'You’re a dead man if they find you.
'Step back in time to 19th-century London, where intrigue and mystery mix in the world premiere of Jack Maggs. Peter Carey’s best-selling and Miles Franklin Award-winning “reworking” of Charles Dickens’ canonical novel Great Expectations, Jack Maggs comes alive on stage in a sweeping new adaptation by South Australian playwright Samuel Adamson, renowned for his successes at England’s National Theatre with Southwark Fair and The Light Princess with Tori Amos.
'The story follows the enigmatic ex-convict Jack Maggs (Carey’s version of Magwitch) returning to London from Australia and embarking on a relentless quest to find his ‘son’ Henry Phipps, who has mysteriously disappeared. Maggs soon becomes entangled in the web of Phipps’ neighbour, Percy Buckle and his bizarre household, where he makes a deal with young novelist and “mesmerist” Tobias Oates (or is it Charles Dickens himself?) to find Phipps. Oates has other plans though, and in Maggs, might just find the perfect inspiration for his new novel.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication: For Alison
Epigraph:
Think of yourself as a magnet, with your arms and especially your hands as the two poles. Touch the patient by placing one hand on his back and the other, in opposition, on his stomach. Then imagine magnetic fluid circulating from one hand to the other…
Question: Should one vary this position?
Answer: Yes, you can place one hand on the head without moving the other, always continuing to maintain the same attention and having the same will to do good…
Question: What is an indication that a patient is susceptible to somnambulism?
Answer: When, during magnetisation of a patient, one notices that he experiences a numbness or light spasms accompanied by nervous shaking. Then if the eyes close, you should lightly rub them and the two eyebrows with your thumbs to prevent blinking…
Question: Are there different degrees of somnambulism?
Answer: Yes. Sometimes you can only produce drowsiness in a patient. Sometimes the effect of magnetism is to cause the eyes to close so the patient cannot open them; if he is aware of everything around him he is not completely in the magnetic state…
Question: How does one bring a patient out of a magnetic state?
Answer: …it is by an act of your will that you awaken him.
Question: You mean you only need to will him to open his eyes in order to awaken him? Answer: This is the principal operation. After that, in order to connect your idea to its object, you might lightly rub his eyes, while willing that he open them; and the affect never fails to occur.
– Du magnetisme animal (1820) by Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puysegur
'Read together or as stand-alone pieces, the thirteen poems offered below are conceived as a creative-critical response to two novels, a Victorian one, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), and its neo-Victorian counterpart, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997). Rather than simply inspired by these novels, the poems are the result of a critical reading of both Carey’s reimagining of Dickens’s great English novel and the source text itself. As such they implicitly engage with Carey’s critics, who have almost unanimously analysed Jack Maggs from a postcolonial perspective, thereby largely ignoring the rewriting of the women characters. Scholars have systematically pointed out how Dickens’s orphan Pip is rewritten by Carey as Henry Phipps, the Australian convict Abel Magwitch as Jack Maggs and Dickens himself as the great Victorian author Tobias Oates. Together with the annotations in part II, the poems offer a creative contribution to the critical engagement with Carey’s novel, by arguing that Carey’s Mercy, servant and mistress of would-be gentleman Percy Buckle in Jack Maggs, can be fruitfully read as a re-imagining of Dickens’s Molly, biological mother of Estella and housekeeper of unscrupulous lawyer Jaggers in Great Expectations. The poems raise questions concerning neo-Victorianism, patriarchal discourse and trauma theory from a feminist perspective.' (Publication abstract)
'As the stage version of his take on Great Expectations opens in Adelaide, the novelist looks back at a right royal kerfuffle – and a memorable encounter with a London cabby' (Introduction)
'The imaginations of convicts in Australia became attuned to the pairing of opposites and this led to strange tensions in their way of representing things. On Norfolk Island the meanings of words were reversed, so that ‘good’ meant ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ meant ‘beautiful’. This undermining of official meanings produced the argot called the ‘flash’ or ‘kiddy’ language of the colony. Designed at first to keep private sentiments from being inspected, it eventually supported a system of dissident actions called ‘cross-work’ or ‘cross doings’. One word loomed large amidst these inversions: ‘fakement’, meaning booty, forgery or deceit. The verb has more extensive meanings: rob, wound, shatter; ‘fake your slangs’ means break your shackles. It also meant performing a fiction and accepting the consequences of it.' (Publication abstract)
