fluid than it was in England, especially in individual terms. Class distinctions there were also more overtly based on money than in England, where birth, breeding, and manners counted as much as or more than wealth in traditional definitions of the gentleman.
When Dickens represents Magwitch as being unable to become a gentleman in Australia, then, he is not portraying Australia as it was historically: an actual place with at least the potential for social mobility and a new we-identity for working-class people who had been rejected by England. Instead, he depicts Australia as an imagined place that is just like England in its social system, except that it is inherently inferior. Even Magwitch, who comes from the lowest of social classes, knows that English gentlemen are better than Australian ones: “I’m making a better gentleman nor ever you’ll be!” says Magwitch, addressing in absentia the Australian gentlemen who scorned him (348). While the Australian gentleman may have more money than the English one—a man who can afford “blood horses” certainly has more economic capital than Herbert Pocket, perhaps the novel’s best exemplar of the gentleman—he can, according to the novel, never be as gentlemanly, because Englishness is part of the cultural and social capital, as Pierre Bourdieu describes them, of the gentleman (“Forms”). Being a colonial gentleman—especially in Australia, where one can only be a gentleman by distinction from convicts—is by definition to be a lesser version of a “real” gentleman.16
According to Andrew Sanders, Magwitch wants “to claim a vicarious place among the gentlemen in order to prove that their gentility is not innate but manufactured” (429).17 Sanders’s remark suggests that the class of gentleman was under stress in England itself, as Great Expectations reveals. Pip’s rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to London gentleman in some ways resembles the rags-to-riches rise represented in Samuel Smiles’s wildly popular Self Help (1859).18 Pip, of course, does rise from being a working-class boy to a London gentleman just as many of Smiles’s exemplary figures do. Such portraits of the socially mobile gentleman were in tension with the more traditional definition of the gentleman as a man of aristocratic or at least genteel birth, with education, manners, bearing, taste—and, ideally, property—appropriate to his status. Also, the traditional gentleman did not work, unless it was in one of the few genteel professions such as the clergy and the military. By contrast, the Smilesian gentleman was characterized by his occupation and his work ethic, which often included self-education and the acquiring of gentlemanly characteristics through diligent study, as well as inherently good character.19 The difference between these two gentlemanly ideals came down to the question of whether cultural and social capital could be acquired through wealth and instruction or whether the important traits were somehow innate in one’s birth and upbringing. Pip obviously becomes the newer, bourgeois kind of gentleman, though he does not gain his wealth in the typical Smilesian way.20 Pip, as several critics have pointed out, is a “made man,” not a “self-made” one.21 The circles within which he moves in London are certainly not aristocratic, despite Mrs. Pocket’s and Drummle’s pretensions; these are bourgeois gentlemen and ladies.22
Ultimately the only thing that separates the bourgeois gentleman like Pip or Herbert from the socially mobile Australian gentleman is his national identity; Pip and Herbert are English, even when they live in Egypt, while the Australian is not. Even for nonconvicts, Australianness is linked to the “stain” of convictism; in Great Expectations, so is Pip. However much he tries at first to dissociate himself from Magwitch, he cannot. There is no denying the connection between his acquired gentlemanliness and the convict stain, even after Magwitch’s money and property are forfeited to the English Crown. The convict stain that clings to Magwitch, as Reid points out, “is undoubtedly and repeatedly racially inscribed” (“Exile,” 58); being a convict becomes a metaphorical racial identity that could be said to displace the racial otherness of the actual Australian indigenous people who are never mentioned. The words stain and taint appear frequently in many different kinds of writing about convicts, likening them to the racial otherness marked by differences in skin color. Even so, in much of the nineteenth-century literature about Australia, the convict is a more threatening Other than the Aborigine simply because the convicts are more visible, both within Australia and on English streets (as with the many convicts Pip comes into contact with). Significantly, Pip feels himself contaminated by this otherness from the first chapter of the novel, even though it is not literally marked on his skin. He has many encounters with convicts throughout the novel; to his perception, even nature seems to share the convict taint by which he has been touched: the “flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom” (89). Of course, neither flowers nor convicts are actually marked by the convict stain, but the convict’s outsider status is so pronounced that it is naturalized as physical. This is not really surprising, since, as Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, by the 1860s social difference in England had come to be articulated in terms of race more often than class (Taming, 112).
Rebecca N. Mitchell also acknowledges that Pip feels a “visceral response to Magwitch” when he returns, but she attributes this to “Pip’s recognition of his own folly. He can now see, from his vantage of greater experience and exteriorized from the position of belief, how faulty Magwitch’s proposition is, how flawed the idea that any money, earned any way, may purchase station or class” (41). But despite the money’s origin in Australia and its connection to the othered, even racialized, convict, it has bought Pip the position of a gentleman; once educated, he is accepted among all his associates as a gentleman and an equal, even by the novel’s most aristocratic (if suspect) characters, Bentley Drummle and Mrs. Pocket. Pip has acquired the necessary cultural capital—not only possessions, which he loses, but also education, manners, and taste, which are finally part of him—to be considered a gentleman of the new bourgeois order by his new peers, good and bad. Dickens shows, says Robin Gilmour, “how much money and gentility, cash and culture, depend on one another” (“Class,” 109), and they are indeed intimately linked for Pip; but he remains a gentleman even after losing his property because in England gentility involves more than just money. Gilmour’s statement is even truer for Australian gentlemen than for English ones, as Great Expectations demonstrates. In Pip’s case, of course, it is mostly money that creates his English gentility—and that money comes from and is identified with an Australian convict and all that he represents.23 What Pip (and Dickens) repress is not merely the racialization of the convict but the fact that for a convict like Magwitch or even a successful free emigrant, their newfound wealth is based on the erasure of the indigenous Australians.24 Elaine Freedgood finds evidence of this repression, which she describes as “fetishistic,” in Magwitch mentioning “Negro head tobacco” three times in two chapters (83). Fetishizing this link to indigenous Australians, still called “blacks” in Australia, as Freedgood reminds us, “symbolizes the crime of Aboriginal genocide without requiring conscious acknowledgement of it, and therefore without forcing the reader to deny, repress, or oppose the fact of genocide” (84). Freedgood’s point that we have to look hard for signs of the “horror” that “circulates in Great Expectations” is an important one in a text like this that overtly raises the gothic horror of convicts but not the people who were abused, killed, and displaced in order for the convict system and colonial Australia to exist at all (82). Pip’s gentlemanliness comes at an even greater cost than he (and we) generally recognize.
Also, Pip is from the beginning closely associated with convicts sentenced to transportation and also, in a sense, to Australia as a place. The first scene of the novel, in which Pip meets Magwitch on the marshes, is set in a border space. The convict appears first in a church cemetery and then on the Battery, which used to be the place where cannon were put to defend England from attack from the sea. Rather like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Great Expectations is set near the Thames, the waterway leading to the world outside England, including its colonies such as Australia.25 The river, of course, is also the mooring place for the Hulks, which house the convicts sentenced to transportation and serve as a transitional space between England and Australia. Thus, Pip’s origins involve an unspoken connection to otherness even before he meets the convict. Those origins, including the graves of his parents and little brothers, are linked
