Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
much he tries at first to dissociate himself from Magwitch, he cannot. There is no denying the connection between his acquired gentlemanliness and the convict stain, even after Magwitch’s money and property are forfeited to the English Crown. The convict stain that clings to Magwitch, as Reid points out, “is undoubtedly and repeatedly racially inscribed” (“Exile,” 58); being a convict becomes a metaphorical racial identity that could be said to displace the racial otherness of the actual Australian indigenous people who are never mentioned. The words stain and taint appear frequently in many different kinds of writing about convicts, likening them to the racial otherness marked by differences in skin color. Even so, in much of the nineteenth-century literature about Australia, the convict is a more threatening Other than the Aborigine simply because the convicts are more visible, both within Australia and on English streets (as with the many convicts Pip comes into contact with). Significantly, Pip feels himself contaminated by this otherness from the first chapter of the novel, even though it is not literally marked on his skin. He has many encounters with convicts throughout the novel; to his perception, even nature seems to share the convict taint by which he has been touched: the “flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom” (89). Of course, neither flowers nor convicts are actually marked by the convict stain, but the convict’s outsider status is so pronounced that it is naturalized as physical. This is not really surprising, since, as Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, by the 1860s social difference in England had come to be articulated in terms of race more often than class (Taming, 112).
Rebecca N. Mitchell also acknowledges that Pip feels a “visceral response to Magwitch” when he returns, but she attributes this to “Pip’s recognition of his own folly. He can now see, from his vantage of greater experience and exteriorized from the position of belief, how faulty Magwitch’s proposition is, how flawed the idea that any money, earned any way, may purchase station or class” (41). But despite the money’s origin in Australia and its connection to the othered, even racialized, convict, it has bought Pip the position of a gentleman; once educated, he is accepted among all his associates as a gentleman and an equal, even by the novel’s most aristocratic (if suspect) characters, Bentley Drummle and Mrs. Pocket. Pip has acquired the necessary cultural capital—not only possessions, which he loses, but also education, manners, and taste, which are finally part of him—to be considered a gentleman of the new bourgeois order by his new peers, good and bad. Dickens shows, says Robin Gilmour, “how much money and gentility, cash and culture, depend on one another” (“Class,” 109), and they are indeed intimately linked for Pip; but he remains a gentleman even after losing his property because in England gentility involves more than just money. Gilmour’s statement is even truer for Australian gentlemen than for English ones, as Great Expectations demonstrates. In Pip’s case, of course, it is mostly money that creates his English gentility—and that money comes from and is identified with an Australian convict and all that he represents.23 What Pip (and Dickens) repress is not merely the racialization of the convict but the fact that for a convict like Magwitch or even a successful free emigrant, their newfound wealth is based on the erasure of the indigenous Australians.24 Elaine Freedgood finds evidence of this repression, which she describes as “fetishistic,” in Magwitch mentioning “Negro head tobacco” three times in two chapters (83). Fetishizing this link to indigenous Australians, still called “blacks” in Australia, as Freedgood reminds us, “symbolizes the crime of Aboriginal genocide without requiring conscious acknowledgement of it, and therefore without forcing the reader to deny, repress, or oppose the fact of genocide” (84). Freedgood’s point that we have to look hard for signs of the “horror” that “circulates in Great Expectations” is an important one in a text like this that overtly raises the gothic horror of convicts but not the people who were abused, killed, and displaced in order for the convict system and colonial Australia to exist at all (82). Pip’s gentlemanliness comes at an even greater cost than he (and we) generally recognize.
Also, Pip is from the beginning closely associated with convicts sentenced to transportation and also, in a sense, to Australia as a place. The first scene of the novel, in which Pip meets Magwitch on the marshes, is set in a border space. The convict appears first in a church cemetery and then on the Battery, which used to be the place where cannon were put to defend England from attack from the sea. Rather like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Great Expectations is set near the Thames, the waterway leading to the world outside England, including its colonies such as Australia.25 The river, of course, is also the mooring place for the Hulks, which house the convicts sentenced to transportation and serve as a transitional space between England and Australia. Thus, Pip’s origins involve an unspoken connection to otherness even before he meets the convict. Those origins, including the graves of his parents and little brothers, are linked both to convicts and to transportation to Australia.
Another 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