[Harold Bloom, Sarah Robbins] Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Bloom’s

GUIDES Charles Dickens’s

Great Expectations

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Bloom’s

GUIDES Charles Dickens’s

Great Expectations

Edited & with an Introduction by Harold Bloom

© 2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications.

www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Sarah Robbins Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Layout by EJB Publishing Services Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. First Printing 135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Great expectations / [edited by] Harold Bloom. p. cm. -- (Bloom's guides) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7910-8168-0 (alk. paper) 1. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. Great expectations. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PR4560.G687 2004 823'.8--dc22 2004015305

Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume.

Contents Introduction Biographical Sketch The Story Behind the Story List of Characters Summary and Analysis Critical Views George Bernard Shaw on the Unamiable Estella and Pip as Function of Class Snobbery George Orwell on Magwitch and the Pantomime of the Wicked Uncle Peter Brooks on the Beginning and Ending: Pip Before Plot and Beyond Plot Dorothy Van Ghent on the Century of Progress, Dickens’s Use of the Pathetic Fallacy, and Pip’s “Identity of Things” Julian Moynahan on Pip’s Aggressive Ambition and the Dark Doubles Orlick and Drummle Goldie Morgentaler on Darwin and Money as Determinant Christopher D. Morris on Narration and Pip’s Moral Bad Faith Joseph A. Hynes on Star, Garden, and Firelight Imagery Ann B. Dobie on Surrealism and Stream-of-Consciousness Nina Auerbach on Dickens and the Evolution of the Eighteenth-Century Orphan Stephen Newman on Jaggers and Wemmick: Two Windows on Little Britain Jay Clayton on Great Expectations as a Foreshadowing of Postmodernism Edward W. Said on Australia, British Imperialism, and Dickens’s Victorian Businessmen

Works by Charles Dickens Annotated Bibliography Contributors Acknowledgments Index

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104 105 110 113 115

Introduction HAROLD BLOOM Charles Dickens reread his autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, before he began to write Great Expectations. He hoped thus not to repeat himself, and his hope was fulfilled: David and Pip are very different personages. Yet Dickens’s anxiety was justified; both of these first-person narrators are versions of Dickens himself, and only acute self-awareness on the novelist’s part kept Pip from becoming as autobiographical a figure as David had been. Still, one can wonder whether Pip is not a better representation of Dickens’s innermost being than David is. Compared to Pip’s incessant and excessive sense of guilt, David’s consciousness seems much freer, or at least works in a more unimpeded fashion to liberate itself, in part, from the personal past. Pip does not become a novelist, as David and Dickens do, and Pip also does not submit to sentimentality, as David does. We are asked to believe that David Copperfield concludes the novel as a fully matured being, but we are left with considerable doubts. Pip, perhaps because he is more distanced from Dickens, seems more worthy of Dickens’s respect and is endowed by the novelist with a more powerful imagination than the novelist David Copperfield enjoys. Why does Pip have so pervasive a sense of guilt? Several critics have remarked that, in Pip, love always emanates from guilt, whether the love be for the father-substitutes Joe and Magwitch, or the overwhelming passion for the beautiful, mocking, and unattainable Estella. Dickens’s best biographer, Edgar Johnson, relates this erotic aspiration to the novelist’s love affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress quite young enough to have been his daughter. Since Estella actually is Magwitch’s daughter, and Magwitch has adopted Pip as a son, pragmatically speaking, there is something of an incest barrier between Pip and Estella, though Pip consciously cannot be aware of this. And yet he is conscious that she is “part of my existence, part of myself”: there is as 7

occult a connection between Pip and Estella as there is between Heathcliff and the first Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. One critic, Shuli Barzilai, relates Pip’s self-lacerating temperament to Freud’s “moral masochism,” the guilty need to fail, and she traces the same self-punishing pattern in Estella’s marriage to the sadistic Bentley Drummle. Both Estella and Pip seem doomed to go on expiating a guilt not truly their own, whether or not it was truly Charles Dickens’s. Dickens originally ended the novel with a powerful unhappiness: Pip and Estella meet by chance in London; she has remarried, and each sees in the other a suffering that cannot be redressed. Unfortunately, Dickens revised this into the present conclusion, in which Pip prophesies that he and Estella will not be parted again. Though this is a little ambiguous and just evades sentimentality, it is highly inappropriate to what is most wonderful about the novel: The purgation, through acceptance of loss, that has carried Pip into an authentic maturity. What matters in that maturation is not that guilt has been evaded or transcended, but that the reader has come to understand it, however implicitly, as the cost of Pip’s confirmation as an achieved self. What Dickens could not bring himself to do in David Copperfield, he disciplined himself into doing in Great Expectations. Self-made, even self-fathered, Dickens disowns part of that psychic achievement when he creates Pip, who is fatherless but keeps faith at last both with Joe and with the memory of Magwitch.

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Biographical Sketch Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport, Portsea, near Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children of John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. The family moved to London in 1814, to Chatham in 1817, and then back to London in 1822. By 1824 increasing financial difficulties caused Dickens’s father to be briefly imprisoned for debt; Dickens himself was put to work for a few months at a shoe-blacking warehouse. Memories of this painful period in his life were to influence much of his later writing, in particular the early chapters of David Copperfield. After studying at the Wellington House Academy in London (1824–27), Dickens worked as a solicitor’s clerk (1827–28), then worked for various newspapers, first the True Sun (1832–34) and later as a political reporter for the Morning Chronicle (1834–36). In 1833 Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell, but her family opposed any contemplated marriage. Dickens never forgot Maria, and she served as the model for Dora in David Copperfield. In 1836 a collection of articles contributed to various periodicals appeared in two volumes as Sketches by “Boz,” Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. This was followed by the enormously popular Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37). Like many of Dickens’s later novels, the Pickwick Papers first appeared in a series of monthly chapbooks or “parts.” Other novels were serialized in magazines before appearing in book form. In 1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children before their separation in 1858. At the beginning of his marriage, Catherine’s sixteen-year-old sister Mary lived with them, but she died after a few months. The shock of this loss affected Dickens permanently, and Mary would be the model for many of the pure, saintly heroines in his novels—such as Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop—who die at an early age. Between 1837 and 1839 Dickens published a second novel, Oliver Twist, in monthly installments in Bentley’s Miscellany, a 9

new periodical of which he was the first editor. This was followed in 1838–39 by Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens then founded his own weekly, Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–41), in which appeared his novels The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. In 1842 he and his wife visited the United States and Canada, and after returning Dickens published American Notes (1842), two volumes of impressions that caused much offense in the United States. He then wrote Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), a novel set partly in America. In 1843 Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the first in a series of Christmas books that included The Chimes (1845), The Cricket on the Hearth (1846), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). Early in 1846 he was for a brief time the editor of the Daily News, a paper of the Radical party to which he contributed “Pictures of Italy” after visiting Italy in 1844 and again in 1845. During a visit to Switzerland in 1846 Dickens wrote his novel Dombey and Son, which appeared monthly between 1846 and 1848. In 1850 he started the periodical Household Words; in 1859 it was incorporated into All the Year Round, which Dickens continued to edit until his death. Much of his later work was published in these two periodicals, including David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860–61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). Throughout his life, Dickens threw himself vigorously into a variety of social and political crusades, such as prison reform, improvement of education, the status of workhouses, and reform of the copyright law (American publishers were notorious for pirating his works and offering him no compensation). These interests find their way also into his work, which is characterized by sympathy for the oppressed and a keen examination of class distinctions. His novels and stories have been both praised and censured for their sentimentality and their depiction of “larger-than-life” characters, such as Pickwick or Mr. Micawber (in David Copperfield). During the last twenty years of his life Dickens still found time to direct amateur theatrical productions, sometimes of his 10

own plays. He also became involved in a variety of philanthropical activities, gave public readings, and in 1867–68 visited America for a second time. Dickens died suddenly on June 9, 1870, leaving unfinished his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was first published later that same year. Several editions of his collected letters have been published. Despite his tremendous popularity during and after his own life, it was not until the twentieth century that serious critical study of his work began to appear. Modern critical opinion has tended to favor the later, more somber and complex works over the earlier ones characterized by boisterous humor and broad caricature.

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The Story Behind the Story Charles Dickens set out to compose what Bernard Shaw called his “most compactly perfect book” during a tumultuous time of upheaval and change in his native England. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when Dickens’s career had flowered, the world’s center of influence shifted from France to London, whose population tripled during the time of Queen Victoria’s reign—and society shifted from one of ownership and property to one of manufacture and trade. While the beginning of the nineteenth century and the effects of the Industrial Revolution brought poverty and persecution for the laboring class, a series of reforms in the 1830s and 1840s helped to stabilize both the economy and the population. Factory acts restricted child labor and limited hours of employment, and the erection of the Crystal Palace in 1851 celebrated the beauty—rather than the strife—of the Revolution’s technological innovation. Charles Darwin’s treatise The Origin of Species, published in 1859, put this progress in the context of evolution and natural selection. And so, in 1860, the story of a boy’s confusion-riddled rise from impoverished orphan to city gentleman grew slowly from a the seed of Dickens’s letter to his friend John Forster, describing “a little piece I am writing ... Such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me ... I can see the whole of a serial revolving around it, in a most singular and comic matter.” Great Expectations is at once an elegy for the lost innocence of lower-class rural population—who, like the Gargerys of Rochester, toiled in the countryside of his childhood—and a critical analysis of the broadening gap between illusion and reality that came with the hopefulness of reform, social mobility, and ever increasing commerce. In order to successfully render this transformation, Dickens’s scholar David Paroissien says the author needed to use first-person narration and maintain a dual focus: “Pip looks back to those events of his life set in Regency England but tells them from a present he belongs to, the now of the relating time.” Through 12

his protagonist, Pip, Dickens sought to define and question the motivations and forces behind a rise in social status and the prejudices surrounding the divide between high society and the base criminal world. An advocate of free trade, Dickens was sickened by the cruelty overcrowded London inflicted upon its inhabitants. His depictions of Smithfield market and Newgate prison serve as reminders of the filthy, teeming, bloody world of questionable justice during this era. But since Pip’s story begins not in the present time but rather in the early part of the century, Dickens appealed to readers by depicting Pip as looking back from a current perspective, with some of the knowledge and maturity that wouldn’t be available to a young, “common labouring boy” in the beginning of the century. Reader faith and investment was necessary for a writer who constructed his plot as a series of bite-sized chunks. As the editor of the weekly journal All the Year Round, Dickens had to contend with the journal’s plummeting sales following the failure of novelist Charles Lever’s serialized publication of his A Day’s Ride. Great Expectations appeared in weekly installments in both All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly from December 1860 to August 1861. This format, though challenging for the writer, brought him a broad readership that only improved his career. Dickens used the serial constraints as structural features in the novel, shaping plot around his need to have a continual series of beginnings and endings and maintaining suspense throughout the work. Great Expectations does not fall neatly into any particular genre. It does have aspects of domestic realism—which by 1860 was characteristic of Dickens’s contemporaries such as Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope—but in different moments also resembles a variety of Victorian subgenres, including the historical novel; a “silver-fork” fiction dealing with high society; a “Newgate” sensationalist or crime novel; and, perhaps most obviously, the Bildungsroman. Seeing the autobiographical nature of Great Expectations is easy with the knowledge that Dickens, like Pip, once lived in the marsh country, was employed in a job he despised, and experienced success in London at an early age. These similarities may be the reason why biographer Thomas Wright 13

says that Great Expectations differs from Dickens’s other novels, arguing that the hero and heroine are “really live and interesting characters with human faults and failings.” Some critics, including Wright, argue that Estella, in name and spirit, is an amalgam of Ellen Lawless Ternan, a 20-year-old actress with whom Dickens had an affair following his divorce. Although like Pip and Estella, Dickens and Ternan were united in the end, Great Expectations’s original ending was considerably more melancholy. After finishing the last installment of the book in June 1861, the exhausted Dickens brought the proofs to his friend, novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Lytton argued that the Dickens’s first and considerably shorter ending—in which Pip encounters Estella remarried and unambiguously leaves her forever—would be too disappointing for readers. In a letter to Forster, Dickens wrote, “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt that the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.” When the novel was published as a whole that July, critics had differing opinions on the revised ending, but the novel was a tremendous commercial success. A century and a half later, few remember that the novel once closed with a remarried Estella’s encounter with Pip on a Picadilly street and their final, unambiguous parting soon after. Today the novel is popular— well-read and widely taught. And Dickens’s controversial decisions in writing the serial have faded into the annals of history. “This was the author’s last great work,” wrote Swinburne. “The defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadow on a sunlit sea.”

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List of Characters Pip, the protagonist of the novel, is an orphan living with Mr. and Mrs. Joe Gargery, his sister and brother-in-law. Realizing with disgust his “commonness” once he encounters Miss Havisham and Estella, he is delighted when he learns he has a secret benefactor who wishes to make him a gentleman. Estella, the adopted charge of Miss Havisham, has been raised with the intention of enacting her guardian’s revenge on men. Upon encountering Pip after she has been “educated for a lady,” she tells him that “I have no heart...no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.” (237). She endures an unhappy marriage to Bentley Drummle, who dies eleven years later. An heiress and the owner of Satis house, Miss Havisham employs young Pip and delights in watching him play with Estella. Soon she decides that Pip will suffer the wrongs that she herself endured when her marriage was called off only minutes before the ceremony. Abel Magwitch, a convict who worked with and was later betrayed by Compeyson, first encounters young Pip in the marshes and then, threatening the boy, begs for food and a file. When Pip reminds him of a young daughter he lost, Magwitch aims to earn a fortune to repay the boy by making him a gentleman through secret contribution. An educated, gentlemanly criminal and former associate of Magwitch, Compeyson uses his looks and his manners to shift blame to Magwitch during a trial, sparking an eternal feud. He also uses his wiles to attract Miss Havisham and eventually to jilt her. Compeyson is responsible for Magwitch’s capture at the end of the novel.

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Joe Gargery is an honest, earnest blacksmith and Pip’s brotherin-law, who endures marriage to a shrill woman without complaint. Later, his pride and love for Pip supersede Pip’s callous shunning of his former social status. Mrs. Joe is Pip’s sister, more than twenty years his elder, who never loses a chance to remind her charge that she “brought him up by hand.” This effort is often conducted with the help of a cane she calls “Tickler.” Dissatisfied with her station in life, and often shrill, jealous, and confrontational, she is silenced when Orlick strikes her in the back of the head. Pip’s dark shadow throughout the book, Orlick first works as a day laborer in Joe’s forge and later works as a porter at Satis house. He is responsible for the attack on Mrs. Joe, and he never forgives Pip for ruining his chances of wooing Biddy. He develops an association with Compeyson; baiting Pip with mention of Magwitch, Orlick lures Pip to a sluice-house in the marshes and attempts to kill him. Jaggers is an intimidating and prominent criminal lawyer in London who assumes the role of Pip’s legal guardian once Magwitch decides to support him in secret. Jaggers’s association with Miss Havisham leads Pip to believe that she is in fact his benefactor. Cold and cruel with his clients and frugal with his emotions and lifestyle, Jaggers is involved with the dirty business of being an “Old Bailey” attorney—therefore he frequently washes his hands with scented soap. He brings Estella to be adopted by Miss Havisham. Pip first encounters Herbert Pocket—the son of Miss Havisham’s cousin, Matthew Pocket—as a “pale young gentleman” lurking in the courtyard at Satis house. Once Pip is informed of his intentions to be made a gentleman, he lives with Herbert; the two become close companions and Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel.” Herbert wants to make a fortune as a merchant so that he can marry Clara Bailey.

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Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Matthew Pocket is one of Pip’s tutors and a chief civilizing force from his life. He has become estranged from his family because of his pragmatism at a time when Miss Havisham was giving large amounts of money to the man who eventually jilted her. Wemmick is Jaggers’s middle-aged clerk, who divides his life quite neatly into to compartments. The professional life, in which he maintains a “post-office mouth” and an obsession with “portable property”; and his personal life, which is housed in an imitation castle he shares with his aging father. His desire to help Pip out of certain predicaments is precluded by his professional life, and Pip must seek him out at home in order to get the advice for which he is looking. Wemmick is in love with the middle-aged Miss Skiffins. One of Pip’s earliest confidantes, Biddy helps Pip with his lessons and he is put at ease by her simple, earnest, humility. When Mrs. Joe is attacked, Biddy moves in with the Gargerys to keep house. Joe’s uncle, Pumblechook is a merchant obsessed with money and possessions. He first delivers Pip to Miss Havisham’s house. After Pip’s is educated to be a gentleman by the generosity of Magwitch, Pumblechook advertises that he was Pip’s earliest benefactor. Powerful though inarticulate, Drummle is one of Pip’s classmates and an “old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture.” (190) When Jaggers encounters Drummle he is impressed by the man’s mannerisms and nicknames him “Spider.” To Pip’s horror, Drummle courts Estella and eventually marries her. Startop is Pip’s other classmate, who has younger, more delicate features and mannerisms and is extremely devoted to his mother. Pip and Herbert solicit Startop’s help in attempting to smuggle Magwitch out of London. 17

Magwitch’s former lover, Molly bore his daughter, who is later revealed to be Estella. She is acquitted of murder, at which point Estella is placed in the care of Miss Havisham and Molly becomes Jaggers’s housekeeper. Mr. Wopsle is a church clerk and frustrated preacher who falls into playacting and moves to London shortly after Pip does, assuming the stage name of Waldengarver. When Pip comes to see one of his productions, Wopsle is startled to see a man lurking behind Pip—Compeyson.

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Summary and Analysis Volume One Pip introduces himself to readers as Philip Pirrip, but qualifies that with the statement that he calls himself Pip. He begins his tale at the moment he first has an impression of the “identity of things”—as a seven-year-old child standing among the nettles in the marshy Cooling churchyard. Pip stands on Christmas Eve, reflecting on the tombstones of his parents—whom he never knew—and his five brothers. He comments that his brothers “gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle,” which, Goldie Morgenthaler says, seems to be taken directly from the third chapter of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published a year before Great Expectations. Morgenthaler’s observations of Darwin’s effect on this work will surface later in the plot. A hero such as Pip, argues critic Peter Brooks, is essentially “unauthored”—and unencumbered by authority figures. Christopher D. Morris contends that Pip’s insistence upon naming himself reflects his inability to be ruled by the past of his parents’ headstones. This could be Dickens way of illustrating, as Brooks says, “a life that is for the moment precedent to plot, and indeed necessarily in search of plot.” This plot begins to unfold when into Pip’s reverie bursts the voice of a rough-looking, gray uniformed man. He has spotted Pip in the churchyard and demands, threatening death, that Pip bring to him some food and a file the next morning. Pip scurries back to the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Joe Gargery, only to be met with his sister’s rebukes for his impudence and a reminder of the fact that she brought him up “by hand.” After supper, Pip schemes to bring part of Christmas dinner to the convict, when the sound of gunfire resounds, indicating another escape from the Hulks prison ships. Pip trips off to bed, afraid to sleep for fear of waking the next morning’s plan. Nevertheless, at the first hint of dawn, he escapes with some morsels, including brandy and a pork pie. 19

On his way to the planned meeting spot, Pip stumbles upon another man, dressed in a like gray uniform, with a badly bruised face and an iron chain encircling his leg. He strikes Pip and runs into the mist, allowing Pip to continue toward his convict. When they meet, the man ravenously east his food, while Pip mentions the other man and the fact that he heard cannons in the middle of the night. Pip indicates which way the man with the badly bruised face traveled and leaves his friend in the mist, filing away at his iron. Though Pip’s fear and guilt begins here, with his being “very much afraid of him again ... and likewise very much afraid from being away from home any longer,” (21) Dorothy Van Ghent argues that its genesis occurred before he committed any ill action. Pip is received by his sister as a criminal; this guilt is only compounded after he commits theft and first realized as he watches the convict limp into the distance. When Pip returns home, half-expecting an awaiting constable, he finds his sister busy with Christmas preparations. When attending church with Joe, he completely ignores the liturgy and is preoccupied instead with the question of whether he will be apprehended for his theft or saved from the wrath of the convict. The Gargerys and Pip later share dinner with the church clerk, Mr. Wopsle, the wheelwright Mr. Hubble and his wife, and Joe’s Uncle Pumblechook. The adults pester Pip, who is overcome with worry about the realization of the missing food. When Mrs. Joe announces the pork pie, Pip dashes away, only to run into a party of soldiers. Though Pip is frightened, the soldiers simply want Joe’s help in repairing handcuffs for the escaped convicts. Upon finishing his task, Joe proposes that he, Pip, and Mr. Wopsle join the soldier’s search. They set out into the dismal marshes, Pip wondering whether the convicts will think he brought the authorities. After a mad chase, the convicts are found at the bottom of the ditch, and with Pip hiding behind Joe during the spectacle, the badly bruised convict accuses the other of murder. When the sergeants stop the conversation and light the torches, Pip is revealed and is startled to be caught in the convict’s sight. He reminisces, “If he had looked at me for an 20

hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face even afterwards, as having been more attentive.” (38) After an hour of travel, the convict apologizes to Joe for taking food from his home; Joe promptly forgives him. Critics make much of this exchange, noting both Joe’s genuine humanity and the foundation of Pip’s kindness toward the convict. Noting a bizarre clicking the convict’s throat, Pip watches intently as the two men are loaded back onto the ship. On the way home, Joe carries his exhausted young charge back, and they deliver news of the convict’s confession to the awaiting visitors. One evening, Pip, who is being taught to write by Mr. Wopsle’s great aunt, practices his script by writing Joe a letter. Joe says that he has never been to school; that he lived in the house until he met Pip’s sister, whom he describes as a “fine figure of a woman,” in part for her efforts raising Pip. Joe allows, however, that his lack of formal schooling could be attributed to his wife’s disinterest in education. Pip declares that from that moment forward, he saw Joe as his equal. During a market day shortly thereafter, Pumblechook announces that Pip is to play at the home of Miss Havisham, a woman known throughout town for being “an immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion.” (51) So the next morning, a scrubbed and linen-bedecked Pip is delivered to Pumblechook’s shop. They arrive at Miss Havisham’s together, and a window is raised; Pumblechook responds to a prompt that Pip indeed stands downstairs, learns that he is unwanted on the premises, and leaves Pip in the hands of a young lady who meets him at the gate. Pip’s young escort informs him that the name of the house is Satis—or enough—and leads him to a dressing room, where a lady dressed in full wedding regalia awaits. Pip soon notices that everything meant to be white is faded and that the woman’s skin seems to hang off her bones. Miss Havisham commands Pip to play, and when his response is a confused stare, turns her eyes to her reflection in the looking glass and bids Pip to call the girl, Estella. At Miss Havisham’s behest Pip plays “beggar my neighbour” with Estella, who labels him a 21

“common labouring boy.” (60) When they are finished, Miss Havisham requests his return and Estella brings him into the courtyard and contemptuously offers him food. After Estella leaves, Pip observes his commonness with contempt, alleviating his frustrations by kicking the brewery wall. Estella soon lets him out, wondering aloud why he doesn’t cry when he seems as though he’d like to. Gratefully finding Pumblechook away from his office, Pip continues the four miles back to the forge, ruminating on his status as a “common labouring boy.” Pip returns home to find his sister and Pumblechook awaiting his arrival. In response to their ceaseless queries he spins a web of elaborate lies, bearing in mind that Pumblechook has himself never laid eyes on Miss Havisham. Only when Pip sees Joe does he begin to feel remorse. He quickly confesses, expressing his disdain about his commonness, and Joe—incredulous that neither a group of dogs nor a game involving flags comprised Pip’s visit—explains that the only sure way to becoming a gentleman is through truthfulness. The next morning, Pip resolves to ask Biddy to tell him everything she knows. But before their planned meeting, Pip is sent by his sister to call on Joe at the public house, The Three Jolly Bargemen. Joe is seated with Mr. Wopsle and “a secret-looking man” (75) Pip doesn’t recognize. This man inquires after Pip’s origins; the three converse until the rum-and-water is brought to the table and the strange man stirs his drink with a file. Only Pip notices this aberration, and in doing so realizes that the strange man is, in fact, his convict. The convict presents a fistful of change to Pip when Pip and Joe rise to leave. The wad is proclaimed to be two one-pound notes, which Mrs. Joe binds and stores under an ornamental tea pot. Pip’s sleep is fitful that night, his mind on the common nature of an association with convicts. Many critics write that Pip’s experience of Satis house is that of living in a daydream; Miss Havisham represents in his hopes a sort of fairy godmother. Dorothy Van Ghent suggests that Miss Havisham’s commanding Pip to play is an illustration of Dickens’s response to society’s increasing commodification of people. At the appointed time, Pip returns, and Estella leads 22

him into a gloomy, low-ceilinged room and instructs Pip to wait until he is called upon. Pip gazes out at a neglected garden until he realizes he is under scrutiny. He observes these strange people called Camilla, Cousin Raymond, Miss Sarah Pocket, until Estella summons him with a bell; she asks him, as they walk, if he finds her pretty. When he assents, Estella slaps him forcefully and asks why he does not cry. Pip solemnly declares that he will never cry for her again. At the top of the stairs they encounter a burly soap-scented man who inquires, biting the side of his forefinger, as to Pip’s purpose. Remarking that boys “are a bad set of fellows,” the man reminds Pip to behave himself. Miss Havisham suggests that Estella and Pip play cards again, but then she directs Pip to a neighboring room. Standing there, Pip observes a long table set for a feast but riddled with mold, dust, and insects. When Miss Havisham enters, she explains that she shall be laid on the table when she is dead, and points out that the object buried under cobwebs is actually a wedding cake. Pip’s task, he learns, is to walk Miss Havisham around the room; he complies, until he is instructed to call for Estella. Estella enters with the adults Pip encountered downstairs. Miss Havisham declares that upon her death all of these people—family members—shall surround the table and “feast upon me.” Mentioning that her absent brother, Matthew Pocket, shall sit at the head of the table, she instructs Pip to continue walking her around the table. When the adults leave, Miss Havisham summons Pip and Estella and says, “when they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table—which shall be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him—so much better if it is done on this day!” (89) Pip and Estella then play cards, and Pip is led back to the yard and fed in the same manner as before. When Pip is left alone he encounters a pale young gentleman, who implores him to fight. When Pip prevails, the pale young gentleman bids him “good afternoon.” Meeting Estella in the courtyard, he honors her request for a kiss on the cheek. Fitful about the incident with the pale young gentleman, Pip returns to “the scene of the deed of violence” (94) with trepidation, only to find the struggle unmentioned. Seated in a 23

garden chair, which Pip is instructed to push, Miss Havisham engages Pip in a discussion about his education and his future as Joe’s apprentice. Pip visits again and again, and though Estella never asks for another kiss, Miss Havisham seems to delight in Pip’s attraction to her young charge. One evening Pumblechook comes to the Gargerys’ with the intention of discussing Pip’s prospects. He begins by suggesting how grateful Pip should be for the work that his sister has done, and then engages Mrs. Joe in a discussion about Miss Havisham’s influence. One day Miss Havisham again inquires the name of the blacksmith to whom Pip is to be apprenticed. Miss Havisham requests that Joe comes to visit her soon, and alone with Pip. Mrs. Joe is offended by her lack of invitation; she suggests that she will travel with them and stay at Pumblechook’s. Joe and Pip continue straight on to Miss Havisham’s and are met by a nonplussed Estella, who leads them in. Miss Havisham asks Joe a series of questions, beginning with, “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?” Instead of responding to Miss Havisham directly, the bumbling, nervous blacksmith addresses Pip. Joe’s foibles, Van Ghent suggests, are common in Great Expectations, where language is unique to character. When characters such as Joe or Magwitch speak in soliloquy, they suggest a world of colliding fragmented existences. When Joe responds that Pip has earned no premium with him, Miss Havisham presents Pip with 25 guineas. Miss Havisham bids them goodbye and remarks that Pip may not return, as Joe is now his master. They return to Pumblechook’s with the news. Pumblechook insists that he’ll take Pip to Town Hall to have him officially “bound” to Joe. Mrs. Pip insists that some of Pip’s windfall be used to finance a celebration dinner at the Blue Boar. Pip returns to his bedroom that night, ashamed of his status and convinced that he shall never like Joe’s trade. As Pip’s education continues, he soaks up all he can from Biddy and Mr. Wopsle. Using the Battery as a study place, Pip imparts his knowledge to Joe. All the while, Pip thinks of Miss Havisham and Estella. When he asks Joe if he should pay another visit to Miss Havisham, to formerly thank her, Joe 24

agrees, after some deliberation, to give Pip a half-holiday for his visit. When Joe’s journeyman, Orlick, hears this news, he protests until Joe grants a half-holiday to everyone. Mrs. Joe, upset by this decision, exchanges harsh words with Orlick; when Mrs. Joe dissolves into an angry fit, Joe and Orlick begin to struggle. Pip disappears upstairs to dress, and when he returns, he finds Joe and his journeymen sweeping up as though nothing has happened. At Miss Havisham’s house Pip is greeted by Miss Sarah Pocket and the news that Estella has gone abroad, “educating for a lady.” (116) When Miss Havisham seems to delight in Pip’s feeling of loss, Pip remains silent until Miss Havisham dismisses him. On his way home Pip runs into Mr. Wopsle, who invites him to take tea in Pumblechook’s parlor and to engage in a reading of a popular tragic play. As under the cover of darkness the two walk home, they run into Orlick, who tells him the Hulks’ cannons are firing again. On the way, the three men are surprised to find a commotion at the Three Jolly Bargemen; when Mr. Wopsle seeks out the cause of the ruckus, he is told that something violent has happened at Pip’s place. When they finally reach home, they see through the crowd to Pip’s sister, lying senseless on the floorboards because of a blow to the head. The details of the evening emerge: Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen since eight o’clock, and when he arrived home at five minutes before ten, he found Mrs. Joe stricken, a convict’s leg iron beside her. Pip imagines that either Orlick or his convict could be responsible for a tragedy of this magnitude; considering the implications of the convict’s actions, Pip is overcome by guilt, “to think that I had provided the weapon.” (121) In giving the convict the file, Pip thinks he has essentially killed his sister himself. He has overtaken his destiny, Van Ghent argues, just as George Barnwell, the character in the play he read that night with Wopsle—he has murdered his nearest relative.Though the incident renders Mrs. Joe an invalid, her temperament improves greatly. About a month later, Biddy comes to work in the kitchen, and begins investigating the curious T-shape Mrs. Joe helplessly draws on 25

a piece of slate. Finally, Biddy realizes that unable to spell Orlick’s name, Mrs. Joe is signifying his hammer. Still, when Orlick was brought before Mrs. Joe, she is gracious to him. Pip falls into the routine of life as an apprentice until the arrival of his birthday, when he is scheduled to pay another visit to Miss Havisham. He again meets Sarah Pocket at the gate, hears that Estella remains abroad, and accepts—after some deliberation—a guinea and another invitation for his next birthday. At home, Pip begins to notice a change in Biddy and, admiring her persistence and her intellect, seeks her out as a confidante. He tells her one Sunday afternoon that he wants to be a gentleman, insisting that he will be miserable if he continues to lead the type of life to which he has been bound. He laments the occasion of being called coarse and common, and confesses that Estella planted such ideas. Biddy asks if Pip would like to become a gentleman to spite Estella or to win her; she suggests that he might achieve his goal of spiting her if he stops caring about her words. As they walk and talk, Pip laments his inability to fall in love with Biddy, and Biddy insists that he never will. Nearing the churchyard, the two run into Orlick; after, Biddy admits that Orlick has always had the wrong intentions for her. Contemplating this, Pip attempts to rid himself of his disaffection for Jo and to sustain a desire for Biddy; all the while, he is haunted by Miss Havisham and Estella. Four years later, Pip assembles with a group of men at the Three Jolly Bargemen to hear news of a popular murder. As they sit, Pip notices a strange gentleman opposite him, biting the side of his forefinger. The stranger asks the crowd if they know whether any of the witnesses have been cross-examined and whether they feel a man’s conscience can rest, knowing that he’s convicted a man who has not yet been heard. Then the strange man asks after Joe Gargery and his apprentice, and when they come forward, he introduces himself as Mr. Jaggers, a lawyer in London. Joe says he bears an offer to relieve Pip from his indentures to Joe, and Joe insists both that he would never stand in Pip’s way and that he doesn’t need compensation for his loss. Jaggers says that part of the offer’s stipulations are 26

that Pip always bears the name “Pip” and that the name of the person who is his benefactor may not be revealed until a time of his benefactor’s choosing. Next the details of arrangement are laid out, including the money set aside for Pip’s lodging and education and the fact that Jaggers should be considered Pip’s guardian. Matthew Pocket—the man, Pip remembers, Miss Havisham said should be at the head of the table when she is laid to rest—should be his tutor, and twenty guineas shall be laid aside for Pip’s work-clothes. Additionally, Jaggers says Joe is to be compensated for the loss of Pip’s services, while Joe protests, insisting that no monetary compensation could suffice for the loss of a child. Biddy attempts to explain the news to Mrs. Joe, and Pip feels sheepish when he hears Biddy and Joe discuss his pending absence. He suggests that the tailor send his new clothes to Pumblechook’s so he is not made into a spectacle. Biddy and Joe insist that they—as well as Wopsle and the Hubbles—might like to see Pip’s new “gen-teel figure.” Joe burns Pip’s documents of indenture, and after an early dinner, strolls out to meet him in the marshes. Later Pip speaks to Biddy, and when she makes him uncomfortable by suggesting that Joe was not simply backward and confused but proud, Pip accuses her of being envious of his good fortune. Visiting the tailor, Mr. Trabb, Pip delivers the news of his good fortune; Mr. Trabb’s reaction convinces Pip of the power of money. Once hats, boots, and stockings have been ordered, Pip approaches Pumblechook, who receives him festively. They eat and drink to Pip’s sister’s health, and Pumblechook pledges to keep Joe “up to the mark.” On Friday Pip puts on his new clothes and pays a visit to Miss Havisham, who says she has heard from Jaggers that Pip has been adopted by an unnamed rich person. As she bids him goodbye, she encourages him to always keep the name of Pip. As their time together dwindles, Pip grows more appreciative of Joe and Biddy’s company. On his last night, he dresses himself in his new clothes and feels melancholy despite their attempts to seem festive. Early the next morning Pip dresses, eats a hurried breakfast, and walks away. He lays his hand down on the finger post of the village and says goodbye. 27

Volume Two Pip makes the five-hour journey to London and discovers a dirty city full of narrow streets. He takes a coach to Little Britain, just outside Smithfield, and arrives at Jaggers’s office only to find his guardian still in court. Mike, a one-eyed client, is asked to leave so that Pip can sit inside the office. While Pip waits, he stares around the office, wondering about the odd objects inside, such as a pistol, a sword, and two casts of faces. He sits until he cannot bear the heat and the menacing looks of the two casts; then, informing the clerk that he’d like to take a walk, enters Smithfield, “asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam.” (165) Beyond he enters Newgate Prison and sees the Debtors’ door, where a drunk minister of justice informs him four people are scheduled to be hung the following day. Checking back in at Jaggers’s office and finding him still gone, Pip heads toward a square in the opposite direction. There he finds a group of people also awaiting Jaggers’s arrival. Jaggers appears and addresses all of the people, including a group of poor Jews, and eventually rebukes or casts them aside so that he and Pip can return to the office. Jaggers’s purpose in life, according to Steven Newman, is to “extort the worst in everybody.” In this first glimpse of his typical day at work, it is obvious that the man is incapable of discussing or considering. Like the objects in his office, the man himself seems an amalgam of mystery and violence. Finally, Jaggers brings Pip into his office and, while lunching, informs him that he is to stay at Barnard’s Inn with young Mr. Pocket until Monday, at which point he should accompany young Mr. Pocket to his father Matthew’s house. After receiving details of his credit and allowance, Pip makes his way toward Barnard’s Inn with Jaggers’s clerk, Wemmick. Barnard’s Inn is a shabby group of buildings, and Wemmick leads Pip up a flight of stairs “which appeared to be slowly collapsing into sawdust.” (173) Bidding him farewell, Wemmick is surprised when Pip commits the social error of inviting a superior to shake his hand. After more than half an hour, young Mr. Pocket emerges with an apology and a cone-shaped wicker 28

basket of strawberries. He pushes through the sticking door to show Pip around the meager apartment—as he points out furniture, Pip notices that the man before him is none other than the pale young gentleman whom he fought at Miss Havisham’s. “And you,” young Mr. Pocket says, “are the prowling boy.” After they share a laugh, young Mr. Pocket introduces himself as Herbert and discloses that at one time he may have been intended for Estella. He expresses no remorse, however, declaring the girl “hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up my Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex.” (177) Herbert explains that Mr. Jaggers is Miss Havisham’s businessman and solicitor and that his own father is Miss Havisham’s cousin. Charmed by Herbert’s easy manner, the two settle in to an easy conversation. Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel,” after the composer’s piece called the Harmonious Blacksmith. As they eat dinner, Herbert instructs Pip on proper London table manners and shares what he knows about Miss Havisham. He explains that Miss Havisham comes from a rich, proud family; she had a half-brother from her father’s second marriage to a cook. Once her father passed away, she was left an heiress, and she was later pursued by a showy, passionate man to whom she gave great sums of money for business ventures. When Herbert’s father, Miss Havisham’s cousin, warned that she was doing too much for the man, Miss Havisham was so upset she ordered him out of her house forever. The day she was to marry the man, at twenty minutes to nine, she received a letter which canceled the entire thing. At that point, she stopped all the clocks. All that is known, Herbert says, is that her intended acted somehow in concert with her scorned half-brother, and that the two men shared the profits. Herbert confesses that he does not know Estella’s origins, saying only that she is adopted and that “There has always been an Estella, since I have heard of a Miss Havisham.” (183) He explains that he works in a counting house and dreams of making a great fortune through trading. On Monday morning Herbert brings Pip to his father’s house, in Hammersmith. They encounter Mrs. Pocket, 29

surrounded by a chaos of children and nursemaids. Mr. Pocket emerges, stresses how happy he is to see Pip, and introduces him to two young men named Drummle and Startop. After dinner—which includes the Pocket’s seven children as well as their widowed neighbor, Mrs. Colier—the boys practiced rowing on the Thames. A few days later, once Pip has settled in, he has a long conversation with Mr. Pocket. Pip asks if he might continue living in Barnard’s Inn with Herbert, and Mr. Pocket agrees. Pip goes to Jaggers to ask for money to buy a few additional things, and after the two settle on an amount, Wemmick pays him twenty pounds. Pip remarks to Wemmick that he’s not sure how to understand Jaggers’ demeanor, and Wemmick assures him that “it’s not personal; it’s professional: only professional.” (198) He explains that the casts that haunt Pip are the faces of famous clients who were executed. Wemmick invites him to stay at his home in Walworth and inquires whether or not Pip has yet dined with Jaggers. When Pip says no, Wemmick suggests that when he does so soon, he shall be sure to look at Jaggers’s housekeeper to see a “wild beast tamed.” (202) After, they walk to a police court to watch Jaggers work. One day Pip proposes to go home with Wemmick for the evening. As they walk toward Walworth, Wemmick instructs Pip to look at Jaggers’s expensive gold watch, explaining that there are “seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about that watch.” (206) They arrive at Wemmick’s house, which looks like a miniature castle. Wemmick explains that hidden in the back are farm animals and crops, so that if the place was besieged, they would survive. Inside they meet a very old man whom Wemmick addresses as “Aged Parent.” As they sit down first to punch in the arbour and then to supper, Wemmick explains that he got hold of his property little by little, but that it’s all his now; he remarks upon being questioned that Jaggers had never seen the place, as he believes strongly in the separation of personal and professional matters. In fact, the next morning, as the two returned to work, Wemmick grew more pragmatic and distant with each step. Indeed, he addresses the problem of reconciling the dark, criminal world with a higher world by compartmentalizing. His 30

Walworth character, says Newman, is an attractive one, but only by dehumanizing himself is Wemmick able to survive the office. Whereas Jaggers might view life as evil, Wemmick sees it in certain ways as checks and balances. Soon after, Pip and his fellow students accompany Jaggers to his set of rooms in a stately yet poorly kempt house. Jaggers says that he owns the entire house, but rarely uses more than what they see; as they eat, Pip’s guardian takes a peculiar interest in Drummle. Pip notices the housekeeper, especially the way she keeps her eyes attentively on Jaggers. As they talk of the boys’ rowing and their strengths, Jaggers implores Molly, the housekeeper, to show the boys her wrist. She protests, but finally is forced to reveal a wrist scarred and disfigured. Jaggers remarks that few men have the power of wrist that Molly does. As the hours pass, Jaggers prepares to dismiss them, first drinking to Drummle; he later warns Pip to avoid him, proclaiming his classmate “one of the true sort” and nicknaming him Spider. A month later, Drummle finishes his studies with the Pockets and returns to his family. Pip receives a letter from Biddy which says that Joe intends to visit London in the company of Mr. Wopsle, that his sister is much the same, and that Pip’s absence is felt, and discussed, in the kitchen nightly. Realizing that Joe’s visit is scheduled for the next day, Pip thinks that “if I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.” (218) Herbert offers moral support by suggesting a breakfast that might please Joe. The next morning, Pip listens with dread to Joe’s heavy boots on the stairs. They greet one another, and though Pip offers to take Joe’s hat, he holds it carefully, “like a bird’s-nest with eggs in it.” With his fractured speech, Joe comments on Pip’s maturity and describes Mr. Wopsle’s play. Emphasizing his hope that he was somehow useful to Pip, Joe says that it’s an honor to eat in the company of gentlemen. Then he mentions that a few nights earlier, Miss Havisham summoned him, asking Joe to relay a message that Estella has come home and would be glad to see him. He then insists that he must go, that he and Pip are not compatible to be seen together in London. 31

The next day Pip sets off for his Satis house, thinking first with remorse that he should stay with Joe, but eventually deciding to stay at the Blue Boar. Leaving by the afternoon coach, Pip realizes that he was traveling with his convict, who is shackled to another. Though their eyes meet, the convict doesn’t recognize Pip; as they continue toward London, a feeling of coincidence tingles in the base of Pip’s spine. As he sits in the Blue Boar’s empty coffee-room, he picks up a local newspaper that includes an article about him, attributing his earliest fortunes to Pumblechook. Brooks argues that this return home from London is the first in a series of repetitions—of attempted reparations for Joe, of knowledge seeking at Satis house. It seems, in fact, to be a harbinger of repressed thoughts and actions when the convict is seated on Pip’s coach. Immediately before falling asleep on the coach, Pip considers whether he should return the twopound notes to the convict. When he awakens, the first words he hears are “Two-pound notes.” It’s as though hopes of Pip’s progress are subverted by the reappearance of the convict. He hopes that he will never be able to go home again. These thoughts, Morgenthaler contends, suggest that Pip represents “the evolution of the human species away from its primitive origins.” Pip feels great guilt about his own developing prejudices and the excuses he gives himself for being unable to stay with Joe. “All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers.... that I should innocently take a bad halfcrown of somebody else’s manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!” (225) When Pip arrives at Miss Havisham’s the next morning, he is shocked when Orlick opens the door. Commenting insolently that he has left the forge, Orlick leads Pip into the hall. Pip then meets Miss Sarah Pocket, who brings him to Miss Havisham and an elegant lady. Pip realizes that the lady is Estella, and each proclaims the other to be much changed. When they are left alone in the garden, Estella discloses that she saw the fight break out between Herbert and Pip long before, and that she was gratified by it. Discussing their 32

prospects of being groomed for one another, Estella says evenly that she has “not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I have never had any such thing.” (238) They return, and Pip is surprised to learn that Jaggers will join them for dinner. Pip is captivated by the act of pushing Miss Havisham’s chair once again, feeling as though the action is transporting him back in time. Estella leaves the room to dress, and Miss Havisham eagerly asks if Pip finds her beautiful and then implores that he love her, describing love as “blind devotion, unquestioning selfhumiliation, utter submission ... giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did.” (240) Jaggers arrives for dinner and asks Pip how many times he has encountered Miss Estella. As they eat dinner, Jaggers scarcely looks at Estella, even when she addresses him. Afterwards it is arranged that when Estella comes to London, Pip should meet her at the coach. After Pip and Jaggers return to the Blue Boar, Pip says into his pillow “I love her, I love her, I love her!” The next morning Jaggers answers Pip’s concern about Orlick’s new position with the dismissing comment that the right sort of man never fills a post of trust. Nervous about running into Pumblechook at the Blue Boar, Pip walks into the marshes and runs into Trabb’s boy, who circles and taunts him. When Pip returns to London, he sends oysters and codfish to Joe as an act of repentance; he then returns to Barnard’s Inn. Seeing Herbert, Pip confesses that he is in love with Estella; Herbert replies that he knew all along and that Pip should have patience in the absence of knowing Estella’s feelings for him. He also insists that Estella cannot be a condition of Pip’s inheritance and suggests, especially upon hearing of Jaggers’s reaction to Estella at dinner, that Pip detach himself from her. When Pip deems such an action impossible, Herbert ventures to make himself agreeable again. He confesses that he is secretly engaged to a woman named Clara who is below his mother’s notions of acceptability and whose father is an invalid. Pip insists that he would like to meet Clara, and the two friends set off to watch Mr. Wopsle’s performance of Macbeth. Wopsle has adopted the stage name of Waldengarver, and his performance of Macbeth is so poor that throughout he is 33

greeted by peals of laughter. Pip suggests to Herbert that they sneak out, but they are greeted at the door by a Jewish man who addresses Pip by name and suggests that Waldengarver would be delighted to see Pip. When they meet in the dressing room Pip consults with Herbert and then invites Wopsle back to Barnard’s Inn for supper. When Wopsle finally leaves at two in the morning, Pip dreams that his expectations are canceled, that he is promised to Herbert’s Clara, that he plays Hamlet to Miss Havisham’s ghost. One day Pip receives a note from Estella which explains that she is London-bound. Pip waits for her at the coach-office, where he runs into Wemmick, on his way to Newgate to consult with a client. As they walk through the prison, Pip is struck by Wemmick’s stiff manner, so unlike when he is at home among the Aged. Pip tries to rid himself of prison dust as he waits for Estella. This prison dust is yet another manifestation of the guilt and distain Pip feels for being so closely linked to a world of crime. From his acceptance of the two-pound notes at the Three Jolly Bargemen to his association with Jaggers and his proximity to Smithfield and Newgate, Pip is tied to violence and crime. Julian Moynahan argues that Dickens has entrapped his protagonist. He writes: “Regardless of the fact that Pip’s association with crimes and criminals is purely adventitious and that he evidently bears no responsibility for any act or intention of criminal violence, he must be condemned on the principle of guilt by association.” These coincidences are ties that bind characters to one another, regardless of reason. When Pip sees Estella’s face, he notices a “nameless shadow” (264) hovering between them. Estella informs Pip that he is to take her to Richmond, in Surrey, where she is to live. As they talk, Pip observes aloud that Estella speaks of herself as though she were someone else. She talks resignedly about Miss Havisham’s wiles and about their own status as mere pawns of her plan. They travel by coach to Estella’s new lodgings, passing through Newgate-street and then Hammersmith, where Pip points out the Pocket residence. When Pip expresses surprise that Miss Havisham might part with Estella so soon 34

after her return from the Continent, Estella insists that it’s simply part of the plan. After dropping her off in Richmond, Pip returns to Hammersmith with a heavy heart, considering airing his woes to Mr. Pocket, and soon deciding against it. As he has grown accustomed to London, Pip has become used to an extravagant lifestyle which includes the employment of a servant (called “the Avenger”) and inclusion in a club called The Finches of the Grove, whose members dine expensively once every two weeks and quarrel among themselves. When Pip and Herbert realize they have plummeted deeply into debt, they sit down at the table and calculate their affairs. These efforts, for Pip, include the act of “leaving a Margin,” (276) to round the amount of their debt up to the nearest whole number. Pip is enjoying his busywork one evening when a letter, signed “Trabb & Co.,” arrives bearing the news of his sister’s death. Pip returns home, realizing with great shock that Mrs. Joe’s is the first death through which he has lived. When he arrives, he finds the funeral an ostentatious affair and Joe crippled with grief. Biddy is very helpful, and Trabb conducts the entire ceremony with a pomp that pains Joe, who says he would have preferred to carry his wife to the church himself. Pumblechook and the Hubbles seem to relish the parade to the churchyard. When everyone finally leaves, Pip and Biddy discuss her prospects now that she is no longer saddled with the responsibility of Mrs. Joe. Biddy suggests that she might enjoy taking a teaching job. When Pip asks about the specifics of his sister’s final hours, Biddy tells him that her last words were “Joe,” then “Pardon,” and then “Pip.” Biddy admits that she is still being pursued by Orlick, and Pip is disturbed by this notion as well as the realization that Biddy has acquired a habit of repeating everything he says. Pip asks to spend the night in his childhood room, and the next morning he sets off early, promising that he’ll visit soon. When Pip’s twenty-first birthday arrives, Jaggers summons him to his office, calls him Mr. Pip, and inquires after his lack of financial stability. When Pip asks whether his benefactor will be revealed to him on this day, Jaggers says no. He does, however, present Pip with a 500-pound note, with the news 35

that he will be presented with the same amount every year, on his birthday. Pip again inquires after his benefactor, and Jaggers is curt about his inability to answer such questions; he says that when the person comes forward, Jaggers’s responsibilities will be finished. Pip seeks Wemmick’s advice on how to help Herbert financially. Wemmick, being at the office and in his pragmatic mind frame, lists the names of the bridges in London and advises that Pip would be better off throwing his money from one of them. Realizing that he might get a different answer at Walworth, Pip resolves to visit Wemmick there. Jaggers joins Herbert and Pip for dinner, and when he leaves, Herbert remarks that Jaggers’s presence made him feel as though he had committed a felony. That Sunday Pip sets out for Walworth in order to obtain advice about Herbert. He makes pleasant conversation with the Aged until he is surprised by tumbling wooden flaps marked “John,” and “Miss Skiffins,” which Wemmick has rigged to amuse his father. Miss Skiffins is a wooden, middle-aged woman upon whom Wemmick seems to dote. Pip once again beseeches Wemmick about Herbert—giving more details this time—and the clerk is much more responsive. The four share tea and toast and listen to the Aged read; Pip observes Wemmick’s attempts to sneak an arm around Miss Skiffins. By the end of the week, Pip receives a note from Wemmick which details the plan for Herbert—Pip will donate 100 pounds yearly to a merchant named Clarriker, who will hire Herbert and make him a partner without mentioning that he’s being paid to do so. Estella stays with a widow named Mrs. Brandley who knew Miss Havisham before her seclusion. Pip is summoned to visit, and Estella mentions her worries that Pip will not heed the warnings she gives against his attraction to her. She then says that Miss Havisham wishes for Pip to accompany Estella to Satis house the day after next. When they arrive, again Miss Havisham prods Pip about the way Estella uses him. Pip sees more clearly the way Estella has been groomed to wreak Miss Havisham’s revenge on men. As the three sit by the fire, Miss Havisham’s arm linked through Estella’s, Estella slowly begins 36

to detach herself. When Estella is reproached, she accuses her guardian of making her proud and hard. When Miss Havisham laments Estella’s inability to return her love, Estella insists again that all of her failings are the result of her being taught to turn against the daylight. Pip escapes into the courtyard for an hour, and when he returns, Estella is seated at Miss Havisham’s knee. Disturbed, Pip cannot sleep through the night, and at two o’clock in the morning he awakes to find Miss Havisham walking around the house, clutching a candle, and moaning quietly. The next day and upon subsequent visits, Pip can see no evidence of the harsh words exchanged between Estella and Miss Havisham. Soon after, at a meeting of the Finches of the Grove, Drummle mentions that he has been keeping company with a woman named Estella. Upset, Pip demands evidence, and the next day Drummle produces a note in Estella’s hand, which says that she danced with him several times. Pip confronts Estella at a ball in Richmond, insisting that she should not associate with characters such as Drummle. She defends herself by explaining that she “deceives and entraps many others—all of them but you.” (312) By the time Pip turns 23, he has moved with Herbert the Temple, one of the Inns of the court. Though Pip had terminated his official lessons with Mr. Pocket, they remain on good terms, and Pip remains interested in reading. When, a week after Pip’s birthday, Herbert travels to Marseilles on business, Pip, overcome by a feeling of loneliness, hears a footstep on the stairs. Pip lets in the man, who looks about sixty, and asks his business. After the man makes some strange comments about Pip’s appearance, Pip realizes that he is staring at his convict. Feeling threatened and confused by the convict’s outpouring of affection and appreciation, Pip insists that he hopes the convict’s gratitude for his actions as a young child will be repaid in the convict’s resolution to rebuild his life. The convict explains that he has traveled the world and worked at many trades; he asks Pip how he has come to his fortune and then begins to make correct guesses as to the logistics, one by one, finishing with Wemmick’s name. As Pip braces himself with shock, the convict gleefully 37

relishes the fact that he has created a gentleman, suggesting that even love can be Pip’s, as long as money can buy it. Thinking sadly of Estella, Pip asks whether anyone else is responsible for his fortune; the convict’s proud dissent upsets Pip. When the convict asks for a place to stay, Pip gives him Herbert’s room. The storms and the shock install in Pip a profound sense of despair; worried about footsteps on the stairs and the convict nearby, he locks the convict in his room and falls asleep in a chair. Van Ghent suggests that the convict is inside Pip as the negative potential for his “great expectations”—Dickens explores extensively that power that brings people together, as binding as the convict’s shackles. It is the effect of the original encounter that propels Magwitch back from across the world to Pip.

Volume Three Pip is troubled by the thought of an unexpected visitor lurking outside on the stairs, and the task of keeping his benefactor away from the prying eyes of his old neighbor woman and her niece seems arduous. He informs the watchman that the man who asked for him was his uncle and inquires after other unknown visitors. The watchman says that he thought another person was with his uncle—a working person, wearing dustcolored clothes. As the clock strikes six in the morning Pip lights the fire; shortly thereafter, he tells the old woman and her niece to modify breakfast, as his uncle had arrived during the night. When the convict awakens, he tells Pip that his real name is Abel Magwitch, but that he came to call himself Provis during his travels. He said that he hopes he is not known in London, though he was tried there most recently, and that he would not advertise the fact that he had returned from Australia. Pip concludes that he must offer the man lodging and that he’ll have to confide in Herbert, although Provis insists upon studying Herbert’s physiognomy before disclosure. Pip secures a lodging house for his so-called uncle, and then goes to see Jaggers, who, after confirming that his benefactor was indeed Abel Magwitch of New South Wales, says that he 38

doesn’t want to hear any more about the situation. Jaggers says that when Magwitch gave a distant hint of wanting to return to England, he was discouraged and told that he would unlikely be granted a pardon. Then he allows that Wemmick received a letter from a colonist named Provis interested in Pip’s address. After that disclosure, the conversation is terminated. This admission, says Morgenthaler, is the revelation of the fairy tale turns inside out—the happy ending is provided by a member of low society, proving, perhaps, Darwin’s idea of interdependence of all things. With Pip’s revelation and Jaggers’s confirmation, moral distinctions between categories are forever blurred. Since Wemmick is out, Pip returns home to find Magwitch drinking rum. Even after his clothes are replaced, the convict still seems untamed and mysterious, and Pip is haunted by the fact that the man can be hanged on his account. Herbert returns and is halted by the sight of Magwitch; the three men sit by the fire as Pip explains the entire situation. Magwitch assures the two young men that he’ll always have a “gen-teel muzzle on.” (341) Herbert and Pip discuss the situation, and Herbert says that although he understands Pip’s impulse to separate himself from Magwitch’s funding and friendship, he sees danger in Pip’s renunciation of this stubborn and passionate man who for so long has had such a fixed idea to help him. They decide that the only thing to do is to convince Magwitch to leave England. Magwitch sits down to tell the boys the story of his life, including mention of the other convict Pip encountered in the marshes, a man named Compeyson. This man, whom Magwitch met twenty years earlier, was good-looking and educated, and he soon took in Magwitch to be his partner in swindling. Compeyson’s other partner was a dying man named Arthur who lived upstairs; one evening Arthur, who was perpetually haunted by the image of a mad woman dressed all in white, saw the woman coming toward him with a shroud, and promptly died. During his employment with Compeyson Magwitch was tried and convicted of misdemeanor; soon after the two men were together tried for felony. At the trial, Compeyson’s character was celebrated, while Magwitch was 39

implicated. For this, after a series of trials and escapes, the two men became mortal enemies. As Magwitch stands smoking by the fire, Herbert pencils in the cover of a book, “ ‘ Young Havisham’s name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who professed to be Miss Havisham’s lover.’ ” Fearful and vowing not to mention Estella to Provis, Pip sets off to find Estella the next day. He is told he can find her at Satis house, and as he passes the Blue Boar for breakfast and to clean up, he sees Bentley Drummle. They meet and exchange tense pleasantries until a waiter informs Drummle that the lady will not ride. Before Pip leaves he thinks he spots Orlick. Miss Havisham and Estella are surprised to greet Pip, and he tells them that he’s discovered the secret of his patronage. In response to Pip’s query, Miss Havisham says that she brought him to Satis house as she might have any other chance boy, and that her association with Jaggers has nothing to do with Pip’s expectations. Pip expresses disdain that she has misled Herbert and Matthew Pocket as well as himself, and begs Miss Havisham do the lasting service for Herbert that he himself began. He then professes his love for Estella, who replies in kind that she doesn’t understand such a thing. She admits that she is to be married to Bentley Drummle. Pip begs her to bestow herself at the very least on someone more worthy, and explains that she will never leave his heart. He moves through the gate and toward London and finds a note from Wemmick awaiting him at the Temple, urging him not to go home. After spending the night at a rooming house in Covent Garden, Pip sets off for Walworth. Wemmick tells Pip that Compeyson is living in London. Herbert, instructed by Wemmick to hide Magwitch until a plan can be constructed for his safe escape, has brought the convict to live with the father of his intended, Clara. Pip leaves Wemmick—noting from the tea service the imminent arrival of Miss Skiffins—and finds Herbert at the house Wemmick indicated. Herbert says that the housekeeper is happy to have the company of Magwitch upstairs from Clara’s father, the surly, noisy, drunk Mr. Barley. Herbert, Pip, and Magwitch construct a plan—they will take Magwitch down the river by boat, when the time is right. 40

Weeks pass without change and Pip begins to realize that Estella is married. He begins rowing regularly, so as to establish himself and his boat as a presence on the river. He keeps a nervous and distanced watch over Magwitch. One evening Pip dines alone and then takes in a Christmas pantomime in which Wopsle is featured. When he greets his former neighbor afterwards, he is shocked when Wopsle indicates that he recognized a man to have been sitting behind Pip, describing him as one of the two convicts they found in the ditch many years earlier. Pip is shocked that Compeyson was behind him, “like a ghost.” (386) Pip returns home and holds council with Herbert by the fire. One day soon after, Pip runs into Jaggers, who invites him to lunch with Wemmick. Jaggers says over lunch that Miss Havisham wishes to settle a matter of business with Pip; he then gleefully mentions that “our friend the Spider” has won the contest of Estella’s heart. When Jaggers summons his housekeeper, Molly, Pip is surprised to notice that the hands and eyes of the housekeeper were so familiar; that, in fact, she is doubtlessly Estella’s mother. After the meal Pip asks Wemmick if he has ever seen Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. When Wemmick says no, Pip reminds him of the time he was instructed to take notice of Jaggers’s housekeeper. Wemmick says that many years earlier, the housekeeper was tried and acquitted for murder. It was a case of jealously, Wemmick says, as both Molly and the murder victim were tramps. He says that the woman was also under strong suspicion of having destroyed her three-year-old child as revenge upon the man, but Jaggers argued against that, insisting that the marks on her hands were not those of fingernails but brambles. The sex of the child, Wemmick says, was female. Pip returns to Satis house, and Miss Havisham begs Pip to explain the history behind his secret partnership with Herbert. She says that if she gives him the money—900 pounds—Pip must agree to keep her secret as she has kept his own. He agrees, and she asks if there is nothing she might do to serve Pip as she has his friend. They sign papers on their agreement and Miss Havisham begs him to write under her name, “I 41

forgive her.” (398) Pip insists that he has forgiven her, and Miss Havisham cries despairingly and repeatedly, “What have I done!” Pip asks after Estella, and Miss Havisham says that she doesn’t know whose child she was but that Jaggers brought her when she was two or three. They part, and Pip walks through the brewery, taking stock of the places where he felt such childish hope and pain. As he looks into the window, he seems Miss Havisham throw herself onto the fire. He rushes in and attempting to smother the flames with his coat and his hands, he burns himself. A surgeon arrives and pronounces her wounds serious and her shock potentially more fatal. The surgeon promises to write to Estella, who is in Paris. Pip sets off to notify the family personally. Back at Barley’s house, Herbert dresses Pip’s wounds and speaks of a discussion he had with Magwitch in which Magwitch mentions a woman with whom he had a child and many struggles. Magwitch told Herbert that the woman was vengeful to the point of murder, and that though she was acquitted, the woman swore that she would destroy the child. Fearful that he would be the cause of the child’s death, Magwitch hid himself. Herbert says that when Pip was seven and ran into Magwitch in the churchyard, Magwitch was reminded of the little girl. Pip asks Herbert to confirm that he has no fever—that he is in the right frame of mind—and then explains patiently that the man they have in hiding is Estella’s father. Pip goes to Little Britain and makes the arrangements with Jaggers and Wemmick for Herbert’s future. Pip mentions that he engaged Miss Havisham in a discussion of Estella’s origins, saying later that he, unlike Miss Havisham, knew Estella’s mother. Jaggers is startled, and Pip says he has seen Estella’s mother in the past three days, and that he knows her father: Provis, from New South Wales. Then Pip discloses all that he knows, leaving Jaggers to infer that some information was imparted by Miss Havisham rather than by Wemmick. Jaggers abruptly changes the subject, and Pip implores Wemmick— invoking his pleasant home and aging father—to urge his superior to be more forthright. Jaggers maps out the story for 42

Pip and asks for whose benefit the secret should be revealed. When Pip fails to provide an answer, Jaggers returns once again to his work. When a client appears, sniveling, shortly thereafter, Jaggers dismisses him, insisting “I’ll have no feelings here.” (415) Pip settles Herbert’s affairs, and Herbert tells Pip that his career is progressing such that he might establish a branchhouse in Cairo, where he and Clara hope to live. A few days later, they receive a post from Walworth which tells them the escape should be plotted for Wednesday. Herbert suggests they engage Startop in the plan, and they begin to construct a detailed scheme which provides for Pip’s injured hands. Pip receives an anonymous note which summons him to the old marshes in order to receive information about his uncle Provis. Pip leaves immediately, stopping at Satis house to inquire after Miss Havisham, and then taking dinner in an inn. He engages the landlord in a unwitting conversation about his own history, with Pumblechook cited as his earliest benefactor. As Pip listens, he realizes how much of an impostor Pumblechook was, and how good, honest, and uncomplaining Joe was. Pip walks through the marshes and seeing a light in the old sluice house, walks in. He calls out to see if anyone is nearby, and is captured, he realizes, by Orlick. Orlick says that he is going to kill Pip—as he did his sister—and that he knows about Provis and Pip’s plans to smuggle him away. Stopping first to drink, he picks up a hammer. Pip shouts and struggles with all his might, hears voices, and sees Orlick emerge from the struggle and run into the night. It is Herbert and Startop come to his rescue, and they assure Pip that he has the next day to rest before the journey. They say that in Pip’s haste he dropped the letter, and so they tried to find him at Miss Havisham’s. Finding Pip nowhere they retired to the Blue Boar, which Pip had often mentioned, and heard from Trabb’s boy that Pip had been seen going in the direction of the sluice house. It is Orlick, Moynahan argues, not Magwitch, who represents the true criminal in Great Expectations, for his origins are mysterious and he has no regret for any of his actions. They work side by side, and in some ways, Orlick represents the 43

shadow of Pip—they are both ambitious, and in many ways, they want the same things. When he confronts him in the sluice-house, he wants to take his life both literally and figuratively. But with this parallel drawn, Moynahan says, the reader may be compelled to see Pip more harshly than Pip might ever see himself. The next morning a bright sunrise inspires the men to begin their journey. They set off and stop at Clara’s house for Magwitch, who seems grateful and relaxed. As they begin to row, he mentions the delights of freedom and compares life’s fleetingness and fluidity to the river’s. They stop that night at a rundown inn, dragging the boat up, and the landlord mentions a seeing a four-oared galley. That night Pip notices two men looking into their boat, and the next morning it is decided that Pip and Magwitch will set off early. They see a Rotterdam steamer that will take them away, but then, in the early afternoon, Pip notices the galley. Soon they hear a policeman call for the arrest of Abel Magwitch. Noticing the face of Compeyson onboard, Magwitch dives into the river to attack him. After a struggle, only Magwitch surfaces, injured badly, and he is immediately placed in shackles. He claims that there had been a struggle underwater, but that he didn’t drown Compeyson—he simply disengaged and swam away. Pip promises to stand by his benefactor. Brooks argues that the fact that Magwitch’s return is played out on a Thames estuary draws a line back to Pip’s childhood and his first encounter with Magwitch on the marshes. “It was like my own marsh country,” Pip thinks, “flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon.” (438) Ghent argues that the river is one of the most prominent demonic symbols in Dickens—it unites classes, reveals evidence, unites victim and criminal, and swallows people whole. At Police Court the next day, Jaggers is convinced Magwitch will be found guilty. Pip is not bothered by news that his inheritance shall be appropriated by the state. At this time Herbert explains that he and Clara must leave for Cairo. Herbert offers Pip a clerkship, and Pip says that he must leave the question open for a little while. On Saturday Pip returns to 44

his lonely home and finds Wemmick on the stairs, looking for him. He asks if Pip will meet him at the Castle on Monday morning, and when he does, the two take a little walk and find, inside a church, Miss Skiffins and a wedding party. The two are married, and Pip promises not to mention a word of the festivities in Little Britain. Pip goes to visits the ailing Magwitch in prison. Though Jaggers put in an application for a trial postponement given the state of his client, Magwitch is found guilty and sentenced to death. In response, Magwitch says, “I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours.” (458) As the days wear on, Pip knows the end is near. When words fail his benefactor, Pip tells him, immediately before death, that he knows of Magwitch’s child, that she was still alive, and that he loves her. Brooks argues that Magwitch’s statement before the court is Dickens way of contrasting human plots, such as the law, with the laws of the universe, which render futile both actions and attempts at interpretation. The shaft of light that falls onto all the court’s attendants eliminates the distinction between the judge and the judged and the guilty and the innocent. Pip’s evolution is apparent in his observation of “the broad shaft of light ... linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err.” (458) Pip falls ill himself after Magwitch’s death, and his debt is so great that he is arrested and carried off to prison. In his abject state he begins hallucinating, seeing Miss Havisham and Orlick and finally Joe. Pip finally snaps out of his feverish haze and realizes that Joe actually is sitting at his bedside, having come to nurse him back to health. When Joe composes a note to Biddy, telling of Pip’s recovery, Pip realizes that Biddy has taught Joe to write. Joe says that Miss Havisham died about a week after Pip took ill, and that she distributed her wealth among the Pockets, including four thousand pounds to Matthew. He also tells Pip Orlick was arrested and thrown into the county jail for robbing Pumblechook. One Sunday, the 45

still-weak Pip and Joe go for an outing, and Pip tries to tell Joe the story of Magwitch—Joe, however, is not interested in revisiting painful memories. Upon rising the next morning, Pip realizes that Joe is gone. He has left only a note and a receipt indicating that he had paid all of Pip’s debt. In some ways, Pip’s emergence from brainfever finds him a child again—in the care of Joe, absolved of all his mistakes. Still, innocence is lost, and Pip must address his lost innocence head on. He returns to find Satis House in a state of disarray, readying for an auction. Stopping at the Blue Boar, Pip encounters Pumblechook, who is very rude to him. Finally, he goes back to his old home, discovering, upon meeting Joe and Biddy, that he arrived on their wedding day. Pip is surprised— as his own slight hopes of a happy marriage with Biddy are dashed—yet he expresses nothing but happiness for the couple. Returning to London, Pip sells his few possessions and takes a partnership with Herbert. Eleven years later he returns to Joe and Biddy, and finds a young child—that they’ve named Pip— sitting before the hearth. Biddy insists that Pip must marry, but Pip tells her that he’s already an old bachelor. After admitting to Biddy that he has not forgotten Estella, Pip goes to revisit the site of Satis house one last time. He walks through the overgrown garden in the mist and thinks of Estella, about her unhappy life and the news that her cruel husband, Bentley Drummle, died two years earlier. As he continues to stroll pensively, Estella’s figure appears in the distance. She declares herself greatly changed and admits that excluding the grounds, she has lost everything, little by little. She says she has often thought of Pip and that she never imagined that in taking leave of Satis house that she’d also take leave of him. She says that she has been bent and broken, but that she is, she hopes, in better shape. They take hands and walk out of the ruins together.

Work Cited Mitchell, Charlotte, ed. Great Expectations. Penguin Classics, 1996.

46

Critical Views GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON THE UNAMIABLE ESTELLA AND PIP AS FUNCTION OF CLASS SNOBBERY Estella is a curious addition to the gallery of unamiable women painted by Dickens. In my youth it was commonly said that Dickens could not draw women. The people who said this were thinking of Agnes Wickfield and Esther Summerson, of Little Dorrit and Florence Dombey, and thinking of them as ridiculous idealizations of their sex.1 Gissing put a stop to that by asking whether shrews like Mrs. Raddle, Mrs. Macstinger, Mrs. Gargery, fools like Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Finching, warped spinsters like Rosa Dartle and Miss Wade, were not masterpieces of woman drawing.2 And they are all unamiable. * * * Of course Dickens with his imagination could invent amiable women by the dozen; but somehow he could not or would not bring them to life as he brought the others. We doubt whether he ever knew a little Dorrit; but Fanny Dorrit3 is from the life unmistakably. So is Estella. She is a much more elaborate study than Fanny, and, I should guess, a recent one. Dickens, when he let himself go in Great Expectations, was separated from his wife and free to make more intimate acquaintances with women than a domesticated man can. * * * It is not necessary to suggest a love affair; for Dickens could get from a passing glance a hint which he could expand into a fullgrown character. The point concerns us here only because it is the point on which the ending of Great Expectations turns: namely, that Estella is a born tormentor. She deliberately torments Pip all through for the fun of it; and in the little we hear of her intercourse with others there is no suggestion of a moment of kindness: in fact her tormenting of Pip is almost affectionate in contrast to the cold disdain of her attitude towards the people who were not worth tormenting. It is not surprising that the unfortunate Bentley Drummle, whom she marries in the stupidity of sheer perversity, is obliged to defend himself from her clever malice with his fists: a consolation to us 47

for Pip’s broken heart, but not altogether a credible one; for the real Estellas can usually intimidate the real Bentley Drummles. At all events the final sugary suggestion of Estella redeemed by Bentley’s thrashings and waste of her money, and living happily with Pip for ever after, provoked even Dickens’s eldest son to rebel against it, most justly.4 Apart from this the story is the most perfect of Dickens’s works. In it he does not muddle himself with the ridiculous plots that appear like vestiges of the stone age in many of his books, from Oliver Twist to the end. The story is built round a single and simple catastrophe: the revelation to Pip of the source of his great expectations. There is, it is true, a trace of the old plot superstition in Estella turning out to be Magwitch’s daughter; but it provides a touchingly happy ending for that heroic Warmint. Who could have the heart to grudge it to him? As our social conscience expands and makes the intense class snobbery of the nineteenth century seem less natural to us, the tragedy of Great Expectations will lose some of its appeal. I have already wondered whether Dickens himself ever came to see that his agonizing sensitiveness about the blacking bottles and his resentment of his mother’s opposition to his escape from them was not too snobbish to deserve all the sympathy he claimed for it. Compare the case of H.G. Wells, our nearest to a twentieth-century Dickens. Wells hated being a draper’s assistant as much as Dickens hated being a warehouse boy; but he was not in the least ashamed of it, and did not blame his mother for regarding it as the summit of her ambition for him.5 Fate having imposed on that engaging cricketer Mr. Wells’s father an incongruous means of livelihood in the shape of a small shop, shopkeeping did not present itself to the young Wells as beneath him, whereas to the genteel Dickens being a warehouse boy was an unbearable comedown. Still, I cannot help speculating on whether if Dickens had not killed himself prematurely to pile up money for that excessive family of his, he might not have reached a stage at which he could have got as much fun out of the blacking bottles as Mr. Wells got out of his abhorred draper’s counter. 48

Dickens never reached that stage; and there is no prevision of it in Great Expectations; for in it he never raises the question why Pip should refuse Magwitch’s endowment and shrink from him with such inhuman loathing. Magwitch no doubt was a Warmint from the point of view of the genteel Dickens family and even from his own; but Victor Hugo would have made him a magnificent hero, another Valjean. 6 Inspired by an altogether noble fixed idea, he had lifted himself out of his rut of crime and honestly made a fortune for the child who had fed him when he was starving. If Pip had no objection to be a parasite instead of an honest blacksmith, at least he had a better claim to be a parasite on Magwitch’s earnings than, as he imagined, on Miss Havisham’s property. It is curious that this should not have occurred to Dickens; for nothing could exceed the bitterness of his exposure of the futility of Pip’s parasitism. If all that came of sponging on Miss Havisham (as he thought) was the privilege of being one of the Finches of the Grove, he need not have felt his dependence on Magwitch to be incompatible with his entirely baseless self-respect. But Pip—and I am afraid Pip must be to this extent identified with Dickens—could not see Magwitch as an animal of the same species as himself or Miss Havisham. His feeling is true to the nature of snobbery; but his creator says no word in criticism of that ephemeral limitation. The basic truth of the situation is that Pip, like his creator, has no culture and no religion. Joe Gargery, when Pip tells a monstrous string of lies about Miss Havisham, advises him to say a repentant word about it in his prayers; but Pip never prays; and church means nothing to him but Mr. Wopsle’s orotundity. In this he resembles David Copperfield, who has gentility but neither culture nor religion. Pip’s world is therefore a very melancholy place, and his conduct, good or bad, always helpless. This is why Dickens worked against so black a background after he was roused from his ignorant middle-class cheery optimism by Carlyle. When he lost his belief in bourgeois society and with it his lightness of heart he had neither an economic Utopia nor a credible religion to hitch on to. * * * [B]ut at least he preserved his intellectual 49

innocence sufficiently to escape the dismal pseudo-scientific fatalism that was descending on the world in his latter days, founded on the preposterous error as to causation in which the future is determined by the present, which has been determined by the past. The true causation, of course, is always the incessant irresistible activity of the evolutionary appetite.

Notes 1. Dickens’s sentimental heroines: Agnes Wickfield: daughter of the Canterbury solicitor with whom David Copperfield boards while at school, David’s tutelary angel and second wife—Orwell calls her “the real legless angel of Victorian romance.” Little Dorrit: the self-sacrificing heroine of the novel named for her, who is born and raised in debtors’ prison and continues to hover as ministering angel over her family after their release. Florence Dombey: the humiliated daughter of the purseproud Dombey clan, whose father, in prosperity, spurns her for not being a male and, in adversity, comes to depend on her samaritan surveillance. 2. Assorted shrews, termagants, and hysterics. Mrs. Raddle: vitriolic landlady in Pickwick Papers. Mrs. Macstinger: imperious widow in Dombey and Son, hell-bent on a second marriage. Mrs. Nickleby: the hero’s mother, given to nonstop twaddle. Rosa Dartle: the repressed and masochistic house-companion in David Copperfield, in love with the voluptuary son of the house. Miss Wade: a head-strong young woman in Little Dorrit, whose “History of a Self-Tormentor” (book 2, chapter 21) is often cited as evidence of Dickens’s grasp of abnormal types. 3. Little Dorrit’s go-getting older sister, who marries into the Merdle plutocracy. 4. In his introduction to the novel in the Macmillan Edition (1904). For his judgment on the conclusion of Great Expectations, see also p. 500 in the original text. 5. H.G. Wells (1866–1946), the prolific author of science fiction, popular histories, and novels about lower-middle-class life (Kipps, Tono Bungay, Mr. Polly), began life as a draper’s apprentice at thirteen, after his father, a shopkeeper and part-time professional cricketer, was crippled in an accident and his mother had to abandon the Wells’s failing china shop to work as a housekeeper. As Shaw suggests, Mrs. Wells free-associated drapery with the tuxedos and tailcoats of the very rich who passed in front of the shop; per Wells himself, “Almost as unquestioning as her belief in Our Father and Our Saviour was her belief in drapers.” As Shaw also suggests, Wells—no Trabb’s boy—loathed his job and ran away at sixteen to become an usher—a teaching assistant.

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6. Jean Valjean, the central figure in Victor Hugo’s novel of social repression Les Misérables (1862).

GEORGE ORWELL ON MAGWITCH AND THE PANTOMIME OF THE WICKED UNCLE * * * Dickens * * * shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him. * * * As soon as he comes up against crime or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the “I’ve always kept myself respectable” habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch in Great Expectations is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. “The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast”, etc. etc. So far as one can discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorised by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. There is an even more “kept-myselfrespectable” touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot take Magwitch’s money. The money is not the product of a crime, it has been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict’s money and therefore “tainted”. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either. Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels “Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved.” But the point is that in the matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote—characters who are more pathetic than the author intended. 51

( ... ) Significantly, Dickens’s most successful books (not his best books) are The Pickwick Papers, which is not a novel, and Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, which are not funny. As a novelist his natural fertility greatly hampers him, because the burlesque which he is never able to resist is constantly breaking into what ought to be serious situations. There is a good example of this in the opening chapter of Great Expectations. The escaped convict, Magwitch, has just captured the six-yearold Pip in the churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly enough, from Pip’s point of view. The convict, smothered in mud and with his chain trailing from his leg, suddenly starts up among the tombs, grabs the child, turns him upside down and robs his pockets. Then he begins terrorising him into bringing food and a file: He held me by the arms in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms: “You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man from harming you at the present 52

moment, but with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?” Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin with, no starving and hunted man would speak in the least like that. Moreover, although the speech shows a remarkable knowledge of the way in which a child’s mind works, its actual words are quite out of tune with what is to follow. It turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him through the child’s eyes, into an appalling monster. Later in the book he is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on which the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As usual, Dickens’s imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of ending David Copperfield’s lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic. “If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand doubleGloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each, present payment,” it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens detail, the double-Gloucester cheeses.3 But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone; he would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is struck, the unity of the novel suffers. Not that it matters very much, because Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

Note 3. Chapter 4: the “appalling sums” Murdstone forces him to learn. [Editor.]

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PETER BROOKS ON THE BEGINNING AND ENDING: PIP BEFORE PLOT AND BEYOND PLOT Great Expectations is exemplary for a discourse on plot in many respects, not least of all for its beginning. For what the novel chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search for a beginning. As in so many nineteenth-century novels, the hero is an orphan, thus undetermined by any visible inheritance, apparently unauthored. * * * There may be sociological and sentimental reasons to account for the high incidence of orphans in the nineteenth-century novel, but clearly the parentless protagonist frees an author from struggle with preexisting authorities, allowing him to create afresh all the determinants of plot within his text. He thus profits from what Gide called the “lawlessness” of the novel1 by starting with an undefined, rule-free character and then bringing the law to bear upon him—creating the rules—as the text proceeds. With Pip, Dickens begins as it were with a life that is for the moment precedent to plot, and indeed necessarily in search of plot. Pip when we first see him is himself in search of the “authority”—the word stands in the second paragraph of the novel—that would define and justify—authorize—the plot of his ensuing life. The “authority” to which Pip refers here is that of the tombstone which bears the names of his dead parents, the names that have already been displaced, condensed, and superseded in the first paragraph, where Pip describes how his “infant tongue” (literally, a speechless tongue: a catachresis that points to a moment of emergence, of entry into language) could only make of the name, Philip Pirrip, left to him by the dead parents, the monosyllabic Pip. “So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (chapter 1). This originating moment of Pip’s narration and his narrative is a self-naming that already subverts whatever authority could be found in the text of the tombstones. The process of reading that text is described by Pip the narrator as “unreasonable,” in that it interprets the appearance of the lost father and mother from the shape of the letters of their names. The tracing of the 54

name—which he has already distorted in its application to self— involves a misguided attempt to remotivate the graphic symbol, to make it directly mimetic, mimetic specifically of origin. Loss of origin, misreading, and the problematic of identity are bound up here in ways we will further explore later on. The question of reading and writing—of learning to compose and to decipher texts—is persistently thematized in the novel.2 The decipherment of the tombstone text as confirmation of loss of origin—as unauthorization—is here at the start of the novel the prelude to Pip’s cogito,3 the moment in which his consciousness seizes his existence as other, alien, forlorn: My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana, wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea—, and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. “Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice.... (chapter 1) The repeated verbs of existence—“was” and “were”—perform an elementary phenomenology of Pip’s world, locating its irreducible objects and leading finally to the individual subject as other, as aware of his existence through the emotion of fear, fear that then appears as the origin of voice, or articulated sound, as Pip begins to cry: a cry that is immediately censored by the command of the convict Magwitch, the father-to-be, the fearful intrusive figure of future authorship who will demand of 55

Pip: “Give us your name.” * * * For purposes of my study of plot, it is important to note how this beginning establishes Pip as an existence without a plot, at the very moment of occurrence of that event which will prove to be decisive for the plotting of his existence, as he will discover only two-thirds of the way through the novel. Alien, unauthorized, self-named, at the point of entry into the language code and the social systems it implies, Pip will in the first part of the novel be in search of a plot, and the novel will recount the gradual precipitation of a sense of plot around him, the creation of portents of direction and intention. ( ... ) The ultimate situation of plot in the novel may suggest an approach to the vexed question of Dickens’s two endings to the novel: the one he originally wrote and the revision (substituted at Bulwer Lytton’s suggestion) that was in fact printed. I think it is entirely legitimate to prefer the original ending, with its flat tone and refusal of romantic expectation, and find that the revision, with its tentative promise of reunion between Pip and Estella, “unbinds” energies that we thought had been thoroughly bound and indeed discharged from the text. We may also feel that choice between the two endings is somewhat arbitrary and unimportant in that the decisive moment has already occurred before either of these finales begins. The real ending may take place with Pip’s recognition and acceptance of Magwitch after his recapture—this is certainly the ethical dénouement—and his acceptance of a continuing existence without plot, as celibate clerk for Clarrikers. The pages that follow may simply be obiter dicta.8 If we acknowledge Pip’s experience of and with Magwitch to be the central energy of the text, it is significant that the climax of this experience, the moment of crisis and reversal in the attempted escape from England, bears traces of a hallucinatory repetition of the childhood spell—indeed, of that first recapture of Magwitch already repeated in Mr. Wopsle’s theatrical vision: 56

In the same moment, I saw the steersman of the galley lay his hand on the prisoner’s shoulder, and saw that both boats were swinging round with the force of the tide, and saw that all hands on board the steamer were running forward quite frantically. Still in the same moment, I saw the prisoner start up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the face disclosed was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still in the same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under me. (chapter 54) If this scene marks the beginning of a resolution—which it does in that it brings the death of the arch-villain Compeyson and the death sentence for Magwitch, hence the disappearance from the novel of its most energetic plotters—it is resolution in the register of repetition and working through, the final effort to master painful material from the insistent past. Pip emerges from this scene with an acceptance of the determinative past as both determinative and as past, which prepares us for the final escape from plot. It is interesting to note that where the “dream” plot of Estella is concerned, Pip’s stated resolution has none of the compulsive energetic force of the passage just quoted, but is rather a conventional romantic fairy-tale ending, a conscious fiction designed, of course, to console the dying Magwitch, but possibly also a last effort at self-delusion: “You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.... She lived and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a lady and very beautiful. And I love her!” (chapter 56). If taken as anything other than a conscious fiction—if taken as part of the “truth” discovered by Pip’s detections—this version of Pip’s experience leads straight to what is most troubling in Dickens’s revised version of the ending: the suggestion of an unbinding of what has already been bound up and disposed of, an unbinding that is indeed perceptible in the rather embarrassed prose with which the revision begins: “Nevertheless, I knew while I said 57

these words, that I secretly intended to revisit the site of the old house that evening alone, for her sake. Yes, even so. For Estella’s sake” (chapter 59). Are we to understand that the experience of Satis House has never really been mastered? Is its nightmare energy still present in the text as well? The original end may have an advantage in denying to Pip’s text the possibility of any reflux of energy, any new aspirations, the undoing of anything already done, the unbinding of energy that has been bound and led to discharge. As at the start of the novel we had the impression of a life not yet subject to plot—a life in search of the sense of plot that would only gradually begin to precipitate around it—so at the end we have the impression of a life that has outlived plot, renounced plot, been cured of it: life that is left over. What follows the recognition of Magwitch is left over, and any renewal of expectation and plotting—such as a revived romance with Estella—would have to belong to another story. It is with the image of a life bereft of plot, of movement and desire, that the novel most appropriately leaves us.

Notes 1. André Gide (1869–1951) preached and practiced the subversion of conventional plot constructions and character definitions in nearly all of his later works, most famously in The Counterfeiters (1925). For Gide the behaviour and function of the characters reveal themselves by trial and error, often by chance or in answer to questions Gide himself puts to them—pretty much in the way scientists come by their information in conducting their research. In the central chapter of The Counterfeiters to which Brooks refers, “Edouard Explains His Theory of the Novel” (part 2, chapter 3), Gide’s alter ego expresses his opinion—by now, thanks largely to Gide, a commonplace—that “of all literary genres, the novel remains the freest, the most lawless” (Gide uses the English word). [Editor.] 2. On the theme of reading in the novel, see Max Byrd, “‘Reading’ in Great Expectations,” PMLA 91, no. 2 (1976), 259–65. 3. “I think” (Latin). By hitching an English (or any other modern) noun, pronoun, or article to the verb, the writer arrives at some such meaning as “awareness” or the cognate “cogitation.” [Editor.] 8. Literally, “things said in passing.” [Editor.]

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DOROTHY VAN GHENT ON THE CENTURY OF PROGRESS, DICKENS’S USE OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY, AND PIP’S “IDENTITY OF THINGS” Dickens lived in a time and an environment in which a fullscale demolition of traditional values was going on, correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men, women, and children by the millions—a process brought about by industrialization, colonial imperialism, and the exploitation of the human being as a “thing” or an engine or a part of an engine capable of being used for profit. This was the “century of progress” which ornamented its steam engines with iron arabesques of foliage as elaborate as the anti-macassars4 and aspidistras and crystal or cut-glass chandeliers and bead-andfeather portieres of its drawing rooms, while the human engines of its welfare groveled and bred in the foxholes described by Marx in his Capital. 5 (Hauntingly we see this discordance in the scene in Great Expectations where Miss Havisham, sitting in her satin and floral decay in the house called Satis, points her finger at the child and outrageously tells him to “play.” For though the scene is a potent symbol of childish experience of adult obtuseness and sadism, it has also another dimension as a social symbol of those economically determined situations in which the human soul is used as a means for satisfactions not its own, under the gross and transparent lie that its activity is its happiness, its welfare and fun and “play”—a publicity instrument that is the favorite of manufacturers and insurance agencies, as well as of totalitarian strategists, with their common formula, “We’re just a happy family.”) The heir of the “century of progress” is the twentiethcentury concentration camp, which makes no bones about people being “things.” Dickens’ intuition alarmingly saw this process in motion, a process which abrogated the primary demands of human feeling and rationality, and he sought an extraordinary explanation for it. People were becoming things, and things (the things that money can buy or that are the means for 59

making money or for exalting prestige in the abstract) were becoming more important than people. People were being deanimated, robbed of their souls, and things were usurping the prerogatives of animate creatures—governing the lives of their owners in the most literal sense. This picture, in which the qualities of things and people were reversed, was a picture of a daemonically motivated world, a world in which “dark” or occult forces or energies operate not only in people (as modern psychoanalytic psychology observes) but also in things: for if people turn themselves or are turned into things, metaphysical order can be established only if we think of things as turning themselves into people, acting under a “dark” drive similar to that which motivates the human aberration. There is an old belief that it takes a demon to recognize a demon, and the saying illustrates the malicious sensibility with which things, in Dickens, have felt out and imitated, in their relationship with each other and with people, the secret of the human arrangement. A four-poster bed in an inn, where Pip goes to spend the night, is a despotic monster that straddles over the whole room, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner. Houses, looking down through the skylight of Jaggers’ office in London, twist themselves in order to spy on Pip like police agents who presuppose guilt. Even a meek little muffin has to be “confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,” and a hat, set on a mantelpiece, demands constant attention and the greatest quickness of eye and hand to catch it neatly as it tumbles off, but its ingenuity is such that it finally manages to fall into the slop basin. The animation of inanimate objects suggests both the quaint gaiety of a forbidden life and an aggressiveness that has got out of control—an aggressiveness that they have borrowed from the human economy and an irresponsibility native to but glossed and disguised by that economy. 60

Dickens’ fairly constant use of the pathetic fallacy6 (the projection of human impulses and feelings upon the nonhuman, as upon beds and houses and muffins and hats) might be considered as incidental stylistic embellishment if his description of people did not show a reciprocal metaphor: people are described by nonhuman attributes, or by such an exaggeration of or emphasis on one part of their appearance that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part, with an effect of having become “thinged” into one of their own bodily members or into an article of their clothing or into some inanimate object of which they have made a fetish. Dickens’ devices for producing this transposition of attributes are various. * * * Many of what we shall call the “signatures” of Dickens’ people—that special exaggerated feature or gesture or mannerism which comes to stand for the whole person—are such dissociated parts of the body, like Jaggers’ huge forefinger which he bites and then plunges menacingly at the accused, or Wemmick’s post-office mouth, or the clockwork apparatus in Magwitch’s throat that clicks as if it were going to strike. The device is not used arbitrarily or capriciously. In this book, whose subject is the etiology of guilt and of atonement, Jaggers is the representative not only of civil law but of universal Law, which is profoundly mysterious in a world of dissociated and apparently lawless fragments; and his huge forefinger, into which he is virtually transformed and which seems to act like an “it” in its own right rather than like a member of a man, is the Law’s mystery in all its fearful impersonality. Wemmick’s mouth is not a post-office when he is at home in his castle but only when he is at work in Jaggers’ London office, where a mechanical appearance of smiling is required of him. And as Wemmick’s job has mechanized him into a grinning slot, so oppression and fear have given the convict Magwitch a clockwork apparatus for vocal chords. * * * Through the changes that have come about in the human, as humanity has leaked out of it, the atoms of the physical 61

universe have become subtly impregnated with daemonic aptitude. Pip, standing waiting for Estella in the neighborhood of Newgate, and beginning dimly to be aware of his implication in the guilt for which that establishment stands— for his “great expectations” have already begun to make him a collaborator in the generic crime of using people as means to personal ends—has the sensation of a deadly dust clinging to him, rubbed off on him from the environs, and he tries to beat it out of his clothes. Smithfield, that “shameful place,” “all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam,” seems to “stick to him” when he enters it on his way to the prison. The nettles and brambles of the graveyard where Magwitch first appears “stretch up cautiously” out of the graves in an effort to get a twist on the branded man’s ankles and pull him in. The river has a malignant potentiality that impregnates everything upon it—discolored copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green dank deposit. The river is perhaps the most constant and effective symbol in Dickens, because it establishes itself so readily to the imagination as a daemonic element, drowning people as if by intent, disgorging unforeseen evidence, chemically or physically changing all it touches, and because not only does it act as an occult “force” in itself but it is the common passage and actual flowing element that unites individuals and classes, public persons and private persons, deeds and the results of deeds, however fragmentized and separated. Upon the river, one cannot escape its action; it may throw the murderer and his victim in an embrace. At the end of Great Expectations, it swallows Compeyson, while, with its own obscure daemonic motivation, though it fatally injures Magwitch, it leaves him to fulfill the more subtle spiritual destiny upon which he has begun to enter. The river scene in this section, closely and apprehensively observed, is one of the most memorable in Dickens. * * * What brings the Convict Magwitch to the child Pip, in the graveyard, is more than the convict’s hunger; Pip (or let us say 62

simply “the child,” for Pip is an Everyman) carries the convict inside him, as the negative potential of his “great expectations”—Magwitch is the concretion of his potential guilt. What brings Magwitch across the “great gulfs” of the Atlantic to Pip again, at the moment of revelation in the story, is their profoundly implicit compact of guilt, as binding as the convict’s leg iron which is its recurrent symbol. The multiplying likenesses in the street as Magwitch draws nearer, coming over the sea, the mysterious warnings of his approach on the night of his reappearance, are moral projections as “real” as the storm outside the windows and as the crouched form of the vicious Orlick on the dark stairs. The conception of what brings people together “coincidentally” in their seemingly uncaused encounters and collisions—the total change in the texture of experience that follows upon any act, public or private, external or in thought, the concreteness of the effect of the act not only upon the conceiving heart but upon the atoms of physical matter, so that blind nature collaborates daemonically in the drama of reprisal—is deep and valid in this book. * * * Pip first becomes aware of the “identity of things” as he is held suspended heels over head by the convict; that is, in a world literally turned upside down. Thenceforth Pip’s interior landscape is inverted by his guilty knowledge of this 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.” The apparition is that of all suffering that the earth can inflict, and that the apparition presents itself to a child is as much as to say that every child, whatever his innocence, inherits guilt (as the potential of his acts) for the condition of man. The inversion of natural order begins here with first selfconsciousness: the child is heir to the sins of the “fathers.” Thus the crime that is always pervasive in the Dickens universe is identified in a new way—not primarily as that of the “father,” nor as that of some public institution, but as that of the child— 63

the original individual who must necessarily take upon himself responsibility for not only what is to be done in the present and the future, but what has been done in the past, inasmuch as the past is part and parcel of the present and the future. The child is the criminal, and it is for this reason that he is able to redeem his world; for the world’s guilt is his guilt, and he can expiate it in his own acts. The guilt of the child is realized on several levels. Pip experiences the psychological form (or feeling) of guilt before he is capable of voluntary evil; he is treated by adults—Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook and Wopsle—as if he were a felon, a young George Barnwell (a character in the play which Wopsle reads on the night when Mrs. Joe is attacked) wanting only to murder his nearest relative, as George Barnwell murdered his uncle. This is the usual nightmare of the child in Dickens, a vision of imminent incarceration, fetters like sausages, lurid accusatory texts. He is treated, that is, as if he were a thing, manipulable by adults for the extraction of certain sensations: by making him feel guilty and diminished, they are able to feel virtuous and great. But the psychological form of guilt acquires spiritual content when Pip himself conceives the tainted wish— the wish to be like the most powerful adult and to treat others as things. At the literal level, Pip’s guilt is that of snobbery toward Joe Gargery, and snobbery is a denial of the human value of others. Symbolically, however, Pip’s guilt is that of murder; for he steals the file with which the convict rids himself of his leg iron, and it is this leg iron, picked up on the marshes, with which Orlick attacks Mrs. Joe; so that the child does inevitably overtake his destiny, which was, like George Barnwell, to murder his nearest relative. But the “relative” whom Pip, adopting the venerable criminality of society, is, in the widest symbolic scope of intention, destined to murder is not Mrs. Joe but his “father,” Magwitch—to murder in the socially chronic fashion of the Dickens world, which consists in the dehumanization of the weak, or in moral acquiescence to such murder. Pip is, after all, the ordinary mixed human being, one more Everyman in the long succession of them that literature has represented, but we see this Everyman as he 64

develops from a child; and his destiny is directed by the ideals of his world—toward “great expectations” which involve the making of Magwitches—which involve, that is, murder. These are the possibilities that are projected in the opening scene of the book, when the young child, left with a burden on his soul, watches the convict limping off under an angry red sky, toward the black marshes, the gibbet, and the savage lair of the sea, in a still rotating landscape.

Notes 4. Coverlets draped over the backs of chairs and sofas to keep them from soilure, specifically a protection against hair oil (imported from the Indonesian seaport Makassar). 5. See esp. book 1, chapter 25, section 5, in which Marx, citing the Public Health Reports for 1865–66, attacks the appalling living conditions of English workingmen. 6. As a formal term in literary criticism, the phrase first appears in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, volume 3, part 4, chapter 12 (1856), in which he imputes the fallacy to writers who are “over-dazzled by emotion” without sufficient mental powers to control their feelings: “the state of mind which attributes the characters of a living creature to [nonhuman phenomena] is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief” or by any other sensation that ends by falsifying the object.

JULIAN MOYNAHAN ON PIP’S AGGRESSIVE AMBITION AND THE DARK DOUBLES ORLICK AND DRUMMLE In Great Expectations, as in its legendary prototypes, the theme of ambition is treated under the two aspects of desire and will, the search for a superabundance of love and the drive for power. And it is in his presentation of the theme in the latter aspect that Dickens makes the more profound analysis of the immoral and criminal elements in his hero’s (and the century’s) favourite dream. But Pip’s ambition is passive. He only becomes active and aggressive after he has ceased to be ambitious. How then does 65

Great Expectations treat the theme of ambition in terms that are relevant to the total action of which Pip is the centre? I have already begun to suggest an answer to the question. Ambition as the instinct of aggression, as the pitiless drive for power directed against what we have called authority-figures is both coalesced and disguised in the figure of Orlick. And Orlick is bound to the hero by ties of analogy as double, alter ego and dark mirror-image. We are dealing here with an art which simultaneously disguises and reveals its deepest implications of meaning, with a method which apparently dissociates its thematic materials and its subject matter into moral fable-cummelodramatic accompaniment, yet simultaneously presents through patterns of analogy a dramatic perspective in which the apparent opposites are unified. In Great Expectations criminality is displaced from the hero on to a melodramatic villain. But on closer inspection that villain becomes part of a complex unity—we might call it Pip-Orlick—in which all aspects of the problem of guilt become interpenetrant and cooperative. The only clue to this unity which is given at the surface level of the narrative is Pip’s obsession of criminal guilt. Pip tells us over and over again that he feels contaminated by crime. But we do not find the objective correlative of that conviction until we recognise in the insensate and compunctionless Orlick a shadow image of the tender-minded and yet monstrously ambitious young hero. ( ... ) Recognition that Pip’s ambition is definable under the aspect of aggression as well as in terms of the regressive desire for passive enjoyment of life’s bounty depends upon the reader’s willingness to work his way into the narrative from a different angle than the narrator’s. The evidence for the hero’s powerdrive against the authority-figures, the evidence of his ‘viciousness’ if you will, is embodied in the story in a number of ways, but a clear pattern of meaning only emerges after the reader has correlated materials which are dispersed and nominally unrelated in the story as told. Orlick, thus far, has 66

been the figure whose implicit relations to the hero have constituted the chief clue to the darker meaning of Pip’s career. He continues to be important in any attempt to set forth the complete case, but there are also some significant correlations to be made in which he does not figure. * * * We might begin with the apparently cynical remark that Pip, judged on the basis of what happens to many of the characters closely associated with him, is a very dangerous young man. He is not accident-prone, but a great number of people who move into his orbit decidedly are. Mrs. Joe is bludgeoned, Miss Havisham goes up in flames, Estella is exposed through her rash marriage to vaguely specified tortures at the hands of her brutal husband, Drummle. Pumblechook has his house looted and his mouth stuffed with flowering annuals by a gang of thieves led by Orlick. All of these characters, with the exception of Estella, stand at one time or another in the relation of patron, patroness, or authority-figure to Pip the boy or Pip the man. * * * Furthermore, all of these characters, including Estella, have hurt, humiliated, or thwarted Pip in some important way. All in some way have stood between him and the attainment of the full measure of his desires. All are punished. Let us group these individual instances. Mrs. Joe, the cruel foster-mother, and Pumblechook, her approving and hypocritical relation by marriage, receive their punishment from the hands of Orlick. Mrs. Joe hurts Pip and is hurt in turn by Orlick. Pip has the motive of revenge—a lifetime of brutal beatings and scrubbings inflicted by his sister—but Orlick, a journeyman who does not even lodge with the Gargerys, bludgeons Mrs. Joe after she has provoked a quarrel between him and his master. If we put together his relative lack of motive with his previously quoted remarks at the limekiln and add to these Pip’s report of his own extraordinary reaction upon first hearing of the attack— With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at all events that as her near 67

relation, popularly known to be under obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than anyone else— we arrive at an anomalous situation which can best be resolved on the assumption that Orlick acts merely as Pip’s punitive instrument or weapon. With regard to Pumblechook’s chastisement, the most striking feature is not that Orlick should break into a house, but that he should break into Pumblechook’s house. Why not Trabb’s? One answer might be that Trabb has never stood in Pip’s light. Pumblechook’s punishment is nicely proportioned to his nuisance value for Pip. Since he has never succeeded in doing him any great harm with his petty slanders, he escapes with a relatively light wound. Although we are told near the end of the novel that Orlick was caught and jailed after the burglary, we are never told that Pip reported Orlick’s murderous assault on him or his confessions of his assault on Mrs. Joe to the police. Despite the fact that there is enough accumulated evidence to hang him, Orlick’s end is missing from the book. Actually, it seems that Orlick simply evaporates into thin air after his punitive role has been performed. His case needs no final disposition because he has only existed, essentially, as an aspect of the hero’s own far more problematic case. Estella receives her chastisement at the hands of Bentley Drummle. How does this fit into the pattern we have been exploring? In the first place, it can be shown that Drummle stands in precisely the same analogical relationship to Pip as Orlick does. Drummle is a reduplication of Orlick at a point higher on the social-economic scale up which Pip moves with such rapidity through the first three-quarters of the novel. Drummle, like Orlick, is a criminal psychopath. At Jaggers’s dinner party the host, a connoisseur of criminal types, treats Drummle as ‘one of the true sort’, and Drummle demonstrates how deserving he is of this distinction when he tries to brain the harmless Startop with a heavy tumbler. But the most impressive evidence that Orlick and Drummle are functional equivalents is supplied by the concrete 68

particulars of their description. To an extraordinary degree, these two physically powerful, inarticulate, and darkcomplexioned villains are presented to the reader in terms more often identical than similar. Orlick, again and again, is one who lurks and lounges, Drummle is one who lolls and lurks. When Pip, Startop, and Drummle go out rowing, the last ‘would always creep in-shore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature, even when the tide would have sent him fast on his way; and I always think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water, when our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in mid-stream’. When Startop walks home after Jaggers’s party, he is followed by Drummle but on the opposite side of the street, ‘in the shadow of the houses, much as he was wont to follow in his boat’. The other creeper, follower and amphibian of Great Expectations is Orlick, whose natural habitat is the salt marsh, who creeps his way to the dark landing below Pip’s apartment to witness the return of Magwitch from abroad, who creeps behind Biddy and Pip as they walk conversing on the marshes and overhears Pip say he will do anything to drive Orlick from the neighbourhood, who appears out of the darkness near the turnpike house on the night Pip returns from Pumblechook’s to discover that his sister has been assaulted, and who, finally, creeps his way so far into Pip’s private business that he ends by acting as agent for Compeyson, Magwitch’s—and Pip’s— shadowy antagonist. Like Orlick, Drummle is removed from the action suddenly; Pip is given no opportunity to settle old and bitter scores with him. In the last chapter we hear that he is dead ‘from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse’. This is the appropriate end for a sadist whose crimes obviously included wife-beating. But more important to the present argument is our recognition that Drummle has been employed to break a woman who had, in the trite phrase, broken Pip’s heart. Once he has performed his function as Pip’s vengeful surrogate he can be assigned to the fate he so richly deserves. Mrs. Joe beats and scrubs Pip until she is struck down by heavy blows on the head and spine. Pumblechook speaks his 69

lies about him until his mouth is stuffed with flowers. Estella treats his affections with cold contempt until her icy pride is broken by a brutal husband. In this series Orlick and Drummle behave far more like instruments of vengeance than like threedimensional characters with understandable grudges of their own. In terms of my complete argument, they enact an aggressive potential that the novel defines, through patterns of analogy and linked resemblances, as belonging in the end to Pip and to his unconscionably ambitious hopes. When Miss Havisham bursts into flames, there is no Orlick or Drummle in the vicinity to be accused of having set a match to her. In the long series of violence which runs through Great Expectations from the beginning to end, this is one climax of violence that can be construed as nothing more than accidental. And yet it is an accident which Pip, on two occasions, has foreseen. Before Miss Havisham burns under the eye of the horror-struck hero, she has already come to a violent end twice in his hallucinated fantasies—in Pip’s visionary experiences in the abandoned brewery, where he sees Miss Havisham hanging by the neck from a beam. He has this vision once as a child, on the occasion of his first visit to Satis House, and once as an adult, on the occasion of his last visit, just a few minutes before Miss Havisham’s accident occurs. What are we to make, if anything, of these peculiar hallucinatory presentiments and of the coincidence by which they come true? * * * How do these hallucinations, the second followed immediately by Miss Havisham’s fatal accident, add to the burden of the hero’s guilt? The answer is obvious. Because Pip’s destructive fantasy comes true in reality, he experiences the equivalent of a murderer’s guilt. As though he had the evil eye, or as though there were more than a psychological truth in the old cliché, ‘if looks could kill’, Pip moves from the brewery, where he has seen Miss Havisham hanging, to the door of her room, where he gives her one long, last look—until she is consumed by fire. But here the psychological truth suffices to establish imaginative proof that Pip can no more escape untainted from his relationship to the former patroness than he can escape untainted from any of his relationships to characters 70

who have held and used the power to destroy or hamper his ambitious struggles. In all these relationships the hero becomes implicated in violence. With Estella, Pumblechook, and Mrs. Joe, the aggressive drive is enacted by surrogates linked to the hero himself by ties of analogy. With Miss Havisham the surrogate is missing. Miss Havisham falls victim to the purely accidental. But the ‘impurity’ of Pip’s motivation, as it is revealed through the device of the recurrent hallucination, suggests an analogy between that part of Pip which wants Miss Havisham at least punished, at most removed from this earth for which she is so profoundly unfit, and the destroying fire itself. * * * [Moynahan briefly discusses Pip’s brainfever as a reflection of his destructive impulses and his helplessness.] When Pip wakes up from his delirium he finds himself a child again, safe in the arms of the angelic Joe Gargery. But the guilt of great expectations remains inexpiable, and the cruelly beautiful original ending of the novel remains the only possible ‘true’ ending. Estella and Pip face each other across the insurmountable barrier of lost innocence. The novel dramatises the loss of innocence, and does not glibly present the hope of a redemptory second birth for either its guilty hero or the guilty society which shaped him. I have already said that Pip’s fantasy of superabundant love brings him at last to a point of alienation from the real world. And similarly Pip’s fantasy of power brings him finally to a point where withdrawal is the only positive moral response left to him. The brick is taken down from its giddy place, a part of the engine is hammered off. Pip cannot redeem his world. In no conceivable sense a leader, he can only lead himself into a sort of exile from his society’s power centres. Living abroad as the partner of a small, unambitious firm, he is to devote his remaining life to doing the least possible harm to the smallest number of people, so earning a visitor’s privileges in the lost paradise where Biddy and Joe, the genuine innocents of the novel, flourish in thoughtless content. 71

GOLDIE MORGENTALER ON DARWIN AND MONEY AS DETERMINANT Great Expectations lends itself to a Darwinian reading because it contains three concepts with broad evolutionary implications— the idea of the primitive or low and its relationship to “civilized” society; the idea of adaptation, of what is fit and not fit; and, finally, the conception of time as moving in one direction only—into the future—rather than being a reanimation of the past. The novel is essentially a Cinderella story in which the fairy godmother turns out to be a convict. The infusion of Magwitch’s money into Pip’s young life creates a relationship analogous to paternity. Jaggers refers to Magwitch as the fountainhead, the source of Pip’s money, and therefore the generating force behind his birth as a gentleman. Magwitch himself makes the point: “Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son ... I’ve put away money only for you to spend” (GE p. 337).11 In this father–son relationship, money substitutes for semen as the stuff out of which life is created. In the same way, money stands for both the biological and the material aspects of Pip’s love for Estella. Pip writes that he cannot dissociate Estella from all his hankerings after money and gentility, nor yet separate her from “the innermost life of my life” (GE, p. 257). Heredity has been discarded; money— that most equivocal of external factors, and the one most commonly associated with metaphors of breeding—has taken its place as a determinant of human identity.12 Great Expectations may appear to be a fairy tale, but it is a fairy tale turned inside-out. In fact, one of the novel’s most obvious intentions is to overturn the fairy-tale plot of hidden identity. Traditionally, this plot depicts the lower-class hero as belonging biologically to a higher station than the one to which circumstances have assigned him. This is, in fact, the plot of Dickens’s early novel Oliver Twist. As Gillian Beer points out, the plot of hidden identity is fundamentally opposed to Darwinism, which insists on the opposite—that all human 72

beings, no matter how advanced they may think themselves to be, share the same lowly animal origins.13 Thus, by overturning the plot of hidden identity, Great Expectations constitutes a reassessment of Oliver Twist. But this reassessment goes beyond Pip’s discovery that his sudden wealth allies him to the underworld rather than to the aristocracy. There is a concomitant reassessment of the very nature of that underworld and its relationship to the rest of society. Where Oliver Twist defines the genteel and the criminal spheres as distinct, contrary, and antithetical, Great Expectations maintains that the upper-class world of the gentleman is implicated in the criminal domain of the underclass, and that the relationship between the two, far from being mutually exclusive, is redolent of complicity and interdependence. This makes Great Expectations, among other things, a meditation on the low, because it bases its demonstration of the inherent kinship between human beings on the interrelationship between the criminal world and its noncriminal counterparts. This interrelationship results in a redefinition of the manner in which Dickens depicts the criminal class in this novel. That class is here presented as more important for the base position it occupies in society than for its anti-social behavior. Magwitch belongs to the underclass of the underworld, but the fortune he makes Down Under will support Pip at the topmost reaches of the social scale. Because its emphasis is on the social position of the convict rather than on his criminality, Great Expectations neutralizes the moral dimension of crime. To be a convict in this novel is to occupy a position of shame, a shame which is primarily associated with being outcast and reviled rather than with being a villain. Evil, which had previously been a major preoccupation in all of Dickens’s fiction, is no longer simply black in this novel, nor is it exclusively associated with crime. In fact, the concept of criminality has here been generalized to include such flawed beings as Pip himself, who sin in their hearts rather than in their deeds. While the world of Great Expectations is not totally amoral, as is the natural world in The Origin of Species, neither is it Manichaean to quite the same 73

extent as in the earlier novels. Instead, the moral distinctions between categories of behavior have become blurred and overlapping. ( ... ) In another echo of Darwinism, Dickens introduces the notion of adaptation or fitness. Miss Havisham’s crime, we are told, lies in her being against Nature, in her trying to shut out the sun and secluding herself “from a thousand natural and healing influences” (GE, p. 411). Her brooding solitary mind has grown diseased, Pip tells us, and this leads him to the conclusion that she has been punished by “her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed” (GE, p. 411). The idea of not fitting, of not having adapted to one’s environment, and therefore cheating and distorting the next generation—as Miss Havisham does to Estella—owes something to Darwinism. Nor is Miss Havisham the only character who is not well adapted to her surroundings. The same is also true of Joe, Pip’s brother-in-law, although in his case, it depends on the surroundings. Joe is a natural in the sense that any form of behavior which forces him away from his essential nature is uncomfortable to him, and this includes all the conventions associated with “polite” society. Clothes provide the most obvious example of Joe’s inability to cope with civilization. He is uncomfortable in anything but his work clothes. And he is uncomfortable anywhere out of his natural element—the country and the forge. His boots are too big; he is clumsy on stairs; he learns to read only with difficulty. The city—that ultimate symbol of human civilization—is his nemesis. He says, “I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes” (GE, p. 246). Yet Joe is not merely the novel’s symbol of the natural man; he is also its embodiment of the affective ideal in human nature. It is he who recognizes Magwitch as a “poor miserable fellow-creatur” (GE, p. 71). In fact, Joe and Magwitch may legitimately be viewed as substitutes for one another, the more 74

so since both are surrogate fathers to Pip. And Pip is ashamed to be connected to both of them. Both Joe and Magwitch are men who act with their hearts; and while this is generally defined as a good, there is also something to be said against such behavior. With Magwitch the ambivalence is built into the ambiguities of the plot—the man is a thief and a convict. Even the altruism of Magwitch’s love for Pip is complicated by his wish to “own” a gentleman. Joe’s love for Pip is more truly selfless, but it is also inept. It cannot save Pip from the harshness of his sister’s upbringing, and it cannot serve Pip as a model for getting along in a world which is more complicated than mere goodness will allow for. ( ... ) To illustrate this new attitude toward time, Dickens evokes the metaphor of a chain: “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day” (GE, p. 101). This is a statement of both randomness and inevitability. Here the past is equated with fate. A single chance day may unavoidably alter the course of a lifetime, and what occurs after that day will never resemble what went before. This is a decidedly different conception of time from that which pertained, for instance, in A Tale of Two Cities, where so momentous a historical event as the French Revolution was described as essentially a roll-over, a substitution of one class by another, a reiteration and reenactment in other terms of previous injustices, without consequences for change in the future. What we have in Great Expectations is Darwinian time— the ceaseless and inevitable moving into the future without a glance back to the reassuring reanimation of the past.

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Notes 11. All references to Dickens’s novels are to the Penguin editions and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 12. Aristotle’s condemnation of usury in his Politics as unnatural breeding “because the offspring resembles the parent,” quoted in Bernard Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 79, is probably the most famous and influential conflation of biological notions with financial ones. Another example of this kind of conflation can be found in the Victorian euphemism for orgasm, “spending.” 13. Beer, p. 63.

CHRISTOPHER D. MORRIS ON NARRATION AND PIP’S MORAL BAD FAITH The problem of Pip’s moral bad faith, both in his actions and in his narrative assessment of his past conduct, has long troubled critics, so much so that in recent years very probing questions have been asked about the depiction of his moral character, even about his self.1 In this essay I want to extend the direction of this recent questioning by considering Pip’s bad faith as an instance of what J. Hillis Miller calls “varnishing,” that is, the authorial establishment of some putative center for a work which simultaneously conceals evidence that would invalidate such a center. 2 Pip’s bad faith works this way in Great Expectations: because we so often attend to the serpentine maneuvers of his conscience, we accept without question that this conscience is functioning within an autonomous, continuous, achieved, created self. And yet analysis of the varnished side of Great Expectations shows that it is precisely these assumptions that have been called into question, even in the very attempt to establish Pip’s conscience as a center. After a discussion of the general relation between narration and bad faith, I examine, in turn, the novel’s famous opening, the allusions Pip makes as narrator, and the letters sent in the novel. The polemical connotations of “deconstruction” are nothing to the purpose here, but I do hope to show the existence of fundamental contradictions in the novel, aporia whose logical reconciliation seems impossible to articulate. 76

I Pip’s relation with all characters is self-serving, even when he claims to be acting altruistically, and in his narration he occasionally covers this seemingly irreducible egotism with a veneer of disingenuous contrition. One example is his relation with Joe. As narrator, Pip claims to have developed a solicitude for Joe, but that claim is everywhere contradicted by his actions. After learning the selfless rationale for Joe’s acquiesence in Mrs. Joe’s “government,” Pip writes: Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but afterwards, at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart. (7, 52)3 But nowhere afterwards are they “equals.” On the contrary, at the end of the novel, Pip still condescends to Joe even as he benefits from his ransoming, even as he egocentrically worries what “little Pip,” his only posterity, will think of him. Similarly distorted appraisals of his past conduct surface in his comments on Biddy, Estella, Pumblechook, and Magwitch. The pervasive pattern of Pip’s distortions raises the question of whether there might be some inherent discontinuity between the narrating and the narrated self. Peter Brooks hints at such a contradiction when he cites Sartre’s remark that all autobiographies are obituaries, excluding the margins of experience. 4 But Pip’s bad faith runs deeper than that phenomenological mauvaise foi described by Sartre: it is not that Pip distorts by reifying the For-Itself in language. Instead, as we will see, there never was an original self apart from language to suffer such distortion. Selfhood has always already been the narrator’s fictive construct, and Pip’s moral bad faith serves to varnish that fact. This deeper contradiction within the process of narration is discernible in other retrospective judgments. After concluding 77

the account of his first visit to Satis House and his new perception of Joe’s thick boots and coarse hands, Pip writes: That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. (9, 76) The admonitory tone of the passage makes it resemble an epitaph on a tombstone: narration itself may be only the substitution of a new set of dead letters for old. But in this paragraph, too, Pip struggles to articulate the determinative value of this first exposure to class, to wealth, to humiliation. In retrospect Pip speaks as a developmental psychologist, a Piaget, who believes in formative events and irrevocable stages of development. (We may note in passing that the metaphor of the chain also serves to exculpate Pip: after this point, he is no longer responsible for his actions.) Yet even more important than the passage’s self-serving function are its contradictory metaphors for life. The chain is the privileged metaphor here, implying absolute continuity, formative events, historical determinism and a narration that could transparently trace these. And yet a life is also a “course,” a movement through time, that lacks the capacity to “bind.” The problem is not simply one of mixed metaphors. Instead, language seems incapable of articulating both diachrony and synchrony simultaneously. Words mark the conversion of the synchronic into the diachronic; to articulate is to be caught in a signifying chain; what Pip struggles to express cannot be expressed: the act of narration already excludes it. It is against this background that we should understand the novel’s famous opening, in which Pip reads his name from the dead letters of the tombstones. 78

Notes An early version of this paper was read at the Eleventh Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film, sponsored by the Department of Foreign Languages, West Virginia University, September 25–27, 1986. 1. Julian Moynahan, in “The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations,” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 60–79, analyzed the ambivalence of Pip’s troubled relations with all characters. Moynahan’s study was one of the first thoroughgoing accounts of Pip’s persistent bad faith: he sees Pip as “implicated in violence” and brought, finally, to a point of “alienation from the real world” (77, 78). More recently, Colin Manlove, in “Neither Here Nor There: Uneasiness in Great Expectations,” Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 61–70, cautioned that “any simple view of Pip’s career in terms only of spiritual amelioration and the finding of his selfhood may require considerable qualification” (69). Judith Weissman and Steven Cohan, in “Dickens’s Great Expectations: Pip’s Arrested Development,” American Imago 38 (1981): 105–26, hold that Pip’s delusions persist through the last chapter because he “does not confront the sorrow and emptiness that make him need to lie” (124). In 1984, two studies of the novel saw Pip’s bad faith as rooted in the conditions of narrative itself: Michael Ginsburg’s “Dickens and the Uncanny: Repression and Displacement in Great Expectations,” Dickens Studies Annual 13 (1984): 115–24, a Freudian reading, argued that the very possibility of Pip’s storytelling is dependent on a repression which “manifests itself as something other than itself” (123). Fiction-making is therefore inherent in the guilt and desire of existence. Peter Brooks’s study in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in the Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), also fundamentally psychoanalytic, argues that repression causes Pip to “misread the plot of his life” (130) and that the return of Magwitch, the repressed, dramatizes Freud’s dynamic tension between eros and thanatos (139). Taken together with the recent deconstructive readings of Dickens by Dianne F. Sadoff (“Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit,” PMLA 95 [1980]: 234–45) and Alistair M. Duckworth, (“Little Dorrit and the Question of Closure,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 [1978]: 110–30), this critical tradition which calls into question the status of Pip’s “self ” seems well established; however, an alternative tradition, which sees the novel as finally valorizing the self, continues. See note 7. 2. J. Hillis Miller, “The Ethics of Reading: Vast Gaps and Parting Hours,” in American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age, ed. Ira Konigsberg (Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, 1981), 34. 3. All references to Great Expectations are from the Oxford Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). Chapter and page numbers are given in parentheses. 4. Brooks, 114.

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JOSEPH A. HYNES ON STAR, GARDEN, AND FIRELIGHT IMAGERY Dickens’ fondness for light imagery crops up once more in the way he uses stars. Estella’s name is immediately relevant, of course, but we ought to note also that stars connote even more generally—until the very last scene—what candles and extinguished fires connote: the illusion which Pip basks in. On the night when Mrs. Joe will announce Miss Havisham’s invitation to Pip, there is a fine contrast evident between fire and starlight—a contrast made while Joe and Pip wait for Mrs. Joe’s arrival: “Joe made the fire and swept. the hearth, and then we went to the door to listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in the glittering multitude” (p. 49). This section suggests all sorts of contrasts: e.g., the difference between the book’s many “prisoners” with and without one another’s help; the difference between a deluded Pip with his eyes on a star (Estella), and an awakened Pip aware of his and Estella’s tie with Magwitch; the pitiless gaze of Estella before her chastening marriage, as distinct from the gaze of an Estella restored to the human race even as Pip is restored. All of these contrasts are implicit—retrospectively— in the symbolic opposition between warm hearth and dry, cold, frosty, white, hard, starlit night; and, by extension, between Joe’s warmth and the others’ cold manipulation of one another. When Estella says that it is not in her nature to love (p. 366), she speaks of a fact which in one or another degree is true for Magwitch, Pip, and Miss Havisham as well, before their various interwound conversions. The same theme is suggested again as Pip leaves for his first meeting with Estella and Miss Havisham: “they [the stars] twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s, and what on earth I was expected to play at” (p. 80

52). Only with Magwitch’s return does Pip become aware of the game he has been “playing,” and of how inhumanly cold he has become. Such are some of the associations, offered by stars, which continually remind us of the real coldness and inhumanity of the particular illusion shown in this book. Thus, Estella’s “light [a candle] came along the dark passage [in Satis House] like a star” (p. 59); later “I saw her pass among the extinguished fires [of the brewery], and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky” (p. 63); despite the “ashes” of Miss Havisham’s “bridal feast,” and that lady’s looking like a “figure of the grave,” “Estella looked more bright and beautiful than before, and I was under stronger enchantment” (p. 242); the juxtaposing of Estella and Miss Havisham’s jewels reminds us that Estella, like the gems, is cold, brilliant, beautiful, and valuable as property owned and used by Miss Havisham (pp. 89, 245, 273); like these jewels, Estella is “ ‘ out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who see her’ ” (p. 117; see also pp. 237, 241, 251); after meeting Estella, Pip regards the stars as “poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my life” (pp. 145–146); speaking unknowingly of his own daughter, Magwitch regards her as jewel-like property, just as Miss Havisham does, and says to Pip that the “‘bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the thoughts on ... shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy ‘em’ ” (p. 325), and thus crassly echoes the sentiments of the “city” Wemmick, whose “‘guiding star always is, Get hold of portable property’ ” (p. 202). This contrast between illusion and reality is shown again in Pip’s statement that “Biddy ... look[ed] at me under the stars with a clear honest eye” (p. 288). In the context, Pip is deceiving himself in telling both himself and Biddy that he will come frequently to visit Joe, whereas Biddy knows that he will not be able to reconcile his promise with his gentlemanly pretensions. Interestingly, stars eventually help to signal Pip’s and Estella’s coming to their senses, humbly seeking forgiveness of each other, and presumably seeing all things, including love, in clear—if subdued—light. Thus, “the stars were shining beyond 81

the mist, and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark”; Estella’s “once proud eyes” manifested a “saddened softened light”; and “as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her” (pp. 491, 493). This last use of stars, though different from the consistent use of stars throughout the book, is not in violation of the characters’ experiences or of the star symbol elsewhere. Further, the stars here support, rather than oppose, Dickens’ decision to accept Bulwer-Lytton’s suggestion for the ending: i.e., throughout the book, stars have symbolized illusion; quite appropriately, then, stars here symbolize the very illusions which Pip and Estella have healthfully dropped, as well as the cooler, more “tranquil,” but very real promise left to them after they have shed all misleading glamour. In my opinion, then, Dickens’ choice of endings is both psychologically and symbolically valid. This paradoxical but perfectly accurate use of symbol appears also in the way gardens are treated. Like stars, gardens here are almost always associated with the illusory, the inhuman, the destructive, the unnatural. Miss Havisham’s is “a rank garden” (p. 63) wherein one looks “upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box tree that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different colour, as if that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt” (p. 80; see also p. 90). Pip the man sees ugliness and unnaturalness for what they are, even as he was earlier appalled by the “city” Wemmick’s walking calmly through a “garden” full of “plants,” “shoots,” and other growths in his Newgate “greenhouse” (pp. 264–266) as distinct from his strolling about the little garden of natural growths in Walworth (pp. 208–211). But Pip the dupe misses the symbolic similarity between himself as unnatural plant raised by others’ manipulations, and these ugly growths in Newgate and in Miss Havisham’s yard. This same confusion turns up again as Estella tries to tell Pip that his devotion to her is based upon illusion. Significantly, since they are walking 82

through Miss Havisham’s decayed garden, the ruin all about them is as nothing to Pip, for whom “it [the garden] was all in bloom” by virtue of Estella’s accidentally brushing against his shoulder (pp. 238–241). In his right mind, of course, Pip sees the garden for the anti-Paradise which it has been in his life (p. 406); and this is why, again, Dickens was right to conclude the novel as he did. Just as Pip and Estella see the stars for what they seemed and for what promise they still hold, so finally and just as credibly they see the garden both as it seemed and as it suggests belated growth and renewal. Stars and garden work together symbolically to suggest neither a burgeoning of young love nor the permanent improbability of all love, but rather the mutual emotional rejuvenation made accessible by mutually suffering for illusions. The suffering which such unnatural careers imply makes Pip’s and Estella’s eventual love for each other as natural as the mist’s lifting from the stars or the garden’s displaying at this late date a second growth of ivy “growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin” (p. 490; see pp. 490–493). By way of partial recapitulation, let me remind the reader that this starlit garden is part of our general discussion of the values of light in the book—whether starlight, candle-light, or firelight. The last of these remains; and I think it accurate to say that firelight is easily the most prevalent and important symbol in Great Expectations. Firelight is always the atmosphere which signals truth or reality, as distinct from the candle-lit atmosphere typical of the poorly seen and illusory. This is why I have said that the symbolic task of Pip and Magwitch (as well as of Miss Havisham and Estella) is to re-kindle human truth in their lives, and it is also why humanly constant Joe is said to be more at home in his working clothes around the kitchen fire or the blacksmith’s forge than imprisoned in his Sunday clothes and visiting either village or city. When Joe tells little Pip how he married Mrs. Joe and gladly assumed responsibility for her infant brother, and how he prefers to suffer the inconveniences imposed upon him by Mrs. Joe, rather than to fight back and take the risk of causing her as much pain as his father inflicted 83

upon his mother, he is notably poking and stirring the fire all the while, and thereby—as I hope to establish—letting us know that such selflessness is the moral burden of the novel (pp. 45–49). Again, after Pip has delivered himself of some splendid lies in describing his first visit to Satis House, he refers to the fire in a way that appears quite gratuitous except as symbol: “ ‘ Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to tell you something’” (p. 69). And when he has told Joe that he lied, Pip penitently sits “down in the ashes at [Joe’s] feet” (p. 70). Joe is hereby made into a sort of smithy-confessor, the center and symbol of truth.

ANN B. DOBIE ON SURREALISM AND STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS Much of the recent criticism of Great Expectations has dealt with the surrealistic elements to be found in it. ( ... ) Since the term “surrealism” can be applied to different art forms and can thus have several different meanings, it is curious that stream-of-consciousness, a strictly literary technique related in a general way to the surrealistic movement, has from time to time been mentioned in connection with Dickens’s writing but never traced in any detail throughout the novels. Great Expectations in particular would seem to have many of the characteristics of the technique, dose examination of which not only provides greater insight into the workings of the novel, but into Dickens’s general style as well. It may not be the complex novel that twentieth-century readers of Joyce and Woolf have grown to expect, but Dickens’s experiments with stream-ofconsciousness in Great Expectations may be responsible to some degree for the book’s effect on modern readers. That Dickens should arrive at simple forms of stream-ofconsciousness is not surprising, for he was throughout his life a 84

conscious manipulator of readers’ emotions both as a writer of novels and as a public reader of them. His pleasure in exciting and controlling his audience frequently led him to indulge in descriptions of violence, arch-villainy, mystery, flights and pursuits, and other melodramatic stock-in-trade. Well aware of the attraction of repulsion, Dickens often let his imagination play upon macabre or sadistic situations, leading some critics to suggest that his appeals for sympathy for the sufferings of the underdog at the hands of a brutal and callous society may have been more related to his interest in commercial success than to any artistic purpose. However, as Stone asserts, the lasting success Dickens has enjoyed could have come only to a conscious artist capable of capturing “the evanescent and yet infinite quality of experience.”1 In spite of the restrictions imposed by Victorian society, the phenomenal career of Charles Dickens reveals an equally phenomenal growth of artistic sophistication in the representation of such immediacy of experience in his novels. ( ... ) The direct interior monologue aims at representing the contents and processes of the mind as they exist at prespeech levels. Harry Stone defines the interior monologue as a literary attempt to “render in written words that semistructured and evanescent aspect of private consciousness which is composed of disorganized and yet meaningfully associated speech-thought.” 1 8 In the direct interior monologue the narrator is invisible and “paring his nails.” Stone recognizes that in his later novels Dickens was capable of representing consciousness by the interior monologue technique, and asserts that in some of his lesser-known short pieces he came close to the interior monologues of the twentieth century.19 However, in Great Expectations, certainly not a “lesser-known short piece,” Dickens skillfully renders an individual consciousness. A major portion of the novel is concerned with the presentation not of external action but of the drama taking place in Pip’s mind as he assesses the world 85

and tries to find his place in it. Dickens does strive to maintain a degree of narrative coherence while depicting the images and associations of Pip’s mind, but the qualities of rambling thought, discontinuity, and private associations are strongly evident. For example, the book begins not with the depiction of some grand action, but with a young boy staring at five graves and indulging in two aspects of mental activity: memory and imagination. My most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, the infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.20 A short time later the convict forces the reader upside down along with Pip: When the church came to itself—for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously. (2) In both excerpts there is a freedom and fluidity of syntax which correspond to the darting impressions within the frightened child’s mind. 86

The indirect monologue differs from the direct only because it less intensely reflects the inner workings of the mind of the protagonist. The reader is more aware of the author’s presence, for though unspoken material is still presented as if it were directly from the consciousness of a character, there is a wider use of descriptive and expository techniques. Scenes can be more dramatized, or the point of view can shift to third person. In other words, the reader goes in and out of the character’s mind; he is not strictly imprisoned within it. Thus, the indirect monologue fulfills its function as Humphrey defines it by creating in the reader “a sense of the author’s continuous presence.”21 The arrival of Magwitch at Pip’s London abode late at night is such a scene. The reader is led into it by following the impressions and reflections of Pip as he sits alone. When a footstep is heard on the stair, the reader is drawn out of Pip’s consciousness and into a scene which is partly dramatized and partly mental. Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up my reading-lamp and went out to the stairhead. Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet. “There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking down. “Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath. “What floor do you want?” “The top. Mr. Pip.” “That is my name. There is nothing the matter?” “Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on. I stood with my lamp held out over the stair rail, and he came slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere instant, and then out of it. In the instant I had seen a face that was strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. (319) 87

The scene continues to alternate between dialogue and the private thoughts of Pip. The dialogue carries the action forward, but Pip’s thoughts set the atmosphere of mystery, dismay, and confusion. The reader is still looking through Pip’s eyes, though with less intensity than in the direct interior monologue quoted earlier. ( ... ) The importance of the native tradition in the development of the English novel is worth noting. Before Freud, Jung, and the surrealists made their contributions to the tide of knowledge concerning the human psyche, Charles Dickens had developed techniques for conveying some of the drama which takes place in an individual’s consciousness. Preeminent Victorian though he was, his narrative innovations point clearly toward the stream-of-consciousness novels soon to follow. Notes 1. “Dickens and the Interior Monologue,” PQ 38 (1959): 64. 18. Thomas E. Connolly, “Technique in Great Expectations,” Philological Quarterly 34 (1955): 52–53. 19. P. 56. 20. Great Expectations (New York, 1966), pp. 1–2. All subsequent quotations from the novel will be taken from this paperback edition (Holt, Rinehart, Winston). 21. P. 29.

NINA AUERBACH ON DICKENS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORPHAN All Dickens’ novels constitute variations on the theme of orphanhood, but only in Great Expectations is he able to confront it without false pathos, in all the dread it held for him and his age. Pip’s confessions both recapitulate and comment on those of previous orphan novels we have looked at, and 88

show, too, why the myth of the orphan—which at its high point practically constituted orphan-worship—was losing its efficacy as the century drew to a close. ( ... ) Pip’s story repeats rather mechanically the paradigm of the orphan-myth established in the 1840’s.17 Like Jane Eyre, Pip brings down by fire the great house he enters as “a kind of servant,” destroying and purging it of the banked embers of its past. The power Pip acquires over Miss Havisham is not Jane’s quasi-supernatural spell over Rochester, but the power of his sincere emotion, which to Dickens is always magical. In a key scene, Miss Havisham kneels to him: “‘Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!’ And so again, twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!” (GE, p. 411). Miss Havisham’s yielding to the power of Pip’s emotion seems somehow to ignite the fire that destroys her and Satis House, a destruction that Pip, like Jane again, has foreseen in odd premonitory visions. So the vision of the orphan passing through a great house which his influence destroys and restores retains its potency. But we do not think of this as we read the novel. For one thing, its point of view makes us aware not of Pip’s power over his world, but of the power of his world over him. His early perspective—that of “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry”—is never really lost. His adult life is still pervaded by his childhood terrors, so that he does not convey to us his powers even when he commands them. Of course, Dickens’ specialty is the worm’seye perspective of a monstrous world looming large over a helpless child, but in Great Expectations the terror is not simply a trick of “camera angle,” as it sometimes is in Dickens. It is inherent in Pip’s situation: he really is alone. For the first time in the novels we have looked at, the orphan’s parents are implacably dead, equated only with their tombstones. Father 89

figures though generations of critics have rightly called them, neither Magwitch nor Joe is really Pip’s father, making Pip’s alienation all the more terrifying when Magwitch looms out of his parents’ graves. Moreover, there is no God in Great Expectations to give sanction to Pip’s identity. God withdrew from Dickens’ world in Bleak House, when the “distant ray of light” that fell on the orphan Jo was finally extinguished in Jo’s death. Pip’s selfhood is contained not in his social definition, as Moll’s was, nor in his soul, as Jane’s was, but in a more fragile thing: his name. For Pip’s identity is self-bestowed; he names himself before the novel begins. His childish naming of himself recalls the eighteenth-century orphan as self-made man, but it is the last act of autonomy Pip is permitted. When Magwitch stipulates that Pip keep his name upon accepting his tainted inheritance, his fear is prophetic, for this is the one thing Pip can’t do: from that moment, a bewildering variety of names is bestowed on him by everyone he meets, even his friend Herbert christening him “Handel.” The crowning erosion of his identity is Joe’s schizophrenic slipping back and forth between “Pip” and “sir.” This is a cannibalistic inversion of the plenitude of names Moll assumed in her escapades. In her picaresque mutability, Moll was simultaneously all these selves and no-self. Pip has only one identity, which is Pip, and when others gnaw away at it, they gnaw away at him. Just as the many names Pip is given employ a picaresque device to invert it, so does the motif of costume. Instead of being a master of disguise, Pip is tormented by his clothes, which become embodied in the humiliating Nemesis of Trabb’s boy. His social rise itself inverts the picaro’s. Instead of being a brilliant improviser, succeeding by the spontaneous manipulation of chance events, Pip mechanically obeys commands to succeed. He does not inveigle his way into Miss Havisham’s house; he is ordered there. He plays grimly when she says “Play!”—no picaro, with his love of games, would require such a command!—loves Estella when she commands him to “love her,” and yearns for gentility as she programs him to. Moll’s desire for gentility was spontaneous; Pip’s is 90

conditioned. Once Pip is “made” a gentleman, all his moves are charted for him according to stipulations delivered by Jaggers. Never once does he act independently; even his adherence to Magwitch is as much a reaction to the influence of another as his love for Estella is. The legacy he bestows on Herbert and forces Miss Havisham to maintain is his one autonomous act, and here, he is “making” another as he has been “made.” Estella, whose automaton-like qualities are only an exaggeration of Pip’s, acts as his chorus: “We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I” (GE, p. 285). The repetition of “you and I” is mechanical, sepulchral, emphasizing the identities they lack by insisting on them. Even more chilling are the words she intones to Miss Havisham: “I am what you have made me” (GE, p. 322). This zombie-like creature is the opposite of the early Victorian orphan, whose mysterious origins were suggestive of infinite Being. Having no soul, the orphan in Great Expectations has become a thing. The eighteenth-century orphan has been turned around, having become manipulated by rather than manipulator of events. He has gone from self-made man to made man. In an odd inversion of the Frankenstein image, Pip returns to the eighteenth-century idea of the orphan as artifact, but emphasizes his loss of power: “The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me” (GE, p. 354). The idea of Pip as artifact is further emphasized by the fact that none of the people who manipulate him are his parents. His being is not organically shaped by inheritance, however hidden. His parents are tombstones; he is infinitely conditioned. The convict image that always follows him seems more suggestive of this incessant coercion than it is of guilt, despite the emphasis of Dorothy Van Ghent’s brilliant essay.18 After all, Pip sins only in thought or by omission. He wishes to run away from the forge, and later from Magwitch, but never actually does so. He avoids seeing Joe and Biddy, but when he does, he 91

never actively cuts them, responding to their love with love as he responds to everybody’s emotions. The most terrifying part of Great Expectations is Pip’s lack of the initiative to sin. Like Alex, Anthony Burgess’ clockwork orange, he is a made man even when he hugs his own evil to himself. In a state of infinite conditioning, there is no room for the fruit of the soul growing on the tree of God. The protective coloring of the orphan was always a sham. Notes 17. An analysis of Dickens’ many uses and variations of this paradigm would constitute a long article in itself. 18. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1933), pp. 125–38.

STEPHEN NEWMAN ON JAGGERS AND WEMMICK: TWO WINDOWS ON LITTLE BRITAIN Jaggers is one of Dickens’s most triumphant achievements in the delineation of character by means of exterior details. By observing these details we can build up an astonishingly vivid and complete impression of the man. Jaggers himself of course tells its much, with his ‘disagreeably sharp and suspicious’ eyes, burly figure, ‘great, bright, creaking boots’ (which laugh for him ‘in a dry and suspicions way’), his ability to conduct only a cross-examination, never a conversation, and his general manner which, as Wemmick tells us meaningfully, is ‘only professional’. He is a man whose private nature is totally subdued to his public personality, and a man who delights in ‘seeing through’ people as though their individual colourings, hopes, thoughts, feelings and beliefs are merely so much tinsel draped river their contemptible vices. This aspect of Jaggers is seen most vividly in Chapter 29 where he broods over the whist table, coming out ‘with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased’. Yet he is by no means drily matter-of-fact. On the 92

contrary, we can detect from the furniture of his office and house strange and concealed currents of the man’s passion, not easily evident in his public manner. Pip describes the office as ‘a dismal place’ and it contains disquieting things: ‘an old rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several strange-looking boxes and packages, and two dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy about the nose’. These are images of mystery and violence. And the house is dark and dingy, its ornamental ‘carved garlands on the panelled walls’ reminding Pip of nooses. The books in the dining room reflect crime, crime and yet more crime. And, above all, there is the housekeeper: a living witness (as the casts of hanged men were (lead witnesses), of Jaggers’s professional skill; but, more than this, an unconscious witness to some obscure, controlled sadism in the man. ‘A wild beast tamed’, Wemmick calls her; and as such she acts both as the outward sign of an inward impulse to animal violence in Jiggers and as the image of that brutality conquered. This repressed sadism throws a revealing light on Jaggers’s attitude to Molly’s daughter, Estella, in Chapter 29. Pip observes him ‘look at her from under his thick eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him, with those rich flushes of glitter and colour in it’. And it illuminates the nature of his interest in ‘the spider’ Bentley Drummle. Jaggers’s public self conceals and controls a temperament both sensual and sadistic. He surrounds himself with images that either flatter or reflect his darkest self; his absorption in crime is partly an expression of his interest in that self. As such we can understand the obsessive need to wash himself in scented soap at the end of each day—Dickens knew as well as Freud what was the classic ritual symbol of guilt. Yet there is reason as well as neurosis behind this grim view of humanity as Dickens makes clear in Chapter 52. Jaggers’s account of how he saved Estella from the usual fate of criminals’ children glows with a pitying indignation that has nothing unhealthy about it. Any thought in the reader that such emotion is uncharacteristic of the mail is immediately curbed partly by the intensely dramatic circumstances (Jaggers, 93

for perhaps the first time in his life, is compelled to submit to examination), partly by the typically intransigent language that admits nothing even while it tells all: ‘Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children, was, their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.’ And Jaggers’s profession is consistent with this complex character. He is an attorney, an advocate for the underworld. He defends the deprived and the depraved. He is unscrupulous in his methods, as we see in Chapter 20 where his client Mike, busy collecting false witnesses, offends him not by lies but by careless phraseology. Jaggers has no interest in legal justice. He is interested only in saving as many outcasts as possible from the judgment of a society which both reason and instinct tell him is as corrupt as the criminals it condemns. As Pip says when he sees him ‘at it’ in court: ‘Which side he was on, I couldn’t make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding the whole place in a mill; I only knew that when I stole out on tiptoe, he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was making the legs of the old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive under the table, by his denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and justice in that chair that day’. (Chapter 24.) ‘After such knowledge. What forgiveness?’ It would be shallow to call Jaggers’s view of life cynical. Nevertheless, for all its realism, this view is not the whole 94

truth. There are areas of compassion, responsibility, magnanimity, love, that it cannot comprehend. Joe, for instance, is beyond Jaggers’s understanding. He regards him as an idiot for not taking advantage of a profitable payment for Pip’s services. Likewise he is ‘querulous and angry’ with Pip for letting Magwitch’s wealth escape him. Living continually with the worst in humanity he has ceased to believe in the best. It is this awareness of the best that dignifies hip’s experience. Jaggers’s vision lends perspective to the central theme; it never rivals or obscures it. Pip’s other contact in Little Britain is Jaggers’s clerk Wemmick. And Wemmick also presents an answer to the problem of reconciling sub-world with upper world. His method is simply to shelve the problem and lead a double life. In Little Britain he endorses Jaggers’s values and scorns anything that ‘smells of mortality’. In Walworth he pulls up the drawbridge of his miniature castle, ‘brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged’. From Wemmick’s point of view this course works perfectly. He feels no tension between his two lives and he never allows the one to affect the other. And he is certainly a most attractive character—at least his Walworth self is. He shows genuine devotion to his father, proves a staunch friend to Pip, and finally becomes a married man with prospects of quiet contentment. Dickens never allows Wemmick’s domesticity to appear sentimental. He salts it with Wemmick’s oddity (‘“Now, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came out, “let me ask you whether any body would suppose this to be a wedding-party!” ’ (Chapter 55) and his incurable interest in ‘portable property’—both nicely adjusted indications of the ghostly other self who allows no emotions and devotes himself to material things. No wonder the contemporary reviews almost unanimously voted Wemmick the comic triumph of the novel. But we mustn’t be hoodwinked by the charm of the Walworth Wemmick into forgetting his twin. The Little Britain Wemmick is very different. We can perhaps gauge his nature best if, instead of regarding the Walworth twin as 95

humanizing the Little Britain twin, we regard the Little Britain twin is de-humanizing the Walworth one. For it is by dehumanizing himself that Wemmick survives at the office. And because he lacks Jaggers’s savage vision of corruption his desiccated attitude to humanity is perhaps more frightening. His conversation with Pip in Chapter 21 is as revealing as his reptilian features: ‘He had glittering eyes,’ Pip tells us, ‘—small, keen, and black—and thin wide mottled lips’. ‘You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered, in London. But there are plenty of people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.’ ‘If there is had blood between you and them,’ said I, to soften it off a little. ‘Oh! I don’t know about bad blood’, returned Mr. Wemmick; ‘there’s not much bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by it.’ ‘That makes it worse.’ ‘You think so?’ returned Mr. Wemmick. ‘Much about the same, I should say.’ Jaggers sees life as essentially evil. Wemmick reduces it to a matter of profit and loss, self-interest and ‘portable property’. He is wholly materialistic. By simplifying humanity in this way he can confront the worst unmoved. He studies men as clinically as a surgeon. Indeed, in Chapter 32, Pip notices that. He regards his clients as specimens rather than individuals. This chapter contains one of the most shocking scenes in the novel. Wemmick introduces Pip to a condemned man: ‘a portly upright man (whom I can see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-coloured frock-coat. With a peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that went wandering about when he tried to fix there, came up to a corner of the bars, and put his hand to his hat—which had a greasy and fatty surface like cold broth—with a half-serious and half-jocose military salute.’ Pip’s horrified description captures the man’s mixture of terror and bravado exactly. The sickening detail about the hat 96

suggests more potently than any analysis a bold temperament congealing at the prospect of death. But Wemmick regards him merely as a dead plant to be stripped of its remaining useful attributes. The way he builds up his ‘portable property’ from condemned clients is only one step removed from the ‘Jack’ (or odd job man) of the causeway in Chapter 54, who dresses in the clothes of drowned men. In the face of this callousness we can perhaps see Wemmick’s ability to lead a double life without trace of psychological disturbance as an implicit criticism of his system rather than a solution to the problem of the two worlds. The fact that he can isolate his humane qualities so completely suggests their limitation, not their strength. As Joe says in Chapter 57, ‘ “ a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle,”’ but it is a sign of weakness when a castle is forever in a state of siege. Like Jaggers, Wemmick serves chiefly as a foil to Pip’s more profound experience.

JAY CLAYTON ON GREAT EXPECTATIONS AS A FORESHADOWING OF POSTMODERNISM Great Expectations—and at last I refer to the novel by Charles Dickens—mixes cultural signs from different periods as pervasively and as incongruously as any postmodern text. Joe, the simple blacksmith, for example, represents a nostalgic portrait of a figure from an earlier era, a phase of capitalism fast disappearing in 1861, when the novel was published, although not as uncommon in rural areas in the 1820s, when the novel was set. The values associated with Joe—integrity, unswerving loyalty, pride in one’s craft—accrue to this residual economic order, thus serving as an implicit critique of the more highly developed dominant economy of London. Staging the contrast as one between country and city helps to reduce the sense of incongruity for readers. Still, the incompatibility of this ideal with modern existence is dramatized at the end of the novel. The only way Pip can find to be true to the lessons he has learned from Joe is to spend eleven years away from the forge 97

in his company’s colonial branch in Cairo. Pip’s summary of those eleven years represents the most “Victorian” moment in the book. His only consolation, the thing that enables him to hold up his head when he thinks of how badly he has behaved, is that now he “lived frugally, and paid my debts.” If the reader had any doubts about the middle-class positioning of this Victorian ethic, Pip clears them up without delay: “I must not leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House, or that we made mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits” (436). If Joe is a holdover from a rural, pre-Victorian mode of early capitalism and Pip matures into a thoroughly up-to-date middle-class Victorian, then is there anyone in the novel who might be said to fore shadow postmodernism? I am happy to say that there is. That person is not Pip, so the answer to the question in my title must be: No, Pip is not postmodern. The character who has the best claim to that role is a minor figure, although a favorite with readers down through the years: Wemmick. Mr. Jaggers’s clerk conflates enough incongruous cultural signs in his humble person to become a veritable icon of the Dickens icon. A model of businesslike decorum at the office, with his post-office mouth and his invariable advice to look after “portable property,” he is an entirely different man at home, where he indulges his Aged P, shyly courts Miss Skiffins, and lovingly tends to his house and garden. The split between these two incarnations is so profound that Pip speculates that there must be “twin Wemmicks” (356). A division of this kind, between the self in its “private and personal capacity,” to use Wemmick’s words (273), and the public, professional self is seen often enough today but is hardly restricted to postmodernism. This kind of alienation was, in fact, one of the hallmarks of the “modern” self, a condition that Marx famously identified as a consequence of urban capitalism. If a divided self were Wemmick’s only distinctive characteristic, then he would be an unusually pure representative of a single historical type, “modern man.” But 98

Wemmick’s interest hardly stops there. His home at Walworth is his other claim to fame. It is a little wooden cottage, which Wemmick has transformed into a miniature Gothic castle, perfect in every detail, including mock fortifications, a moat with its own drawbridge, a flag, and a cannon, which is discharged punctually at nine o’clock every evening. He lives in a simulacrum of another era, a theme park version of feudal England. And like today’s theme parks, he takes pride in bringing to life a cliché. Wemmick has turned his house into a literal incarnation of the saying “A man’s home is his castle.” His mode of existence—inside this simulacrum—reproduces the economic conditions of a “freehold” (200), as far as is possible in a suburb of nineteenth-century London. As Wemmick proudly explains, “I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades” (200). Inside the castle is Wemmick’s prized “collection of curiosities.” His treasures “were mostly of a felonious character,” including a forger’s pen and “a distinguished razor or two” (201). The collection is a treasury of Victorian murder, as odd as Rick Geary’s postmodern comic book of that name. The Aged P is so proud of his son’s accomplishment that he thinks “it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment” (200). After visiting some of the houses preserved by the British National Trust, with their mismatched architectural styles and their (far more expensive) collections of curiosities, I sometimes wonder if they did. In short, Wemmick’s home is a postmodern pastiche, a simulacrum, as misshapen—and comical—as “Great HairSpectations” at the local mall. With Wemmick as a guide, one begins to notice that Great Expectations itself is a palimpsest of different cultural periods. Raymond Williams has pointed out that no era is ever characterized by a single ideology, and he has proposed dividing cultural beliefs along temporal lines into the “residual, dominant, and emergent.” In Dickens’s novel, one can identify traces of at least five different epochs, each competing with the others for cultural space: (1) the “feudal” freehold of 99

Wemmick’s castle; (2) the preindustrial capitalism of Joe’s forge; (3) the “Victorian” middle-class values of Pip’s mature years, with their clear connections to the fortunes of empire; (4) the “modern” alienation that splits Wemmick into twin selves; and (5) the “postmodern” world of simulacra and pastiche. The discontinuity among these layers contributes to many of the novel’s most enduring effects: the comedy of Wemmick, the tenderness toward Joe, the ethical growth of Pip, and the social commentary on modern urban alienation. Yet few readers before today have ever read them as signs that there is “no consensus about reality.” The more usual procedure has been to single out one strand and elevate it as the master discourse of the text. Where Dickens’s contemporaries saw the novel as a return to the comic types and affectionate portraits of his youthful fiction, modernist critics perceived a new, “dark” phase of social criticism, and David Lean and the Classics Illustrated of the 1940s discerned images of masculinity and national identity that could symbolically replace the loss of empire. Only at the end of the twentieth century have people begun to focus on discontinuity itself, seeing in Dickens a foreshadowing of the “incompatible realities” of postmodernism. When Elvis comes calling for Estella, can any marriage be too far-fetched?

EDWARD W. SAID ON AUSTRALIA, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, AND DICKENS’S VICTORIAN BUSINESSMEN Let me say a little here about what I have in mind, using [a] well-known and very great novel.... Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is primarily a novel about self-delusion, about Pip’s vain attempts to become a gentleman with neither the hard work nor the aristocratic source of income required for such a role. Early in life he helps a condemned convict, Abel Magwitch, who, after being transported to Australia, pays back his young benefactor with large sums of money; because the lawyer 100

involved says nothing as he disburses the money, Pip persuades himself that an elderly gentlewoman, Miss Havisham, has been his patron. Magwitch then reappears illegally in London, unwelcomed by Pip because everything about the man reeks of delinquency and unpleasantness. In the end, though, Pip is reconciled to Magwitch and to his reality: he finally acknowledges Magwitch—hunted, apprehended, and fatally ill—as his surrogate father, not as someone to be denied or rejected, though Magwitch is in fact unacceptable, being from Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not the repatriation of transported English criminals. Most, if not all, readings of this remarkable work situate it squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction, whereas I believe that it belongs in a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow. It has been left to two more recent books than Dickens’s—Robert Hughes’s magisterial The Fatal Shore and Paul Carter’s brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay—to reveal a vast history of speculation about the experience of Australia, a “white” colony like Ireland, in which we can locate Magwitch and Dickens not as mere coincidental references in that history, but as participants in it, through the novel and through a much older and wider experience between England and its overseas territories. Australia was established as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century mainly so that England could transport an irredeemable, unwanted excess population of felons to a place, originally charted by Captain Cook, that would also function as a colony replacing those lost in America. The pursuit of profit, the building of empire, and what Hughes calls social apartheid together produced modern Australia, which by the time Dickens first took an interest in it during the 1840s (in David Copperfield Wilkins Micawber happily immigrates there) had progressed somewhat into profitability and a sort of “free system” where laborers could do well on their own if allowed to do so. Yet in Magwitch “Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but they could hardly, in 101

the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal sense, but what they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders. And yet they were capable of redemption—as long as they stayed in Australia” (Hughes 586). Carter’s exploration of what he calls Australia’s spatial history offers us another version of that same experience. Here explorers, convicts, ethnographers, profiteers, soldiers chart the vast and relatively empty continent each in a discourse that jostles, displaces, or incorporates the others. Botany Bay is therefore first of all an Enlightenment discourse of travel and discovery, then a set of travelling narrators (including Cook) whose words, charts, and intentions accumulate the strange territories and gradually turn them into “home.” The adjacence between the Benthamite organization of space (which produced the city of Melbourne) and the apparent disorder of the Australian bush is shown by Carter to have become an optimistic transformation of social space, which produced an Elysium for gentlemen, an Eden for laborers in the 1840s (Carter 202–60). What Dickens envisions for Pip, being Magwitch’s “London gentleman,” is roughly equivalent to what was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia, one social space authorizing another. But Great Expectations was not written with anything like the concern for native Australian accounts that Hughes or Carter has, nor did it presume or forecast a tradition of Australian writing, which in fact came later to include the literary works of David Malouf, Peter Carey, and Patrick White. The prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but imperial: subjects can be taken to places like Australia, but they cannot be allowed a “return” to metropolitan space, which, as all Dickens’s fiction testifies, is meticulously charted, spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages. So on the one hand, interpreters like Hughes and Carter expand on the relatively attenuated presence of Australia in nineteenthcentury British writing, expressing the fullness and earned integrity of an Australian history that became independent from Britain’s in the twentieth century; yet, on the other, an accurate reading of Great Expectations must note that after 102

Magwitch’s delinquency is expiated, so to speak, after Pip redemptively acknowledges his debt to the old, bitterly energized, and vengeful convict, Pip himself collapses and is revived in two explicitly positive ways. A new Pip appears, less laden than the old Pip with the chains of the past—he is glimpsed in the form of a child, also called Pip; and the old Pip takes on a new career with his boyhood friend Herbert Pocket, this time not as an idle gentleman but as a hardworking trader in the East, where Britain’s other colonies offer a sort of normality that Australia never could. Thus even as Dickens settles the difficulty with Australia, another structure of attitude and reference emerges to suggest Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient. In his new career as colonial businessman, Pip is hardly an exceptional figure, since nearly all of Dickens’s businessmen, wayward relatives, and frightening outsiders have a fairly normal and secure connection with the empire. But it is only in recent years that these connections have taken on interpretative importance. A new generation of scholars and critics—the children of decolonization in some instances, the beneficiaries (like sexual, religious, and racial minorities) of advances in human freedom at home—have seen in such great texts of Western literature a standing interest in what was considered a lesser world, populated with lesser people of color, portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoes.... To lose sight of or ignore the national and international context of, say, Dickens’s representations of Victorian businessmen, and to focus only on the internal coherence of their roles in his novels is to miss an essential connection between his fiction and its historical world. And understanding that connection does not reduce or diminish the novels’ value as works of art: on the contrary, because of their worldliness, because of their complex affiliations with their real setting, they are more interesting and more valuable as works of art.

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Works by Charles Dickens “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” 1833. Sketches by Boz, 1836. Pickwick Papers, 1836–7. Oliver Twist, 1837–9. Nicholas Nickelby, 1838–9. The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840–1. Barnaby Rudge, 1841. American Notes, 1842. A Christmas Carol, 1843. Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843–4. The Chimes, 1844. The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845. The Battle of Life, 1846. Pictures from Italy, 1846. Dombey and Son, 1846–8. The Haunted Man, 1848. David Copperfield, 1849–50. A Child’s History of England, 1851–3. Bleak House, 1852–3. Hard Times, 1854. Little Dorrit, 1855–7. A Tale of Two Cities, 1859. Great Expectations, 1861. Our Mutual Friend, 1864–5. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870.

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Annotated Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990. This thousand-plus page study delves into both Dickens’s public and private lives. Ackroyd contends that Dickens was the first to introduce the language of the Romantic poets into the novel. He also says that his dramatic readings revolutionized the art form. Brook, G.L. The Language of Dickens. London: Andre Deutsch, 1970. This book concerns the speech of Dickens’s characters, including Joe Gargery’s, in sections such as “Substandard Grammar” and “Substandard Vocabulary.” Cary, John, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination. London, Faber & Faber, 1973. Using concrete examples from Dickens’s work in each of the seven chapters—broken down into topics such as “Dickens and Violence” and “Dickens and Sex”—this work illustrates how the writer’s imagination created interesting and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions. It also discusses Dickens’ tendency to “break his characters into fragments,” and describes how a character’s approach to inanimate objects reveals their conflicts or mindsets Carlisle, Janice, ed., Charles Dickens: Great Expectations. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996. This work contains an authoritative text of Great Expectations, biographical as well as historical contexts, and essays that cover a broad spectrum of current theoretical approaches, including feminist, psychoanalytic, gender, and deconstructionist critiques. Ford, George, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism Since 1836. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955. 105

A study of Dickens’s affects on his audiences, this book addresses along the way both the evolution of the author and the reading public. Ford argues that Dickens doesn’t stick to a time-honored fictional formula; in fact, according to some critics, Great Expectations was a welcome return to some of Dickens’s earlier stylings. Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872–4. Drawing on letters and anecdotes, this three-volume work is part biography and part critical appraisal. Forester’s memories help chart the evolution of Great Expectations from Dickens’s initial idea, to the steamer chartered so as he might accurately render Magwitch’s attempted escape, to Dickens’s exhaustion following the book’s completion. Gross, John, and Gabriel Pearson, eds. Dickens and the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Christopher Ricks’s “Great Expectations,” argues that Dickens maintains the reader’s sympathy by giving Pip enough honest self-reflection to admit his shortcomings and enough impetus to do good work in the name of his friends and family. Other essays herein also mention Great Expectations, including Angus Wilson’s “The Heroes and Heroines of Dickens,” which connects Estella with Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend. House, Humphrey, The Dickens World. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. This work discusses in part the way the attitude of money in Great Expectations is more typical of the time of the book’s publication than it is of the earlier decade in which it is set. House contends that Dickens shared Magwitch’s belief that money can make a gentleman; he argues against the assumption that the base of Great Expectations is class consciousness.

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Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, revised edition London: Allen Lane, 1977. This modern biography deals extensively with the relationship between Dickens and Charles Lever, whose novel A Day’s Ride hurt the circulation of All the Year Round to the extent that Dickens felt compelled to publish Great Expectations in the magazine. Leavis, F.R., and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist. London, Chatto & Windus, 1970. This work contains a close reading of Great Expectations that is particularly sympathetic to Pip—a character certainly plagued by fears and inadequacies, but never completely blind to his own fallibility. It draws parallels between Great Expectations and other books, including The Scarlet Letter and Pilgrim’s Progress. Martin, Graham, Great Expectations. Milton Keynes: Open University Publications, 1985. This work is part of a course on “the Nineteenth Century Novel and Its Legacy.” Miller, J. Hillis, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Often called one of the most influential studies of Dickens’s novels, this book contains a quite detailed and documented chapter on Great Expectations, which contends that Pip is the archetypal Dickens hero. Pip must confront the conflicts created by money and rank, Miller argues, and eventually must disregard societal pressures and surrender to “selfhood.” Rosenberg, Edgar, Great Expectations: Charles Dickens. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. This is a thorough and comparative study of all versions of Dickens novel, including its serial runs in both Harper’s

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Weekly and in All the Year Round. It also contains background information, context-setting facts, and a variety of criticsm. Stone, Harry, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Novel-Making Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Arguing for a strong focus on the fairy-tale approach Dickens took to his writing, this book suggests Orlick’s role as devil and Magwitch’s role as Pip’s double. The work also suggests two possible works which directly influenced the writing of Great Expectations: E.C. Grenville Murray’s preface to The Roving Englishman, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Dickens-edited short story “The Ghost in the Garden Room,” which appeared in All the Year Round and which concerns a protagonist strikingly similar to Pip. Wall, Stephen, ed. Charles Dickens. Penguin Critical Anthologies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. A critical anthology that contains the original ending of Great Expectations, Thomas Hardy’s essay on “Food and Ceremony,” and several other essays and exhibits. The appendix gives a dated list of when each installment of the serial appeared in All the Year Round. Worth, George J. Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1986. A comprehensive listing of scholarship, criticism, and appreciation of Great Expectations, from the time the book was published in 1861, to Dickens biographies and bibliographies, to film adaptations. Wright, Thomas. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Butler & Tanner, 1935. Praising both the pathos and humor in Great Expectations, Wright suggests that this is Dickens’s only work in which the hero and the heroine are the most interesting characters. He draws the conclusion that Estella is actually a model for

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Dickens’s lover Ellen Ternan, pointing out that Ellen Lawless Ternan’s initials are present in the heroine’s first name.

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Contributors Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International Prize. Sarah Robbins has an MFA in fiction writing from New School University. She is a New York City-based writer and editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the American Book Review, ArtNews, Glamour, and Newsday, and she is currently at work on a novel. George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and critic, first revolutionized the Victorian stage and later became concerned with dramas of ideas. He is the author of many plays, among them Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913), and Saint Joan (1923). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. George Orwell is best known for his satirical and political writings. This British essayist and novelist is the author of Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1946), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). 110

Peter Brooks is University Professor at the University of Virginia. In addition to his work on Dickens, he has published books on narrative and narrative theory, including Reading for the Plot (1984) and Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000). Dorothy Van Ghent is an American writer and critic who is the author of The English Novel: Form and Function (1953) and the editor of The Essential Prose (1965). Julian Moynahan is Professor of English Emeritus at Rutgers University. He is the author of Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D.H. Lawrence (1966), Selected Poems (May 1991), and AngloIrish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (2000). Goldie Morgentaler is an Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like (1999) Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism. Joseph A. Hynes has written “Image and Symbol in Great Expectations” which was published in ELH journal. Ann B. Dobie is the director of the Louisiana Writing Project State Network and former director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana. She is professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Nina Auerbach is the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her special area of concentration is nineteenth-century England, she is the author of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian 111

Women Writers (1993), Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997), and Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress (2002). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts. Stephen Newman has written Great Expectations (1975), which is considered to be one of the finest works of scholarship on the novel. Jay Clayton is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (1993), Time and the Literary (2002), and Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (2003). Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was also president of the Modern Language Association in 1999. He is the author of many books, including The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), and Reflections on Exile (2000). He twice received Columbia’s Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association.

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Acknowledgments "Introduction to Great Expectations" by Bernard Shaw. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations by Edgar Rosenberg (ed). Pp. 632-641. © 1999 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate. "Charles Dickens" by George Orwell. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 641-644. © 1940 by George Orwell. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. "Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations" by Peter Brooks. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 679-689. © 1999 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission. "On Great Expectations" by Dorothy Van Ghent. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 648-654. © 1999 Thomson Learning. Reprinted by permission. "The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations" by Julian Moynahan. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 654-663. © 1999 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission. "Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations" by Goldie Morgentaler. Pp. 707-721. Reprinted with permission from Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 38, 4 (Autumn 1998). © by Rice University. "The Bad Faith of Pip's Bad Faith: Deconstructing Great Expectations" by Christopher D. Morris. From ELH 54: 4 (1987). Pp. 941-955. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. "Early Stream-of-Consciousness Writing: Great Expectations" by Ann B. Dobie. From Nineteenth-Century Fiction (25), No. 113

4 (March, 1971): Pp. 405-416. © by University of California Press. Reprinted by permission. "Image and Symbol in Great Expectations" by Joseph A. Hynes. From ELH (30), No. 3 (September, 1963): Pp. 258292. © by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission. "Incarnations of the Orphan" by Nina Auerbach. From ELH 42: 3 (1975). Pp. 395-419. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. "Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)" by Stephen Newman. From Notes on English Literature, John D. Jump & W.H. Mason (eds). Pp. 79-85. © 1975 Stephen Newman. Reprinted by permission. "Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century" by Jay Clayton. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Janice Carlisle. Pp. 621-623. © 1996 Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press. Reprinted by permission. "Two Commentaries on Great Expectations: From Deconstruction to Postcolonialism" by Edward Said. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Janice Carlisle. Pp. 524-526. © 1996 Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Chatto & Windus, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

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Index characters are alphabetized by their first names

A Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, 69, 77, 80, 83 capture, 15, 17, 44, 56, 101 clockwork throat, 61 convict, 15, 19–22, 25, 32, 37–39, 43, 51–52, 61, 62–65, 72–73, 75, 86–87, 91, 100–1,103 daughter, 7, 15, 18, 42, 45, 48, 81 death, 45, 57, 62, 101 escape, 40–41, 44 Pip’s father-substitute, 7–8, 55, 64, 72, 74–75, 90, 101 as secret benefactor, 15–17, 38–39, 46, 49, 56, 58, 90–91, 95, 101–2 speech, 24, 52–53 Acceptance of loss theme, 8 innocence, 12, 50, 71 and Joe, 26–27 and Pip, 25, 37, 46 Adaptation theme in Great Expectations, 72, 74 All the Year Round (periodical), 10, 13 Ambition theme in Great Expectations, 65–71 American Notes, 10, 104 Auerbach, Nina on the orphan theme in Great Expectations, 88–92

B Barnaby Rudge, 10, 104 Barzilai, Shuli, 8 Battle of Life, The, 10, 104 Beer, Gillian on Great Expectations, 72

Bentley Drummle in Great Expectations crimes of, 67–70 dark shadow of Pip, 65–71, 93 death, 69 mannerisms, 17, 30–31 marriage to Estella, 8, 15, 17, 37, 40–41, 46–48, 67 Biddy in Great Expectations, 17, 31, 45, 77, 81 and Joe, 46, 71, 91 and Orlick, 16, 26, 35, 69 and Pip’s education, 22, 24–27 Bildungsroman, 13 Bleak House, 10, 90, 104 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights, 8 Brooks, Peter on Great Expectations, 19, 32, 44–45, 77 on the plot of Great Expectations, 54–58 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 14, 56, 82

C Carey, Peter, 102 Carlyle, Thomas, 49 Carter, Paul The Road to Botany Bay, 101–2 Chimes, The, 10, 104 Christmas Carol, A, 10, 104 Clara Bailey in Great Expectations, 16 Clayton, Jay on postmodernism in Great Expectations, 97–100 Compeyson in Great Expectations, 18 betrayal of Magwitch, 15, 39–41, 44, 69 death of, 57, 62 and Miss Havisham, 15 and Orlick, 16

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Cricket on the Hearth, The, 10, 104

D Darwin, Charles Origin of Species, The, 12, 19, 39, 72–76 David Copperfield, 10, 104 autobiographical content, 7–9 Dora in, 9 Mr. Micawber in, 10, 101 narrative of, 7 David Copperfield in David Copperfield, 49, 53 consciousness of, 7 Day’s Ride, A (Lever), 13 Decipherment theme in Great Expectations, 55 Demonic symbolism in Great Expectations exaggerated character features, 61 graveyard, 62 Jaggers’ office, 60, 93 Newgate prison, 62 the river, 62 Smithfield, 62 Dickens, Catherine Hogarth, 9 Dickens, Charles affairs of, 7, 14, 47 biography, 9–11 birth, 9 critics, 7–8, 11–12 death, 11 imagination, 47–49, 53, 85 inconsistent characters, 51–53 public readings, 11 theatrical productions, 10–11 use of pathetic fallacy, 59–65 works by, 104 Dobie, Ann B. on the stream of consciousness in Great Expectations, 84–88 Dombey and Son, 10, 104

E Eliot, George, 13

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Estella in Great Expectations, 77, 100 Miss Havisham’s influence on, 16, 18, 21, 29, 33, 34–37, 74, 91 marriages, 8, 15, 17, 40–41, 46–48, 67–68, 70, 80 parents, 7, 15, 18, 29, 40–42, 45, 48, 93 and Pip, 7–8, 14, 22–23, 25–26, 31–34, 36–38, 45–48, 56–58, 62, 67, 70–72, 81, 83–84, 90–91 and star imagery, 80–83 tormentor, 47–48 unhappiness of, 15, 33–36, 46

F Fatal Shore, The (Hughes), 101–2 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 88, 93

G Great Expectations, 10, 104 autobiographical content, 7–8, 13 character list, 15–18 coincidences in, 34, 38, 63, 70 critical views, 14, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 28, 31–32, 34, 38–39, 43–45, 47–103 historical aspects of, 100–3 human discordance in, 59–65 language, 24 The Origin of Species influence on, 12, 19, 39, 72–76 plot of, 13, 19, 45, 48, 53–58, 72–73, 75 postmodernism in, 97–100 self-delusion of, 100 story behind, 12–14 stream of consciousness in, 84–88 structure of, 13 summary analysis, 19–46 two endings of, 8, 14, 56–58, 71, 82 violence in, 70–71 writing of, 7, 12, 14 Guilt and atonement theme in Great Expectations, 61

of great expectations, 71, 93 murderer’s, 70 Pip’s, 7–8, 20, 25, 27, 32–34, 51, 60, 62–64, 66, 70, 71, 91–92

H Hard Times, 10, 52, 104 Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, The, 10, 104 Havisham, Miss in Great Expectations, 17, 80 death, 45, 67, 70–71, 89 and Estella, 18, 21, 24–26, 31, 37, 91 revenge on men, 15, 24–25, 29, 34, 36 and Satis house, 15, 21–22, 32–33, 36, 40–43, 46, 49, 58–59, 70, 78, 81, 84, 89–90 sufferings of, 15–16, 23, 27, 40, 49, 74, 81–83 Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations desires of, 16, 33–34, 44 help to Magwitch, 17, 38–44, 91, 103 and Pip, 28–38, 42–43, 46, 90 Historical novels, 13 Hogarth, Mary model for heroines, 9 Household Words (periodical), 10 Hughes, Robert The Fatal Shore, 101–2 Hugo, Victor, 49 Humor, 11, 52 Hynes, Joseph A. on imagery in Great Expectations, 80–84

I Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People, 9 Imagery in Great Expectations firelight, 80–81, 83–84 garden, 82–83 star, 80–83

J Jaggers in Great Expectations, 17, 60, 98, 100 dirty business of, 16, 26, 28–31, 68–69, 91–96 forefinger, 61 housekeeper, 18 mannerisms, 92–97 as Pip’s counsel, 27–30, 33–36, 38–45, 72 Joe Gargery, Mr. in Great Expectations, 15, 35, 67, 78, 81 and Biddy, 46, 71, 91 honesty and warmth, 16, 21, 43, 71, 73, 80, 83–84, 95, 97–98 Pip’s father-substitute, 7–8, 16, 19–20, 22, 24, 26–27, 32–33, 45, 51, 64, 74–75, 77, 90 pride of, 27, 31 speech of, 24–25 Joe Gargery, Mrs. in Great Expectations, 15, 49, 83 attack on, 16–17, 25–27, 31, 43, 64, 67–69 death, 35 disinterest in education, 21 jealousy of, 16, 19–20, 22, 24, 67, 75, 77, 80 Johnson, Edgar, 7 Joyce, James, 84 Jung, Carl, 88

L Lever, Charles A Day’s Ride, 13 Little Dorrit, 10, 104

M Malouf, David, 102 Martin Chuzzlewit, 10, 104 Marx, Karl, 59, 98 Master Humphrey’s Clock (weekly), 10 Matthew Pocket in Great Expectations

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and Miss Havisham, 17, 23, 29, 40, 45 tutor, 16, 27–28, 30–31, 37 Miller, J. Hillis, 76 Molly in Great Expectations crimes of, 18, 41 and Estella, 18, 41, 93 and Jaggers, 18, 31 Morgenthaler, Goldie on Great Expectations, 19, 32, 39, 43–44 on The Orgins of Species influence on Great Expectations, 72–76 Morris, Christopher D. on Great Expectations, 19 on Pip’s moral bad faith, 76–79 Moynahan, Julian on Great Expectations, 34 on the theme of ambition in Great Expectations, 65–71 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 11, 104

N Narrative, Great Expectations direct monologue, 87–88 first person, 7, 12, 66 indirect monologue, 85, 87 Pip’s, 54, 76–79, 85–88 stream of consciousness, 84–85, 87–88 third person, 87 Newgate prison in Great Expectations, 13, 28, 34 Newman, Steven on Great Expectations, 28, 31 on Jaggers and Wemmick in Great Expectations, 92–97 Nicholas Nickleby, 10, 104

O Old Curiosity Shop, The, 10, 104 Little Nell in, 9 Oliver Twist, 9, 48, 72–73, 104 The Origin of Species (Darwin)

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influence on Great Expectations, 12, 19, 39, 72–76 Orlick in Great Expectations, 32, 40 arrest of, 45 attack on Mrs. Joe, 16, 25–26, 35, 43, 64 attack on Pip, 16, 43 and Biddy, 16 and Compeyson, 16 crimes of, 66–70 dark shadow of Pip, 16, 33, 43, 65–71 Orphanhood theme in Bleak House, 90 in Great Expectations, 88–92 Orwell, George on Dickens’s inconsistent characters, 51–53 Our Mutual Friend, 10, 104

P Paroissien, David, 12 Pickwick Papers, 9–10, 52, 104 “Pictures of Italy,” 10, 104 Pip in Great Expectations ambition of, 65–71 authentic maturity, 8 and “commonness,” 15, 22, 24, 51 consciousness, 85–89 dark doubles of, 65–71 education, 21, 24, 26–27, 30–31, 37 father-substitutes of, 7–8, 19, 31–33, 46, 55–56, 64, 72, 74–75, 77, 89–90, 101 identity of things, 59–65, 73, 82–84, 90, 93–97 imagination and hallucinations, 7, 56, 70–71, 86 injuries, 43–45 looking back of, 12–13, 19, 44, 57 loss, 12, 25, 37, 50 and Magwitch, 17, 19–22, 25, 32, 34, 37–46, 51–52, 56, 62, 81, 86–87, 90–91, 101–3

moral bad faith, 76–79 naming of self, 19, 27, 54, 56, 90 passion for Estella, 7–8, 21–26, 31–38, 40–42, 45–48, 56, 58, 62, 69, 80–83, 90–91 rise in social status, 13, 15, 16–17, 22, 26–31, 38, 45, 48, 57, 73, 78, 91, 97–98, 100 secret benefactor, 15–17, 27, 35–40, 44, 49, 56, 90–91, 100–2 sense of guilt, 7–8, 20, 25, 27, 32–34, 51, 60, 62–64, 66, 70–71, 91–92 Postmodernism foreshadowing in Great Expectations, 97–100 Pumblechook in Great Expectations, 20, 25, 33, 35, 45–46, 77 plans for Pip, 21–22, 24, 27, 32, 43, 64 obsessions of, 17 robbery of, 67–71

criminality of, 64, 66, 73–74 and commodification of people, 22 high, 13 “Newgate,” 13, 82, 95 unification, 44 Victorian, 85, 88, 91, 98, 103 Startop Great Expectations, 43 mannerisms, 17, 30 violence against, 68–69 Stone, Harry, 85 Surrealism, 84, 88

T Tale of Two Cities, A, 10, 52, 75, 104 Ternan, Ellen, 7, 14 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 13 Time theme in Great Expectations, 72 and metaphor of chain, 75, 78, 103 Trollope, Anthony, 13

V R Realism domestic, 13 Road to Botany Bay, The (Carter), 101–2

Van Ghent, Dorothy on Dickens’ use of pathetic fallacy, 59–65 on Great Expectations, 20, 22, 24–25, 38, 44, 91 on Pip’s identity of things, 59–65

S Said, Edward W. on the historical aspects of Great Expectations, 100–3 Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations at Satis House, 23, 26, 32 Shaw, George Bernard, 12 on the class snobbery in Great Expectations, 47–50 Sketches of Boz, 9, 104 Smithfield market in Great Expectations, 13 Society in Great Expectations civilized, 72–74 and class snobbery, 47–51, 64, 75

W Wells, H.G., 48 Wemmick in Great Expectations, 28, 34, 37, 39, 41–42 “aged parent,” 30, 36, 95, 98 divided life of, 17, 31, 36, 81–82, 95–100 mannerisms, 92–97 post-office mouth, 61 and Miss Skiffins, 17, 36, 40, 45, 95, 98 White, Patrick, 102 Williams, Raymond, 99 Woolf, Virginia, 84

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Wopsle, Mr. in Great Expectations, 20–22, 24–25, 27, 49, 64 playacting, 18, 31, 33, 41, 56

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as Wadengarver, 18, 33–34 Wright, Thomas, 13–14 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 8