Structurally, For the Term of His Natural Life is made up of a series of semi-fictionalised accounts of actual events during the convict era, loosely bound together with the tragic story of its hero. Most of the incidents and many of the individual characters are easily identifiable from historical sources including Marcus Clarke's own non-fiction work Old Tales of a Young Country.
Typically of Victorian-era convict novels, Rufus Dawes is a wrongfully convicted gentleman; contemporary readers would have considered an actual murderer an inappropriate hero for a work of popular fiction.
