"

A ghost story in two parts: Charles Dickens, Peter Carey, and avenging
phantoms.
Brittan, Alice. "A ghost story in two parts: Charles Dickens, Peter Carey, and avenging
phantoms. " Australian Literary Studies. 21.4 (Oct 2004): 40(16). Expanded Academic
ASAP. Gale. Brevard County School District Main. 2 July 2008
<http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-
Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A139307934&source=gale&sr
cprod=EAIM&userGroupName=fl_breva&version=1.0>.

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Queensland Press
The hostis responds to hospitality in the way that the ghost recalls himself to the living, not
letting them forget. (Anne Dufourmantelle, 'Invitation,' Of Hospitality 4) (1)
It is only just that an argument about phantoms begin by introducing its own ghosts.
Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth prowl the shadows of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations
and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, the novels that are my central subject, and they are plays in which
the outraged dead return to reveal the fraudulence of a social imposter. The opening scene of
Hamlet contains one of literature's most devastating visitations, who appears to the royal
sentinels as they await the midnight return of the apparition that resembles their buried
sovereign. Darkness and duty explain only part of the care with which the sentries test the men
who approach their post. The play begins with Barnardo's cry, 'Who's there?' and the guard's
cautious rejoinder, 'Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself' (I,i,1-2). Before Francisco yields
his watch to the man sent to relieve him, he poses Barnardo's question to new interlopers, calling
again into the night, 'Who is there?' (I,i,14). It is Horatio, come to see the rumoured ghost. When
it floats into view moments later, he asks, 'What art thou' (I,i,46)? The impossible question
resonates, repeating the anxious interrogations that open the play, and showing us that haunted
men become fastidious about identifying the living because there are no answers to the questions
'What art thou?' and 'Who is there?' that can make an apparition knowable or explain its trespass.
No name of password will calm a sentry confronted by a ghost, but Horatio repeatedly orders the
spirit of the King to 'speak,' to identify himself and reason his presence. Hamlet redoubles
Horatio's efforts, importuning the likeness of his father to answer, describe and direct. (2) When
Macbeth and Banquo meet Shakespeare's other unnatural invention, the three weird sisters, they
have much the same questions and demands. (3) But in Macbeth the witches' 'intelligence' is
'strange' (I,iii,76), and when at last the King's ghost addresses Hamlet, he begins with a
prohibition, saying, 'I am forbid / To ten the secrets of my prison house' (I,v,13-14). However,
the laws that govern ghosts require that the King disclose the secret of his murder in order to
replace the 'forged process,' or false tale, with the true (I,v,37). If a forgery is a dishonest copy,
then Claudius has forged the singular privilege of kingship, for he has killed the true sovereign,
his brother, and usurped King Hamlet's throne, marrying his queen, calling his heir 'son' (I,ii,64),
and disguising regicide with the lie of accidental death. And yet before the apparition has uttered

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a word, the guards already know that '[s]omething is rotten in the state of Denmark' (I,iv,90),
because two kings cannot rule one nation, even when one is a ghost. By its very presence the
apparition uncovers the corruption of Claudius's reign and exposes his claim to the throne as a
thief's boast, much as Banquo's bloody spirit reveals the murderous deceit of the new king.
Maddened by guilt and terror, Macbeth speaks for the silent figure that none but he can see, and
thus confirms the suspicions of the lords who attend the coronation feast. Like Claudius, King
Macbeth has stolen his crown from its rightful owner and violated the laws of succession.
The phantoms of Hamlet and Macbeth stir the air of Great Expectations and Jack Maggs, in
which Carey reimagines Dickens's famous story to Australian advantage. Both novels are about
the return of the vengeful dead. Dickens's Abel Magwitch and Carey's Jack Maggs suffer the
social death of transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales, a place which many
convicts, as well as those they left behind, believed to be 'as far beyond recall as the grave.' (4)
As Coral Lansbury writes in her study of representations of Australia in nineteenth-century
British fiction and journalism, 'a man transported was mourned as though he were dead' (10)
because England 'was as well rid of him as though he had been hanged' (13). However, neither
Magwitch nor Maggs accepts his permanent exile. Instead, they return to London as illegal men,
like spirits come to name the violence committed against them. But they desire a revenge that is
more complicated, more devious, than the order that King Hamlet issues to his son: kill the man
who killed me and claim your throne. Both characters have become generous benefactors to the
impoverished, orphaned boys who showed them compassion when they were shackled prisoners,
and they risk death by hanging to introduce themselves to the affluent young men they have
made.
Through enterprise and hard work, Abel Magwitch and Jack Maggs both grow rich in Australia,
and each uses his money to turn a poor boy into a gentleman with glittering social opportunities
and all the props that an educated man of means requires: fine clothes and jewellery, spacious
lodgings, lavish furnishings, expensive books, and liveried servants. To finance the creation of a
respectable British gentleman from a place of disgrace, to know that the chair, suit, or book
bought with convict money cannot be distinguished from the same chair, suit, or book bought
with inherited wealth, and that the cultivated, well-dressed man who sits and reads, or walks
through the streets of London, is peer to the man born into plenty: this is the eloquent insult that
Magwitch and Maggs offer a society that blamed them for their poverty and punished them for
their rough accents and ragged clothes as much as for their crimes. However, Dickens's Pip
Pirrip and Carey's Henry Phipps take no pleasure in proving the thesis that men, like objects, are
made rather than born. When Magwitch comes to Pip's rooms to announce that he is the source
of the young man's good fortune, Pip receives him not as a 'second father' but as a 'wicked spirit'
(Dickens 315, 319). When Maggs arrives in London to find his 'son,' Phipps hides from the
patron he has known from childhood but never met, emerging only to reveal himself as the
Phantom that torments Maggs in his dreams.
Long before Pip discovers that Magwitch, rather than the eccentric Miss Havisham, is
responsible for his great expectations, he sees apparitions. Jack Maggs suffers from a tic
douloureux, but when he allows the unscrupulous writer Tobias Oates to hypnotise him in
exchange for information that may lead to his vanished 'son,' the pain acquires a human shape

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and the ghostly name 'the Phantom' (Carey 53). As in Hamlet and Macbeth, the appearance of a
ghost compels the startled host to ask, 'Who are you?' or 'Where do you come from?' but these
unanswerable questions always return to challenge the speaker, illuminating the secrets of his
own identity and provenance. The unwelcome visions that darken Pip's mind do more than
express his guilt and foreboding. The mystery of their origin and meaning shakes the security of
Pip's dramatic social ascent and sends a tremor through every object, each new book and tailored
waist-coat, that supports his performance. If Abel Magwitch is the father whose forbidden return
makes Pip's expectations evanesce, Peter Carey reverses the relationship between Australian
ghost and English host, casting Jack Maggs as the father bewildered by the disappearance of a
spectral son. The cherished boy becomes the fearful Phantom, in whose presence Maggs feels his
conviction that he is an Englishman flicker and fade.
The Phantom Father
Fred Kaplan and J. Hillis Miller remark that all Dickens novels contain 'plots of lost parentage'
(Kaplan 159) and that most of their heroes are 'orphan[s], of illegitimate, or both' (Miller 251).
Both critics contend that by placing outcast, disinherited figures at the centre of his novels,
Dickens was able to explore his enduring interest in the origins of the self and the invention of
social identity. As Miller writes, the Dickensian hero 'will be totally responsible, himself, for any
identity he achieves,' because society grants him none (252-3). The opening scene of Great
Expectations introduces us to a young boy to whom society has offered a minimal inheritance
indeed: orphaned Philip Pirrip stands before the graves of his parents and five brothers and
attempts to imagine their faces and compose their histories from the slender evidence offered by
their epitaphs. Weeping at the precariousness of his own existence, Pip is suddenly seized bodily
by a figure whose origins are even more occult than his own. The stranger 'started up from
among the graves' (4) like a creature exhumed. However, we know he is not a ghost because he
questions Pipas though the boy himself were a frightful apparition: 'Tell us your name!' (4);
'Show us where you live' (4); 'Where's your mother?' (5); 'Who d'ye live with' (5)? Pip answers
with terrified alacrity, repeating his name three times, pointing to the village where he lives with
his misanthropic sister and her husband, the kind blacksmith Joe Gargery, and introducing his
captor to the family gravestones (4-5). The convict does not give his own name or explain where
he has come from, but in between threatening to cut Pip's throat and promising to rip out his
liver, Magwitch compels the young boy to do what the five brothers who lie beneath 'little stone
lozenges' (3) cannot: utter his name and sketch his brief autobiography.
The opening scene of Great Expectations places both Pip and Magwitch at the brink of the grave.
By its end, Pip has established his place among the living and been allowed to come down from
the tombstone where Magwitch perched him. But as the convict walks across the churchyard, it
seems to Pip 'as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of
their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in' (7). The man has not simply escaped
from the Hulks where prisoners await transportation to Australia; he is a refugee from the
subterranean land of the dead, whose jealous citizens reach up to grasp the leg iron that marks
him as one of their own. On the horizon, Pip sees the silhouette of a gibbet 'with some chains
hanging on it which had once held a pirate,' and he fears that the convict is 'the pirate come to
life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again' (7). Despite the strength of his

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hands and the force of his threats, Magwitch is little more than a terrible wraith who has snatched
a temporary reprieve from death, as a pirate steals and runs with his unjust riches until he is
caught and hanged. (5) It is difficult to imagine a more vivid representation of social and legal
banishment than this portrait of a living phantom.
Pip is an uneasy boy before he meets the convict, but when he becomes a thief guilt fills his sleep
and clouds his waking eyes. The night before he must satisfy his promise to steal food and a file,
Pip dreams that he is being conveyed to the prison ship while a 'ghostly pirate' (15) summons
him to the gibbet to be executed, and when he awakens and begins his furtive journey across the
marsh he mistakes a signpost for a 'phantom devoting [him] to the Hulks' (16). The sign guides
the honest traveller to the village, but directs the miscreant toward the condemned. The pirate
and the phantom are the convict's kinsmen, and it is not difficult to understand why they haunt
Pip. But he suffers similar hallucinations when he visits Miss Havisham, the wealthy recluse who
pays him to play with her beautiful ward, Estella. Following the elusive girl through Miss
Havisham's garden, Pip fancies that 'she seemed to be everywhere' (63), appearing and
disappearing in the distance and then vanishing 'into the sky'; bewildered, Pip next sees Miss
Havisham hanging by the neck, 'with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she
were trying to call to [him]' (63). Julian Moynahan proposes that we understand Pip's vision as
an 'imaginative fantasy which both projects and disguises the boy's desire to punish his employer
and to destroy her baleful power,' which teaches him that poverty is a social humiliation (75).
Surely we may also understand this scene as a visual rhyme. In the figures of the disembodied
girl and the hanged woman who calls to Pip from the gallows we must recognise the ghostly
appearance of the convict among the gravestones and the dream-summons of the executed
brigand. Long before his discovery that Estella is the daughter of the escaped convict, and that
Miss Havisham was robbed and betrayed by Magwitch's criminal associate, Compeyson, Pip's
visions connect Satis House with the Hulks and the gentlewoman with the pirate.
Pip's hallucinations expose a hidden kinship between the persecuted fugitive and the wronged
aristocrat, but they do more than quietly predict the novel's startling revelations. Their
insubstantiality sharpens Pip's own social embodiment, heightening his sense of injustice and
poor prospects, and their refusal to explain themselves demands his own self-reckoning. Pip's
graveyard meeting with Magwitch and his visions of the pirate and Miss Havisham teach him
that he is Pip Pirrip and that it is a dreadful, abject thing to be, but his shame does not disappear
when he becomes rich, and nor do his visions. Pip pursues Estella, the girl whose haughty
elegance first made him long for refinement and whose hand he hopes to win, but in her face he
often glimpses a 'nameless shadow' (261), a fleeting and faintly familiar presence whose source
he cannot identify. 'What was it?' (235, 236, 261), he asks repeatedly, but the question might
more aptly be phrased, 'Where does it come from?' Pip worries that he cannot 'trace ... to Miss
Havisham' the obscure 'suggestion' (235) in Estella's face, and this disturbs him because it
muddies the path he has traced from his own un-provenanced good fortune to Miss Havisham's
door, and threatens his belief that her adopted daughter is the final jewel of his inheritance. Like
a ghost, Estella's expression disinters a lie. By reminding Pip of Magwitch and of Molly, the
servant acquitted of murder who will later be revealed as Estella's mother, the shadow menaces
two 'forged' (Hamlet I,v,37) genealogies that intertwine at their root: the parentage of the girl and
of the fortune.

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Pip is chilled by Estella's expression for the same reason that he is discomfited by his visit to
Newgate Prison with Wemmick, Jaggers's clerk, who collects legal fees and 'portable property'
(259) from jailed clients. Wemmick frequently preaches the gospel of 'portable property'--
throughout the novel the two words are virtually inseparable--and most of his own moveable
goods come from the desperate or the dead. With 'prison dust' (261) on his feet and the memory
of Newgate in his mind, Pip sees in Estella the shadow that flaws her history (261), and like his
childhood fantasies, this untraceable presence does more than scaffold the later disclosure that
Estella is the daughter of criminals. It rhymes with Wemmick's rings and brooches, which tell
nothing of their criminal origins when they grace his finger or lapel, and with the anonymous
money that Wemmick disburses to Pip, for who can name the father or chart the lineage of a
pound note? Pip believes that Estella is the possession for which his material acquisitions are
prelude and prerequisite, but if she is portable property to be bequeathed like Wemmick's jewels,
to be moved and given the surname of a new owner, then the uncanny strangeness in her face
betrays the ancestry that her portability obscures, and distorts the bloodline of every object that
Pip has bought to ready himself for his bride.
Shortly before Pip greets Estella with the dust of Newgate on his shoes, he attends an
unintentionally comic performance of Hamlet. The title role is played by Mr Wopsle, the former
clergyman whose pretensions to grandness clearly parody Pip's own. From the first scene the
hopelessly inept actors are upstaged by their costumes, props and set. For Peter Stallybrass and
Ann Rosalind Jones, Dickens's hilarious depiction captures in particular the 'embarrassing
materiality of the immaterial Ghost' (245), whose crucial evanescence is destroyed by his 'all-
too-material' (246) armour, cough, and prompt sheet. By its inexplicable presence, the shade
should demand that the living explain themselves, that they discover in their social order
evidence of hidden trespass and deceit. But there is nothing other-worldly about Dickens's King
Hamlet, whose stage entrances and exits are as obvious as his script. And in the role of young
Hamlet, Wopsle is as eager to display his jewellery, fine cloak and silk stockings as to punish his
villainous uncle. Dickens's Prince Hamlet is not a character, he is an animated costume, and the
ghost of his father is a collection of props. Pip laughs with the test of the audience, but the
appearance of an insistently material ghost should alert rather than amuse him. Although Pip has
always associated ghosts with property--with Magwitch and the pirate who steal it flora the rich,
and with Miss Havisham and Estella who lord it over the poor--King Hamlet should persuade
him that a phantom may consist of nothing more than an assembly of objects, whose failure to
create the illusion of insubstantiality simply shifts the source of our bewilderment. We can no
longer pose the unanswerable question, 'Who or what are you?', because the ghost is nothing
more than the goods. We are left with no choice but to interrogate the objects themselves.
Ironically, Pip already knows that despite their 'all-too-material' (Jones and Stallybrass 246)
form, objects can create a ghost. He has recently turned a boy into a house servant by dressing
him in 'a blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches' and a pair of boots (216),
but soon names him the 'avenging phantom' (216) because he must be fed and kept occupied) As
the washerwoman's son the boy was an innocuous mortal; costumed in boots and cravat, he
'haunted [Pip's] existence' (216). Solid objects can turn a living boy into a shade, but they can
also become as shadowy and illicit as any ghost. When Abel Magwitch, another embarrassingly
material avenging phantom, returns from New South Wales to announce himself as the father of

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Pip's expectations, he looks around Pip's rooms with an 'air of wondering pleasure, as if he had
some part in the things he admired' (311). And of course he does. After making his disclosure,
Magwitch confesses that he endured hardship and ridicule in the colony by imagining Pipas his
constant witness and companion (315), and then he conducts a triumphant inventory of the goods
that prove the success of his plan to make and own a 'brought-up London gentleman' (317),
lifting the gold watch from Pip's pocket (316), touching his diamond and ruby ring, praising his
beautiful linen and his costly clothes, and admiring the hundreds of books that line the walls.
Magwitch was sustained in exile by thinking of Pip in London, holding 'steady afore [his] mind'
(317) the prospect of their reunion. In his long absence, Pip's watch, rings, linen, garments, and
books, to say nothing of his furniture and servant and lodgings, were the tangible counterparts to
Magwitch's remote imaginings. Magwitch indeed holds 'some part' in Pip's things, not simply
because he sent the money to buy them, but because they were his emissaries, his forerunners,
and the distant tools of his social revenge.
Like King Hamlet's return from his 'prison house' (I,v,14), Magwitch's return to England replaces
a 'forged process' (I,v,37) with the truth, which is that Pip's wealth is illegal and his social
standing a chimera. In his horrified delirium, Pip conceives that the man's 'wicked spirit' sent
'messengers' to herald its approach (319). He ransacks his memory for warnings of the convict's
return, but he need not catalogue his premonitions because Magwitch's messengers fill his rooms
and clothe his body. The exile's journey back to London began long before he boarded a ship in
New South Wales. With every object that Pip bought with his money and in his name, the
convict was conjured into being. Years before he knocked at Pip's door to see the collection
compiled on his behalf, the ghost made his appearance, disguised in the goods that made the poor
boy a gentleman. (7)
By the end of the novel, Pip has overcome his loathing for Magwitch and accepted him as a
second father. He has also lost every penny willed to him and sold every piece of portable
property he owned, because once convicted as a 'returned Transport' (439) and sentenced to yet
another death, Magwitch forfeited his estate to the Crown (442). To earn a living, Pip becomes a
colonial merchant with a trading firm and sets sail for Cairo to manage the company's 'Eastern
Branch' (474). Although Dickens labours to show us that Pip has found honest employment with
a company that has a 'good name, and worked for [its] profits, and did very well' (475),
contemporary readers will distrust the premise that importing goods from England's eastern
possessions is an honorable profession, and question whether the colonial trader is other than a
pirate protected by government charter. What we can say with confidence, however, is that Pip's
work as a merchant of imported goods answers the pressing question, 'Where does it come
from?' Magwitch's return provoked a crisis of origins, revising the paternity of all of Pip's
property, including Estella, and unsettling the social hierarchies in which Pip had such faith. If
Magwitch shows his 'son' that portable objects, like orphans, are haunted by invisible histories,
Pip attempts an exorcism. Having been romanced and duped by anonymous riches, he becomes
an historian of wealth, documenting the movement of commodities from colony to London shop
and following every stage of their mobile careers on paper and in person. Peter Carey's Jack
Maggs also undertakes to exorcise the ghost from the goods, although Carey's phantoms are of
quite a different sort.

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The Phantom Son
Jack Maggs is not a slavish rewriting of Great Expectations, and it begins with the convict's
return to London rather than with his first encounter with the brave orphan Henry Phipps. Carey
never situates Maggs and Phipps in a graveyard, and yet the fore-conceit of his novel is that
when Pip and Magwitch meet among tombstones it is the boy rather than the man who is a ghost.
As a 'bolter from New South Wales' (96) Maggs may be socially dead and face execution if
discovered, but it is the man he calls 'son,' Henry Phipps, who becomes the polymorphous
Phantom and skirts the perimeter of the novel as a hunted figure, yielding centre stage to his
richly embodied and compassionately imagined benefactor. If we may trace all of Pip's ghostly
dreams, hallucinations and shadows to their inaugural 'father,' the convict who arose from the
grave, then every version of Maggs's tormenting Phantom will lead him to his 'son.' But between
Maggs and his Phantom Carey interposes a third man, the writer Tobias Oates, who is clearly a
rather unflattering version of Charles Dickens himself. It is the writer who names and, arguably,
invents the Phantom in the course of treating Maggs's tic douloureux with 'animal magnetism,' a
form of therapeutic hypnotism that occupied the fringes of mid-nineteenth century psychiatry
and red the Victorian appetite for news of the spirit world. By the late 1830s Dickens was a
student of mesmerism (Kaplan 28); by 1844 he was an avid practitioner (Kaplan 71). Fred
Kaplan contends that Dickens's interest in magnetism was a natural outgrowth of his gift for
creating fictional characters, for both depended on control and invention and allowed him to
explore the origins of individual identity (71). (8)
Tobias Oales's fascination with mesmerism is in some measure consistent with Dickens's own, as
is Oates's tendency to appraise his manuscripts, and even his ideas, as commodities. Before we
condemn Oates as a base materialist, it is worth listening to Andrew Miller, who points out that
the publication of Dickens's early novels in serial form 'marked the emergence of new
professional authors who retained a greater degree of control over their work (most importantly,
by controlling copyright) while, simultaneously and consequently, being more vulnerable to
economic loss' (8). Miller argues that this shift turned nineteenth-century novelists into
'producers within a fully capitalist mode of production and ma[d]e them especially attentive to
the consequences of commodity production and exchange within their novels' (9). If, as Miller
claims, the changing economics of publishing helped to shape the Victorian novel's thematic
focus on the creation and circulation of goods, then Tobias Oates both incarnates the
ambivalence of Dickens's need to censure as well as profit by capitalista, and reflects the central
importance of portable property within the mercantile world of Great Expectations. (9) In Jack
Maggs, however, Henry Phipps knows from childhood that Maggs is his benefactor and the
owner of the house at 27 Great Queen Street. The convict's return is infelicitous, but it is not a
surprise. In fact, Maggs is less interested in owning a 'brought-up London gentleman' (Dickens
317) than in owning his own story, because in the world of Carey's novel the contents of the
mind are commodities of greater economic and social value than the contents of any house, no
matter how well appointed.
The first time that Jack Maggs meets Tobias Oates he recognises the celebrated author as a thief.
In disguise as a footman in the household of Percy Buckle, a grocer turned into a gentleman by
an unexpected inheritance, Maggs collapses in agony while serving dinner and Oates rushes to

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his aid, offering a diagnosis--tic douloureux--and a remedy. When he awakens, Maggs learns that
he has responded freely to Oates's questions under hypnosis. The convict is terrified that he has
revealed his identity, and he understands Oates's actions as a violation of the laws of exchange,
insisting that he has been 'burgled, plundered' (36), and that the writer is the 'man who had
robbed him' (39). He confronts Oates, and the two men negotiate a 'bargain' (55) that will profit
them both: Maggs agrees to be mesmerised every day for two weeks, and Oates agrees to
introduce him to a 'Thief Taker' named Wilfred Partridge who may be able to find Henry Phipps.
Oates barters for access to the 'treasure house' (96) of Maggs's memory in the same way that he
pays Londoners to tell him their stories (48-49), which he transforms into amusing sketches and
sells by the word. Oates's spacious mind houses his literary ambition to 'topple Thackeray
himself (50) as well as his constant preoccupation with cash: the margins of his notebooks are
'marked with calculations headed [pounds sterling]-s-d' (142) because in effect the manuscript is
already money. In the case of Oates's planned novel, The Death of Jack Maggs, the idea itself is
a saleable commodity. Oates estimates the value of his inspiration 'like a pawnbroker' studying a
jewel, and wonders if he might 'sell the copyright of such a work, and sell it entire, today, with
not a word yet written' (216). When Maggs finally realises that Oates has mesmerised him not as
a scientist or healer, but as a looter, he calls him a 'thief' (305), and the epithet is as much an
economic fact as a metaphor.
Oates steals Maggs's memories of his miserable childhood in London, where he was trained as a
professional burglar, and of New South Wales, where he suffered the cat o' nine tails and the
triangle. The Phantom is the pretext for Oates's crime. The writer persuades Maggs that his
physical pain is caused by a 'creature who wishes [him] harm, who lives within [him] like a
worm lives in the belly of a pig' (52-53) and that as a mesmerist he is capable of exorcising this
malefactor. Perhaps eviction is the fairer word, because Maggs's Phantom always lurks in the
corners of rooms like an intruder. In fact, theft is the metaphor that organises Oates's second
session with Maggs, for when he instructs the convict to imagine himself protected from the
ghost by a thick wall, the 'Somnambulist' refuses to picture himself in a 'prison' (56) and instead
proposes a 'house.' Oates approves, and the prison becomes a 'good sturdy house with double
walls of London brick'--an edifice very much like Maggs's property on Great Queen Street--that
is haunted not only by the Phantom, who peers in through a window because the door is locked
(58), but by a group of 'Gentlemen ... and ladies' (57) who are 'spying' and rifling through
drawers because they plan to take the house away from its uncouth owner. The image of
intrusion and burglary is a multivalent one, borrowing elements from Maggs's own childhood as
a trained raider of great houses, from his fear that he will lose 27 Great Queen Street to the
Crown if discovered in London, from his intuition that Oates is entering his mind to pilfer his
valuable secrets, and perhaps, given Oates's position as the director of this psychic drama, from
the mesmerist's own tenuous social position as an upstart gentleman and the owner of a home
whose escalating bills he cannot pay.
Tobias Oates will not realise until much later in the novel that the Phantom is his own invention,
"a personification of pain that he had planted in the other's mind' (221). Dickens reached this
very conclusion in the course of his own experiments with therapeutic mesmerism. In 1845 he
named the 'bad spirit' (Kaplan 80) that tormented his patient the 'Phantom' (Kaplan 85), even as
he speculated that the ghost was his own imaginative creation. In fact, Dickens came to see his

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patient, a Madame de la Rue, as well as her dark shadow, as 'extensions of him' (Kaplan 90),
hybrid creatures fathered rather than discovered by the novelist's talent for suggestion. By the
time Oates acknowledges that the Phantom is his son of sorts, he is already in thrall to the spirit,
who has taken on independent life in Maggs's increasingly volatile and desperate consciousness.
The idea that '[b]loody instructions, ... being taught, return / To plague th'inventor' (Macbeth I,
vii, 9-10) is one of Carey's persistent obsessions--it is the central premise, for example, of his
recent My Life as a Fake--which is why Maggs twice paraphrases the opening lines of the
soliloquy in which Macbeth weighs the merits and consequences of murdering Duncan to satisfy
the prophesy of the weird sisters: 'If 'twere done, 'twere best done quickly ...' (49, 158). (10) In
the name of ambition Macbeth does kill Duncan, and his compound crimes return as ghosts and
hallucinations. In the name of their own social ambitions, Tobias Oates and Jack Maggs both
become inventors, and each is tormented by the return of his 'instructions', which converge in the
malevolent figure of the Phantom.
Although we will learn that Maggs's facial tic repeats and preserves the wound inflicted upon his
aborted son (222-23), the personification of his pain is not a murdered infant but a 'soldier of the
King' in the penal colony of New South Wales (222). When Maggs falls asleep in the house he
bought and furnished for Henry Phipps, the soldier appears to him in the 'dim drawing room' of
his dream (122). Stepping out of the shadows in a 'uniform made to protect the King himself'
(122), the ghost conducts Maggs to Moreton Bay, where he survived ruthless floggings by
casting his mind back to England and 'constructing piece by piece' the 'kind and beautiful
interior' of a house in Kensington that he robbed as a child (350). The house at 27 Great Queen
Street is Maggs's re-creation of that dwelling, but its sanctuary is violated by an apparition who
leads him back to the place of torture that he sought to escape, spiriting the memory of Australia
into the very centre of Maggs's gracious London drawing room. Like Dickens's Abel Magwitch,
Maggs survived the horrors of transportation by sealing his mind against Australia and sending
his imagination and his money back to England, but unlike Magwitch, Maggs returns to find that
the gentleman he created is not at home. Maggs does not tarry to admire the goods that fill his
'son's' rooms. The only objects that preoccupy him are representations: the handwritten
manuscript in which he tells Phipps the story of his cruel childhood; and the 'extravagantly
framed enamel miniature' (271) that depicts an 'exceedingly well-bred young man in a blue coat'
whom Maggs believes to be 'Mr Henry Phipps, Esquire' (272).
Maggs carries both of these portraits with him when he travels across England with Tobias Oates
to meet Wilfred Partridge, the Thief Taker who is himself a thief and a fraud. In the course of the
journey, Oates loses control over the man who was once his 'subject' (201), as a patient and as
the central character in a projected novel whose copyright has already been sol& The author
finds himself hustled across the country against his will and cast as a powerless "character' (306)
in Maggs's rival story. Moreover, the meeting with the Thief Taker goes badly: Partridge
attempts to steal the enamel miniature for its opulent frame, and Maggs slits the man's throat to
recover his 'boy' (285). For Maggs, Phipps is the portrait. To pocket the image is literally to steal
the son (285). Yet when Oates examines the miniature he discovers that it is a copy of Richard
Cosway's portrait of King George IV, which presented the sovereign 'dressed as a commoner' in
a 'plain blue jacket, not the uniform of the Prince of Wales Light Dragoons' (285). The man
Maggs believes to be his son is not only dead, for George IV died in 1830, but the former King

"+

of England in disguise. (11) Oates judges it 'kindest' (and perhaps safest) to 'let the fraud remain'
(285), but it is a fertile and telling mistake. The spirited housemaid Mercy Larkin, who will
become Maggs's wife, insists that to be flogged by a 'soldier of the King' is in fact to be lashed
by the King himself (346), for every man in the military draws his authority, like his salary, from
the monarch whose interests he serves. This is an economic truth that Henry Phipps understands.
Desperate to sever his connection with Maggs, he enlists as a subaltern in the 57th Foot
Regiment--the very regiment that tortured Maggs in Moreton Bay--and announces that he has
acquired 'a new benefactor' (321), not nearly as generous as the last, but of unimpeachable social
credentials: namely 'His Majesty,' the reigning King William IV.
Thus when Maggs finally meets his gentleman, in the front hallway of 27 Great Queen Street, he
'beheld his nightmare: long straight nose, fair hair, brutal dreadful uniform of the 57th Foot
Regiment' (351). (12) Maggs does not recognise his 'son'; in the 'spectral figure' that peers at him
down the barrel of a gun he sees the 'Phantom' who has at last broken the 'locks' and entered his
house (351). Following an obscure legal precedent pointed out to him by Percy Buckle, Phipps
hopes that by shooting the convict as an intruder he will secure ownership of his house and all its
contents. The son becomes the avenging phantom who turns his benefactor from proprietor into
thief, who accepts Australian wealth but loathes the Australian, who does not protect his 'father'
from arrest of hear his tale with sympathy but who confronts him as an English officer of the law
and as an executioner. Unlike Magwitch, Maggs provokes no revelation about the source of
Phipps's property. Instead, it is the benefactor who has traced a 'forged' genealogy and is aghast
to learn that the King is the true father of his 'son.' The convict does not explicitly connect the
Phantom with the enamel miniature that he guards as though it were the body of his child, but it
is clear to the reader that in mistaking a monarch for Henry Phipps Maggs possesses the
dangerous ambition of Macbeth himself, who wanted not only to be king, but, more importantly,
to be the father of kings. (13) Dickens's Magwitch claimed 'some part' (311) in Pip's household
goods; Carey's Maggs would claim all of England and every object in it. But Maggs's treasured
portrait portrayed a 'son' who was already a phantom, in addition to being a fraud.
Henry Phipps's return to 27 Great Queen Street is an exorcism and an eviction. He drives his
own ghost from Maggs's mind, for the Australian gives up his English son and his English house
and returns home without fear that he will meet the exterior embodiment of the Phantom.
England, not Australia, turns out to be the haunted land. England is the Hades of vengeful spirits.
In the end Maggs abandons the figures represented in the miniature portrait--the layered image of
the gentleman and the King--and grasps instead the lockets of hair that he carries in his pocket to
remember his Australian-born sons, choosing the quick over the dead, flesh and blood over the
false image. If Great Expectations discovers the shadow of the gibbet in the gentleman's living
room, Jack Maggs proposes that writing itself is a series of sinister trades, of thefls, swindles,
and unjust exchanges, and the writer a pawnbroker who buys misery low and sells high. Carey's
novel is a hostile guest indeed, entering Charles Dickens's literary home with the blend of desire
and malice that disinters avenging phantoms, and seeking, like the ghosts we have met, to reveal
how truth has been forged.
WORKS CITED

""

Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. New York: Vintage, 1998.
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Durfourmantelle. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites
Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. The Epic of Australia's Founding. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1987.
Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Kaplan, Fred. Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction. Princeton, N J: Princeton
UP, 1975.
Koval, Ramona. 'The Unexamined Life.' Meanjin 56.3-4 (1997): 667-82.
Lansbury, Coral. Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English
Literature. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P, 1970.
Miller, Andrew H. Novels behind Glass. Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969.
Moynahan, Julian. 'The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations.' Essays in Criticism 10
(1960): 60-79.
Neal, David. The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales.
Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1991.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. Edward Hubbler. Signet
Classic Shakespeare. New York: The New American Library, 1963.
--. Macbeth. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Arden Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1989.
(1) Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality. The footnote to this sentence
explains that the 'Latin hostis means guest but also enemy' (157).
(2) Throughout the play's opening scene, Horatio orders the spirit to 'speak' at least six times (I,i,
49, 51, 129, 132, 135, 139). Similarly, Hamlet asks his father's phantom, 'Say, why is this?
Wherefore? What should we do?' (I,iv,57) and then enjoins the spectre to 'Speak' (I,v, 6).

"#

(3) 'What are these, /.../ That look not like th'inhabitants o'th'earth, / And yet are on't? Live you?
or are you aught / That man may question?' marvels Banquo (I,iii,39-43). 'Speak, if you can:--
what are you?" demands Macbeth (I,iii,47).
(4) See Coral Lansbury 10. Historians David Neal and Robert Hughes also argue that
transportation was a form of social death. See Hughes 461 and Neal 6.
(5) In the introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said draws on Hughes's The Fatal
Shore to argue that in the character of Magwitch, Dickens 'knotted together several strands in the
English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but
they could hardly, in the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal
sense, but what they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders' (qtd in Said xv). By
likening Magwitch to a ghost, Dickens presents his exile in the most radical terms imaginable.
(6) In her explanatory notes to the Oxford edition of Dicken's novel Margaret Cardwell writes
that the 'avenging phantom' is a facetious reference to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the
monster tries to destroy its creator, There is no reason, however, not lo connect Pip's comical
servant-phantom with the other ghosts within Great Expectations, including that of King Hamlet.
(7) It is worth noting that Sydney Smith, whose characterization of Australia as a pro-industrial
Arcadia where England's working classes might prosper influenced Dickens's own advocacy of
free emigration to the colony, was scandalised by the wealth of some former convicts. As Coral
Lansbury writes, '[s]uch sudden acquisition of riches did not point to reform but to a sharpening
and refinement of those talents which had brought them to sentence in England' (22-23). In other
words, wealth was a testament not to honest labour but to heightened and continued criminality,
a prejudice that contributes to Pip's revulsion for Magwitch's money. Lansbury argues that in
Great Expectations anyone who despised money "gouged ... from the soil of Australia' might
'have been a gentleman in the opinion of society, but in Dickens's book he was damned as a prig
and a fool' (145).
(8) Carey' states that he based Oates's interest in magnetism on Dickens's own involvement in the
field. See Ramona Koval 671.
(9) For a discussion of Dickens's desire to expose the labour hidden by the commodity fetish see
Andrew H. Miller 121, 123. 151, 157.
(10) In his use of Macbeth Carey also pays a debt to Dickens, who alludes to the play in Great
Expectations, particularly in his description of Molly, Estella's mother and Magwitch's wife
(210). In addition, Jaggers's obsessive handwashing deliberately recalls Lady Macbeth's guilty
compulsion.
(11) George IV was succeeded by William IV, whose brief reign ended on June 20, 1837 with
the coronation of Princess Victoria.

"$

(12) I thank one of the anonymous readers of this paper for pointing out the legendary brutality
of Captain Patrick Logan of the 57th Regiment, who was the commandant of Moreton Bay from
1826 until his murder in 1830. While mesmerised, Maggs mentions Logan (94) just before Oates
persuades him to remove his shirt and show his back, whose 'sea of scars, of ripped and tortured
skin' (95) is vivid testimony to the sadism practiced under Logan's rule. Later, Maggs dreams
that Logan/the Phantom has ordered that he be lashed to the bone (123). For a description of
Captain Logan's infamous career at Moreton Bay, sec Hughes 443-51.
(13) Macbeth murders Banquo because the weird sisters prophesied that whereas Macbeth would
become king, Banquo was destined to 'get kings' (I, iii, 67).
Gale Document Number:A139307934