Jack Maggs was published by University of Queensland Press in 1997. The novel is a postcolonial reimagining of Dickens’s Great Expectations, told from the perspective of the convict. Jack Maggs, an Australian ex-convict, returns illegally to London to find Henry Phipps, the young gentleman he has been secretly supporting. But Maggs is intercepted by Tobias Oates, a young novelist (transparently modeled on Dickens), who recognizes in Maggs’s story the raw material for a great novel and begins to extract it — by mesmerism, by manipulation, by the writer’s ruthless appropriation of other people’s experience.
The novel asked a question that Dickens never did: who owns the story of the convict — the convict himself, or the empire that transported him and the literary culture that turned his suffering into entertainment?
Collecting Jack Maggs
First edition (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1997): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Australian first edition, fine in jacket: $50–$125
- UK first edition (Faber): $25–$60
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
Dickens Rewritten
Jack Maggs (1997) retells the story of Great Expectations from the convict’s perspective. Maggs (Carey’s Magwitch) returns illegally from Australia to Victorian London to find the young gentleman he has been secretly supporting. Carey’s innovation is to make the convict the protagonist and the Dickens figure — here a young novelist named Tobias Oates — the antagonist, a literary vampire who exploits Maggs’s story for his fiction. The novel is a postcolonial argument: Australia reclaiming its narrative from the imperial metropolis.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Carey influenced by Dickens? Deeply. Carey shares Dickens’s love of grotesque characters, elaborate plotting, and vivid physical description. Jack Maggs and Oscar and Lucinda are explicitly in dialogue with Dickens, and Carey has called Dickens the greatest novelist in the English language.