the world, where they were to assume a new national identity and, if they behaved well, a chance at success they could not have in England. This would shore up the social class relations of pseudofeudalism in England. Thus, transportation was not a failure by British standards; it was the Australian colonies that refused to take any more convicts. Thus, for the Dickens who wrote novels with transported convict figures, transportation had done its job when the convicts stayed in Australia and failed only when they refused to give up their English identity and returned to England. The Dickens who was editing Household Words favored the voluntary emigration of the poor or discontented to solve the same social problems—before they resulted in felonies. In addition, he and his stable of journalists wanted to reassure both poor emigrants and those of a higher class with some capital that Australia was no longer merely “Botany Bay,” a depot for convicted felons. Instead, Australia was imagined in the journal as a place where English people, even former convicts, could reform, if necessary, and become respectable and successful—a place they could voluntarily adopt as their new home and identity.2
Although Dickens never visited Australia, he learned much about it from books and from people who had been there;3 in fact, he became so interested that in 1865 he supported the decision of his son Alfred to emigrate, and three years later he sent his youngest son Edward there as well. Much of Dickens’s knowledge about Australia came initially from Caroline Chisholm, a well-known promoter of Australian emigration schemes for working-class families and single women.4 Dickens first met Chisholm in February 1850, after which he wrote about the subject in the first number of Household Words, as well as other publications. In fact, claims Mary Lazarus, “Dickens must have been Mrs. Chisholm’s best publicist” (16). Besides Chisholm, Dickens knew and corresponded with many people who had been to or were still living in Australia, including some of his writers for Household Words, such as W. H. Horne, who would have given him firsthand testimony about life and conditions there as well as contributing to the journal (Lazarus, 19).
By portraying the fate of convicts once they had arrived in Australia, Dickens and the other Household Words authors could demonstrate to their reading audience that Australia was safe for free English people of all classes. In these representations, Australia becomes a place where all types of victims of the social and economic changes in England—those classed as failures in England because they could not support themselves or perhaps had committed social blunders and needed to repair reputations—could have a fresh start and a chance to succeed. By promoting emigration, the Household Words authors encouraged those who were not contributing to English social harmony to essentially transport themselves (sometimes with government or charitable assistance). In one way, at least, Great Expectations also shares this mission; even Magwitch has reformed and succeeded in Australia and is no longer a frightening figure who threatens either Australian or English identity.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Dickens, therefore, clearly knew that the colonies that would become the nation of Australia were growing larger and more independent from Great Britain.5 As Johannes Voigt puts it, “With the end of the huge wave of convicts and after the beginning of the wave of free immigration encouraged by England, shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century, a movement began to stir within the Australian colonies towards co-governing,” and in 1855 and 1856 the British government had allowed the various colonies to set up their own elected legislative assemblies (21). The new co-governing colonies were not going to agree to reinstate convict transportation, and Britain was not going to force it on them. With the one exception of Western Australia, which accepted convicts for the benefit of the free labor until 1868, transportation was over. So why publish a novel about it in 1860–61, when his journal had been actively supporting free emigration, or voluntary transportation, for the previous ten years? The answer lies partly in the issue of form, or genre. As a journal, Household Words tended to print informational material, even if heavily editorialized. It published many supposedly “true life” convict stories but no literary works that address this topic. As a novel, Great Expectations was doing something more complex.
Many critics have discussed Great Expectations, identifying it with several different literary genres. Writing in 1989, Thomas Loe identified the three most prominent genres of the novel as the bildungsroman, the novel of manners (which includes romance), and the gothic, which is the one he focuses on in his article. In contrast, I read the novel mostly as a social problem novel in which Dickens shows the effects of transportation on individual characters and how transportation was tied up with social mobility, in both England and Australia, and with defining national identity and social class, mostly in England. The effects of transportation in the novel are ambiguous at best; this demonstrates that a new system, such as the emigration or voluntary transportation being extolled in Household Words, needed to be encouraged.6 Like other critics since Loe, I am also interested in the way Dickens uses gothic elements in the novel.7 This important formal difference between Great Expectations and Household Words may offer another reason why Dickens prominently featured a transported convict in his novel in 1861, when the articles in his journal, which rarely feature gothic tropes, dealt with the current reality that convict transportation had been abolished.
Gothic elements figure in two main ways in Great Expectations. One is that the novel takes up some gothic conventions, such as the deserted churchyard, the chains hanging from the former gallows, the threatened cannibalism, and the violence of the fighting convicts. According to Tabish Khair, the appearance of Magwitch in the beginning of Great Expectations is “as ‘Gothic’ a scene in its resonances as any” (105). And of course, Miss Havisham, living in darkened Satis House dressed in her ragged yellowed wedding dress, reliving her long-past betrayal, is another key gothic aspect of the novel. Alexandra Warwick, in contrast, argues that these key scenes from Pip’s life that utilize easily recognizable gothic props for sensational effects actually serve to “empty out” the form and its traditional meanings (32). While “the narrative of Great Expectations promises an older conventional form of Gothic,” it “denies” that promise (Warwick, 32). Like the pseudofeudal social hierarchy that characterized English national identity and required the expulsion of the convict, the “still-feudal relations” that form the (relatively) secure environment of the young Pip are “hollowed out” and replaced with a new type of urban gothic, often associated with the sensation fiction of the 1860s (32). What this new form of gothic fiction represses, says Warwick, is money, but I would argue that Dickens’s “new” gothic convict novel also represses the deviant or rebellious individual who threatens those “still-feudal relations.” So when Magwitch, who is nothing if not the return of the repressed, which is the meaning most often associated with gothic forms,8 comes back to England, he represents not only the money that has ironically propelled Pip, the main character, into the ranks of the gentleman but also all Pip’s contacts with convicts throughout the novel. Julie Barst argues that for English gothic texts like Great Expectations, Australia’s function is to be “a space whereby repressed characters can hang in the balance, awaiting their opportunity for return, their chance to produce the uncanny and sensational” effects that are “typical of Gothic in both those [characters] who repressed them and the readers themselves” (6).9 By publishing a convict novel in 1861, Dickens doubtless appealed to a readership interested in gothic stories, especially modern ones, which are classified by many critics as sensation fiction like that popularized at the moment Dickens published Great Expectations (Horner, 108). What Dickens does not represent in his gothic/sensation novel is the return of what is still deeply repressed in English and even much Australian literature today—guilt for brutality toward and even eradication of the indigenous Australians. Neither do the journal writers, who are trying to repress the notion of the convicts as dangerous criminals and felons (as Pip at first assumes the returned Magwitch is) and to portray Australia as a safe and prosperous place. The Aborigines are repressed so deeply that they cannot be seen returning (or appearing) in these texts; the convicts, though they are supposed to be repressed, are still racially defined as white and thus can be portrayed as returning.
In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch
