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penny post, instituted in 1840, had become a general means of communication; and the railways
not only facilitated this but literally speeded up the movement of goods, of raw materials and
machine-made products, and above all of people around the country.
Train travei was still a novelty, and generally a joy, compared with the perpetual discomforts of
a seat in a coach, which was like 'a dose box' -especially the smoothness of the ride, the
sensation of speed ('the velocity is delightful', wrote Charles Greville), and the ever-changing
scenery and animation of railway stations. By 1848 some 5,000 miles of railway-lines had been
laid in Britain. A great new national industry had been born, employing thousands to service it,
and widely boosting other industries, like engineering and coal, production of which reached 50
million tons in 1848.
In this year a year of political and nationalist revolutions throughout the continent - and the
appearance of the Communist Manifesto produced by Marx
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and Engels - the activities of the Chartists in England reached a ciimax. In April, the last of three
national petitions supporting the People's Charter was presented {in three hackney-cabs) to
Parliament. So many of the signatures were forged (Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington
were among them), and the advertised march of half a million people was such a fiasco, that the
movement petered out, although its principfes would be incorporated in trade unionism and in
later political reforms.
A much greater impact was made on England by the disastrous failure of the potato crop in
Ireland in 1846. In the next five years some 800,000 people are said to have died of hunger and
disease. Over a million left Ireland, to labour in factories and mines in the north of England, and
in railway construction gangs and a host of manual trades. Many emigrated, swelling the
increasing outflow of migrants, which stood at about 25,000 a year before 1830, but averaged
over 250,000 between 1347 and 49.
Most of these emigrants - Irish, Scottish, Cornish, the Midlanders and Northerners - headed for
the United States and the as yet unfederated provinces of Canada. A few thousand went to
Cape Colony in South Africa, or to the newly annexed Boer republic of Natal. The settlement
of New Zealand had been interrupted by the first Maori War of 1845-48. But in Australia,
where the transportation of convicts to the eastern colonies had virtually ceased, the white
inhabitants now numbered over 300,000 - 50,000 of them in Sydney, which still ruled, on
behalf of the British government, all the known settled areas of the huge island continent.
Transportation to New South Wales had ended in 1840, by which time 92 convict transports
had dumped their human cargos on the distant coast. But eight years later, the Secretary of
State for the Colonies, Earl Grey, recommended that selected convicts, those who had served
part of their sentence in Britain, should be exiled, as it were, to New South Wales and Van
Diemen's Land (Tasmania). But such was the outcry from the free settlers in Sydney and
Melbourne against the arrival of a few convict ships in 1849 that all future transportation was
directed to Fremantle in Western Australia - where the system came to an end in 1868.
The anti-transportation rallies in Sydney and Melbourne in 1849 coincided with the publication
in London of a book by Alexander Harris called the The Emigrant Family, written as both a
novel and a guide.
One wonders whether William Honeycombe read this book, and how much he absorbed about
Australia from newspaper items and articles, and regular advertisements such as this: 'To enable
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