[8] It was based on a stage adaptation of the popular 1865 novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend: A Matter-of-Fact Romance by Charles Reade about the corrupt penal system in Australia.
The Taits went on to make several more films with Lincoln, including The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1911), The Luck of Roaring Camp (1911), Called Back (1911), The Lost Chord (May 1911), The Bells (1911) and The Double Event (1911).
[19] The Tait brothers were theatre entrepreneurs who had moved into film production with The Story of the Kelly Gang and Robbery Under Arms.
In February 1911 The Bulletin reported that: The Taits are going to produce It’s Never Too Late To Mend in biograph drama form at Melbourne Glaeiarium.
"Willie" Lincoln, who was an Australian playwright in his youth, and is nowadays running the "Paradise" Pictures at St. Kilda, is understood to be responsible for this biograph version of Charles Reade’s drama.
Picture show condensations of familiar stories, also original film dramas of the sort now imported from America and Europe, might as well be locally fixed up.
Lincoln for dumb show purposes, and Johnson and Gibson had prepared three or four thousand feet of photographs for reproduction on the screen.
A man with a ripe, sonorous voice supplied brief descriptive details, and kept the story in a state of coherency, the only noticeable shortcoming being the absence of a moral tag, to the effect that the conversion of the English thief, Tom Robinson, had been fully completed in The Sunny South.
The pictures are clear and the acting is adequate, while to our ideas it is more natural, for it has not the Gallic mannerisms and excessive gesture noticeable in some of the imported pictorial dramas, which are usually interpreted by French artists.
"[29] The Launceston Examiner said "in its construction the adapter has endeavoured to retain all the main and most salient features of the novel, allowing for the bridging over of many incidents, to make a natural sequence and clear-cut story.
"[30] The Launceston Daily Telegraph said the novel had been "exceedingly well adapted by W. J. Lincoln... [a] magnificent pictorial representation, so full of strong human interest".