During lockdown, Bolton Library and Museum Service has been diving deep into its archives to tell some of the town's most weird and wonderful unheard stories.
This is the tale of a 15-year-old boy sent to the other side of the world alone - for a petty crime.
Today, pickpocketing is likely to be punished by a community order or suspended prison sentence. That certainly wasn't the case in Victorian times.
A Bolton teenager by the name of James Costello found that out firsthand.
Standing at just over 4ft 8in - with a 'large round head', a flat nose, a small mouth, a large chin and sporting pockmarks and freckles - Costello looked much like any other 15-year-old at the time.
The sentence he received for picking the pocket of Rachael Duckworth in November 1839 is extraordinary by today's standards.
A ‘Court Indictment File’, in the archives at Bolton Library and Museum Service details cases brought to the Quarter Sessions Court.
The document shows Costello was charged with larceny. In English law larceny was replaced as a statutory crime by theft in 1968.
In January 1840, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to be transported for 10 years.
It wasn't Costello's first offence, despite his young age. He had previously been convicted and imprisoned on two other occasions for the theft of stockings, shirts and shoes.
The Bolton Chronicle reported at the time that the Court Recorder decided on the punishment as he said that there was 'no hope for his reformation'.
Transportation was a common Victorian punishment. Criminals were sent to British colonies by ship to live for a set period of time.
Children as young as nine could be sent thousands of miles away.
Ship passenger lists on Ancestry show Costello set sail for Van Diemen’s Land (what Europeans used to call Tasmania) the ‘Hindostan’ ship in September 1840. It was a four-month voyage and he arrived in his new home land in January 1841.
Further information acquired by Bolton Libraries and Museum Service from the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority in Tasmania details more details about Costello's eventual life on the Australian island.
He was initially taken to Point Puer prison, for children between the ages of nine and 18-years-old.
But he was badly behaved and was passed between probation centres, before his 'extreme bad character' saw him end up in Cascades - where the country's worst criminals were put to work.
Just three-and-a-half months after receiving his 'Certificate of Freedom', aged 25, he was convicted of house breaking and stealing surgical instruments.
Costello was then sentenced to seven years in Norfolk Island - a penal settlement on an island between New Zealand and New Caldedonia. His bad behaviour continued and he was punished with hard labour in chains.
Freed once again 1856, he was fined twice for being drunk. But he managed to stay out of trouble for the next 20 years, even managing to build a family - he was married and fathered a son in 1869, also named James.
His family didn't manage to keep him out of trouble forever. He was charged with larceny once more in 1876, before dying aged 66 in 1892.
