of an Exile
James Tucker · 1929
Opening lines
Respecting the parents of Ralph Rashleigh, little needs here he add save that they were of a decent rank as London shopkeepers, and that they were thus enabled to afford their son the advantage of a good plain English education, upon the completion of which he was articled to a conveyancer in extensive practice, who resided near Chancery Lane […]
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
Ralph Rashleigh, an educated Londoner, drifts into petty crime, is tried and sentenced to death, escapes, is recaptured, then has his sentence commuted to transportation to New South Wales. There he endures the lash, the cell and the weather barefoot; the convicts set up a theatre, and he works for a time as a labourer for a settler, according to Project Gutenberg Australia. Ebsco sees in it a semi-autobiographical novel that makes the convicts the victims of a corrupt regime and sharply criticises the colony's penal system.
Context
The manuscript, dated 31 December 1845 and signed Giacomo di Rosenberg, was shown in 1920 to the Royal Australian Historical Society. A rewritten version appeared in London in 1929, with a preface by the Earl of Birkenhead; in 1952, Colin Roderick published an edition presented as the first authentic text, according to the Project Gutenberg Australia library. The historian M. H. Ellis argued that Tucker was only its copyist.
Who it is for
A long narrative in a nineteenth-century English with a heavily laden style; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
A rare testimony on the Australian penal colony, which its 1952 publisher finally presented in its original text.
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