Frederic W. Pailthorpe's realisation of the novel's initiating incident: The Stranger in the Churchyard (1885).

Abel Magwitch appears in the opening pages of Dickens's Great Expectations as a ragged, starving convict who has fled from a transportation holding-vessel on the Medway. In the churchyard of a Kent village, he encounters the local blacksmith's brother-in-law, six-year-old Pip (Philip Pirrip), who supplies him with food and a file to help further his escape. At this point in the narrative Magwitch is a terrifying figure whom the narrator (the mature Pip) compares to a hunted animal. Yet he becomes something of a step-father to Pip: from this dramatic scene onwards, the boy's life is inextricably bound to that of the felon. As for Magwitch, his rags-to-riches evolution, which begins in Australia, smacks of Samuel Smiles' doctrine of Self-Help (1859).

Felix Octavius Carr Darley's frontispiece for the second volume of the Sheldon & C. (New York) two-volume edition: The Convict's Return.

Forty-three-year-old Magwitch is at his nadir when the party of soldiers, accompanied by Joe the blacksmith and Pip, re-apprehends him on the marshes. Then, having been transported to Australia in accordance with his original sentence, Magwitch doubly reinvents himself, becoming both a prosperous sheep-rancher and Pip's secret sponsor: from the other side of the world, he succeeds in creating a gentleman out of the labouring boy who reluctantly assisted him in the churchyard. That boy perhaps represents to Magwitch an image of himself as a neglected orphan; his advancement may be part of the ex-convict's revenge against the class system. Since Magwitch was "transported for life," his return to England to see how the boy has progressed inevitably places him in grave danger. Re-apprehended and tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of Compeyson, his former criminal associate, he dies in the infirmary of Newgate Prison, tended by the boy whom he has made a gentleman.

A Possible Chronology for Abel Magwitch, Escaped Felon and Australian Rancher: 1760-1860

xxx xxx xxx xxx

Related Materials

Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

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_______. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition.16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. XIII.

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_______. Great Expectations. The Gadshill Edition. Illustrated by Charles Green. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897-1908.

_______. Great Expectations. "With 28 Original Plates by Harry Furniss." Volume 14 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.

Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. "Ch. 33, Great Expectations." Charles Dickens. Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012. San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2011. Pp. 102-103.

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Created 2 December 2021