SOURCE: Hassall, Anthony J. “A Tale of Two Countries: Jack Maggs and Peter Carey's Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 2 (October 1997): 128-35.

‘And did you like Dickens at the end of it?’
‘I never did like or dislike him …
All I wanted to do was understand him.’

(Ackroyd 896)

‘You are planning to kill me, I know that …’
‘Not you, Jack, a character who bears your name …’
‘You are just a character to me too, Toby.’

(Carey, Jack Maggs 332)

1: REINVENTING MAGWITCH

Peter Carey has generally preferred to fictionalise Australia at a remove, to re-imagine it, shape-shifted out of its present appearance by science fiction transformations, or by movements out of present time. The mirror his fiction holds up to late-twentieth-century Australia and its international context never simply reflects, like Stendhal's, but distorts, like those in the amusement parks that recur in his work.¹ In this sense, his imagination has always been Dickensian, so it is intriguing to find that in his latest novel Carey has rewritten the story of Magwitch, the convict in Great Expectations. In doing so he has made many changes to Dickens's original: switching the centre of interest from Pip (renamed Henry Phipps) to Magwitch (renamed Jack Maggs) and Dickens himself (renamed Tobias Oates); telling a tale of two countries and two characters; and claiming the story as an originary Australian narrative.

Carey is not given to repeating himself, and Jack Maggs is yet another striking departure from his earlier work, particularly from his last two novels, The Tax Inspector (1991) and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), which were themselves unlike their predecessors, or each other.² Like Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack Maggs draws on nineteenth-century English writing as it intersects with the beginnings of European Australia, but the tone here is remarkably different, more optimistic and more overtly compassionate. In Oscar and Lucinda, Boat Harbour in 1866 is an ugly and brutal outpost of an arrogant, racist empire. Its sustaining ideology has been mortally wounded by the double failure of the Established Church to controvert Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and to establish a strong foundation in New South Wales. While the Wingham where Jack Maggs and his family settle some thirty years earlier is geographically close to Boat Harbour, it is altogether more benign. In London Jack Maggs was offered no life but a criminal's, and his wife Mercy Larkin no life but a child prostitute's: Wingham however readily accommodates them, and recognises their fundamental decency. This outcome is in stark contrast to the bleak and despairing ending of Oscar and Lucinda, in which the terrified Oscar Hopkins drowns as his broken glass church sinks into the Bellinger River. With an ending more optimistic than that of any Carey novel since Bliss, Jack Maggs suggests that Carey's vision of early Australia has undergone a profound metamorphosis, from despair to something like hope.

2: THE OLD DART

The narrative present of Jack Maggs covers three weeks at the beginning of the summer of 1837, the time when Maggs has returned to London illegally, at the risk of his life, to explain himself to his adopted son, and to enjoy the fruits of his investment in that gentleman. Maggs's origins are as unpromising as those of any earlier Carey protagonist, but he is more humanly engaging, and portrayed with more open sympathy. When he was three days old he was thrown off a bridge on to the mudflats of the Thames, then rescued and raised as a child criminal in turn-of-the-century London. Betrayed and transported for life, he experiences the sadistic brutality of Captain Logan's Morton [sic] Bay. The story of his early life, which is narrated retrospectively while the present action moves forward, chronicles his attempts to transform himself, and so to escape first from his deprived and criminal London childhood, then from his imprisonment, next from New South Wales, and finally from his attempt to reinvent himself, through the person of Henry Phipps, as a Victorian gentleman.

The reader meets Maggs as a mysterious stranger arriving in London, and from that moment he pursues his quest with single-minded determination, all the while facing the threat of exposure and hanging. For most of the book Phipps, the adopted son he has come to seek, evades Maggs's pursuit. Phipps is eventually exposed as weak, snobbish, ungrateful and even willing to murder his benefactor. This present-time, single-line narrative is not only interspersed with the analeptic narrative of Maggs's earlier life, but also with the story of his entanglement with the affairs of the young novelist Tobias Oates, whose career mirrors Charles Dickens's. The central relationship in Jack Maggs is not between orphan and convict, as in Great Expectations, but between Maggs and Oates, who wants to turn Maggs into a fictional character. Experimenting with mesmerism, Oates blunders amateurishly into Maggs's subconscious memories, pretending to liberate him from his ‘phantom’ while in fact appropriating his story for a planned novel, The Death of Maggs. The combination of all these stories is structurally complex, but a spirited pace is maintained, the progressive release of information is skillfully calculated, and the suspense is worthy of a first-rate thriller.

In the elegantly constructed and tensely narrated climax, Maggs confronts the looming dangers, and plays his contest with Oates to an honourable draw. He turns away from the false ideal he has constructed for Phipps and accepts the true self recognised by Mercy Larkin. Returning to the New South Wales he no longer despises, he marries Mercy, who turns his discounted and troublesome Australian sons into a real family, and in time has children of her own. Doubly unexpected, the ending is determinedly Australian and optimistic.

The Maggs created in this cracking yarn is powerful, dangerous and yet basically decent, well versed in the rough side of life, quick to use violence to defend what he values, and determined to put his life in order and to tell his story. While he is more resilient and more formidable than most of Carey's protagonists, and less subdued than the older Magwitch, he is also vulnerable, literally and psychologically scarred by his experiences. His is not, however, the vulnerability of the profoundly and inescapably damaged, like Tristan Smith or Benny Catchprice of The Tax Inspector, and his strength and integrity ensure that he is not finally a victim.

The outcome of the major subplot, the love between Tobias Oates and his sister-in-law Lizzie Warriner, is altogether more sombre. Having achieved the first triumph of his career as a writer, and having set up the happy home and family that he longs for after the emotional deprivations of his childhood, in a rash moment Oates seduces his wife's sister. The consequences of this self-indulgence are the wasting of Lizzie's young life, and the poisoning forever of his marriage. If the conclusion of Maggs's story is unusually optimistic, the bleak account of Oates's failure to maintain the family life that he, like Herbert Badgery, so craves is more familiar Carey territory.

3: THE WRITING OF JACK MAGGS

There is no avoiding the similarities between the story of Tobias Oates and that of Charles Dickens, which is almost as celebrated as his novels, and which of course appears in those novels in various degrees of disguise and transformation. Carey has Lizzie Warriner die on 7 May 1837, the date on which Dickens's sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died, causing him great grief (Johnson 195-204). This clearly invokes the various accounts of Dickens's emotionally-charged entanglements with his sisters-in-law. Magwitch, on the other hand, has no widely recognised original(s).³ Carey not only invents a transparently fictional ‘original’ of Magwitch: he invents a story of how he found his way into the pages of Oates's novel The Death of Maggs, which according to Jack Maggs was published in the same manner and at the same time as Great Expectations.⁴ Playfully named characters like the rotund lawyer Makepeace (Oates is anxious to emulate the success of his rival Thackeray), and Ma Britten (Mother Britain), the foster mother who criminalises Maggs and then rejects him, further interrupt uncritical immersion in the narrative illusion.⁵

In addition to this overt intertextuality there is metafictional emphasis throughout Jack Maggs on the ways in which stories are written, and the complex relationships between fictional characters and the figures who inspire them. The nineteenth-century setting, recreated graphically and with generous detail, and the use of language and ideas that approximate their nineteenth-century originals while retaining a degree of late-twentieth-century sensibility, make Jack Maggs intriguingly cross-referential, like Oscar and Lucinda, Possession and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Although Great Expectations is a first-person narration, the process of writing and the creation of fiction are naturalised and hence largely occluded in the narrative. In Jack Maggs, by contrast, the business of writing is insistently foregrounded. The book is full of the actual mechanics of Maggs's and Oates's writing: it includes, for example, a lovingly detailed description of Oates's writing portmanteau, as compact and functional as any laptop. Carey has maintained an interest in the nature and functions of stories and their telling throughout his career, from his early self-referential short stories through Bliss and Illywhacker, but no other work is as deeply concerned as Jack Maggs is with the actual processes by which novelists gather, transform and inscribe their material.

At the centre of the nest of stories written and told in Jack Maggs is Maggs's own account of his past, his determined attempt to transcribe the story of his childhood and youth into a written record. He is riven by contradictory desires to reveal and conceal his story. His desire to conceal it derives not only from his fear of exposure as an absconder, but also from his feelings of shame for being a criminal. The obverse of this shame is his ambition to make a Victorian gentleman out of his adopted son Henry Phipps, a goal which is linked to his desire to return to the simplified, idealised England of his memory, which he has kept as a talisman to help him endure the punishments of the convict system. These desires, together with the vividly recalled memories of his childhood and his youthful love for Sophina Smith, make up the personal narratives which have sustained Jack through a harrowing life. He does not want them scattered abroad, but he does need to record them, to ensure that they will not die, and to justify himself to Henry Phipps, whom he believes to be his true heir, the person who will preserve his story.

Phipps, however, has no wish to meet Maggs or to receive his record, and indeed we never learn the ultimate fate of the manuscript so painstakingly encoded into mirror-reversed writing and disappearing ink, except insofar as it appears in Jack Maggs. Tobias Oates, on the other hand, is desperately anxious to acquire Jack's story, both as raw material, and as an insight into the Criminal Mind. He therefore sets up an elaborate subterfuge designed to enable him to purloin the story while Jack is mesmerised, and unaware of the theft. To cover his deceit and to pacify his subject, Tobias manufactures yet another text, a false account of what he pretends Maggs has revealed in his hypnotic sessions. Eventually Oates fictionalises Maggs's story in a classic English novel, The Death of Maggs, which Jack does not see, but which his widow Mercy reads and collects.⁶ What Jack would have made of all this publicity is not clear, but he bitterly resents Oates's deception and theft of his story, and forces him to destroy both the early drafts and the false journal.

4: THE THIEF AS AUTHOR, THE AUTHOR AS THIEF

Hypnotism nowadays enjoys a mixed reputation: part parlour-game or stage-show, part serious psychiatric therapy, and part means of access to recesses of memory not normally reachable by the conscious mind. The effects of hypnotism, or magnetism/mesmerism as it was called in the nineteenth century, are similar to those of the electroconvulsive treatment of mental patients in the twentieth century. In Bliss an inmate named Nurse tells Harry Joy about ECT:

Then they take you to the shock table and they put these two bits of an, bits of metal, on your head. Here. And then the doctor turns on the juice … It is a darkness you can't imagine. A blackness. Cold black ink. Like death … They steal your memories from you … They take away all your faces, all your pictures.

(Bliss 161)

To forestall this theft, Nurse is writing down all the memories he had left in a book which he wraps in plastic bags and buries in the garden. Unfortunately he tells everyone about the book, so ‘even his notebook memories would be stolen from him’ (161). In Jack Maggs, Oates mesmerises Maggs, using magnets rather than electrodes, in an attempt to cure him of his tic douloureux; but he quickly discovers that he can steal the memories which Jack has also been writing down and concealing. Near the end of the book Jack still has the tic douloureux, and the phantom that Oates has been trying to rid him of, which he says he did not have until Oates unearthed it, is still frighteningly present: ‘he could feel the Phantom pulling with his strings inside his face … He imagined that horrid half-smile upon his patrician face’ (323).⁷ In an even more serious failure, Oates is blamed by Dr Grieves for having killed Percy Buckle's butler Spinks with his threats and talk of ‘Mesmeric Fluid’ (206).

The phantom which Oates finds in Jack's psyche eventually transmogrifies into a soldier of the 57th Regiment who flogged Jack when he was a convict at Morton Bay. When Jack finally confronts Henry Phipps, who coincidentally has just joined that same hated regiment, Phipps appears to be this phantom flogger:

There, in the firelight, he beheld his nightmare: long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot Regiment. The Phantom had broken the locks and entered his life … I am to die before I meet my son.

(385)

Phipps is clearly something of a shape-shifter. The four-year-old orphan Jack remembers would obviously have changed as he grew up, but not as much as is suggested by the miniature portrait he has sent to Jack. When Oates sees this treasured portrait, he recognises that it is ‘to all intents and purposes, a copy of Richard Cosway's portrait [of King George IV] which Tobias had viewed, only last year, at the Royal Academy’ (311). In an ironic epiphany, Jack perceives Phipps as his flogger, the phantom/demon who haunts and torments him. This perception releases him from the dream of creating an English gentleman that has consumed a significant part of his life, and frees him to leave England in imagination as well as in fact. The recognition also lets Phipps escape from the script that someone else had written for him into his own life and his preferred sexuality. For years he had been falsely complicit with his benefactor's fantasy, writing with the help of his tutor Victor Littlehales concocted replies to Maggs's letters, ‘lies’ which could also be called ‘comfort’, designed to gratify the needs of ‘him who signed his letters “Father”’ (387). Phipps knew he would eventually have to forsake the comfortable life that those lies supported:

He had known this time would come ever since that day sixteen years ago when Victor Littlehales, his beloved tutor, had rescued him from the orphanage. Now this privileged tenure was ended and he must leave his house, his silver, his rugs, his paintings. He must be a soldier.

(321)

It is therefore not inappropriate that Phipps's eventual confrontation with Jack Maggs is a violent one, in which Phipps is literally and metaphorically clothed in the hated uniform of the 57th Regiment. Neither he nor his benefactor can escape without violence from the fictions which have structured their lives.

5: SECRETS AND LIES

Carey has always been interested in the power of stories—truthful and otherwise—and in the ethics of their tellers. Vance Joy asserts in Bliss that stories have to be paid for, and Tobias Oates, who makes his living by appropriating other people's stories, pays all sorts of Londoners for theirs, as Jack Maggs learns:

Did he tell you to wait? … Said he was going to fetch you a shilling? Said you were to tell him your story, is that so? … He cannot help himself … It is not that he hasn't got a heart … But he is an author … and he must know your whole life or he will die of it.

(50-51)

Oates's hunger for stories and his desire to penetrate the Criminal Mind prompt his bargain with Maggs, in which he agrees to introduce Maggs to the Thief-taker Partridge, who in turn will help him find the absconding Henry Phipps, but only in exchange for two weeks of mesmerism.

Jack Maggs learned the value of knowing other convicts' secrets in the penal settlements of New South Wales, and he has no intention of surrendering his own to Oates. As a child he saw his ‘brother’ Tom Britten inform on Silas Smith, Ma Britten's partner in crime (186), and if Oates's account is to be believed, Tom later betrayed Sophina to the gallows, causing Jack to incriminate himself and be transported. In Morton Bay, then a hell-hole, a prison of last resort for intractable convicts, Jack learned the ultimate value of secrets, as he tells his fellow footman Edward Constable, before they exchange theirs:

There a man might be killed on account of knowing another man's secret … every man would be a spy on every other man. It was how they kept us down. If you and I were lads together in that place, then you must give me a secret of yours, should you chance to stumble over one of mine. That way we were in balance.

(202)

Later in the book Maggs insists on establishing a similar balance of terror with Tobias Oates. Maggs is angry that Oates has obtained his secrets under false pretences, and is now in a position to betray him: ‘The truth is: you have had me reveal secret information in my sleep … You'd tell my frigging secrets to the world’ (276). Maggs then proposes a deal: ‘If you had a very bad secret of your own … it would take you out of danger’. Oates responds:

‘You imagine I would give you the power to blackmail me?’ ‘That's the one I want,’ said Jack, in a much lighter tone. ‘By Jove, if you have one like that, you can sleep like a babe all the way to Gloucester and know no harm will come to you’.

(277)

And so Tobias confesses his relationship with his sister-in-law, and the pregnancy which threatens to expose them. The balance established by this bartering of compromising truths ultimately enables Maggs to force Oates to destroy what he has to that point written about him.

Carey's characters repeatedly seek to escape from the bodies, the lives or the narratives in which they believe they are trapped, and his novels suggest that countries are similarly trapped by the stereotypical, theme-park versions of themselves with which they once identified.⁸ In the course of his life, Jack Maggs suffers many forms of imprisonment. As a child, he was imprisoned from birth in a criminal life, and he and Sophina were confined to the Islington house of Ma Britten: ‘Silas in his penitentiary had more freedom than we did’ (254), Maggs recalls. Their only escape from the drudgery of cleaning the downstairs rooms where Ma Britten received her ladies and carried out her abortions were burglary expeditions, and the chance these provided to spend time in the luxurious houses they robbed, and to fantasise that they owned them. Later Maggs was imprisoned literally in New South Wales and imaginatively in his dream of an idealised English summer. His passionate identification with the England which expelled him leads him to deny the freedom he finds in Australia: ‘I am not of that race … the Australian race … I am an Englishman’ (372); ‘I'd rather be a bad smell here than a frigging rose in New South Wales’ (273). And finally he is imprisoned by the belief that he can protect the four-year-old ‘orphing’ (313) he met briefly in the smithy's forge, and transform him into a gentleman, the self of his dreams. As so often in Carey, the attempt is partly successful, but it also goes terribly wrong. Phipps is corrupted while being educated by his Oxford tutor, and is so unhappy in his imposed identity that he can be persuaded by Percy Buckle to attempt to kill his benefactor.

6: TALES OF TWO COUNTRIES

Carey's comparison of New South Wales and England is foregrounded in the final pages of the book, which resonate back through the narrative, decisively altering it. Throughout his earlier, brutal time as a convict, Jack used his memories of England to maintain his will to live; but when he returns to London he finds that it is a different place from his imaginings, and indifferent to his emotional attachments. It is significant that Jack is constantly constrained by fear and the threat of betrayal in England, whereas he is free, socially acceptable and prosperous in Australia. His return to the social order which made him a criminal, which he has romanticised from afar, enables him to recognise the freedom offered by the social order of his former prison, which has itself begun to metamorphose from a penal colony into a site of liberation.

Subsequent generations of fictional Australians returning ‘home’, like Richard Mahony, found England small-minded, class-ridden and unwelcoming, and the lives that it offered them clearly and irrevocably inferior to the lives they had established in Australia: lives they had seen as provisional and makeshift until the cold douche of reality provided by the trip home revealed how the new had supplanted the remembered forever. Henry Handel Richardson and Martin Boyd are the best known exponents of that sub-genre of Australian writing which chronicles disillusioning returns to the motherland. Jack himself is finally transformed from an Englishman into an Australian, opting for the more open, generous and egalitarian Australian culture he has come to recognise.

For their part, the English have not been reluctant to remind colonial revenants of their convict origins and alleged criminal tendencies. Even Tobias Oates, who knows better, cannot finally resist demonising Jack:

… in his grief Tobias began to heap up all his blame upon him. It was now … in the darkest night of his life, that Jack Maggs began to take the form the world would later know. This Jack Maggs was, of course, a fiction.

(390)

Not only is the ‘real’ Jack Maggs nearly killed by the son he has risked his life to see, his fictional namesake is actually killed off by Tobias Oates in the fire planned as the climax of The Death of Maggs. But Carey's Maggs does not die at ‘home’ in London, like Abel Magwitch. When Mercy Larkin saves him from Henry Phipps's bullet, he is finally free to abandon his misguided Victorian dream, and return to live a long and fruitful life, including two terms as president of Wingham shire, in the colony of New South Wales.

Like a good many of its convicts and early settlers, Australia's early fictions came from England. Dickens was the greatest and most popular novelist of his time—perhaps of all time—in England, and his time spanned the decades in which New South Wales transformed itself from a forlorn penitentiary on the backside of the world into a prosperous colonial settlement with aspirations to nationhood. To create a national repository of their own, uniquely Australian stories, Australians have sought to (re)claim and (re)write those English stories which constituted their first meta-narrative, as well as inventing new ones. At the end of Bliss, Harry Joy adapts the stories he learned from his father Vance, which reflect many different cultures, to his new culture at Bog Onion Road. In this sense, Jack Maggs continues Carey's project in that earlier work, a project he shares with other mythmakers like David Malouf and Alex Miller, to (re)mythologise Australia in its own terms.

Many Carey characters struggle with little or no success to escape from the social and psychological prisons in which they find themselves. Jack, however, who starts off with almost nothing in his favour, escapes from both his man-made and his self-made prisons: not, like Dickens's Pip, into some uneasy middle-class Victorian status, with an ambivalent and rewritten ending to his unrequited passion for Estella, but to the place of a respected citizen surrounded by a loving family. The contrast is clearly in Australia's favour. Perhaps Peter Carey too is coming home in imagination, and finding it more rewarding than the dreams of over there.

Notes

1. In a celebrated comparison, Stendhal has characterised the novel as ‘a mirror carried along a high road’. See Stevick, p. 389.

2. Carey's last novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, was not short-listed for the 1994 Miles Franklin Award, perhaps because it did not actually mention Australia. But beneath the allegorical disguise of a partly invented language and a largely invented geography, Efica and Voorstand are unmistakable versions of Australia and America, whose complex interrelations Carey has explored throughout his career. In Jack Maggs, the colony of New South Wales is a haunting absence for most of the book, but when it appears in the final pages, it dramatically alters the reader's interpretation of all that has gone before. It will be interesting to see whether this makes Jack Maggs sufficiently ‘Australian’ for the Miles Franklin judges.

3. For the supposed originals for Miss Havisham, see Ackroyd, pp. 886-87. While no originals have been suggested for Magwitch, his appearance in Great Expectations has been followed by a number of fictional, film and television extensions, many with an Australian perspective. These include the Australian Broadcasting Commission's 1987 television series, Great Expectations: The Untold Story, Michael Noonan's 1982 novel Magwitch, and Kathy Acker's 1982 fiction/plagiarism Great Expectations. In The Potato Factory Bryce Courtenay describes the Australian experience of Ikey Solomon, who is alleged to be the character on whom Fagin in Oliver Twist is based.

4. The Death of Maggs by Tobias Oates was ‘abandoned by its grief-stricken author in 1837’ and ‘begun again in 1859’. The first chapters appeared in 1860, the year in which Great Expectations was first serialised in All the Year Round, and then appeared in book form (Jack Maggs 391-2).

5. British history includes two celebrated Oateses, with very different reputations. One was a notorious conspirator, opportunist and turncoat. The other was a famously selfless hero who accompanied Scott on his ill-fated journey to the South Pole.

6. Mercy donates her collection of Tobias Oates's versions of The Death of Maggs, together with Jack's letters to Henry Phipps, to the Mitchell Library in Sydney (Jack Maggs 392).

7. In 1845 Dickens mesmerised Madame Émile de la Rue to alleviate a facial tic, and encountered her belief that she was pursued by a phantom. See Johnson, pp. 541-42 and Ackroyd, pp. 449-52.

8. See in particular ‘American Dreams’ and Illywhacker.

Works Cited

Acker, Kathy. Great Expectations, in Blood and Guts in High School, Plus Two. London: Picador, 1984.

Ackroyd, Michael. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Byatt, A. S. Possession. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990.

Carey, Peter. Bliss. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1981.

———. Illywhacker. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1985.

———. Jack Maggs. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1997.

———. Oscar and Lucinda. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1988.

———. The Tax Inspector. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1991.

———. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994.

Courtenay, Bryce. The Potato Factory. Melbourne: Heinemann Australia, 1995.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. London: Cape, 1969.

Great Expectations: The Untold Story. Dir. Tim Burstall. ABC 6-part mini-series. From 7 Feb. 1987.

Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

Noonan, Michael. Magwitch. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982.

Stevick, Philip, ed. The Theory of the Novel. New York: Free Press, 1967.