Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
of free immigration encouraged by England, shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century, a movement began to stir within the Australian colonies towards co-governing,” and in 1855 and 1856 the British government had allowed the various colonies to set up their own elected legislative assemblies (21). The new co-governing colonies were not going to agree to reinstate convict transportation, and Britain was not going to force it on them. With the one exception of Western Australia, which accepted convicts for the benefit of the free labor until 1868, transportation was over. So why publish a novel about it in 1860–61, when his journal had been actively supporting free emigration, or voluntary transportation, for the previous ten years? The answer lies partly in the issue of form, or genre. As a journal, Household Words tended to print informational material, even if heavily editorialized. It published many supposedly “true life” convict stories but no literary works that address this topic. As a novel, Great Expectations was doing something more complex.
Many critics have discussed Great Expectations, identifying it with several different literary genres. Writing in 1989, Thomas Loe identified the three most prominent genres of the novel as the bildungsroman, the novel of manners (which includes romance), and the gothic, which is the one he focuses on in his article. In contrast, I read the novel mostly as a social problem novel in which Dickens shows the effects of transportation on individual characters and how transportation was tied up with social mobility, in both England and Australia, and with defining national identity and social class, mostly in England. The effects of transportation in the novel are ambiguous at best; this demonstrates that a new system, such as the emigration or voluntary transportation being extolled in Household Words, needed to be encouraged.6 Like other critics since Loe, I am also interested in the way Dickens uses gothic elements in the novel.7 This important formal difference between Great Expectations and Household Words may offer another reason why Dickens prominently featured a transported convict in his novel in 1861, when the articles in his journal, which rarely feature gothic tropes, dealt with the current reality that convict transportation had been abolished.
Gothic elements figure in two main ways in Great Expectations. One is that the novel takes up some gothic conventions, such as the deserted churchyard, the chains hanging from the former gallows, the threatened cannibalism, and the violence of the fighting convicts. According to Tabish Khair, the appearance of Magwitch in the beginning of Great Expectations is “as ‘Gothic’ a scene in its resonances as any” (105). And of course, Miss Havisham, living in darkened Satis House dressed in her ragged yellowed wedding dress, reliving her long-past betrayal, is another key gothic aspect of the novel. Alexandra Warwick, in contrast, argues that these key scenes from Pip’s life that utilize easily recognizable gothic props for sensational effects actually serve to “empty out” the form and its traditional meanings (32). While “the narrative of Great Expectations promises an older conventional form of Gothic,” it “denies” that promise (Warwick, 32). Like the pseudofeudal social hierarchy that characterized English national identity and required the expulsion of the convict, the “still-feudal relations” that form the (relatively) secure environment of the young Pip are “hollowed out” and replaced with a new type of urban gothic, often associated with the sensation fiction of the 1860s (32). What this new form of gothic fiction represses, says Warwick, is money, but I would argue that Dickens’s “new” gothic convict novel also represses the deviant or rebellious individual who threatens those “still-feudal relations.” So when Magwitch, who is nothing if not the return of the repressed, which is the meaning most often associated with gothic forms,8 comes back to England, he represents not only the money that has ironically propelled Pip, the main character, into the ranks of the gentleman but also all Pip’s contacts with convicts throughout the novel. Julie Barst argues that for English gothic texts like Great Expectations, Australia’s function is to be “a space whereby repressed characters can hang in the balance, awaiting their opportunity for return, their chance to produce the uncanny and sensational” effects that are “typical of Gothic in both those [characters] who repressed them and the readers themselves” (6).9 By publishing a convict novel in 1861, Dickens doubtless appealed to a readership interested in gothic stories, especially modern ones, which are classified by many critics as sensation fiction like that popularized at the moment Dickens published Great Expectations (Horner, 108). What Dickens does not represent in his gothic/sensation novel is the return of what is still deeply repressed in English and even much Australian literature today—guilt for brutality toward and even eradication of the indigenous Australians. Neither do the journal writers, who are trying to repress the notion of the convicts as dangerous criminals and felons (as Pip at first assumes the returned Magwitch is) and to portray Australia as a safe and prosperous place. The Aborigines are repressed so deeply that they cannot be seen returning (or appearing) in these texts; the convicts, though they are supposed to be repressed, are still racially defined as white and thus can be portrayed as returning.
In Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch the transported convict is paradoxically the most wealthy and the lowest socially of any of the characters portrayed. It 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