ABSTRACT
Dickens could not make up his mind to go to Australia, al though a proposed reading tour promised to be lucrative. His correspondence chronicles the histoiy of this long (in)decision:
If there were reasonable promise, I could make up my mind to go to Australia and get money. (Letter to John Forster, 22 October 1862)
I cannot resolve altogether to abandon the idea, and yet it is immensely difficult to resolve to pursue it. (Letter to R. H. Horne, 3 November 1862)
As to me, I have decided nothing; though I rather think the balance is slightly turning in my mind against Australia. (Letter to Mrs. Heniy Austin, 4 December 1862)
I think (I cannot at present be quite sure) that I shall NO T GO to Australia. (Letter to Mrs. Henry Austin, 20 December 1863)
I have had ambassadors, well backed with money, from Australia. But I couldn’t make up my mind to go. (Letter to Captain E. E. Morgan, 6 July 1863)1
Dickens did not, in the end, go to Australia, but he sent many others on that trip, perhaps in some sense in his stead. He sent Abel Magwitch and Wilkins Micawber, who mended their ways and got rich; he plotted the transportation of Wackford Squeers of Nicholas Nickleby and the servant boy of David and Dora Cop perfield; he dispatched two of his many sons-Alfred Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens-to be sheep farm ers in the bush; and he shipped off many (hopefully) reformed prostitutes from the home for homeless women, Urania Cot tage, he ran with Angela Burdett-Coutts, to remake their lives in Australia; he sent off fictional women in need of reform as well: Little Em’ly and Martha Endell “are saved from the usual ignominious death dealt to fallen women and are allowed to im migrate to Australia where they lead happy, or at least fulfilling, lives.”2 Dickens could not go, even though Magwitch and his son Alfred Tennyson did very well there, making money at a rate they could not have begun to approximate at home. In the indecision recorded in Dickens’s letters, Australia beckons and threatens: a source of potential wealth, it seems also to be a source of repressed horror. This horror circulates in Great Expectations in many forms, including domestic abuse, state violence, slavery, and cannibalism. I argue that there is a particularly overwhelming horror that cannot be named but only encoded fetishistically in the most apparently negligible of details. The “negligible” (un interpretable, insignificant, nonsymbolic) detail on which this chapter focuses is “Negro head” tobacco; the horror in question is Aboriginal genocide in Victorian Australia.
