is through him that Pip’s dreams of becoming a gentleman are negotiated, and the novel’s presentation of what it means to be a gentleman is thoroughly entangled with both social class and national identity through Magwitch. This is part of the cultural work accomplished by the novel. Pip’s desire to be a gentleman and not a blacksmith like Joe, which is vaguely suggested by his desire to learn to read and improve himself even before he receives his “expectations,” challenges the ideal social relationships of pseudofeudalism with its invocation of the self-made man.10 Thus, in Great Expectations, Australia signifies both as a place to get rid of the socially deviant, who are a threat to a cohesive national identity, and as a way to fund both the creation and the maintenance of the new gentleman as the essence of Englishness in an industrialized and urbanized age. The new-made gentleman and the convict are two sides of the same coin; both challenge the pseudofeudal hierarchy.
Sending problem characters to Australia via convict transportation had actually become a staple literary device by the time Dickens wrote Great Expectations. It was a convenient way to get rid of a character without killing him or her outright.11 Many novelists, including some highly canonical ones, mention transportation, and numerous others, like Dickens, wrote novels featuring transported convicts after transportation had ended. (Many of these are discussed in later chapters.) In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch appears on the first page of the novel and is packed off to Australia by the end of chapter 5. The action of the novel, however, never moves to Australia, despite the fact that “the colony becomes a location from which the plot is directed” (Litvack, II:101). The only descriptions of it are given to us piecemeal as part of Magwitch’s recollections at various points near the end of the second volume, after he has reappeared. Yet even if Australia figures only as the novelist’s “green room,” as Leon Litvack calls it (I:26), its very existence out there somewhere works to create Englishness by serving as an Other in terms of both place and class. Additionally, Jonathan H. Grossman claims that Magwitch’s return instantiates the new global transport network that creates a sense of simultaneity for individual people (235), recalling Benedict Anderson’s linkage of print capitalism—such as novels—with the creation of a sense of simultaneity that works to generate national identity (Imagined, 25). The transportation broadsides aimed at the working classes (discussed in chapter 2) may portray Australia as a blank space or as a confused amalgamation of Australia and America, but they too create a sense of simultaneity that helps incorporate the respectable working classes into the English polity—as long as (unlike the convicts) they do not resist their place in the social system, of course. Even without actually appearing in the text, Australia thus helps reinforce both English national identity and existing class relations as an important part of it.
In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch is a paradoxical character who represents both a threat to the social harmony created through hierarchical class relations and a reinforcement of those distinctions. Before his conviction, he helps Compeyson break the heart of and obtain money from Miss Havisham, a gentlewoman, thus inherently disputing the security and naturalness of the social hierarchy; he does this at the insistence and according to the instructions of Compeyson, whom Magwitch believes is a gentleman.12 Besides the Havisham scam, Magwitch also participates in general thieving and passing bad notes, both of which are threats to property. Magwitch challenges the social class system in another way by enabling Pip, an uneducated working-class boy, to rise to the status of English gentleman, a class to which he was not born and has no real claim.13 Yet viewed in another way, Pip’s rise reinforces that system by emphasizing the superiority and desirability of being a gentleman instead of a respectable working-class man. The fact that, at least before Magwitch returns, Pip is not a very exemplary gentleman works to undermine Magwitch’s notion that his money can successfully intervene in the social hierarchy. In fact, Janet C. Myers comments that Magwitch’s return makes “visible the challenge he and Pip present to the existing class system and to the traditions of primogeniture and inheritance,” linchpins of the pseudofeudal social hierarchy (82).
Magwitch the convict, though, actually does succeed in “creating” a gentleman. Even though Pip does not seem to become a very gentlemanly gentleman with the money Magwitch provides to fund his education and lifestyle, Pip does eventually acquire the qualities of an honorable gentleman. Ironically, these qualities show themselves more clearly once he finds out his rise has been funded by corrupted money and he feels morally required to reject it. He cannot give up his gentlemanliness at this point, because it has now become part of him—his body as well as his identity. His true gentlemanliness, in fact, is developed and proved by taking care of Magwitch/Provis unselfishly until Magwitch’s death. Recognizing Magwitch as a victim of English society’s desire for social harmony is part of Pip’s reform and assimilation into the category of real English gentleman, while Magwitch’s death neutralizes the convict as either a threat to or a meddling agent in class relations.
Of Magwitch’s time in Australia, we learn very little. “I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in the new world,” he says (344), and this is most of what we get about what has happened to him in the Antipodes. What we learn about Australia is mostly its almost unimaginable distance from England: it is “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from this” (344). Australia is thus brought into existence as an imagined space, but it is visible only in brief flashes. That is, Australia fluctuates through the course of this novel (and many other literary representations) between being a chimerical illusion and becoming an actual place. It is the absent referent for the term transported that occurs incidentally in so many nineteenth-century novels, along with the empty name Botany Bay, which Magwitch himself uses: “Nor yet I don’t intend to advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from Botany Bay” (357). Kirsty Reid links the imagined space of Australia directly to social class when she says that “Magwitch’s return to metropolitan space . . . undermines those notions of collective difference which supposedly separated ‘gentlemen,’ a class which claimed the right to possess every place, from the criminal exiles who had been sentenced to be forever without place” (“Exile,” 62; emphasis in original). Reid is right in pointing out how Magwitch’s return disrupts the binary between gentlemen and exiled criminals, but such exiles were not exactly “without place.” If Australia could be represented as a new or different location with its own identity, then it too was a place, one that was often thought of as specially designed for the rebellious or wayward. Many convict novels and other forms of literature, as well as Dickens’s Household Words, did focus specifically on portraying the land and (white) people of Australia. Although it happens only in Magwitch’s scattered recollections, even in Great Expectations Australia becomes at least a partially imagined place where someone we “know” has lived. In fact, Australia needs to be a place in order to define England and Englishness by its otherness.
Thus Great Expectations in effect produces Australia by having Magwitch, who has actually been there and experienced it as a real place, return to see the English gentleman he has created. Importantly, what Dickens’s novel does not engage is the possibility that, historically, someone like Magwitch could have become a gentleman in Australia. Although in the novel Magwitch has been stung by Australian settlers “with blood horses” labeling him “common” (348)—as Estella does to young Pip (95)—historically there were emancipated convicts who became not only wealthy but also respectable in New South Wales.14 This was especially true during the period in which the novel is probably set; according to Litvack, the most reliable dating of the action of the novel puts it in the tenure of Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1809–22), which was “a time of widening opportunity for transportees” (II:104). Some former convicts became so wealthy and powerful that they were even invited to Government House, considered the pinnacle of Australian society.15 Even among those who were not so fortunate as that, their newfound freedom and relative prosperity often allowed emancipists to become respected and respectable citizens among the middling classes in Australia. In other convict novels, emancipists become gentlemen who can afford “blood horses,” even if their own blood may be
