Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
also participates in general thieving and passing bad notes, both of which are threats to property. Magwitch challenges the social class system in another way by enabling Pip, an uneducated working-class boy, to rise to the status of English gentleman, a class to which he was not born and has no real claim.13 Yet viewed in another way, Pip’s rise reinforces that system by emphasizing the superiority and desirability of being a gentleman instead of a respectable working-class man. The fact that, at least before Magwitch returns, Pip is not a very exemplary gentleman works to undermine Magwitch’s notion that his money can successfully intervene in the social hierarchy. In fact, Janet C. Myers comments that Magwitch’s return makes “visible the challenge he and Pip present to the existing class system and to the traditions of primogeniture and inheritance,” linchpins of the pseudofeudal social hierarchy (82).
Magwitch the convict, though, actually does succeed in “creating” a gentleman. Even though Pip does not seem to become a very gentlemanly gentleman with the money Magwitch provides to fund his education and lifestyle, Pip does eventually acquire the qualities of an honorable gentleman. Ironically, these qualities show themselves more clearly once he finds out his rise has been funded by corrupted money and he feels morally required to reject it. He cannot give up his gentlemanliness at this point, because it has now become part of him—his body as well as his identity. His true gentlemanliness, in fact, is developed and proved by taking care of Magwitch/Provis unselfishly until Magwitch’s death. Recognizing Magwitch as a victim of English society’s desire for social harmony is part of Pip’s reform and assimilation into the category of real English gentleman, while Magwitch’s death neutralizes the convict as either a threat to or a meddling agent in class relations.
Of Magwitch’s time in Australia, we learn very little. “I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in the new world,” he says (344), and this is most of what we get about what has happened to him in the Antipodes. What we learn about Australia is mostly its almost unimaginable distance from England: it is “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from this” (344). Australia is thus brought into existence as an imagined space, but it is visible only in brief flashes. That is, Australia fluctuates through the course of this novel (and many other literary representations) between being a chimerical illusion and becoming an actual place. It is the absent referent for the term transported that occurs incidentally in so many nineteenth-century novels, along with the empty name Botany Bay, which Magwitch himself uses: “Nor yet I don’t intend to advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from Botany Bay” (357). Kirsty Reid links the imagined space of Australia directly to social class when she says that “Magwitch’s return to metropolitan space . . . undermines those notions of collective difference which supposedly separated ‘gentlemen,’ a class which claimed the right to possess every place, from the criminal exiles who had been sentenced to be forever without place” (“Exile,” 62; emphasis in original). Reid is right in pointing out how Magwitch’s return disrupts the binary between gentlemen and exiled criminals, but such exiles were not exactly “without place.” If Australia could be represented as a new or different location with its own identity, then it too was a place, one that was often thought of as specially designed for the rebellious or wayward. Many convict novels and other forms of literature, as well as Dickens’s Household Words, did focus specifically on portraying the land and (white) people of Australia. Although it happens only in Magwitch’s scattered recollections, even in Great Expectations Australia becomes at least a partially imagined place where someone we “know” has lived. In fact, Australia needs to be a place in order to define England and Englishness by its otherness.
Thus Great Expectations in effect produces Australia by having Magwitch, who has actually been there and experienced it as a real place, return to see the English gentleman he has created. Importantly, what Dickens’s novel does not engage is the possibility that, historically, someone like Magwitch could have become a gentleman in Australia. Although in the novel Magwitch has been stung by Australian settlers “with blood horses” labeling him “common” (348)—as Estella does to young Pip (95)—historically there were emancipated convicts who became not only wealthy but also respectable in New South Wales.14 This was especially true during the period in which the novel is probably set; according to Litvack, the most reliable dating of the action of the novel puts it in the tenure of Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1809–22), which was “a time of widening opportunity for transportees” (II:104). Some former convicts became so wealthy and powerful that they were even invited to Government House, considered the pinnacle of Australian society.15 Even among those who were not so fortunate as that, their newfound freedom and relative prosperity often allowed emancipists to become respected and respectable citizens among the middling classes in Australia. In other convict novels, emancipists become gentlemen who can afford “blood horses,” even if their own blood may be suspect in terms of English social class. Nineteenth-century Australian society was by no means classless, but movement between classes was often more 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.