ABSTRACT
As much as it harks back to Dickens and the carnivalesque world of his fiction, with its urban realism and interpenetration o f competing discourses, Jack Maggs tells a distinctly Aussie story: for, as Carey put it, “it is such an Aussie story that this person who has been brutalized by the British ruling class should then wish to have as his son an English gentleman, and that no matter what pains he has, what torture he has suffered, that would be what he would want” (“Interview” 2) While hoping that this story reflects “the Australia of the past, not the Australia of the future,” Carey also concedes the impossibility o f fully knowing the past (2). His Dickensian pastiche feels to Carey like “a science fiction of the past in a way. None of us has been there. We have a lot o f received opinion and it s intimidating to write because there are all these experts, but we don’t really know” (2).
