Criminality and Empire in Great Expectations

Abstract

As Edward Said pints out, Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations poses a critical nexus between the criminal and the colonial, through Magwitch's use of cash earned in Australia the penal colony in order to fund the making of Pip into an English gentleman. this paper proposes that the plot structure of Great Expectations employs a widely accepted Victorian "separation of spheres" between criminality and Empire on the one hand, and English society on the other, only to reject that separation in the course of the novel. On the level of policy and of imagination, Victorian Britain criminalized Empire in ways ranging from the practice of colonial transportation to literary depiction, and Great Expectations represents, but then ultimately exposes as faulty, this desire on the part of a genteel progressive domestic society to relegate the criminal and the colonial to an unacknowledged, regressive past. Pip's difficult process of recognizing Magwitch as his benefactor in fact parallels Victorian society's reluctance to acknowledge the criminal and colonial sources of its domestic affluence. This paper investigates these issues by examining Dickens's personal and biographical interests in criminality and in Empire; by comparing Pip's visits to Newgate Prison in Great Expectations with Dickens's journalistic essays on Newgate in Sketches by Boz; by addressing the representation of the criminal justice system in Great Expectations; by considering Magwitch's Australian penal exile; and finally by comparing that exile to Pip's rather different, voluntary Egyptian exile.