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
Letters of Charles Dickens more intimate than any biography", and the critic Nicholas Lezard recommended it in the "Guardian" with the words, "The whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters." Also in 2012, a 4-hour audiobook was issued by Naxos under the title "Charles Dickens: A Portrait in Letters", the readers being David Timson and Simon Callow. One reviewer wrote that they "create myriad personalities with varying accents, tones, class distinctions, and personal idiosyncrasies that are nearly flawless". Letters of Charles Dickens The letters of Charles Dickens,