les Gavan Duffy, who was one of Clarke's literary friends,
supplies the following account of how the novel came to be so
extensively curtailed:

'As one of the trustees to the public library (Melbourne), I saw Clarke
constantly, and had always a friendly, and sometimes a confidential,
conversation with him. He visited me now and then at Sorrento, and on
one of these occasions he spoke of a story he had running through a
Melbourne periodical about which he was perplexed. He asked me to read
it, and tell him unreservedly what I thought of it. I read the story
carefully, making notes on the margin, and wrote him frankly the
impression it had made on me.

'After twenty years I can recall the substance of the letter, which is
probably still in existence. A powerful story, I said, but painful as it
is powerful. The incidents, instead of being depressing, would be tragic
if they befell anyone we loved or honoured. But there was no one in the
story whom he could have intended us to love or honour. The hero
underwent a lifelong torture without any credible, or even intelligible,
motive, and on the whole was a _mauvais sujet_ himself. To win the
reader's sympathy, all this must be altered. I strongly advised that the
latter part of the story, in which the Ballarat outbreak was described
under a leader whom he named Peter Brawler, should be omitted; and I
objected to the publication of a song in French _argot_ with a spirited
translation, as the latter would naturally be attributed to the author
of the novel, whereas I had read it in an early _Blackwood_ before he
was born.

'Marcus Clarke thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my
suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of
his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted
both the things I had objected to.'

Ending, as it began, with a tragedy, the artistic unity of the novel is
thus preserved, and the dominant aim of the author emphasised. Many of
those who read it in the serial parts strongly disapproved of the
excisions, but there can be little doubt that the story is the stronger
for their having been made.

It was as the work of a vivid historian, rather than of a social
reformer, that Marcus Clarke's masterpiece won its popularity, and, for
its dramatic and substantially accurate view of the worst (always the
worst) aspect of convict life, it will continue to be read while anyone
remains to take an interest in