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In 1814 Wakefield became secretary to the British minister at Turin, Italy, and in 1816 he married. His wife died in 1820, and in 1826, while on the staff of the British embassy in Paris, he tricked a young heiress into marrying him. Wakefield was tried and convicted of abduction and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, and the marriage was dissolved by an act of Parliament. While confined in Newgate Prison, London, Wakefield saw firsthand the immense problems of the penal system and learned of the forcible removal of convicts to British overseas possessions, where squalid and often brutal conditions prevailed.
He concluded that the controlled low-cost settlement of ordinary citizens (not convicts) in the colonies would best solve the problems of poverty and crime caused by the sharp increase in the British population. In his first important book, A Letter from Sydney . . . (published in 1829 while he was still in prison), which was thought by many to have come from Australia, he proposed the sale of crown lands there in small units at a “sufficient price” (fixed and modest), rather than the granting of large tracts free. The proceeds would pay for sending emigrants from Great Britain, who were to be equally divided by sex and to represent a cross-section of English society.
