This harsh, experimental prison was home to 3000 boys, some as young as 9, between 1834 and 1849, but has become the setting for Steve Harris' new novel The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens: How the British Empire turned artful dodgers into child killers.

A former editor and publisher at The Age, Sunday Age and Herald Sun, Tasmanian-born Harris is returning to Launceston to launch his latest book at Petrarch's Bookshop next week.

During the launch Harris will share how Tasmanian road trips and Charles Dickens' 19^th century fictional characters inspired him to dig for answers that eventually resulted in the historical account of two boys accused of bashing a prison overseer to death.

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With a successful career in the newspaper business behind him, Harris found his journalistic questions did not abate so he turned these thoughts to what would later become three books.

Driving along the Midland Highway five years ago, Harris noticed the black silhouettes dotted along the rural hills and wanted to know more.

In particular, the hangman silhouette depicting Solomon Blay seized Harris' attention.

His research formed the outline for his first novel Solomon's Noose, published in 2015, about a Van Diemen's Land convict who became Queens Victoria's longest-serving hangman.

Further research lead to second book, The Prince and the Assassin, from 2017, about Australia's first royal tour, and then The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens came from the same line of study.

"Curiosity became research. I visited Port Arthur and heard about Point Puer," Harris said.

"I got more curious and thought [child prisoners at Port Arthur] was an undertold, or forgotten, story. Those boys didn't have a voice; they really do deserve a voice.

"I went from Google to archives and did lots of reading. I like research; it's like travelling in your mind," he said.

During his reading Harris uncovered more and more about 19^th century Britain, where the industrial revolution had lead to wealth for some, but poverty for many more.

He also uncovered the true tales of Dickens' artful dodgers, with young boys, like Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell, turning to a life of petty crime to survive on the streets.

"It was the haves versus the have nots; these boys were the have nots," Harris said.

Children caught for one of the more than 200 crimes listed at the time were tried in court as adults, and those who kept reoffending were exiled on the other side of the world for seven- or 14-year terms.

"They were sent to prisons on the Thames, then prison hulks, then convict ships and Hobart Town," he said.

"Three thousand were sent out over the years to Van Diemen's Land. They weren't wanted in the Mother Country, but they weren't wanted in Van Diemen's Land either."

Too young to be skilled or of use to the prison, but not old enough to fight off the attentions of seasoned male convicts starved of female attention, the boys were sent to Point Peur to keep them out of trouble and "put them on the right path".

This "right path" included strong discipline, learning a trade and religious teaching, but with a lack of support for the education side the boys ended up "doing as they did in England and fending for themselves".

Neither of Harris' two characters, or their peers, had a proper childhood and, as a result, they "became harder and harder".

In winter 1843 a convict overseer was fatally bashed at Point Puer.

More than 20 boys were involved but Sparkes and Campbell, who were 15 or 16 at the time, "were fingered and put on trial, with the likelihood they were headed for the scaffold".

While The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens covers convict treatment Port Arthur in the 1800s, it also shows how "things in history never really go away", Harris said.

"We have the same issues today, with 600+ kids under 14 incarcerated. That is 13 per cent of the prison population."

The moral panic around young people who don't conform that existed 200 years is still prevalent now.

"When young people kill someone, people wonder if they were born evil or if they have dysfunctional lives, but we still don't really know the answer," Harris said.

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