instance of imagined similarity to the convict is the scene in which Pip goes to the Town Hall to receive his indentures and is mistaken by the bystanders for a young criminal.26 This scene is very like an incident Magwitch later describes when as a child he too was called before a court and was subject to the gossip of the bystanders, who speculated about his crimes (138, 370–71). As Eiichi Hara has noted, Pip’s being bound as an apprentice has a story of crime already written into it from the popular criminal biographies, stretching back to William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century engravings of “The Idle Apprentice” (598). The apprentice who gets into bad company (often including a demanding bad woman), steals from his master, and is then transported was also a staple of the convict broadsides so widely consumed by the working-class public (see chapter 2). Here the tale is told to a more middle-class audience that feels no empathy with the renegade apprentice and instead needs to expel the bad apprentice from England to preserve Englishness. Pip, of course, is not an idle or criminal apprentice, but he is tempted by money and the promise of class mobility, as is the bad apprentice. Though he gets his money seemingly providentially rather than by stealing, in London he becomes an idle young gentleman with profligate associates (the Finches) who wants money to impress a woman (Estella). And though Pip does not steal his money, it turns out to have come from a transported thief. Pip also feels deep guilt at abandoning his “parents,” as the apprentices in broadsides and ballads almost always do. Further, although Pip is never exiled to Australia, his money and his expectations come from there. Thus, all the elements of the convicted apprentice tale are there; they are just rearranged. Pip’s desires for social mobility are therefore linked by the story with the kind of working-class people who threaten the sanctity of property and thus, along with machine breakers, Chartists, and other overt rebels, inherently pose a challenge to a vision of class harmony intimately associated with English national identity.27 Pip’s story literally breaks down the difference between a gentleman and a working-class convict.
Great Expectations reveals the complicated way that Victorian anxieties and deep ambivalence about social mobility are projected onto the figure of the transported convict. The working-class Pip’s desires to become a gentleman are portrayed as only natural, reinforcing the centrality of the gentleman to English national identity, yet these desires end up linking him to a racialized convict and barring him from the kind of domesticity that would bring him happiness. Joe, in contrast, the paragon of working-class virtue, happily, even proudly, accepts his place in a social hierarchy that allows him domestic happiness, though still privileging the gentleman—bourgeois or aristocratic—as the norm for a modern English national identity created by establishing the pseudofeudal hierarchy in which everyone has a place and is contented with it. Magwitch, the working-class character who does not fit in this idealized paternal system, is expelled from England and then punished when he tries to reclaim an English identity instead of accepting a new Australian one. If, as Suvendrini Perera claims, “Magwitch’s resurrection from the unquiet grave of Australia in Great Expectations” is “a return that ends by implicating and incriminating every institution of the metropolis” (76), then he serves as a dangerous working-class ghost who threatens the very Englishness of the English.
Dickens generally follows a similar pattern for convicts in many of his novels, a pattern that is evident in Great Expectations but also presaged in several others.28 In Dickens’s novels, convicts are almost always first abhorred as criminals and then transported; when they return, they are given a sympathetic history showing how they were victimized and not just deviant or rebellious. This is important because it shows that it is not an evil nature that caused them to commit crimes, but the social conditions into which they were thrust; by sending them to Australia, the social conditions change and they can reform. However, in Dickens’s novels they almost inevitably return to England, where they become penitent and die. Since they are eventually made sympathetic, however, their rebellion against social stability in England is basically obliterated and they become like other members of the English working class. But even when sympathetic and penitent, the transported convicts are stained so much by their transportation to Australia that they still cannot be reintegrated into English society and must totally disappear by dying. Reform is not enough to restore their Englishness, even a working-class version of it.
While my focus in this chapter is on English national identity and how social class was an essential part of constructing it in Dickens’s fiction, Australian readers also read Dickens avidly. Kylie Mirmohamadi and Susan K. Martin point out in Colonial Dickens that colonial Australians “carved out a subjectivity that involved being British and Australian; of being both from here and of there” (26; emphasis in original). Australian readers, Mirmohamadi and Martin suggest, read both England and Australia through Dickens (27–29). Thus, Dickens’s fiction played a complicated role in creating Australian identity, confirming its readers in their ties to England as “Home” but also, because most of those born in Australia would not have visited England, also emphasizing their difference from the “Old Country,” which they could only imagine through his words, the same way that English readers imagined Australia.
HOUSEHOLD WORDS
Although Dickens obviously did not write all of the articles published in the journal Household Words, he personally supervised and edited everything that went into its pages. The title page of each issue conspicuously bears the heading “conducted by Charles Dickens.” Thus, the content of the family-oriented journal can reasonably be viewed as passing his muster, even when he did not actually write it; as Anne Lohrli puts it, “Such principles as it had were the opinions that Dickens held” (4). The journal, which began its run on March 30, 1850, and ran until 1859 (when it became All the Year Round because of a dispute with the publisher), includes numerous articles considering transportation and portraying transported convicts, even though transportation had been mostly abolished in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land by that time. However, the journal’s and Dickens’s interest in transportation coincided with an uptick of curiosity about Australia among the English public as a result of a widespread push for free emigration to the colonies there. In general, the writers for Household Words tend to look at transportation with nostalgia as a desirable way of dealing with England’s criminals; they lament the loss of transportation to Australia, portraying transportation as a solution to one of England’s major social problems by offering both appropriate punishment and a chance to reform and become respectable for convicted English felons. Essays thus focus on Australia’s history, on the punishments inflicted there (especially at Norfolk Island, the notorious secondary penal station), and on transported convicts who have succeeded in Australia after finishing their sentences. These writers also try to reassure potential emigrants that Australia is no longer just a penal settlement and that it is a safe and respectable place to which to emigrate. Two series of articles deal with the stories of “specials,” or genteel convicts. Presumably, the middle-class reader would identify with and be titillated by the possibility of someone like him-or herself being transported, while also realizing that not all convicts are uncouth and debased.29 The likeness yet difference of the special convict is one more way that the figure of the convict muddies national identities and confuses class distinctions.
Unlike Dickens’s novels, almost all of the Household Words articles about transportation feature supposedly historical transported convicts who stayed in Australia, giving up their Englishness in exchange for a chance at a new life, as more and more free emigrants were doing in the 1850s.30 Portraying former convicts as good citizens who have adopted Australia as a home and achieved or regained respectability was a way to convince potential free emigrants that Australia was no longer primarily a den of thieves and that they need not be afraid to go there.31 This more positive view of Australia may seem to be at odds with the story of Magwitch and with Dickens’s other novelistic portrayals of transported convicts, but these articles suggest the other side of the same coin—the good things that can happen if convicts do not return to England and try to reclaim their English identity, which is much to England’s perceived advantage.
While
