In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, the reader learns a great deal in Chapter XXXIX about the strange menacing man in coarse gray with "a great iron on his leg" who terrifies and threatens little Pip, who after after tearing violently at a second convict is captured, but looks at Pip and with a "clicking" in his throat, and confesses to having stolen "wittles" from the blacksmith.
Sitting on his step one evening in London, Pip discovers this same convict. With repugnance, Pip learns that it is Abel Magwitch, not Miss Havisham, who has been his benefactor all the time that he has been learning and living in London with Herbert Pocket. For, when Pip tries to repay him the two one-pound notes that came to him by a messenger when he was a boy, Magwitch folds them and places them in the fire, telling Pip his story, explaining that having someone he can love and help gives him validation: "This way I kept myself a going," he tells Pip when men in New South Wales remarked that he was an old convict and an "ignorant common fellow." He tells Pip he looked at these men and said to himself, "I'm making a better gentleman than you'll ever be!"
Having earned money and then received money left to him by his former employer, Magwitch has lived for the day that he can "come one day and see my boy and make myself known to him on his own ground." In fact, he is willing to risk his life to do this since he is subject to hanging if he returns to England because he received a life sentence in New South Wales. (Australia was a penal colony for England in those days).
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