Journal of Victorian Culture, 2017

Vol. 22, No. 4, 450–464, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2017.1359965

Vagrant, Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture

of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

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Alistair Robinson

I.  A song of want: Introduction

The winter of 1860–61 was particularly bitter. A hard frost gripped England throwing
thousands of labourers out of work and into the streets. In London the main thor-
oughfares thronged with the unemployed, many of whom were homeless and hungry,
unable to afford food or rent. Although for many workers winter was typically a time
of slack-trade and scarce resources, the five long weeks of near sub-zero temperatures
caused almost unprecedented levels of want and sent jobless gangs rippling through
the metropolis, breaking into bakeries in the Whitechapel and Commercial Roads, and
choking up the soup-kitchens in Clerkenwell and Leicester Square.1 In Ragged London
in 1861 (1861), a chronicle of these desperate times, the journalist Andrew Hollingshead
observed that ‘the noisy crowds who clamour at police-courts – […] who are foremost
at soup-kitchens, and other similar charitable distributions – contain very few of the
patient, hard-working poor.’ Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that many of the
‘greasy tramps, low thieves and their girls’ that bullied their way through the crowds of
applicants were the same workers that Hollingshead praised for patience and industry.2
These virtues, however, rubbed off in the crush of poverty, revealing the ugly human
animals that lay beneath.
As law-abidance became a victim of necessity, and the scenes of desperation multi-
plied, the press began to blame the Poor Law guardians of the metropolis. Although the
papers did not condone the looting of bread from East-End bakeries, these actions were
seen as symptomatic of the Poor Law’s failure to fulfil its duties. As the crisis developed
the metropolitan guardians were increasingly lambasted in the dailies for rejecting relief
applicants. A January edition of Reynolds’s Newspaper paints a particularly vivid picture
of this kind of negligence, describing how ‘brutal officials’ shut the workhouse gates ‘in
the faces of the hundreds of the pale-faced, half-naked, and shivering men, women, and

  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.

© 2017 Leeds Trinity University

 Journal of Victorian Culture 451

children’.3 During this period of hardship, vagrants in the metropolis became objects
of both fear and pity as the bitter winter pushed many into riotous disorder, but also
claimed many ‘houseless wretches dying in the streets’.4 It was also at this time that
another houseless wretch came to the public’s attention, a vagrant ‘who limped, and
shivered, and glared’ out on the Kentish marshes of Great Expectations (1860–61).5
On 1 December 1860, the first weekly number of Great Expectations appeared in All

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the Year Round, a fledgling miscellany established by Charles Dickens in April the previ-
ous year. The new novel was to be a tonic for the magazine, pepping it up and restoring
its readership, then languishing after a dose too many of Charles Lever’s serial, A Day’s
Ride (1860–61).6 Perhaps as a consequence, it starts with a jolt, as ‘A fearful man, all in
coarse grey’ (p. 4) springs on the narrator and protagonist, Pip, a solitary lad of six who
he threatens to eat in a mist-filled churchyard, marooned in the heart of ‘th’ meshes’
(p. 14). This man is Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict who eventually becomes Pip’s
benefactor and transforms him into a gentleman. At this early stage, however, he is a
nameless figure occupying the same ambivalent space as London’s houseless poor. It
seems more than likely that within the contemporary climate, both actual and emo-
tional, readers of All the Year Round would have felt sympathy for Magwitch even as
they felt uneasy on behalf of Pip. The ravenous man, ‘awfully cold’ (p. 18) and as ghastly
as if he were a corpse ‘come to life’ (p. 7), must have reminded Dickens’s readers of the
dreadful scenes then unfolding in the capital. As they were described by Hollingshead,
a contributor of All the Year Round at this time, ‘the chief streets of the metropolis have
been haunted for weeks by gaunt labourers who have moaned out a song of want that
has penetrated the thickest walls’.7
Of course, when Dickens began to compose Great Expectations he could not have
known how severe the winter of 1860–61 was going to be: he began to write his new
novel in August 1860 and had the first five numbers ‘ground off the wheel’ (as he put it)
by the end of October that year.8 Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that in his depiction
of Magwitch, Dickens was trying to engage with the routine seasonal sympathies of his
readers. Winter was, after all, habitually a time in which the houseless featured heavily
in the press: as the Saturday Review remarked in late November 1863, ‘Discussions in
the newspapers about the homeless poor are a standing order of the day at this season
[…] The annual period of distress is rapidly approaching’.9 Reading the papers around
Christmastime – which is when the first numbers of the novel are set – the public could
expect to find appeals from London’s refuges, and stories about vagrants starving in

  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).
452 A. Robinson

its streets: according to the London City Press, these echoed with ‘The death-groans of
three hundred cast-aways […] every year’.10 The pity Pip feels for Magwitch when he
sees the convict ‘limping to and fro’, so frozen that he might ‘die of deadly cold’ (p. 18),
is the pity that Dickens assumed his readers would have felt in any December, regardless
of the thermometer.
The stage was carefully set, then, when Magwitch appeared before the public, and this

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imbues him with a significance that has been generally overlooked. Since E. M. Forster’s
Aspects of the Novel (1927), it has been an all too common critique that Dickens pro-
duced ‘flat’ characters; psychologically unconvincing caricatures that might entertain,
but refuse to persuade us of their reality.11 This has certainly been the approach that has
shaped interpretations of Magwitch. George Orwell referred to him as a ‘pantomime
wicked uncle’.12 Harry Stone, with less precision, called him a ‘terrifying creature’, the
‘nightmare offspring’ of Dickens’s imagination.13 And more recently, Goldie Morgentaler
has read him as an image of primitive man in his uncivilized state, a position that has also
been adopted by Deborah Wynne.14 These readings flatten Magwitch for us, stripping
him of his complexity by imagining him in emblematic terms. In this paper I perform
a much needed re-evaluation of Magwitch, arguing that he is not simply a fearsome
figure, but a nuanced character whose depth is borne out of his relationship with society
as a whole. This approach is influenced by critics like Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth and
Michael Parrish Lee, who argue that Dickens presents us with a predominantly social
rather than psychological world; one that is concerned with individual psychology, but
only in so far as ‘the individual psyche [is] part of the system that conditions it’.15 In the
following I argue that Dickens’s depiction of Magwitch as a vagrant-cum-convict, and
the cannibal associations ascribed to him as part of these conjoined identities, is vital
to the novel’s critique of the society that shaped him.

II.  Whipped and worried and drove: The vagrant past of Abel Magwitch
Magwitch is a convict. But convicted of what? This is a question answered in the third
stage of Pip’s expectations when Magwitch comes to London to see the gentleman he has

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.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 453

made. Settling himself in Pip’s cosy chambers in the Temple, a nest of clerks and lawyers
embedded in the City, Magwitch reveals that he has lived much of his life on the roads,
and at variance with the law. He was first conscious of himself when ‘a man – a tinker’
up and left and ‘took the fire’ (p. 346). From thereon he lived hand to mouth, ‘tramping,
begging, thieving, working’ (p. 347) and in the process he became, ‘a bit of a poacher,
a bit of a laborer, a bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most

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things that don’t pay and lead to trouble’ (p. 347). This catalogue of occupations accrued
on tramp confers a vagrant status on Magwitch, not only because they are all obviously
peripatetic, but also because of their sheer multiplicity. As Henry Mayhew defines the
vagrant character in London Labour and the London Poor (1850–52):

A vagrant […] is an individual applying himself continuously to no one thing, nor pur-
suing any one aim for any length of time, but wandering from this subject to that, as well
as from once place to another.16

Magwitch is therefore not just physically but also mentally and economically vagrant,
unable to devote himself to any one calling. Dickens never makes clear whether this
unsettled mode of life is grounded in Magwitch’s natural inclinations, or in social biases
that precluded him from a permanent situation. Magwitch, on the other hand, does
blame such prejudices for his underemployment, telling Pip that he didn’t have a job ‘as
often as you may think, till you put the question whether you would ha’ been over-ready
to give me work’ (p. 347). Either way, he exhibits a multitude of vagrant behaviours.
In addition to being constitutionally vagrant, Magwitch is also legally vagrant:
throughout his early life he was ‘carted here and carted there, and put out of this town,
and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove’
(p. 346), all of which were penalties applied to the itinerant by various bulwarks of law
and order. In the early nineteenth century, when Great Expectations is set, the wandering
poor could be removed to their parish of settlement by any other parochial authority in
England or Wales and, if charged with the crime of vagrancy, could be imprisoned and
flogged.17 It becomes explicit that Magwitch has been convicted of this offence when
he relates that he finally met Compeyson, his one-time criminal handler and nemesis
within the novel, having ‘come out of Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal’ (p.
347). It is this fateful meeting that embroils Magwitch, already a petty thief, in the
much more serious crimes of forgery and counterfeiting; this eventually leads to his
imprisonment in the Hulks, his desperate escape, his fortuitous meeting with Pip, and,
finally, his recapture and transportation to Australia.
Magwitch the convict, then, was always already a vagrant. This is reinforced on a
literary level by his recurring association with a canine motif; a commonplace trope used
to characterize the houseless poor in the 1860s. Hollingshead, for example, describes
one vagrant, ‘tossed about the streets unable to work, and […] dying from starvation’, as

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.
454 A. Robinson

creeping along ‘like a poor dog’.18 Similarly, an article on night refuges published in that
chill January 1861, notes that the inmates ‘twirl [a] rug around them […] coiling them-
selves up like dogs’ when they go to bed.19 And later in the decade, in The Seven Curses
of London (1869), the journalist James Greenwood equates the ‘juvenile vagrant’ with
‘the cur of the street’.20 Consequently, it is significant that throughout Great Expectations
Magwitch is likewise characterized by canine imagery. On his first appearance in the

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marshes we are told that he ‘glared’ and ‘growled’ (p. 4). This allusion to his feral and
dog-like nature is compounded when Pip returns to the churchyard with food and a
file and he is described as gobbling the ‘wittles’ with ‘strong sharp sudden bites, just
like [a] dog’ (p. 19). Much later in the novel, when he returns from Australia, Magwitch
describes himself as a ‘hunted dunghill dog’ (p. 319), and while watching the convict
eat in his rooms the older Pip notes, as he did as a child, that he ‘looked terribly like a
hungry old dog’ (p. 331). This insistent simile, which speaks of Magwitch’s neglected
and degraded condition, is accompanied by a set of cannibalistic images. These haunt
him (and us) throughout the novel, enforcing our sense of his hunger, his menace,
and his desperation. Such an association is supremely suitable for a man-dog-vagrant.
After all, in the nineteenth century ‘cannibal’ was thought to be etymologically rooted
in ‘canis’, the Latin for dog.21

III.  The terrific idea: Dickens’s cannibal imagination

Dickens had a macabre obsession with cannibalism, a fact that has long been noted. John
Carey, in his classic study The Violent Effigy (1973), recounts how Dickens was brought
up hearing the Bluebeard-based fairy-tale ‘Captain Murderer’ whose eponymous anti-
hero would bake his brides in pies, season them with salt and pepper, and wolf them
down with his freshly sharpened teeth.22 The cannibal theme of ‘Captain Murderer’,
as Carey goes on to describe, insinuated itself into many of Dickens’s novels, where it
is often both grisly and humorous. One only has to look as far as his first novel, The
Pickwick Papers (1836–37), to see Dickens’s anthropophagous imagination in action.
In a comic episode involving two servants closeted together, Joe, the ‘fat boy’, sets down
his knife and fork, leans slowly forward, and tells pretty Mary Weller, ‘How nice you
look!’: ‘there was enough of the cannibal in the young gentleman’s eyes’, we are told,
‘to render the compliment a double one’.23 For Dickens, as Carey notes, cannibalism
is an ‘amusing’ form of violence.24 Elsewhere, however, it filled Dickens with horror,

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.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 455

and in his defence of the Franklin expedition he mustered ‘his detailed knowledge of
cannibalism’ to refute its possibility.25
In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a renowned Arctic explorer, set sail to discover the
Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, Franklin and his crews on board the Terror and the
Erebus soon vanished, and in 1854 the Admiralty declared them dead. Later that same
year, another explorer, Dr John Rae, reported that he had received an account from the

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Inuit about the fate of the Franklin expedition. According to them, Franklin’s party,
starving to death in the Arctic wilderness, had taken ‘the last resource – cannibalism
– as a means of prolonging existence’.26 Whether or not Rae’s sources were telling the
truth was a bone of contention between the explorer and the press. With The Times in
the vanguard denouncing the Inuit as ‘liars’ – ‘like all savages’ – it was not long before
others, including Dickens, joined the fray, determined to defend a national hero.27 In
what amounted to what one critic has called ‘a remarkable series unprecedented and
unrepeated on any single topic in Household Words’, Dickens commenced a campaign
in which he smeared Rae’s report by framing the Inuit as ‘covetous, treacherous, and
cruel’.28 In an editorial entitled ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’ (1854), Dickens censored Rae
for believing ‘the wild tales of a herd of savages’ and asserted that no ‘Englishman’ either
‘would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this
horrible means’: his use of ‘Englishman’ here, rather than Briton, is typical of Dickens,
a writer who according to Jen Hill relied ‘on “English” as a shorthand for the nation’.29
In his vehement protest that the English could never be cannibals, Dickens was very
much of his time. Charles Kingsley, in his rip-roaring maritime adventure, Westward
Ho! (1855), similarly depicts the English as impervious to the lures of forbidden flesh as
the hero’s love interest, a beautiful maid with an unbeknown English ancestry, shrinks
with disgust from the ‘horrors of cannibalism’, despite being raised by a South American
tribe with a taste for ‘roast Spaniard’.30 That said Dickens, without accusations against a
heroic explorer, nonetheless found the ‘terrific idea’ of cannibalism (in all its forms) an
enduring imaginative preoccupation.31 It is the fear of cannibalism that starts the round
of stories related in The Wreck of the ‘Golden Mary’ (1856), a Christmas number for
Household Words published two years after the Franklin dispute. It is also the impetus

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).
456 A. Robinson

behind another series of tales told at Christmastime, ‘The Long Voyage’ (1853). Sat
comfortably by the fireside, as Dickens sets the scene, the first story he tells features a
decidedly home-grown cannibal, who might, in some respects, appear familiar.
‘[D]­erived from that unpromising narrator for such stories, a parliamentary blue
book’, the narrative concerns several transported convicts who escape from an island
penal settlement. They are struck by famine, and while ‘Some of the party die and are

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eaten; some are murdered by the rest and eaten’. When the colonial authorities finally
catch up with them there is only one survivor left, a ‘solitary monster’ who is taken
back to the settlement and forced into a chain gang. Nonetheless, he absconds again
with another inmate; this time, however, his plan is not to escape per se, but to sate his
‘inappeasable relish for his dreadful food’. When he is recaptured he has ‘portions of the
man’s body’ and an ‘untouched store of salted pork’.32 It seems likely that this story, as
Dickens claims, was based on real events. Patrick Brantlinger records an actual instance
of convict cannibalism that sounds very similar to Dickens’s story: in the early 1800s
Alexander Pearce was transported to Tasmania, but managed to escape with several
other convicts to mainland Australia. When he was found he was alone, carrying an
axe, and like the convict in ‘The Long Voyage’, had a parcel of human flesh. In Pearce we
can see the germ of the cannibal-convict in ‘The Long Voyage’. In addition, Brantlinger
sees Pearce as a model for Magwitch, a connection that Stone has also made, albeit
indirectly.33 In ‘The Long Voyage’, Stone notes, we find a prototype of Abel Magwitch:
‘The fearsome escaped predator and the fearsome escaped Magwitch have much in
common’.34
But how much do they really have in common? Magwitch does not kill and eat Pip,
nor does he have an insatiable hankering for human flesh. Moreover, although in a
rather clumsy allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Pip compares him to the
‘misshapen creature’ (p. 339), there is in fact no sense that he is like a ‘solitary monster’.
Starving and wretched when he threatens to eat Pip on the marshes, Magwitch’s cannibal
impulse is born of necessity rather than desire. His status is therefore more equivocal
than his predecessors, and this enhances his effectiveness as a critique of society. This
was not a unique ploy on Dickens’s part: vagrants figured as potential cannibals recur
throughout the mid-Victorian period, emblematizing the dangers that accompany social
exclusion and injustice. More often than not, they represent the ugly side of ‘ye have
the poor always with you’.35
In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), a novel that Dickens originally wanted
to publish in All the Year Round instead of Lever’s A Day’s Ride, Maggie Tulliver comes
across a set of could-be cannibals.36 Having resolved that ‘gypsydom was her only ref-
uge’, Maggie runs away to join the gypsies on Dunlow Common. Unfortunately, the
hospitality and deference that she expected from the travellers is not forthcoming and,

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.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 457

having discovered that they have ‘got nothing nice for a lady to eat’, she begins to won-
der whether ‘they meant perhaps to kill her as soon as it was dark, and cut up her body
for gradual cooking’. That Maggie imagines that she would make better fare than the
gypsies’ ‘stew of meat and potatoes’, or what can be found in their ‘bag of scraps’, is in
part a projection of her own thrumming hunger which she refuses to satisfy with the
gypsies’ food.37 More than that, however, Maggie’s misgiving reflects her perception of

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their outsider and distinctly un-English status. As Brantlinger argues, ‘Dickens and other
Victorian writers treat cannibalism as the nadir of savagery, the complete antithesis of
civilization’.38 Maggie’s suspicion that the gypsies are cannibals sets them beyond the
bounds of her own bourgeois circle; this position is, of course, propped up by their
vagrant existence, which excludes them from settled, English society and, as Magwitch
suggests, from a permanent place in the economy that drives it.
Thomas Carlyle similarly portrays vagrants as potential cannibals, wandering through
England but alienated from its national culture. In ‘Downing Street’ (1850), one of his
execratory Latter-Day Pamphlets, Carlyle intones:

the Irish Giant, named of Despair, is advancing upon London itself, laying waste all English
cities, towns and villages […] I notice him in Piccadilly, blue-visaged, thatched in rags, a
blue child on each arm, hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he may devour.39

Half political lampoon, half grotesque fairy-tale, Carlyle presents us here with the Irish
migrants fleeing the Great Famine, so dehumanized by hunger that they have become
agglomerated into a man-eating giant. However, unlike Eliot’s cannibal gypsies, these
starving vagrants are not just outside civilization, but set against civilization: an apoc-
alyptic judgement sent to savage the blubbery heart of the metropole – a just Carlylean
punishment for mismanaging Ireland.40 Carlyle’s identification of a cannibalistic threat
is obviously rhetorical, and operates here, as it does elsewhere in his writings, to signify
an anarchic threat to the stable political order.41 For contemporaries this may not have
been so far-fetched: during the course of the previous decade thousands of hungry
Irish had set sail for England. The majority of them – over 35,000 – had ended up in
London, many of them homeless or crammed into overcrowded tenements.42 Given
that Carlyle was writing in the wake of the 1848 Chartist demonstrations, and a flush
of continental revolutions that had occurred the same year, it must have been easy for
his readers to imagine that the physical hunger present in the ‘famishing Connaughts’

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.
458 A. Robinson

could become a political hunger that would overturn the country’s government and
embroil it in anarchy.43
Like Dickens in his response to Rae’s report, both Eliot and Carlyle exile cannibalism
from the English community, locating it only in foreign threats. This in itself is no sur-
prise: cannibalism was a ‘tool of Empire’, frequently ascribed to non-English peoples as
a means of justifying their subjugation.44 However, although race plays its part in these

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depictions of the gypsies and the Irish, it is also significant that the expected issues of
nationality shade into more pregnant issues of humanity. At the moment when Maggie
entertains the idea that she might be eaten, she also imagines the gypsy patriarch as
‘the devil […] or else a fiery-eyed monster with dragon wings’; and Carlyle, of course,
imagines the migrants as a giant, another beast born of romance.45 Such monstrous
depictions of the wandering poor suggest that to be a vagrant cannibal, moving within
but excluded from the community, is to offer up a challenge to the human condition.
Carlyle saw this as a challenge to proper human governance, which if overthrown would
result in social chaos; he had already outlined the consequences of this in The French
Revolution (1837), the final days of which were spent in grisly self-consumption: ‘The
Revolutionary Tribunal, after all it has devoured, has now only, as Anarchic things do,
to devour itself ’.46 Maggie Tulliver, in contrast, sees it quite differently as a personal,
almost religious battle between good and evil, man and the devil; this is a reading
of the (potential) vagrant cannibal that Dickens also subscribes to, although in more
subjective and interior terms.
In ‘Night Walks’ (1860) Dickens meets another could-be cannibal in the form of a
vagrant, ‘hare-lipped youth’. An ‘ugly object’ hunched on the steps of St Martin-in-the-
Fields, the church in Trafalgar Square, it is dressed in a ‘loose bundle of rags’ and, like
those other outcasts described by the press, ‘made with its whining mouth as if it were
snapping at me, like a worried dog’.47 Related in 1860 in one of Dickens’s ‘uncommercial’
adventures, the hare-lipped youth is a near contemporary and a prototype of Magwitch;
another dog-like vagrant starved to the brink of cannibalism, ‘snapping’ at the human
hand that Dickens reaches out to help it. As it turns out, instead of biting Dickens, the
vagrant flees from him, leaving his rags behind. This behaviour is fitting for a ‘worried
dog’ whose hunger, exposure and sleeplessness have brought it to such a pitch of anxiety
that no kindness or reason can sooth it. ‘Worried’, also meaning to tear or pull apart,
likewise resonates with the strain of the vagrant’s appetite, its cannibalistic ‘snapping’.
In addition to this, the simile further suggests that the vagrant has been ‘worried’ him
or herself, torn and pulled at, perhaps by the other ‘ugly object[s]’ of the street.

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).
 Journal of Victorian Culture 459

Amidst the scenes depicted in Dickens’s uncommercial papers, this episode is par-
ticularly powerful. As Matthew Beaumont has recently noted, ‘In encountering this
creature, Dickens confronts the limits of humanity’. This humanity, as Beaumont goes
on to observe, belongs to Dickens himself; in addition, as the vagrant ‘worries’ between
cannibalistic satiation and human endurance, what Dickens witnesses is a human being
challenged by and challenging the limits of its own humanity.48 This is the harrowing

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ordeal that Magwitch also faces at the start of Great Expectations. It is an unenviable and
irrevocable choice – hunger or humanity. As Eliot writes, referring to Dante’s Inferno,
‘Does not the Hunger Tower stand as the type of the utmost trial to what is human in
us?’49

IV.  Man eating man, eaten by man: The cannibal culture of Great Expectations

‘You young dog,’ said the man, licking his lips, ‘what fat cheeks you ha’ got.’
I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong.
‘Darn me if I couldn’t eat ’em,’ said the man with a threatening shake of his head, ‘and if I
hadn’t half a mind to’t’ (p. 4)

This scene between Magwitch and Pip is at once both humorous and sinister, and with
each reading the emphasis alters. One could read it as Orwell does, and see Magwitch’s
lip-smacking designs for young Pip’s cheeks as the hyperbolic threats of a pantomime
villain; or as Stone interprets it, as a clever and comic psychological manoeuvre by
which Magwitch coerces Pip into helping him.50 But while these readings capture the
sense that Magwitch’s threats are unreal, they misplace the locus of emotional intensity.
Initially we are inclined to feel that Pip’s fear is genuine and that Magwitch’s hunger
(at least for human flesh) is over-expressed, and that therefore the threat is insincere.
However, although Pip notes that he was ‘trembling’ (p. 4); that he tried to ‘keep myself
from crying’ (p. 5); and that in the end he was so frightened that he ‘ran home with-
out stopping’ (p. 7), in fact, much of the scene’s comic relief is derived from Pip, not
Magwitch. In the exchange just quoted, the valve that relieves the emotional intensity
is not released by Magwitch, but by the older Pip when he notes that although his
cheeks were fat ‘I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong’. Here the
narrator’s interjection presupposes the reasonableness of Magwitch’s desire to tuck
into his cheeks, and counters this with the equally reasonable observation that, like a
pig or a bullock not quite ready for slaughter, he was ‘undersized’ and ‘not strong’. By
adopting a common-sense attitude towards Magwitch’s unconscionable musings, it is
Pip rather than Magwitch who releases the tension and convinces us of the unreality
of the convict’s threats.
Magwitch meanwhile is curiously opaque. It is difficult to judge his sincerity in the
initial moments of this first encounter. In retrospect it might seem clear that he was
feigning all along. He, of course, does not eat Pip, and he uses the device of the young

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.
460 A. Robinson

man, who has a ‘secret way’ of ‘getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver’ (p. 6),
to ensure that Pip gets him the food and the file. However, in these first moments what
we witness is not a carefully staged threat, lip licking and all, but the genuine conflict
of a man starved to the very brink of breaking a sacred taboo. Indeed, he seems to be
trying to coerce himself, rather than Pip, when he says ‘‘‘Darn me if I couldn’t eat ’em,”
[…] with a threatening shake of his head, “and if I hadn’t half a mind to’t’’’. Here there

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is a disjunction between Magwitch’s words and his actions: one expressing one half of
his mind, and the other expressing the unimaginable other. To put it another way, if this
were a staged attempt to trick Pip into believing that cannibalism is on the cards, then
surely a positive nod of the head would be appropriate? Instead we get a ‘threatening
shake’, a violent negative to the half-formed plan to kill the boy and dine off him. This
indication that Magwitch is at least half sincere is bolstered by the vivid intensity with
which he tells Pip about the young man, and the way he repeatedly and methodically
dwells on how ‘your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate’ (p. 6). This
lingering over Pip’s ‘heart’ and ‘liver’ is more than a comic iteration; it is another expres-
sion of his repeated demand for ‘wittles’ (pp. 5–6), meaning victuals, but etymologically
connected to ‘vitals’, the organs of the body necessary for life.
But although he is tempted by cannibalism, Magwitch does not possess the craving
for human flesh that belonged to Alexander Pearce or the convict in ‘The Long Voyage’.
Instead, like the hare-lipped youth, he frets between humanity and hunger, and finally
subdues the latter. This self-denial on the edge of death by privation has a significance
and potency within a novel where, as James Marlow observes, we are presented with a
‘cannibal society [that] converts human beings into something to be consumed’.51 Unlike
the imputations against the Franklin expedition, this consumption is far from literal
and has readily been seen as an economic metaphor, an interpretation routinely based
in the cannibal-capitalist equation made by many Victorians themselves.52 As Kingsley
decried in his explosive invective against London’s sweated economy, ‘Cheap Clothes and
Nasty’ (1850), capitalism is ‘Man eating man, eaten by man, in every variety of degree
and method!’53 However, the anthropophagic relationships between the characters of
Great Expectations are more complex than this, and while the act of cannibalism can
stand in place of economic gain, it is also often a sign of society’s more fundamental
moral failings.
Pip, as Carey notes, is a distinctly ‘edible hero’, and it is not just Magwitch who threat-
ens to eat him.54 After Pip has returned from the marshes, he sits down to Christmas
lunch amidst a predominantly hostile party of Mrs Joe’s dinner guests. One of these
fellow diners, the pompous Uncle Pumblechook, looks at the pig on the table, looks

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.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 461

at young Pip, and tells the boy he should be grateful for not having been born a ‘four-
footed Squeaker’ (p. 27). With a nod to Mrs Joe, he goes on to elaborate that if he had:

You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according to the market price of
the article, and Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in your straw
[…] and he would have shed your blood and had your life. (p. 27)

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The gratuitous detail of this analogy more than hints that Pip whets his ogreish
appetite. More than that, the cannibalistic imagery of Pip being slaughtered for ‘so many
shillings’ before he is eaten suggests, as Gail Turley Houston has noted, that ‘Pip’s rela-
tions with his sister and her uncle are “market” relations’.55 This suggestion is enhanced
a little later in the novel when Pip returns from the wealthy Miss Havisham’s house
and Pumblechook, while discussing with Mrs Joe the financial rewards that might be
harvested from such a connection, places him ‘before the fire as if I were going to be
cooked’ (p. 97). The metaphor of cannibalism-as-capitalism, then, is certainly present
in Great Expectations and, moreover, is expressed through other characters than Pip.
Miss Havisham, a rich and aging heiress, identifies the eager anticipations of her
relatives, many of which are hankering after a fat legacy, with ghoulish appetites.
Summoning them to see the remnants of her rotting bridal banquet, she informs them
that when she is dead she intends to be laid out upon the table. She then arranges them
around it, and with magnificent pomp declares: ‘Now you all know where to take your
stations when you come to feast upon me’ (p. 88). Turn-and-turn-about, Havisham later
looks upon her adopted daughter, the beautiful Estella, with a ravenous intensity that
likewise borders on the cannibalistic. When Pip visits Satis House as an adult, he sees
Havisham lingering over her protégée:

She hung upon Estella’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her gestures, and sat
mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at her, as though she were devouring
the beautiful creature she had reared. (p. 302)

Here, however, Havisham has no craving for financial fortune. Indeed, she loads her
adopted daughter with ‘the most beautiful jewels’ (p. 243). Instead, Estella is a perverse
speculation on the marriage market: unlike the majority of parents who scurry through
Victorian novels fussing over lucrative and respectable matches, Miss Havisham calcu-
lates her dividend in smothered hopes and frustrated desires: as she instructs Estella,
‘Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!’ (p. 95).
Such profligate consumption, in which metaphorical feeding is dislocated from
financial gain, is prevalent in Great Expectations and signifies the heady thrill that
accompanies power, however tentative or vicarious, held over another human life. This
is expressed by Pip, when he is lured back to the marshes by Orlick, who ties him up in
a remote limekiln with the express purpose of killing him. As Orlick builds himself up
to the dreadful deed, stoking his ire with a flask of liquor, Pip reflects, ‘I knew that every
drop it held was a drop of my life’ (p. 427). Similarly, in the jovial excitement following
the soldiers’ intrusion on Mrs Joe’s dinner, Pip remarks, ‘what terrible good sauce for a

55. Houston, Consuming Fictions, p. 165.

462 A. Robinson

dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was’ (p. 33). None of the guests, he says, had
been half as lively before the soldiers had barged in; they seem to enjoy a collective civic
power as they discuss how the convict will be recaptured and sent back to the Hulks.
And later, when Pip and his companions dine with Jaggers, a formidable, browbeating
lawyer, we are told that the dim but brutal Bentley Drummle ‘seemed to serve as a zest
to Mr Jaggers’s wine’ (p. 215): presumably because he piques his professional curiosity

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– it is just such characters that he snatches or sends to the noose.
From the meanest lackey, like Orlick, to the independently wealthy, like Havisham,
a culture of cannibalism is endemic in Great Expectations. These anthropophagous acts
are symbolic of wanton desires for various forms of financial, physical and emotional
power. As such, they might make us reconsider Kate Flint’s Darwinian analysis of the
novel, in which she claims, ‘It emphasizes an uncomfortably close dependency of one
form of animal life on another. Daily survival is made suspiciously similar to an act
of cannibalism’.56 This is true as far as it goes, but other than Magwitch’s cannibalistic
threats, the images of anthropophagy we have seen have little to do with Darwin’s ‘uni-
versal struggle for life’. Indeed, in Great Expectations cannibalism is often frighteningly
refined. Within the constellation of cannibalistic images there is only one instance of
(near) man-eating resulting from ravenous hunger. Instead, before people are meta-
phorically consumed, they have often undergone a complex preparatory process. Both
Estella and Pip, at least in his guise as a ‘Squeaker’, are specially ‘reared’ for slaughter.
Similarly, Pip is distilled into Orlick’s moonshine liquor; Magwitch is artfully whisked
into a ‘sauce’; and Drummle is grated into ‘zest’. The image of Miss Havisham as a ‘feast’
likewise smacks of expense and preparation, especially given that she will be replacing
her own bridal banquet. Far from being vital (in both senses) the edible products that
the civilized world turns people into are luxuries and relishes. The juxtaposition of these
two types of cannibalism through Magwitch is a strong condemnation of ‘civilized’
society; this condemnation is made all the more apparent upon his return to London.
Hiding from the law, which would hang a returned transport, and under the care
of Pip and his friend Herbert, Magwitch makes a particularly visceral vow that he will
never be ‘low’, or crude, again: ‘Muzzled I have been since that half a minute when I was
betrayed to lowness, muzzled I am at the present time, muzzled I ever will be’ (p. 341).
The metaphor of Magwitch being ‘muzzled’ is significant. It resonates with the cluster
of canine and cannibalistic images attached to him and it marks how, as the novel draws
to a close, he has become civil or, in Pip’s terms, ‘softened’ (p. 405): the mouth that was
so hungry has been caged. In this way the image seems to support Marlow’s analysis
that ‘Magwitch in fact proves the capacity of man to transcend the jungle mentality,
to avoid the cannibal disposition inculcated by English society’.57 This victory is, of
course, compounded by the fact that Magwitch is the only character to be tempted to
acts of survival cannibalism, which both magnifies his own triumph and highlights the

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.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 463

vindictive motives that govern the novel’s anthropophagists. As a consequence, we can

identify Magwitch with what Beaumont has called the ‘“Montaignean” cannibal’, that is,
the cannibal ‘whose behaviour serves to expose the latent barbarity of civilized society’.58
However, although Magwitch plays the Montaignean part, he performs this role
less optimistically than Marlow suggests. Magwitch himself may belong to the jungle
of want on the road, but as I have argued, cannibalism in Great Expectations generally

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has a more luxurious setting; just as for Michel Foucault torture is a civilized ‘art of
maintaining life in pain’, so cannibalism in Dickens’s novel is often a dreadful but none-
theless sophisticated process.59 Moreover, Magwitch avoids the ‘cannibal disposition’, not
in spite of society, but because he is alienated from it. As a vagrant could-be cannibal,
like Eliot’s gypsies or Carlyle’s ‘Giant’, Magwitch exists outside of civilization; first as a
social outcast, a vagrant-cum-convict; and then also as a geographical exile, when he
is transported to Australia. This position of extreme marginalization is also confirmed
by the image of the muzzle.
Nearly 20 years before Dickens sat down to Great Expectations, he penned an unpub-
lished preface to American Notes (1842). While justifying his criticisms of the United
States, he thanked those American friends who did not try to choke him with ‘an iron
muzzle’, and let him exercise his ‘liberty and freedom of speech’.60 Ghosted by the image
of the plantation slave, whose torturous manacling is detailed in American Notes, this
depiction of the muzzled reporter captures Dickens’s sense of social constraint and
alienation. Moreover, it also gestures towards the hypocrisy of a society that claims
to welcome ‘freedom of opinion’, but refuses to hear its critics.61 In Great Expectations
the muzzle performs a similar duel function. Indeed, although it expresses Magwitch’s
‘softened’ state it is likewise charged with irony, because the world he naively attempts to
conform to is a-squirm with voracious and avaricious mouths: the oath that Magwitch
swears unfits him for ‘civilization’, and the muzzle – as in the preface – signifies both his
outsider status and the inveterate humbug of society. In the end, then, Magwitch may
transcend the cannibal community, but only because he is permanently excluded from it.

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.

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.
464 A. Robinson

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Alistair Robinson
University College London

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alistair.robinson.15@ucl.ac.uk