In the early years of the industrial revolution London was expanding rapidly, poverty was increasing and merely existing was a challenge for the lower classes who too often fell foul of the ruthless criminal laws of the time.
The city was full of unemployable wretches living in deplorable conditions and they were looked upon as disrupting the lives of the upper classes. Some of the lower classes were more fortunate than others, they had jobs but even they could fall victim to greedy opportunists.
This is the setting into which these four souls were cast, Edward the farm-boy, Susannah the prostitute, Jacob the silk weaver and Ann the urchin.
Convicted of their alleged crimes, they suffered in London’s notorious prisons until their transportation across the oceans to the bottom of the world, to the Great South Land.
When circumstance conspired to bring them all together, to an improbable location, as distant from their imaginations as the likelihood of inhabiting the moon or the stars, it was Susannah’s strength of character and optimism that inspired them as they made their lives on Norfolk Island, the place of Angels and Eagles.
The city was full of unemployable wretches living in deplorable conditions and they were looked upon as disrupting the lives of the upper classes. Some of the lower classes were more fortunate than others, they had jobs but even they could fall victim to greedy opportunists.
This is the setting into which these four souls were cast, Edward the farm-boy, Susannah the prostitute, Jacob the silk weaver and Ann the urchin.
Convicted of their alleged crimes, they suffered in London’s notorious prisons until their transportation across the oceans to the bottom of the world, to the Great South Land.
When circumstance conspired to bring them all together, to an improbable location, as distant from their imaginations as the likelihood of inhabiting the moon or the stars, it was Susannah’s strength of character and optimism that inspired them as they made their lives on Norfolk Island, the place of Angels and Eagles.
