All these examples play very minor roles in Dickens' fiction - they serve as narrative devices and little else. However, one other consequence of Britain's colonial process - the policy of transportation - plays a far more fundamental part in Great Expectations. It is true, however, that, as Donald Simpson asserts in 'Charles Dickens and the Empire', the concept of transportation offered Dickens a perfect plot device - 'a transported convict exactly meets the need for a benefactor who can make a substantial fortune yet who has to remain anonymous, and of whom Pip will eventually be ashamed.The capital law against returning from transportation sharpens the impact of the later chapters, when Pip sheds his pretensions as well as his wealth.' Thus Dickens, like so many Victorian authors who used the colonies as 'places to transfer burned-out characters or from which to retrieve characters' (Jonah Raskin in The Mythology of Imperialism (New York:Random House,1971)), uses this aspect of colonialism as the dramatic cornerstone for his novel.
The fact that Dickens sees the peripheral edge as merely a place for European characters to sojourn, ignoring any indigenous peoples which might occupy it, is not unusual - Raskin believes that 'for the Victorians, existence meant existence in England ... going to India was like falling off a cliff.' This attitude - that nothing which happened away from the metropolitan centre could really be said to have happened at all - directly affects Magwitch and Pip in the novel. Magwitch may have earned his fortune by honest labour, but because he has done it in 'the vulgar colonial fashion' (Sadrin in Great Expectations), he can never be accepted into English society where standards are more demanding. The lax morality and classless system of the colony can not be transferred to the centre, at least not yet - therefore Magwitch, though he may achieve success on the periphery, cannot hope to be welcome in England - and Pip, by his association with 'colony money' will never be a true gentleman.
Dickens' Australia is a place of opportunity for the hardworking penitent - although it is worth noting that, like his contemporaries, very little attention is paid to the ethics of the colonial project - the landscape is seen as a place which exists only to be exploited by the coloniser. It is also interesting that the colony is a completely different world, with different social and moral structures, and therefore those who dwell there cannot easily be reintegrated into 'real' English society. Although the periphery is a potential paradise, this is seemingly only so for those who are misfits at home, and the metropolitan centre maintains complete dominance both socially and culturally.
