Abel Magwitch Abel Magwitch Abel Magwitch is a fictional character from Charles Dickens's 1861 novel, "Great Expectations". Charles Dickens set his story in about 1800, setting his character Abel Magwitch to meet a man called Compeyson at the Epsom Races. Compeyson, Dickens wrote, had been brought up in a boarding school and was an attractive, charming gentleman. Magwitch, at the same time, began a relationship with a mentally unstable woman named Molly, who later stood trial for murder. Jaggers, her defense attorney, convinced the jury that she was too weak to have strangled the woman. Molly was acquitted and became (unknown to
Charles Dickens that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote "Oliver Twist", "The Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby"; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the