On the Machinery of Moral Improvement: Music and Prison Reform in the Penal Colony on Norfolk Island

In 1840 a Scottish naval officer, Captain Alexander Maconochie, was appointed Superintendent of the British penal settlement on Norfolk Island, a tiny speck in the Pacific 1000 miles off the coast of Australia, designated by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling, as ‘a place of the extremest punishment, short of death’. This became the setting for what is still regarded as one of the seminal experiments in the history of penal reform, based on an innovative system of rewards and penalties that aimed at the rehabilitation, rather than merely the punishment and repression of prisoners. Integral to Maconochie's armoury of reforming influences on the convicts was music, conceived not as an abstract aesthetic experience but as a means of ‘moral improvement’, facilitating the prisoners' transition from selfish brutality to civilized social being. Here, at the margins of British society, both socially and physically, music including the ballads of Thomas Moore, Robert Burns and Charles Dibdin was harnessed to inculcate the moral qualities—love of country, longing for home, hope for the future—which Maconochie aimed to foster in the prisoners. Set out in a short bureaucratic memorandum, his remarkably clear and practical argument for the role of music as part of a ‘moral economy’ arguably represents some of the most cogent British theorizing on the social and moral effects of music in the first half of the nineteenth century.