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 a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey ("Dombey and Son") on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine "The Knickerbocker", saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the "New-York Tribune", and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications,