Australia in the Dickensian Imagination

The criminal exile- Magwitch a mere penniless orphan who learns to behave as if entitled, a gentleman the convicts largess Lukacs-- critical realist dickens?? The issue of Pips class Later realist?? about classlessness?? Lukacs on Dickens.. both critical and social.. Pg 111 Dickens- the insider of the outside.. insider in london.. outsider in Australia Magwitchs generosity.. inheritance or gift?? Pip is consisitently disenfranchised.. by this benefactors/family But Dickens positioned at a moment in English social history defined by the rise of an industrial elite, the end of tariffs such as the Corn Laws that protected a landed aristocracy, and the beginning of wholesale political reforms that would both extend the franchise to un-propertied classes and extend the right to own (and hence inherit and bequeath) Use of the Frankensteinian myth Why is the money soiled.. when he realizes that Magwitch was his benefactor?? The money itself comes to seem almost a burden, as Pip winds up longing for a time before desire entered his life, before his pretensions to wealth and culture had ever been stimulated

were an irreducible part of what Herbert Spencer, in the year Great Expectations appeared, called the social organism. Max Weber had called the iron cage of property relations under capitalism an order . . . now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. 11 It is misleading to contrast the graver mood of Great Expectations with the lighter mood of David Copperfielda nd use in evidence the differenta ttitudes towards Australia, 'a Utopia for Mr. Peggotty and the Micawbers ... a place of hard exile for Magwitch' (p. I47). The point should not be made without allowing for the difference of imagined time between the two novels. David Copperfielde nds at the time of writing, a time when families were being helped and encouraged by the Family Loan Colonization Society to begin a new life in Australia; Great Expectations belongs to the period 1807-26 (see Mary Edminson, 'The Date of the Action in Great Expectations', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, June 1958) when Australia was still a convict colony. Magwitch returns only to die.. there was an exit to Aus but no entry back to GB The principle characters have no freedom they are constantly instructed.. the iron cage of property relations under capitalism?? The very plot of Great Expectations relies on wealth produced by colonial Victorian labor practices in which both convicts and Aboriginals are something less than free; but of the two groups-convicts and Aboriginals-only one group can find representation. Movement from GE to DC The changing Australian Landscape..