SOURCE: Hassall, Anthony J. “A Tale of Two Countries: Jack Maggs and Peter Carey's Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 2 (October 1997): 128-35.

In the following essay, Hassall examines the differences between Jack Maggs's characterization in Jack Maggs with the character of Magwitch in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.

‘And did you like Dickens at the end of it?’ ‘I never did like or dislike him … All I wanted to do was understand him.’ 

(Ackroyd 896)

‘You are planning to kill me, I know that …’ ‘Not you, Jack, a character who bears your name …’ ‘You are just a character to me too, Toby.’ 

(Carey, Jack Maggs 332)

1: Reinventing Magwitch

Peter Carey has generally preferred to fictionalise Australia at a remove, to re-imagine it, shape-shifted out of its present appearance by science fiction transformations, or by movements out of present time. The mirror his fiction holds up to late-twentieth-century Australia and its international context...