Vagrant, Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations.

Keywords:

• Cannibalism
• vagrancy
• Charles Dickens
• Great Expectations
• homeless
• homelessness
• hunger

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Matthew Beaumont who read draft versions of this article and gave me valuable feedback and encouragement. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees for the Journal of Victorian Culture whose thoughtful advice has helped shape this article into its final form.

Notes

1. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society, 2nd revised edn (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 36–37, 45–46; John Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861, ed. by Anthony S. Wohl (London: J. M. Dent, 1986), p. 16.

2. Hollingshead, Ragged London, pp. 59, 16.

3. ‘The Poor and the Rich – Frightful Sufferings of the Working Classes’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 13 January 1861, p. 8.

4. Evening Mail, 21 December 1860, p. 4.

5. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. by Charlotte Mitchell (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 4. Future references will be given in the text.

6. Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 473, 486–87.

7. Hollingshead, Ragged London, p. 5. Hollingshead published ‘A New Chamber of Horrors’ in All the Year Round (2 March 1861); it was later incorporated into Hollingshead’s Ragged London.

8. Quoted in Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 488.

9. ‘The Homeless Poor’, Saturday Review, 21 November 1863, pp. 664–65 (p. 665).

10. ‘Refused Admittance’, London City Press, 14 April 1860, p. 4.

11. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings, ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), pp. 47–49.

12. George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, ed. by Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 35–78 (p. 72).

13. Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994), p. 14.

14. Goldie Morgentaler, ‘Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 38.4 (Autumn 1998), 707–21 (p. 718); Deborah Wynne, ‘“We were unhealthy and unsafe”: Dickens’ Great Expectations and All the Year Round’s Anxiety Stories’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 5.1 (March 2000), 45–59 (p. 55).

15. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 182. See also Michael Parrish Lee, The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 75–106.

16. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work, 4 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1967), III, p. 370.

17. Lorie Charlesworth, Welfare's Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009), pp. 52–59, 171.

18. Hollingshead, Ragged London, p. 43.

19. ‘The Houseless Poor’, Temple Bar, January 1861, 225–29 (p. 228).

20. James Greenwood, The Seven Curses of London, ed. by Jeffrey Richards (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 6.

21. Matthew Beaumont, ‘Heathcliff’s Great Hunger: The Cannibal Other in Wuthering Heights’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 9.2 (June 2004), 137–63 (p. 154).

22. John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 22, 24.

23. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, ed. by Peter Washington, Everyman edn (Pössneck: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 760–61.

24. Carey, The Violent Effigy, p. 22.

25. Jen Hill, White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 119.

26. Quoted by Charles Dickens, ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’, Household Words, 2 December 1854, 361–65 (p. 361).

27. Quoted by Ian R. Stone, ‘‘‘The contents of the kettles”: Charles Dickens, John Rae and Cannibalism on the 1845 Franklin Expedition’, Dickensian, 83 (Spring 1987), 6–16 (p. 8). Stone provides a concise but thorough narrative of the controversy between Dickens and Rae. For an incisive and critical account of the conflict, see Hill, White Horizon, pp. 117–29.

28. Angus Easson, ‘From Terror to Terror: Dickens, Carlyle and Cannibalism’, in Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. by Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 96–111 (p. 98); Dickens, ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’, p. 362.

29. Dickens, ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’, pp. 363, 361; Hill, White Horizon, p. 121.

30. Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 431.

31. Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, in The Wreck of the ‘Golden Mary’, ed. by Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski (London: Hesperus Press, 2006), pp. 3–42 (p. 27).

32. Charles Dickens, ‘The Long Voyage’, Household Words, 31 December 1853, 409–12 (p. 409).

33. Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 66.

34. Stone, Night Side of Dickens, p. 13.

35. Matthew. 26.11.

36. Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 476.

37. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. by A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 112, 119–20, 118–19.

38. Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals, p. 66.

39. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Downing Street’, in Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets, ed. by M. K. Goldberg and J. P. Seigel (Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the Humanities, 1983), pp. 109–58 (p. 119).

40. M. K. Goldberg and J. P. Seigel, ‘Introduction’, in Carlyle’s Latter–Day Pamphlets, ed. by M. K. Goldberg and J. P. Seigel, pp. xix–lxv (pp. xx–xxii).

41. See Easson ‘From Terror to Terror’ for an account of Carlyle’s equation between cannibalism and political anarchy, and how it influenced Dickens during the 1850s.

42. Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 133–34.

43. Carlyle, ‘Downing Street’, p. 157.

44. Peter Hulme, ‘Introduction: The Cannibal Scene’, in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–38 (p. 3); also Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals, pp. 29–30.

45. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, p. 120.

46. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 3 vols (London: The Folio Society, 1989), III, p. 283.

47. Charles Dickens, ‘Night Walks’, Charles Dickens on London (London: Hesperus, 2010), pp. 71–80 (p. 78).

48. Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (London: Verso, 2015), p. 371, 370–72.

49. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, p. 344.

50. Stone, Night Side of Dickens, pp. 126–27.

51. James E. Marlow, ‘English Cannibalism: Dickens after 1859’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 23.4 (Autumn 1983), 647–66 (p. 662).

52. Gail Turley Houston, Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dickens’s Novels (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 162–66.

53. Charles Kingsley, ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’, in Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1885), pp. lxiii–lxxxvii (pp. lxviii–lxix).

54. Carey, The Violent Effigy, p. 24.

55. Houston, Consuming Fictions, p. 165.

56. Kate Flint, ‘Origins, Species and Great Expectations’, in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. by David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 152–74 (p. 158).

57. Marlow, ‘English Cannibalism’, p. 661.

58. Beaumont, ‘Heathcliff’s Great Hunger’, p. 140.

59. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 33.

60. Charles Dickens, ‘Dickens’s Unpublished Introduction of 1842’, in American Notes for General Circulation, ed. by Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 275–77 (pp. 276–77).

61. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. by Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 267.