Several volumes issued in succession from the British press, full of highly colored sketches of colonial life; in which the advantages possessed by many emancipists, the splendour of their equipage, and the luxurious profligacy of their lives, were exhibited as the larger prizes of a fruitful lottery. Among these works, the most popular, that of Cunningham, professed to delineate the sentiments of the prisoners, from which it might be inferred that few conditions of human life offered so many chances of gaiety and prosperity.[193] About the same period, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, of a talented family, and afterwards distinguished by his connection with colonisation, was imprisoned in Newgate for the abduction of Miss Turner. During three years' residence he professes to have devoted great attention to the subject of transportation. Few sessions passed but some prisoner, formerly transported, appeared under a second charge. In conversing upon their prospects, they described the country of their former exile in terms of high eulogy. It was the opinion of Wakefield that, as a punishment, it had no influence in preventing crime. The evidence of several settlers from New South Wales was of the same character; and M'Queen, a member of parliament, long resident in that country, stated that he had been often asked what offence would be sufficient to ensure transportation.[194] The letters received from the prisoners, recorded their good fortune, and were read by their former acquaintances. They were filled with exaggerations, dictated by vanity or affection; and seemed to convey an impression that, of their families, they only were fortunate. A colonist is certainly not entitled to deny, that many strong cases of perversion occurred; but, except the superiority of diet, and the high value of labor common to new countries when they prosper at all, the descriptions given were mostly illusive and mistaken. The extreme misery and degradation endured by many, and to which all were liable, rendered the ordinary condition of prisoners one which could not have been desired, except by the most wretched of the people.