The question of how much or how little “real life” influences the construction of an author's characters has long been debated by both readers and writers. In Jack Maggs, a historical novel that is partly an homage to Dickens' Great Expectations, the Australian novelist Peter Carey—whose previous books include Oscar and Lucinda—enters the fray by inventing a fateful meeting between a figure very much like Charles Dickens and one of his great characters, the convict Abel Magwitch.

It is 1837, the year of 18-year-old Victoria's accession to the throne. The Industrial Revolution is in full swing and London, the epicenter of the industrialized world, is in the process of radical change. The Haymarket, for example, a street once famous for its outdoor market, is so transformed that “a man from the last century would not have recognized it; a man from even 15 years before would have been confused.” The poor are everywhere. There are no unions to uphold the interests of the working class; there is no welfare system for the destitute except the poorhouse and the prison.

To this teeming and unpredictable city returns an outlaw who was banished forever more than 20 years ago. Jack Maggs is an imposing and mysterious figure:

He was a tall man in his 40s, so big in the chest and broad in the shoulder that his fellows on the bench seat had felt the strain of his presence. … His brows pushed down hard upon the eyes, and his cheeks shone as if life had scrubbed at him and rubbed until the very bones beneath his flesh had been burnished in the process. … His eyes were dark, inquiring, and yet there was a bruised, even belligerent quality which had kept his fellow passengers at their distance all through that long journey up from Dover.

Maggs, who had been deported from England to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales, has come back—surreptitiously and under threat of execution—to satisfy an irrational longing. Years earlier, when he was being taken by coach in manacles to the port where he would be shipped out, a little orphan boy named Henry Phipps showed him a momentary kindness. The image of the innocent child haunted him throughout his lengthy incarceration. He vowed to make enough money to enable Phipps to live in comfort, enough to “spin him a cocoon of gold and jewels … weave him a nest so strong that no one would ever hurt his goodness.”

After being pardoned, but required to remain in Australia, Maggs did indeed make a fortune as a brick manufacturer. Keeping his vow, he lavished his wealth on the boy. Phipps is now living in style in a handsome establishment on Great Queen Street.

Afraid of the authorities and unsure of his reception, for Phipps has not answered his recent letters, Maggs does not approach his beneficiary directly. Instead, he secretly finds employment as a footman in the house next door of one Percy Buckle, Esquire. Formerly a humble grocer, Buckle came into an unexpected inheritance and was elevated to the rank of gentleman. He is a mild-mannered fellow with literary interests who fancies himself a patron of the arts. In particular, he cultivates writers who have not quite arrived and plays host at what he flatters himself is a salon.

Buckle's prize catch is Tobias Oates, a young author who is as much of an upstart, and as socially insecure, as Buckle himself. Oates (based in almost every detail on the young Dickens) is brilliant, facile and unstable. The author of Captain Crumley, a comic first novel that met, like Dickens' Pickwick Papers, with staggering and unprecedented success, he is tormented by a devouring ambition closely allied to the “unholy thirst for love” that his impoverished childhood has given him. He hopes and believes he will one day make his name “not just as the author of comic adventures, but as a novelist who might topple Thackeray himself.”

In introducing Oates to Maggs, Carey cleverly imagines the effect a powerful and suggestive personality might have on a receptive artistic consciousness. Oates was forged in frightening circumstances, and as an artist he developed the technique of confronting the sources of his anxiety: “He feared poverty; he wrote passionately about the poor. He had nightmares about hanging; he sought out executions, reporting them with a magistrate's detachment.” Jack Maggs personifies the poverty, rage and despair Oates dreads, as well as the strength that attracts him. When the odd-looking footman collapses in a fit of tic douloureux while waiting on Mr. Buckle's guests, Oates decides that Maggs is an ideal subject for the study of mesmerism. An enthusiastic amateur practitioner of the then fashionable science, Oates “would be the archeologist of this mystery; he would be the surgeon of this soul.” Maggs reluctantly agrees to go along.

Under hypnosis the ex-convict slowly begins to reveal his secrets. It turns out he endured a childhood that, for want of a better word, one can only describe as Dickensian. Abandoned as a baby on the mud flats under London Bridge, he was brought up by a tough abortionist and her sinister son, and apprenticed to a silver thief. The thief trained little Jack to recognize valuable silver. His job was to climb down the chimneys of fashionable houses and to let in the thief's daughter Sophina, with whom he would proceed to rob the house. As teenagers Jack and Sophina fell in love, but their innocent idyll ended in tragedy.

Oates and the other frequenters of Buckle's salon are titillated but disturbed by the unfolding tale; they worry that Maggs is a dangerous man. Nevertheless, they continue to protect him from the law, Buckle out of pity, Oates out of artistic arrogance and curiosity. He sees his greatest character to date in the making.

Meanwhile, Maggs begins to uncover the truth about the man he looks upon as his son, and it is not pretty. The handsomely underwritten Phipps has developed expensive tastes and come to view himself as a true gentleman. But he is revolted by the fact that the source of his fortune is “convict gold,” and feels only distaste for his benefactor. As long as Maggs was a safe distance away, Phipps could go about his dissipated life in peace. When he receives a letter announcing that Maggs is planning to return to London, he realizes he will not be able to keep his place in society if he is forced to share it with a brutish former thief. This prompts him to run off, first to an underground “gentleman's club” (for Phipps is homosexual), then to the Army, where he purchases a commission in a second-rate regiment.

Tobias Oates is fascinated by everything he hears from Maggs, whose mind, he reflects, “is a world as rich as London itself. What a puzzle of life exists in the dark little lane-ways of this wretch's soul, what stolen gold lies hidden in the vaults beneath his filthy streets.” The author accepts Maggs as a gift from heaven, for he has long been intrigued by what he conceives to be “the Criminal Mind,” and sees Maggs as a prototypical example of it.

Of course, there is nothing so simple as a criminal, or a noncriminal, mind. Before long we learn that Oates has fallen out of love with his wife and in love with her sister. Morally and emotionally vulnerable, he becomes entangled in activities that can be construed as criminal and finds himself fleeing with—and at the mercy of—Maggs. Who is the criminal now? Who has the criminal mind? Neither man, according to Carey. He argues that our circumstances make us what we are, and it is the cruel exigencies of early 19th-century society that have turned Jack Maggs, an affectionate boy, into a nearly-hardened criminal. “I am an old dog,” he says, “who has been treated bad, and has learned all sorts of tricks he wishes he never had to know.”

Equally important to Carey's contention is the question, Who is the stronger man? In this contest Maggs wins hands down. Oates proves vacillating, panicky and treacherous when faced with pressure. Maggs, although frequently misguided, remains steadfastly true to his principles and unflinching in his pursuit of them.

As the book progresses it becomes apparent that the author, who lives in New York and has set this work primarily in London, is writing from the point of view of his native land. Integrity is rare in the England of Jack Maggs. It may be a fluid society that permits even Buckle, Phipps and Oates to rise to the rank of “gentleman,” but despite this potential for mobility, class lines, once established, are absolute. Maggs thinks of Australia, where he spent so many years in cruel servitude, as a sort of hell. At the same time, however, it is the place where he was free to make a fortune completely unhampered by his origins or his accent, and where the question of whether he was a gentleman was on the whole meaningless. It is also the place to which, in the end, he willingly returns.

Carey's depiction of the artist as a lesser person than the creature he makes use of implies something that is surely true: Creative fire is, finally, a gift that has little or nothing to do with virtue. Tobias Oates is a great artist and on some level that excuses his portrayal of Maggs. Carey is more interested in raising than settling questions, though, and undercuts Oates' ideas about his craft. Oates invents what he considers to be an artistic denouement that has an apocalyptic fire consume his convict-hero. Carey reveals the “real” and much less dramatic story: Maggs lives out his days back in Australia as an unremarkable paterfamilias. Which ending, the author is clearly asking, is more appropriate?

In plot, incident and irony Jack Maggs is as entertaining a piece of work as the Victorian novels it is modeled on. It is effective, too, as straight historical fiction. But most of all Carey's book is, as he intended, a telling meditation on the nature of the creative process, on how the artist finds and distills art from the chaos of raw experience.