For the writer, Tobias Oates, he is a case study of the criminal mind and extraordinary raw material for a novel. To the terrified onlookers, he becomes a monster in their midst. Mesmerised, Maggs takes off his shirt to reveal the scars of the lash across his back. It’s explained as a kind of psychotherapy in which the demons of the mind will be released. Here are more stories – of the maid, Mercy, Buckle’s young mistress, who falls for Maggs and Constable, the other footman, rogered by the dashing Phipps, who lives across the street but is hiding out in his club and the novelist, Tobias Oates, who comes to dinner and applies his skill with mesmerism to hypnotise the phoney footman, Maggs. The novel’s story begins with Maggs’s disguising himself as a footman in the eccentric establishment of Percy Buckle, bookloving fishmonger turned sham gent by another unlikely windfall. He is determined to deliver his history, his own sorry apologia, written in mirror-writing and invisible ink, at the heart of which is the secret memory of an innocent girl hung by the law. Now Maggs comes back in person, unlawfully, wanting recognition from Phipps, whom he regards as a son. The boy, Henry Phipps, has grown up a gentleman, thanks to the money the convict, Jack Maggs, has regularly remitted from the colony. A convict, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, returns to London intent on finding the boy who years before did him a kindness. Let me gropingly try to lead you through it.
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