Convicts in Australia Magwitch, a main character of Charles Dickens' 1861 novel "Great Expectations". The most famous convict novel is Marcus Clarke's "For the Term of His Natural Life" (1874), followed by John Boyle O'Reilly's "Moondyne" (1879). "The Broad Arrow" by Caroline Woolmer Leakey was one of the first novels to depict the convict experience, and one of the only to feature a female convict as its protagonist (Marcus Clarke drew on Leakey's book in writing "For the Term of His Natural Life"). Thomas Keneally explores the convict era in his novels "Bring Larks and Heroes" (1967) and "The Playmaker" (1987). Convicts feature
Charles Dickens single day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews, and Dickens learnt his "monopolylogues", (farces in which Mathews played every character), by heart. Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education was to inform works such as "Nicholas Nickleby", "Dombey and Son", and especially "Bleak House"—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much