Biographical Note
Charles Barrow, Charles Dickens' maternal grandfather, had been the Head of the Moneys Section at the Navy Pay Office. In 1810 it was found that he had been systematically falsifying his accounts for nine years. During this period he had embezzled nearly £6,000. Threatened with legal proceedings Charles Barrow fled abroad, eventually dying in the Isle of Man, outside English legal jurisdiction, in 1826, when Dickens was fourteen years old. Legal outlawry must have produced some cloaked, mysterious references to his absent maternal grandfather. Flight overseas for suspected felons, bankrupts and indeed any persons visited with moral or social disgrace, was a commonplace of Victorian life and fiction. But two situations are always charged with heightened atmosphere in Dickens' novels. The first is the menace that forever surrounds the lives of the respectable from the very existence of a criminal friend or relative at large - this is the fate of Mrs Rudge, the dark secret of David Copperfield's aunt, Betsy Trotwood, the strange tension of Mrs Clennam's tomblike home in Little Dorrit, the central situation of Great Expectations. The other is the extraordinary vividness of foiled attempts by criminals to get away from England's shores. The dramatic police interception of the illegally returned transported convict Magwitch's attempt to get to the Continent and to liberty, is one of the prime examples of this situation. (The other is the 'Anwerks package' scene in Martin Chuzzlewit when Jonas Chuzzlewit, the murderer, is turned back as he boards ship for the Low Countries). These scenes have a detail of circumstance and a power of apprehension that suggests the feeding of fiction by an often told family story.
In 1816, Charles Dickens' father, John, had been appointed to one of the principal naval dockyards in Chatham at the mouth of the River Medway in Kent, 30 miles south-east of London. With his father, accompanying him in the course of his duty into the dockyard or on sailing trips up the River Medway, Dickens must have first seen the convicts who worked at unloading, and the marshes at Cooling, north-east of Chatham, off which the galley ships lay - scenes which would play a part in the story of his fictional self, Pip, and Pip's benefactor, Magwitch.
Read more about this topic: Abel Magwitch
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