The recent Chartism Day included an paper on the Williams’
‘confession’ and a reappraisal of his role in the insurrection by Les James.
This led me to look again at my discussion of the transportation of the three
Chartist leaders to Van Diemen’s Land in the second edition of Three
Rebellions, published at the end of last year.
After they were sentenced, Frost, Jones and Williams were then
returned to Monmouth Gaol to await their fate and were placed, at their own
request, in the same condemned cell. Isolated from what was happening, they were
unaware of the massive campaign to save their lives or the rival campaign among
Monmouthshire’s gentry to bolster the government’s resolve to execute them.
Feargus O’Connor expressed the view that ‘Frost has been the victim of a black
conspiracy; and that if he is executed he will be foully and deliberately
murdered.’[1] Initially, the government was unimpressed by calls
for mercy arguing that some examples needed to be made to prevent anarchy. On
Tuesday 28 January 1840, Frost’s appeal was rejected and the following day the
Cabinet unanimously confirmed this decision with Normanby, the Home
Secretary, immediately informing Monmouth Gaol that the sentence should be
carried out on Saturday 1 February. Preparations for their execution were well
advanced when two days before it was scheduled, it was postponed until Thursday
6 February. Some years later, Frost commented that the postponement was part of
a government plot to push the three into a suicide pact, something they had
discussed and which he and William Jones had rejected.[2]
John Frost
This intensified sympathy among Chartists for Frost and his
fate became a rallying point that unified the movement behind a massive
petitioning campaign, and mass meetings were held in almost every major town
across Britain. In Dundee, for instance, a meeting called on Chartists to
consider what ‘the violent and ignominious death of Mr Frost would inflict upon
this unhappy, miserable, distracted and misgoverned country’.[3] The Frost Defence Fund, quickly established, proved
effective at raising funds from across Britain.[4] The level of support was exceptional. Lord Brougham,
who presented many of the petitions to the House of Lords, said he had never
known a subject that caused so much public interest. More signatures were
collected on petitions for reprieve than had been collected for the first
Petition and there is more evidence of revolutionary organisation with plans for
rescue or for further rebellion should the death sentence be carried out than at
any other time. In Monmouthshire, there was a wave of arson attacks, threatening
letters and assaults aimed at those associated with the prosecution. O’Connor,
probably correctly, saw that peaceful action was the only means of saving Frost,
Zephaniah Williams and William Jones from the gallows. The Queen’s marriage to
Prince Albert was planned for 10 February and many Chartists expected a pardon
as a practical way of heading off demonstrations. The government was in a
difficult position however, as it was facing widespread criticism over its
handling of Chartism. It triggered a no-confidence debate in the House of
Commons on the day Frost’s appeal was rejected that it survived by only 21 votes
and it needed to be seen to be resolute in its response to rebellion.
Nonetheless, there was growing pressure outside Westminster for
clemency and Frost’s lawyers repeatedly lobbied the Cabinet, although the
Bradford rising did not help their cause. Yet, Tindal’s blunt recommendation for
mercy at the trial and his intervention on 31 January, when he told Normanby
that the government should consider sparing all three prisoners on the grounds
of legal objections raised in the trial proved crucial.[5] His intervention made it increasingly difficult for
the government to maintain its firm stance and a reprieve was finally granted on
1 February 1840. O’Connor felt he had succeeded with his campaign of peaceful
mass petitioning where rebellion had failed and that the authorities could be
open to the extra-parliamentary pressure.[6] The focus for O’Connor now moved towards obtaining a
free pardon for the three men.[7] Whether Melbourne made the decision to commute the
sentence because of Chartist pressure or Tindal’s intercession, the first
unlikely, the second probable, it was an astute move defusing a potentially
inflammatory situation. Frost, Jones and Williams were transported to Van
Diemen’s Land from Portsmouth on 24 February arriving in Hobart four months
later.[8] Frost returned to Britain in 1856 but Zephaniah
Williams and William Jones did not, dying in Tasmania in 1874 and 1878.[9]
There is no doubt that this was a political trial.[10] The prosecution focussed its attentions on what
happened in Newport and made little attempt to examine the full extent of the
rebellion and the Attorney-General was instructed that the trials should not be
allowed to drag on. The Tory press was quick to scent a cover-up and, according
to one observer: ‘It would be impossible to describe the indignation of the
country magistrates at this abandonment of duty upon the part of the Crown’.[11] Although Normanby wrote to express his appreciation
at the valuable services of the local magistracy on 21 January 1840, any
tempering of their feelings was probably countered when the death sentences were
commuted. This may explain why Justice Maule passed savage sentence against
rebels appearing before the Brecon Lent Assizes. David Lewis and Ishmael Evans
of Brynmawr were sentenced to the maximum sentence of seven years’
transportation for administering illegal oaths and with incitement to
violence.[12] By the end of 1840, many Chartists still remained
in prison: 62 in Monmouth Gaol, 4 in Usk, 12 in Brecon Gaol and 50 in Montgomery
and one in Swansea.
At around midnight, on Sunday night, the prisoners were roused
from their sleep, told of the change of sentence and informed that they were to
be moved immediately on the orders of the Home Office. They were driven to
Chepstow escorted by police and a troop of lancers and, around 4.00 am put
aboard the steamship Usk and taken to Portsmouth, a voyage that usually
took four days but took fifiteen because of bad weather. There, they spent ten
days on the prison hulk York before being transferred to the
Mandarin on 24 February for transportation to VDL – 14,000 miles and 4
months later, Frost, Jones and Williams arrived at Hobart on 30 June 1840. The
voyage itself was not uneventful. Frost was convinced that there was a
government plot to kill the three men.[13] Before the Mandarin sailed, the Governor of
Portsmouth had warned Frost that if there was any commotion on the ship, the
officer in command of the troops had orders to act ‘with the greatest
promptitude’. His view was reinforced by rumours of a mutiny to take over the
ship before it reached the Cape and sail to South America, and a letter was sent
to the three inviting them to lead it. Although Zephaniah Williams was inclined
to join the plotters, Frost would have nothing to do with it and burned the
letter. Dr Alexander McKechnie, the Surgeon Superintendent who, in addition to
his medical duties, was responsible for security appeared to befriend the
Chartists promising to do what he could to make their lives as comfortable as
possible.[14] Although all three were indebted to McKechnie,
Frost had doubts about the surgeon’s motives. Frost concluded that the letter
was bogus, may have been written by McKechnie and was a calculated ploy to
entrap them and give the government the excuse to carry out their commuted
executions. For Frost, the suspicion that they had been encouraged to commit
suicide in Monmouth Gaol, the warning from the Governor of Portsmouth and the
bogus letter were sufficient to convince him of a government conspiracy to kill
them. Although his suspicions might have been justified, there is no evidence
apart from Frost’s later letters to confirm the conspiracy’s existence.
McKechnie’s motives are also important in considering the
validity of Zephaniah Williams’ ‘confession’ made a few weeks after rumours of
the mutiny had spread around the ship. A copy was discovered by David Williams
among the papers in Lord Tredegar’s Library at Newport when he was researching
his biography of Frost during the 1930s. The confession confirmed everything
that the government had suspected about the rebellion: it was a revolution that
planned to overthrow the government and establish a republic. Although he denied
everything at his trial, Williams admitted to McKechnie all that the Crown had
alleged when it outlined its case at the Monmouth Special Assizes. Both Wilks
and David Jones rely heavily on the confession that the rebellion was an attempt
to establish ‘an autonomous republic, a commonwealth, a commune of armed
citizens’[15] and that it was a ‘local rising originally
conceived as part of a general insurrection’ to support their revolutionary
conclusions.[16] They are critical of Williams’ dismissal of a
document suggesting that its existence undermined his conclusion that the
rebellion was in fact a monster demonstration.
Williams did not doubt that Zephaniah Williams was the author
of the confession, though the original has never been found, but his concern was
why William had made the statement.[17] He suggested that it was designed to curry favour
with the authorities in the hope of some reward such as remission of his
sentence. If McKechnie knew what was going on during the voyage and of Williams’
apparent willingness to join the mutiny as Frost believed, he could have
exploited Williams’ obvious desperation to extract the confession and this may
account for the extent to which it confirmed the view of the establishment in
London and Monmouthshire that Newport was an act of rebellion. One further
problem is that the confession does not marry with Williams’ known actions
during the rebellion especially his assurances to the marchers from Blaina that
they should arm themselves only for defence. Humphries concludes that Williams
produced an account ‘he knew the authorities wanted to believe’.[18] If this was the case, it failed abysmally. The Home
Office made no use of the confession perhaps because ministers recognised that
it was an opportunistic fabrication that would not stand up to public scrutiny.
Normanby had always been keen not to exaggerate what happened at Newport and
only inaugurated the Special Assize under pressure from the Tory opposition.[19] If the confession arrived while the Whigs were
still in power, Normanby had good reasons to suppress it. If, on the other hand,
it arrived after Peel formed his government in late 1841, he too had good reason
not to publish it for fear of exacerbating the situation.
Supporters of the three men had been encouraged by their
partial success and now began to work for a complete reprieve. Further petitions
were received by the Queen and the government: the Home Office listed 568
petitions in 1840. Two came from Merthyr Tydfil signed by over 26,000 people
including 11,000 women. J. T. Leader moved for a free pardon in the House of
Commons but the debate was not held until 10 March 1840 when the prisoners had
been at sea for two weeks.[20] He was supported by Hume and Thomas Slingsby
Duncombe, radical MP for Finsbury, who argued that if Frost could not be legally
hanged, he could not be legally transported. However, there was little interest
in the debate and the motion was easily defeated by 70 votes to 7. During the
1840s and early 18, there was widespread support for the plight of Frost, Jones
and Williams. A Committee for the Restoration of the Exiles was formed and the
Merthyr Chartist leader Morgan Williams played an extremely active role.
Quietly, over the spring of 1841, while both William Lovett and Feargus O’Connor
were in prison and without the arguments that had accompanied the collection of
names for the smaller petition of 1839, the Chartist movement accumulated
1,339,298 signatures seeking a pardon. Presented to the House of Commons on 25
May by Duncombe, it was rejected only on the casting vote of the speaker.[21] Campaigns in 1841, 1844, 1846 and 1847-1848 for a
free pardon were all vigorously opposed by the government, despite petitions
from Australia about the good conduct of the three leaders, Sir James Graham,
Peel’s Home Secretary and other ministers were clear: the Newport rebellion had
been more dangerous than protests in the Canadas. Nevertheless, the different
campaigns helped to bring a new vitality to a movement increasingly ravaged by
factionalism and reinforced O’Connor’s position as its leader. During 1853 and
1854, the fate of Frost, Williams and Jones was linked to that of the Young
Ireland leaders also transported to VDL.[22] The attitude of the government can be summed up by
the annotation on a letter from Mary Frost to the Home Office dated 25 August
1853…’Put with the other Papers’.
The Chartists received an unexpected reception in the colony.
An opposition newspaper bluntly stated, ‘no person attentively reading the trial
can form that conclusion that Frost ever contemplated ‘levying war against Her
Majesty which is the treason complained of’ and hoped that the three men would
soon be freed.[23] The three Chartists were given the privileges of
political prisoners and were confident they would escape detention at Port
Arthur that was generally used for repeat offenders. Normally, they could have
expected to be sent to one of the Probation Stations along the Tasmanian coast
to serve between 2-4 years on public works before being granted a ticket of
leave and released into the community to work for wages. Of the 214 convicts on
the Mandarin, they were the only ones sent to Port Arthur where Frost
became a clerk in Commandant Charles O’Hara Booth’s office, Williams a
supervisor in the coalmines, and Jones an overseer blacksmith in the boys’
penitentiary at Point Puer. All three encountered problems in their early years
in the colony. William Jones was removed from his position within a year and,
after several months in the hospital at Port Arthur was placed in Number One
Garden Gang. He had managed to adapt to his new conditions better than his two
companions and by 1843, was thought sufficiently reformed to be appointed a
constable in Hobart, a position that Williams, now estranged from Jones, thought
‘just suits the tyrants’. Despite achieving some prosperity in his old trade, by
1848, he was penniless, his only source of income was earned as a part-time
actor and he exposed William’s plans for a second escape to the authorities. He
died in Launceston in late1873 aged 68. Zephaniah Williams tried to escape and
was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in chains first in the logging and then
the garden gangs. Denied his ticket of leave largely because Booth decided he
was too useful an asset to lose, he spent a total of three years at Port
Arthur.[24] Finally, he was transferred to the probation
station at Impression Bay where he was needed to prospect for fresh water,
something he accomplished in three weeks. Frost’s employment as a clerk ended in
1841 and he was transferred to Brown’s River, possibly for displeasing Lord John
Russell by an indiscreet letter to England. While at Brown’s River, he was
sentenced to three days’ solitary confinement for insolence to the
superintendent. Although recommended that he should be removed to Port Arthur
and ‘employed at labour in the same manner as other convicts’, he too was sent
to Impression Bay on the Tasman Peninsula, where he became a schoolmaster and
was commended for being ‘studious, quiet and obedient’.
Sir John Franklin was replaced in 1843 and Williams planned to
raise the question about the time he and Frost had been detained in penal
settlements when the new governor visited Impression Bay. Perhaps because of his
appeal, Williams and Frost then started two years’ probation. They were
initially moved to Slopen Island, a transit station for convicts en route for
Hobart where they arrived in November 1843. After three months in a quarry,
Williams was made a convict constable before being moved after a month to the
town of New Norfolk as a watch-house keeper supervising road gangs. He
single-handedly put down a riot in the New Norfolk lunatic asylum in April 1845,
something for which he applauded throughout the colony. The Governor recommended
to London that he should be granted his ticket of leave. However, the Whigs had
returned to power in 1846 and Sir George Grey, now Home Secretary stubbornly
refused to grant even this small concession. Desperation appears to have set in
again and he was soon back in a logging camp in the bush and then unsuccessfully
attempted a second escape that resulted in his return to Port Arthur. Once he
was released into the Convict Barracks in Hobart, he decided not to return to
Wales and was sufficiently confident about the future to ask his wife and family
to join him. He finally received his ticket of leave in November 1849, a
conditional pardon on 27 June 1854[25] and a free pardon on 24 February 1857.
Although he took no part in public life, Williams’
entrepreneurial and business abilities played an important part in developing
the colony’s coal reserves. In 1849, he began mining at Knocklofty without
success, but later discovered the coalfield in New Town neglected for 20 years.
Until 1853, in partnership with R. J. Collins, a Canadian Patriot he worked the
Triumph mine, producing between 30-40 tons of coal a day. When coal was found at
the Mersey River, Williams went to inspect it. Offers from a Launceston
syndicate fell through and Williams started his own company acquiring over 2,000
acres, forming a miners’ camp and starting work at Tarleton where the Denison
colliery was opened in 1853. He sent to Wales for miners, built houses for them,
a tramway and a deep-water jetty.[26] In 1855, he entered another partnership and until
1859 managed the Denison, Nook and Don mines. Williams left the industry when
the mines failed, became a publican at Ballahoo and built a fine house at
Tarleton. Meanwhile some of his family had come out to join him and he died at
Launceston on 8 May 1874.[27]
Frost was sent to New Town to work initially for William Carter
and later for Rev. W. Jarrett.[28] In May 1846, he worked at Bothwell and received his
ticket-of-leave next November. For the next eight years, he earned a meagre
living as a schoolmaster in various places and played no part in the public life
of the colony. On 27 June 1854, he received a conditional pardon. Aberdeen’s
coalition government had conditionally pardoned one of the leaders of the 1848
Irish rising, William Smith O’Brien, because it needed the votes of Irish MPs.
Duncombe immediately raised the case of the Chartists in the House of Commons
and Lord Palmerston, the Home Secretary, announced their pardon. This meant that
Frost was now free to leave VDL but could not return to Britain. As he did not
wish to die in the colony, six months later at the age of seventy, he sailed for
America with his daughter Catherine, who had recently joined him in exile. They
reached California in May 1855 and made their way to New York. There in May
1856, he received news of his free pardon that had been given to political
prisoners at the successful conclusion of the Crimean War He wasted no time in
going home and arrived in Liverpool on 12 July. On his return, Ernest Jones
highlighted Frost’s continued commitment to Chartist principles:
Seventeen years of exile have rolled over his head, it is
grey with age, but it has never once bowed to expediency or power. John Frost is
a noble evidence of Chartist faith, endurance and courage; he is an omen of
Chartist triumph.[29]
After a brief stay in London, Frost returned to his family at
Stapleton near Bristol. In his absence, his mother and three of his children had
died. His wife was also ailing and died within a year of his return. Catherine,
who had accompanied him around the world, soon returned to Tasmania. His
daughter Ellen had married William David of Blackwood, who had turned Queen’s
Evidence in 1839 and then absconded and both seem to have emigrated to
Australia. His old adversary Thomas Prothero had also recently died. In August
1856, he visited Newport and was greeted by 1,000 people as he stepped off the
Bristol packet. He spoke to the crowd from a window of the temperance hotel in
Llanarth Street saying that he still held the same opinions as he had done
seventeen years before and that he was determined to work for the radical reform
of Parliament. The Denbighshire Advertiser in an aptly titled editorial
commented:
…it is worse than an absurdity to dream of it [the Charter]
…The working men of England are too sagacious and enlightened not to perceive
this, and hence the revival of the Chartist agitation will be as abortive as its
success is hopeless…we believe that the workmen of these islands will not again
allow themselves to be Frost-bitten in order to obtain even the six points of
the Charter.[30]
Greater applause awaited Frost in London. On 15 September 1856,
a huge demonstration took place in London during which, if The People’s
Paper is to be believed, up to a million-people assembled to welcome Frost
home.[31] ‘Mighty multitudes lined the streets’, it reported,
‘men marched in great part twenty-six abreast’ and an ‘almost ceaseless storm of
applause and cheers…rose from all around’. In ‘a splendid open carriage’ drawn
by ‘four greys with postilions in gala dress...decorated with laurels’ Frost
himself was showered in flowers and surrounded by the crowds as many of those
who had assembled tried to shake his hand.[32] At Primrose Hill, Ernest Jones read an address and
Frost briefly responded.[33]
Frost perhaps planned to take an active part in public life. In
the immediate aftermath of the London demonstration, he embarked upon a tour of
Britain that lasted from September 1856 through the following spring. Although
he spoke about events in 1839 at least once, when he declared that Hodge and
Harford were government agents and that the story about the Welsh mail had been
fabricated, his main topic was the horrors of transportation. Thousands paid to
hear him lecture and many more were turned away from packed halls.[34] Frost’s lectures, presented as a sensational exposé
were dominated by a tale of brutal tyranny, arbitrary rule, physical torture,
human degradation and destruction faced by convicts. By revealing the truth
about the barbaric conditions suffered by convicts, Frost hoped to excite a
similarly intense hatred for tyranny in the people of Britain and to rouse them
again to demand radical reform in the House of Commons. This was already passé
and soon no more was heard from him. He remained a revered figure in radical
circles and retained an interest in public matters but played no part in the
reform organisations of the next twenty years. Like Chartism, he was already an
anachronism. His interests turned to spiritualism that he had been introduced to
in the United States and several times, he expressed his intention to write his
autobiography but never did. He died on 27 July 1877, age ninety-three.[35]
[1] ‘Frost and his Trial’, Northern Star, 18
January 1840, p. 4. Those subscribing to the Frost Defence Fund are listed pp.
7-8.
[2] This is discussed in ibid, Humphries, John, The Man
from the Alamo, pp. 166-167.
[3] Northern Star, 25 January 1840, p 6.
Northern Star, 1 February 1840, p. 1, listed meetings in Huddersfield,
Dewsbury and Manchester.
[4] ‘The Frost Defence Fund’, Northern Star,
18 January 1840, pp. 7-8, 25 January 1840, pp. 7-8.
[5] ‘Meeting of the Fifteen Judges to decide on the Case of
Frost, Williams and Jones’, Monmouthshire Merlin 1 February 1840,
p. 4.
[6] ‘Frost and his Companions are saved’, Northern
Star, 1 February 1840, pp. 5-8.
[7] ‘Meeting of Delegates…of devising the best means of
procuring a Free Pardon’, Northern Star, 8 February 1840, p. 1.
[8] ‘Transportation of the State Prisoners, Frost, Williams
and Jones’, Monmouthshire Merlin, 8 February 1840, p. 3, ‘The
Condemned Chartist Prisoners, Further Particulars’, Monmouthshire Merlin,
15 February 1840, p. 3, ‘The Chartist Convicts—Frost, Williams and Jones’,
Monmouthshire Merlin, 22 February 1840, p. 3, ‘The Chartist Convicts’,
Monmouthshire Merlin¸7 March 1840, p. 3.
[9] On the lives of the three in Australia see, ibid, Brown,
Richard, Three Rebellions, pp. 573-577.
[10] Ariouat, Jacqueline, ‘Rethinking Partisanship in the
Conduct of the Chartist Trials, 1839-1848’, Albion, Vol. 29, (4), (1998),
pp. 596-621, considers the nature of ‘partisanship’.
[11] Beacon, 25 January 1840.
[12] Ibid, Williams, David, John Frost, p. 323,
suggests that the intervention of the Home Secretary led to his sentence being
annulled.
[13] Ibid, Humphries, John, The Man from the Alamo,
pp. 173-175.
[14] McKechnie (1803-1866) was employed as Surgeon on a
second convict ship, the Layton, also to Van Diemen’s Land in 1841. See
Therry, Roger, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South
Wales and Victoria, (Sampson, Law, Son and Co.), 1863, pp. 15-16, for
discussion of the influence of surgeons on convict ships.
[15] Ibid, Wilks, Ivor, South Wales and the
Rising of 1839, p. 249
[16] Ibid, Jones, David, The Last Rising, p. 209.
[17] Ibid, Humphries, John, The Man from the Alamo,
pp. 176-181, discusses Williams’ ‘confession’ concluding that Williams produced
an account ‘he knew the authorities wanted to believe’. James, Les, ‘The
Confession of Zephaniah Williams and the 1839 Rising’, Journal of the Gwent
Local History Council, 116, (2014), pp. 3-33, and James, Les¸ Render the
Chartists Defenceless: John Frost’s Voyage with Dr McKechnie to
Van Diemen’s Land in 1840, (Three Imposters), 2015, is the most recent
discussion.
[18] Ibid, Humphries, John, The Man from the Alamo,
p. 180.
[19] Ibid, Wilks, Ivor, South Wales and the
Rising of 1839, pp. 216-217.
[20] Hansard, House of Commons, Debates, 10 March
1840, Vol. 52, cc1133-1150. The response of Normanby to Lord Teynham’s
presentation of a petition for pardon from Newport clearly expressed the
government’s position, ‘the petition did not, in any respect, merit the
character he had given. He had no doubt been misled, and the petition would be
regarded as coming from persons interested in the fate of those men…and [did not
represent] the feelings and opinions of the respectable inhabitants of Newport:
Hansard, House of Lord, Debates, 10 March 1840, Vol. 52, c1109.
[21] McDouall’s Chartist and Republican
Journal, 26 May 1841.
[22] John Williams to Lord Palmerston, 9 March 1853, and
John Williams for the Committee to Home Office, 10 March 1854, James Harris to
Lord Palmerston, 25 February 1854, HO 18 links William Smith O’Brien to Frost
suggesting that the government should extend ‘the little clemency to the man
Frost as has been extended to the gentleman O’Brien!’
[23] Launceston Advertiser, 23 July, 6 August 1840.
[24] Booth had been trying for eighteen months to
manufacture iron castings and he turned to Williams in desperation. Williams
quickly resolved the problem but his reward was seven months supervising their
manufacture.
[25] Herman Merivale to H. Waddington, 8 June 1852,
responded that Sir John Pakington, Tory Colonial Secretary, supported a
conditional pardon for Williams and Jones largely because ‘neither was actually
present at the affray which took place at Newport.’ See also Williams’ Petition
for a Conditional Pardon, 15 September 1851, National Archives, HO 18.
[26] Ibid, The Man from the Alamo, pp. 241-269,
examines the Welsh miners at Ballahoo Creek.
[27] Rudé, G., ‘Zephaniah Williams, (1795-1874)’,
ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 601-602.
[28] Rudé, G., ‘John Frost, (1784-1877)’, ADB,
Vol. 1, pp. 419-420.
[29] People’s Paper, 19 July 1856.
[30] ‘Chartism Frost-Bitten’, Denbighshire
Advertiser, 27 September 1856, p. 4.
[31] The numbers were certainly disputed. The Times,
16 September 1856, for example, claimed that 20,000 people attended. At least
one old Chartist also remembered the day as a disappointment: ‘It was a sorry
affair. What was worse, it excited the derision of the shopkeepers who bestowed
any notice on it at all. Two or three hundred people at the most constituted
what was intended for a great democratic demonstration’. Adams, W. E.,
Memoirs of a Social Atom, 2 Vols. (A. M. Kelley), 1903, reprinted in one
volume, (Augustus Kelley), 1968, p. 198.
[32] People’s Paper, 20 September 1856, The
Leader, 20 September 1856.
[33] Chase, Chartism, pp. 351-353.
[34] Frost published several versions
of his account of convict life. The first, produced while he was still in
America awaiting a full pardon was entitled A Letter to the people of the
United States showing the effects of aristocratic rule, (The Author),
1855. The content of one of his earliest lecture appearances on return to
Britain then appeared in autumn 1856 as The Horrors of Convict Life: two
lectures, (Holyoake and Co.), 1856. A reworked version of this was published
in two editions, both of which were printed in 1857, as A Letter to the
People of Great Britain and Ireland on Transportation showing the effects
of Irresponsible Power on the Physical and Moral Conditions of Convicts, by John
Frost, late of Van Diemen’s Land, (Holyoake and Co.), 1857. Reid,
Kirsty, ‘The Horrors of Convict Life: British Radical Visions of the Australian
Penal Colonies’, Cultural and Social History, Vol. 5, (4), (2008), pp.
481-495.
[35] ‘Death of John Frost, The Chartist’, Western Mail,
30 July 1877, p. 2, ‘Death of John Frost, The Chartist’,
Monmouthshire Merlin, 3 August 1877, p. 7.
