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One of the most evocative names in Dickens occurs in Great Expectations: Abel Magwitch. However, while most people have thought that this was a made-up Dickens name, in Portsmouth it has always been accepted it was an alteration - deliberate or through misremembering - of Madgwick, one of the best known names in the port from which the First Fleet of Australian colonists left, 35 years before Dickens was bom, and to which Magwitch returned in the opposite direction at the very real risk of his life. The name Madgwick first appears in Portsmouth in about 1750, associated with horse-dealers and market traders. Two hundred yards from where Dickens was born, there are still Madgwicks living,...