Victorian London, England and Englishness in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs

Abstract

Neo-Victorianism is described as a genre in critical and fictional writing which alters our perspective of past and present by bringing two different centuries into focus. From a new genre which is rooted in the past and strongly attached to the present, arise analytical comparisons and alternative-creative works. Victorian England is a vantage point for the Industrial Revolution; when contemporary readers and critics trace effects and results of major social, economic and intellectual changes in the twenty-first century back to their source, Victorian England appears as a model for the industrial shift in Europe. This situation justifies the choice of setting for a great number of Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels: among numerous nineteenth-century settlements, Victorian London becomes prominent. London is a designed spot in time and space which is laden with success in industrial production to become a role model, but at the same time with its characteristics such as the heavy burden of urbanisation, showing itself in over-populated places, filthy and inhumane living and working conditions; it exhibits the downside of the industrialisation period. Social and institutional vices of industrialism are portrayed in historical documents as well as literary works in settlements and places of the nineteenth-century: factories, workhouses, slums, hospitals, asylums, and colonies. Period-specific developments are measured through recorded personal and social stories, coming from every class of society, belonging to every age, gender and ethnicity, in the motherland as well as colonies. Moving from the philosophies influencing mainly the first half of the twentieth century, it is argued that contemporary theories show a growing interest on perception, representation and production of space. This article aims to emphasize the set of relations between the concepts of belonging, identity and otherness in the light of the theories on heterotopias and third spaces in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, which is a Neo-Victorian rewriting of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.