Abel Magwitch is a major fictional character from Charles Dickens' 1861 novel Great Expectations.

Magwitch, at the same time, began a relationship with a mentally unstable woman named Molly, who later stood trial for murder.

He is taken to the black hole (a solitary confinement cell) after landing his first punch, but he manages to escape some time around Christmas of 1812.

The novel begins with young Pip visiting the graves of his parents and brothers, where he is surprised by Magwitch: "[a] fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg.

A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

Pip, terrified, steals a pork pie, brandy and a file from his house and brings them to Magwitch the next morning.

Magwitch, upon hearing about the other escapee, realizes that Compeyson has also escaped and, after having eaten, drunk, and filed his leg iron off, he sets off to search for him.

Dickens continues his tale in about 1829, when Pip is 23 years old, Magwitch secretly returns to England under the name of "Provis".

Flight overseas for suspected felons, bankrupts and indeed any persons visited with moral or social disgrace, was a commonplace of Victorian life and fiction.

The first is the menace that forever surrounds the lives of the respectable from the very existence of a criminal friend or relative at large – this is the fate of Mrs Rudge, the dark secret of David Copperfield's aunt, Betsy Trotwood, the strange tension of Mrs Clennam's tomb-like home in Little Dorrit, the central situation of Great Expectations.

The dramatic police interception of the illegally returned transported convict Magwitch's attempt to get to the Continent and to liberty, is one of the prime examples of this situation.

These scenes have a detail of circumstance and a power of apprehension that suggests the feeding of fiction by an often told family story.

With his father, accompanying him in the course of his duty into the dockyard or on sailing trips up the River Medway, Dickens must have first seen the convicts who worked at unloading, and the marshes at Cooling, northeast of Chatham, off which the galley ships lay – scenes which would play a part in the story of his fictional self, Pip, and Pip's benefactor, Magwitch.

However, the 1861 census[3] (£) lists a "Pheeary Madgwick" living next door to Dickens' childhood home (the address then was 393 Commercial Road).

There is a possibility that Madgwick produced a good meal for Dickens and was honoured with the namesake character Magwitch.