ABSTRACT
Retracing Pip’s journeys, Jack Maggs repeats the topography of Great Expectations, the marsh country, London and its dirtiness - its ‘soot’ (p. 38), ‘mud’ (p. 60), ‘smuts’ (p. 61). London Bridge, St Paul’s, Newgate reappear as landmarks which are emblematic4 o f the town but also o f a particular social system, Newgate standing for the repressive dimension o f English society. If Carey cites Blackfriars, for instance, he also introduces a novelty4 with toponyms such as Cecil Street, Great Queen Street hinting at the social division symbolized by the East End and the West End (Disraeli saw Britain as ‘two nations’ within one). However, from his vantage-point o f an egalitarian society - or at least from the ideal vision o f a classless Australian society5 - he underlines a
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change which heralds the disruption o f the established social framework with the decadence o f the aristocracy and the emergence o f new sections o f the population who had to struggle for recognition and representation:
Sending his protagonist on the road, like Dickens referring to the picaresque tradition, Carey describes Jack Maggs travelling in a coach towards Gloucester and committing a murder in an inn, in an act o f selfdefence against a man who attempted to rob him o f the portrait o f his son that has come to represent the son himself.1 This attempted robbery o f the cherished portrait is an allusion to the ‘rape o f the lock’ in Pope’s ‘HeroiComical poem’,2 the lock being transformed into the portrait. Besides, the scene involving Carey’s hero and the villain Partridge - a reminder o f Magwitch’s Compeyson and o f Orlick - further testifies to Carey’s search into the many layers o f the English literary heritage. Summoning Fielding’s intertext ( Tom Jones), Carey, the magic realist, crosses the frontier of the real even further (the portrait is the son),3 and adds a playful gothic element to the mock-heroic mood with the gory detail o f the actual murder: Jack Maggs slits Partridge’s throat (p. 253) whereas Jones’s sword is only symbolically ‘stained with the blood o f his enemies’.4
