image of person or book cover 3154857768976537022.jpg
This image has been sourced from online.
y separately published work icon Jack Maggs single work   novel   historical fiction  
Issue Details: First known date: 1997... 1997 Jack Maggs
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Latest Issues

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation.
Influenced by Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.

Adaptations

Jack Maggs Samuel Adamson , 2024 single work drama

'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 ExpectationsJack 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.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Faber ,
      1997 .
      image of person or book cover 2617901325464973989.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 327p.
      ISBN: 057119088X
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Knopf ,
      1998 .
      image of person or book cover 291598106495331201.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 306p.
      ISBN: 0679440089
    • Toronto, Ontario,
      c
      Canada,
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Vintage Canada ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 7270644309089175312.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 357p.
      ISBN: 0679309799
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Vintage ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 8701628261709922523.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 1v.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 22 February 1999.
      ISBN: 9780679760375
      Series: y separately published work icon Vintage International New York (City) : Vintage , 1993- 19532994 1993 series - publisher novel

      'William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Thomas Mann, Doris Lessing, Albert Camus, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy, among many others: Vintage International is devoted to publishing the best writing of the past century from the world over. Offering both classic and modern fiction and literary nonfiction in elegant editions, Vintage International aims to provide readers with world-class writing that has stood the test of time and essential works by the preeminent authors of today.'

      Source: Vintage.

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Faber ,
      2011 .
      image of person or book cover 414146000079144875.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 327p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 3 February 2011
      ISBN: 9780571270170
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 2015 .
      image of person or book cover 886235776249768650.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 352p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 22 April 2015
      ISBN: 9780143571278
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 2020 .
      image of person or book cover 7816699229419765534.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 480p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 3 March 2020
      ISBN: 9781760896447
Form: audiobook

Other Formats

  • Braille
  • Large print.

Works about this Work

Rough Excision : A Poetic Response to Great Expectations (1861) and Jack Maggs (1997) Carolien Wielockx , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: New Writing , vol. 21 no. 4 2024; (p. 492-514)

'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)

Peter Carey on Jack Maggs and Snubbing the Queen : ‘I Thought She Was a Relic’ Sian Cain (interviewer), 2024 single work interview
— Appears in: The Conversation , 16 November 2024;

'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 Margin Writes Back : A Study of Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs Riya Maji , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Marginality in Australian Literature 2023; (p. 192-201)
The Novel Road to the Global South : Australian Fiction, International Exposure and the Transnational Politics of Disadvantage Sascha Morrell , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
Fiction and Fakements in Colonial Australia Jonathan Lamb , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Studies , September vol. 23 no. 3 2020; (p. 360-370)

'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)

[Review] Jack Maggs Melissa Bellanta , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , April no. 14 2003;

— Review of Jack Maggs Peter Carey , 1997 single work novel ; The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Peter Carey , 1994 single work novel ; Oscar and Lucinda Peter Carey , 1988 single work novel ; Illywhacker Peter Carey , 1985 single work novel ; The Tax Inspector Peter Carey , 1991 single work novel ; Collected Stories Peter Carey , 1994 selected work short story
Second Look Peter Craven , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 5 September 2004; (p. 23)

— Review of Jack Maggs Peter Carey , 1997 single work novel
[Review] Jack Maggs Bharat Tandon , 2006 single work review
— Appears in: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die 2006; (p. 860)

— Review of Jack Maggs Peter Carey , 1997 single work novel
Carey Lives Up to Great Expectations Lucy Frost , 1997 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 10 August 1997; (p. 7)

— Review of Jack Maggs Peter Carey , 1997 single work novel
Comeuppance from Down Under in Dickens of a Book Erica Wagner , 1997 single work review
— Appears in: The Times , 18 September 1997; (p. 43)

— Review of Jack Maggs Peter Carey , 1997 single work novel
Peter Carey's Jack Maggs and the Trauma of Convictisn Elizabeth Francesca Ho , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 17 no. 2 2003; (p. 124-132)
Writing Nineteenth-Century Fiction in the Twentieth Century Robert Sirabian , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association 2002; (p. 53-60)
Rewriting the Empire of the Imagination: The Post-Imperial Gothic K. J. Renk , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , vol. 39 no. 2 2004; (p. 61-71)
Renk's thesis is that Carey and Byatt 'parody the style and conventions of Victorian literature, as they also critique and satirize the Imperial Gothic novel.' She argues that 'while the Imperial Gothic novel reveals the anxieties of ebbing Empire, the Post-Imperial Gothic novel [of Carey and Byatt] exposes how Victorian writers plundered the minds of the marinalized to create art p.62).
Concealed Meaning in Peter Carey's Jack Maggs Trevor Byrne , 1995 single work criticism
— Appears in: The CRNLE Reviews Journal , no. 1-2 1995; (p. 106-115)
Byrne discusses Carey's novel as being essentially an exploration of the process of fictional writing, inviting the reader to think about what underlies the process of selectivity involved in creating stories.
A Ghost Story in Two Parts : Charles Dickens, Peter Carey, and Avenging Phantoms Alice Brittan , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 21 no. 4 2004; (p. 40-55)

Awards

1998 winner Miles Franklin Literary Award
1998 winner Commonwealth Writers Prize South-East Asia and South Pacific Region Best Book from the Region Award
1998 winner Commonwealth Writers Prize Overall Best Book Award
1997 winner The Age Book of the Year Award Fiction Prize
1997 winner The Age Book of the Year Award Book of the Year
Last amended 20 Dec 2024 11:58:56
Settings:
  • c
    England,
    c
    c
    United Kingdom (UK),
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • c
    Australia,
    c
  • 1800-1899
Influenced by:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X