Jack Maggs belongs to a long line of adaptations of Great Expectations, including David Allen's play Modest Expectations (1990), in which Dickens and his mistress Ellen Ternan visit Australia, and Michael Noonan's Magwitch (1982), which expands the convict's story without significantly revising it. As Australia has come increasingly interested in its colonial past, rather than seeking to forget its origins as a penal settlement, concern with figures like Magwitch/Maggs has increased. Robert Hughes has produced a compelling history of British settlement in Australia, The Fatal Shore (1988), which vividly depicts the privations endured by those condemned to transportation. Equally, Marcus Clark's For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) and George Dunderdale's The Book of the Bush (1870) provide graphic, and at times startling, accounts of life in the outback.

Carey is certainly not alone in his need to engage with Dickens's novels. Most recently John Irving has drawn upon...