SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Bleak House.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (1 February 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder describes Jack Maggs as a brilliantly written novel, likening Carey's text to a work Charles Dickens might have written if he were not constrained by the social mores of the nineteenth-century.

A former convict, deported to Australia and prospering there, returns illegally to England in the 1830s to present himself to the young recipient of his mysterious benefactions. It must be Magwitch, of course, Pip's patron in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. It must be, that is, except that it is Maggs, protagonist of Peter Carey's new novel [Jack Maggs].

Like Magwitch, Jack Maggs moves amid a swirl of sights, smells, passions and plots that limn a time of radical British expansion and grim misery. He too must conceal himself for fear of hanging. He too finds the child he idealized at a...