Discovering New Pasts: Victorian Legacies in the Postcolonial Worlds of Jack Maggs and Mister Pip

Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, two recent works that “write back” to Great Expectations, demonstrate how contemporary novelists can “muck around with Dickens” to express postcolonial themes. This paper considers three aspects of their storytelling: references to abortion in Jack Maggs, which eschew contemporary ethical concerns to convey Carey’s postcolonial critique; metafictive aspects of Carey’s portrayal of the character Tobias Oates, with his many parallels to Dickens; and Jones’s focus in Mister Pip on acts of reading and misreading the Victorian story. Considering these elements of the novels makes us more attentive to how writers and readers reinvest meaning in Victorian classics to suit our own cultural needs.