Great Expectations Pages
Great Expectations Pages
Great Expectations Pages
Connell Guide
T o C H a r l eThe
s diCkens’s
Connell Guide
to
Charles Dickens’s
GreatGreat
Expectations
expectations
“i only wish an accessible and insightful guide
like this had been available to me as a teenager.”
Sir Max HaStingS
by
John Sutherland & Jolyon Connell
A l l yo u n e e d t o k n ow A b o u t t h e
n ov e l i n o n e c o n c i s e vo lu m e
Is Pip a snob? 29
Bildungsroman 12
Dickens’s use of humour 16
Education 22
The marshes 26
Dickens and class 32
The original Miss Havisham 44
Sex in Great Expectations 50
The Criminal Code 59
Ten facts about Great Expectations 64
Dickens at work, by his eldest son, Charley 68
Pip’s reliability as a narrator 78
Biddy 90
The importance of hands 98
Pip’s journey down the Thames 100
Modern critics 114
A short chronology 120
Bibliography 122
Introduction
Few works of English literature have been more
loved than Great Expectations. Originally
published, in serial form, in the weekly newspaper,
All the Year Round, which Charles Dickens owned
and ran, it has always been one of the best-selling
Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work,
with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been
adapted more for both film and television.
It has been as popular with critics as it has with
the public. Early reviews were mixed, with the
influential Blackwood’s magazine finding it “feeble,
fatigued, colourless”, and the American Atlantic
Monthly lamenting that “some of the old hilarity
and play of fancy has gone…” But later critics have
been more or less unanimous in their praise. In
1937 George Bernard Shaw called the novel
Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John
Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the
most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus
Wilson as “the most completely unified work of
art that Dickens ever produced”.
Great Expectations has been so successful
partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens
always had a keen eye on the market and
subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em
laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.”
From the violent opening scene on the marshes to
the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the
4
Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and
drama. But while these elements of Great
Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also
a novel which, as this guide will seek to show,
raises profound questions not just about the
nature of Victorian society but about the way
human relationships work and the extent to which
people are shaped by their childhoods and the
circumstances in which they grow up.
5
A summary of the plot
The hero of Great Expectations, “Pip” (christened
Philip Pirrip), is an orphan, brought up by his
much older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery.
Joe is a good-hearted blacksmith who treats Pip
kindly. Mrs Joe is a cane-wielding tyrant. Visiting
his family’s graves on Christmas Eve, in a
deserted graveyard in the marshes, Pip is jumped
on by a convict on the run from the “hulks” –
prison-ships lying in the mouth of the nearby
Medway estuary. Terrified, he agrees to steal food
for the convict, as well as a file to saw off his
fetters. Later, when the convict, Abel Magwitch, is
recaptured, he does not betray Pip. Nor does he
forget Pip’s kindness.
Pip’s apprenticeship in Joe’s forge, a year or
two later, is preceded by a strange summons to
visit the imperious Miss Havisham in nearby
Satis House. Abandoned at the altar 20 years
earlier she has kept its interior, and her dress, and
even the wedding table feast (now rotted and food
for mice) exactly as it was on the day, when she
was jilted.
At her ruined and shuttered house, Pip is
humiliated and tormented by Miss Havisham’s
young ward, Estella. He nonetheless falls
hopelessly in love with Estella.
After several visits to Satis House, Pip is called
on by an inscrutable London lawyer, Jaggers, who
6
informs him that he now has “expectations” – a
handsome bequest is in prospect. He, Jaggers, is
not free to say who the mysterious benefactor is.
Pip naturally assumes it to be Miss Havisham, the
heiress to a great brewing fortune.
Now Pip can rise in life. He goes off to London
to pursue the goal of becoming a “gentleman”. Joe
and the housekeeper, Biddy, whom he leaves
behind, are heartbroken. In London, which he has
never visited before, he lodges in the city’s legal
quarter, with Herbert Pocket – a young clerk,
distantly related to Miss Havisham. Herbert has
no expectations whatsoever and slaves in an
insurance office. He and Pip become friends. Pip
also befriends Wemmick, Jaggers’s head clerk, one
of the more amiable characters in the novel.
Now a man about town, Pip still aspires to
marry Estella, who has become a serial breaker of
men’s hearts, as Miss Havisham has trained her to
be. She is cold as ice towards Pip, out of kindness
as she perversely tells him, because she actually
cares for him, and would rather not break his
heart. But she will never love him, or any man.
She cannot.
Pip learns that his sister has been savagely
attacked and left a helpless invalid. Dolge Orlick, a
journeyman blacksmith dismissed by Joe, is
suspected. One night, when alone – aged 23, and
about to come into his fortune – Pip is visited by
Abel Magwitch, the escaped convict he helped on
7
the marshes. To his dismay, Magwitch, alias
Provis, turns out to be his benefactor. Having
prospered as a sheep-farmer in Australia he
decided to use his money to create a gentleman “of
my own”, both in gratitude to Pip and as an act of
revenge against his accomplice, Compeyson, who,
because he was a gentleman, was treated leniently
by the court for the same offence (forgery) as led
to his being transported for life. Having come back
without leave, Magwitch will be hanged if caught.
Pip, mortified as he is, gives his patron refuge but
refuses to accept any more of his money.
He visits Miss Havisham to protest at her
having cruelly misled him and learns that
Estella is to marry oafish Bentley Drummle,
a “gentleman” by birth with aristocratic
connections. Estella has no feeling for Drummle
or any man. She is simply carrying through Miss
Havisham’s merciless campaign against the
male sex.
On a subsequent visit, in which Miss Havisham
finally implores Pip’s forgiveness, the old woman
dies as the result of a fire which burns Satis House
to the ground. Pip himself is badly injured trying
to save her. It emerges that Magwitch is Estella’s
father. (Her mother, Molly, is Jaggers’s house-
keeper.) Magwitch’s mortal foe, Compeyson, is,
it further transpires, the man who jilted Miss
Havisham at the altar. Dickens was never a
novelist frightened by coincidence or improbability.
8
After nearly being murdered in an encounter
on the marshes with his old enemy, Orlick, Pip
tries to help Magwitch escape. His efforts are
foiled by Compeyson, who – still making mischief
– has found out what is going on and has tipped off
the police. In a desperate fight in the waters of the
Thames, Compeyson is drowned and Magwitch
mortally wounded. He dies in the condemned
cell of Newgate prison. Pip, having contracted
jail-fever as a result of his visits to the jail, is
nursed back to health by Joe, who nobly pays off
Pip’s debts – Magwitch’s fortune being confiscated
by the crown – thus stopping him being sent to the
debtors’ prison. Pip then returns home to ask
Biddy to marry him but finds she is already
married – to Joe.
Penniless, he becomes a clerk, and goes off to
work abroad alongside Herbert. Eleven years later
he returns to visit Joe and Biddy. In the ruins of
Satis House he is reunited with Estella whom he
finds walking there. (Estella’s husband, Drummle,
has been killed by a horse he was abusing.) The
narrative suggests that they may at last marry but
the ending is left deliberately ambiguous.
9
What is Great Expectations
about?
At the heart of Great Expectations – as searching
an exploration of Victorian civilisation and its
values as can be found in literature – lies this
exchange between Pip and Biddy, the housekeeper
at the forge.
10
gentility and his own fiction, notably Vanity Fair,
as his biographer, Gordon Ray, suggests, calls for a
“redefinition” of gentlemanliness for an age with a
more fluid class structure. The Thackerayan
redefinition involved detaching “nobility” as an
exclusive property of the traditionally “noble”
classes and relocating it in the middle classes who,
Thackeray implies, were morally superior and in
any case already rising to the top of English society
in steadily greater numbers. The nobles in Vanity
Fair – Sir Pitt Crawley, the Marquis of Steyne,
etc. – are, all of them, utterly ignoble. It is Dobbin,
the greengrocer’s son, who is the true gentleman.
Dickens’s own view of gentility is more
complex, understandably so given his background.
Thackeray, in a sense, wrote about gentlemen
from “the inside”. Born into a respectable family,
and very much at home in the world of London
clubs, his province, in W.C. Roscoe’s words, is that
“debateable land between the aristocracy and the
middle classes”. (Most of his main characters,
even Dobbin, went to public school.) Dickens, on
the other hand, had more slender claims to
gentility: his grandfather had been a steward to
Lord Crewe, his father a clerk in the Navy Pay
Office who lost any claim to respectability when,
after moving to London in 1822, he was
imprisoned for debt. Dickens himself, in the most
scarring experience of his life, was sent to work in
a blacking factory, making all the more remarkable
11
his subsequent transformation into successful
author and self-made gentleman who eventually
assumed the right to use the crest of the old
Dickens family of Staffordshire.
His rapid rise led some contemporaries to
question his ability to describe gentlemen, with a
Times reviewer, writing about John Forster’s
biography of Dickens in 1871, observing unkindly
that the author was “often vulgar in manners and
dress… ill at ease in his intercourse with
gentlemen…” The novelist and critic, G.K.
Chesterton, offered a more enlightened perspective:
12
a gentleman. They mean that he could not take
that atmosphere easily, accept it as the normal
atmosphere, or describe that world from the
inside… Dickens did not describe gentlemen in
the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen… He
described them… from the outside, as he
described any other oddity or special trade.
13
It has been suggested that Dickens’s view in
Great Expectations stemmed in part from the
circumstances of his own life: the novelist famous
for celebrating the values of hearth and home had
broken, after 22 years of marriage, from his wife
and taken up with a young actress, Ellen Ternan,
thus becoming an outsider again.
Certainly his thinking on the nature of gentility
and the extent to which it can be acquired, as
opposed to inherited, had evolved in the years
since he wrote his first orphan’s story, Oliver Twist.
As Gilmour points out, there are two conflicting
impulses at the heart of this earlier novel: “a
horror of the criminal underworld when seen
through the terrified eyes of the child Oliver,
and a sympathetic understanding of the same
underworld from a different, more realistic and
socially compassionate perspective”. Dickens, who
never forgot his experience in the blacking factory,
understands why characters like Nancy, Bill Sikes
and the Artful Dodger are as they are: he shows all
too clearly why they have become criminals and
equally clearly how Oliver finds in Fagin’s den
companionship and warmth, not to mention food,
shelter and laughter, all of which had been denied
him in the workhouse so-called respectable
society provided for penniless orphans like Oliver,
“despised by all, and pitied by none”. (Fagin was
even named after Bob Fagin, a boy who was kind
Opposite: poster for Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 film adaptation, starring
Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke, Robert De Niro and Anne Bancroft
14
15
to Dickens in the blacking factory.)
And yet, as Gilmour says, in Oliver Twist
Dickens doesn’t follow through on the idea that it
is an accident of birth which condemns a child to
the workhouse “and the fault of society that the
road from the workhouse should lead so naturally
to the life of crime”. Quite the opposite. Oliver is
rescued by fairy godparents, the Maylies and
Mr Brownlow, and miraculously it turns out that
he himself, after all, is the son of a gentleman.
The novel may recognise the common humanity
of Oliver and the Artful Dodger, but while one
is reclothed and sent off to a smart school the
other is transported. The underworld and
16
respectable society, the novel leaves us feeling, are
utterly incompatible.
Dickens’s second famous treatment of the
orphan is similarly ambiguous. David Copperfield
is a gentleman’s son who nearly loses his birthright
after his mother’s death when he is set to work in
a warehouse and then runs away, but in the end,
like Oliver, he is symbolically reclothed and sent
off to school. In David’s case, the underworld
he is plunged into is merely disreputable rather
than criminal, but the novel has a similar message:
“gentlemanliness involves climbing out of the
abyss and putting it resolutely behind one… both
[Oliver and David] are gentlemen by birth
17
whose tenacious hold on an inner conviction of
gentility throughout their sufferings is rewarded
by fairy godparents”.
In Great Expectations the fantasy of fairy
godparents and innate gentility is dispensed with
utterly. Pip grows up a blacksmith’s boy and never
turns out to be anything else (we are told nothing
about his father); he has to acquire gentility rather
than recover it. Miss Havisham is like a grotesque,
witch-like version of David Copperfield’s Aunt
Betsey – her name reinforcing the idea that she is a
“sham” – while the source of Pip’s money, and
eventual gentility, turns out to be another “witch” –
Magwitch – who is associated from the beginning
with the world of violent crime and who has made
18
his money in what is literally the underworld:
Australia. There is no attempt in Great Expectations
to romanticise gentility or to resist or underplay the
links between the gentrified life to which Pip
aspires and the criminal world into which he could
so easily have slipped. Rather, Dickens is concerned
to stress how interrelated they are – how one
depends upon the other: Pip, after all, is given the
financial basis of a comfortable life only to find that
it is made possible by someone whose whole history
is, in effect, a contradiction of the refinement which
he seeks. “Behind every fortune,” wrote Balzac, “lies
a crime.” Similarly, Dickens suggests that gentility
presupposes an underclass, and because of the
nature of Victorian society an underclass in which,
for many belonging to it, there was little choice but
to live outside the law.
Great Expectations is Dickens’s most
compelling analysis of what he had come to think
was wrong in his society. It is seen as a society,
says Q.D. Leavis,
19
Expectations. In analysing Pip’s rise to gentility,
Dickens dwells constantly on the misgivings his
hero feels, on the personal betrayals he commits
and above all on the guilt of which he is always
conscious.* While Pip does not discover
Magwitch’s role in his destiny until he grows up,
the secret complicity between them established at
the beginning of the novel continues throughout
and leaves us, by the end, questioning the very
notion of gentility. Pip’s great expectations come
to nothing; they lead not to happiness but to
loneliness and disenchantment, as is evident not
just from the tale he tells but from the ironic,
remorseful tone in which he tells it. However else
it can be described, Great Expectations is,
ultimately, a novel about lost illusions.
20
siblings in a deserted marshland graveyard: cut off
from the past by the death of his parents, left only
with the harsh guardianship of a single surviving
sister, his “first most vivid and broad impression of
the identity of things” comes when he is seized by
a convict who leaps out from behind the
gravestone of his dead father.
21
Dickens brilliantly establishes Pip’s sense of
guilt in these early pages. It is shown to be
inevitable, as if Dickens were anticipating
Freud, who argued gloomily in Civilization and
its Discontents (1930) that the function of
society is to make people feel guilty: even if he
had not met the convict, Pip has been brought
up to believe he has committed a sin simply by
being born. The encounter with Magwitch in
the churchyard “merely plays in an even
harsher key the tune he is used to at home”,
22
as A.L. French neatly puts it. Pip’s life is
“largely a matter of being threatened, bullied,
knocked around, and made to feel ashamed of
eating and being alive”. When he returns to the
forge for Christmas dinner, Mr Hubble (the local
wheelwright – hence “hub”) calls him “naterally
wicious”, while Mr Pumblechook says nastily
that if he had been born a pig the butcher “would
have come up to you as you lay in your straw…
and he would have shed your blood and had
your life”. Pip’s sister, Mrs Joe, then complains
23
of the trouble he has been to her:
24
protect him from his sister, he has no choice but to
do as the convict demands, and his child’s sense of
fear and guilt is cleverly evoked by Dickens in deft
touches: the way the natural features of the
landscape appear to run at Pip when he returns to
the marshes – with even the cattle looking at him
accusingly – and his fevered imaginings before he
steals the pork pie:
25
Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he
gradually settled down upon the pie, I made bold
to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.’”
“Did you speak?”
“I said, I was glad you enjoyed it.’”
“Thankee, my boy. I do” (3)
Ordnance Terrace in
Chatham from 1817 to 1822
– the house still stands –
and knew the area
thoroughly, and of course
moved back near there when
he bought a house at Gad’s
Hill. Satis House must be in
TH E M AR S H ES Rochester (perhaps based
on Restoration House
there). Cooling Churchyard
“Ours was the marsh has the gravestones of 12
country, down by the river” children who died in infancy,
Pip says (1). The county is surrounding the graves of
Kent. The original for the their parents. Rochester, on
churchyard of chapter 1 may the Medway river, is 30
be Cooling, between miles from London, but the
Gravesend and Rochester, river Dickens means is the
which is next-door to Thames, flowing out into the
Chatham. Dickens lived at North Sea.◆
26
again feel the separation from the criminal that is
felt by the consciously self-righteous, a fellow-
feeling that is kept alive by Dickens throughout
the first half of the novel.
27
subhuman in himself.) When he is brought food,
he gulps it furtively, like a dog. “No other work
of Dickens, not even Oliver Twist or Our Mutual
Friend, is so impregnated with violence, latent
and actual, or so imaginatively aware of the
gradations between the primitive and the refined,”
says Robin Gilmour.
Pip, at home, has to endure his sister’s “hard
and heavy hand”, random thrashings from Tickler
and unpleasant doses of tarwater which make him
conscious of “going about, smelling like a new
fence”. Mrs Joe’s system of bringing up by hand –
demeaning, savage, brutalising – is the regime of a
primitive rural society depending almost
exclusively on physical discipline and not at all on
the development of mind and spirit, exacerbating
Pip’s sense of guilt and leaving him timid and self-
conscious. Everyone bar Joe conspires to make
Pip feel he is scarcely better than a young animal:
punched and beaten and scrubbed by his sister
and bullied by Pumblechook, he is soon to be
despised by Estella who slaps his face and calls
him a “little coarse monster” and to have his hair
poked into his eyes by Mr Wopsle. “Pip’s
encounter with Magwitch brings to dramatic
focus all the violence, the injustice, the physical
and moral coercion inherent in his environment,”
says Gilmour. “Never has any novel been so
imbued with the horrors of infancy,” says the
biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd. Pip is robbed
28
of all dignity; he is a child alone in a society of
adults, sustained only by Joe’s affection and a deep
sense of outrage and injustice. (He longs to pull
Wopsle’s nose and to fight back against
Pumblechook.)
And we watch it all, as it were, through two sets
of eyes: one mature, one juvenile. It was happening
then; it is happening now. Pip’s narrative voice,
though frequently laced with irony and humour,
combines in passages such as the one which opens
the novel a sense of emotional immediacy with the
kind of calm pictorial composition that only a
mature sensibility could achieve. It is an
extraordinary mixed effect which is peculiar to
Great Expectations; the unique tone which Dickens
achieves is one found nowhere else in his work.
Is Pip a snob?
Dickens held no brief for village life. He is
essentially an urban novelist, with none of the
sense of the compensating benefits or attractions
of provincial existence one finds in, say, George
Eliot’s Silas Marner or Adam Bede. The opening
scenes of Great Expectations make it vividly clear
why Pip has few qualms about quitting the forge
when he has the chance to advance his prospects
in London, and these scenes need to be borne in
mind when considering the familiar charge that
29
Great Expectations is a “snob’s progress” – and
that Pip would have been better staying where he
was. Much of the energy of Dickens’s writing in the
early part of the novel is devoted to showing just
how mean and constricted Pip’s circumstances
are, and how understandable his wish to escape
them. It is a theme later developed by Dickens’s
admirer, Thomas Hardy, in Jude the Obscure.
The charge that Pip is a snob is so frequently
made as to have become a kind of shorthand label
for the novel: reviewing the BBC’s 2011 adaptation
(its fifth), for example, Anne Billson in The Daily
Telegraph referred to the book as “Dickens’s
Bildungsroman about an upwardly mobile young
man blinkered by snobbery”, an interpretation
admittedly made more plausible by a script which
played up this aspect of Dickens’s story. The
charge was aired most forcefully by the critic
Humphry House in his revisionary 1960
monograph, The Dickens World. Labelling Great
Expectations a “snob’s progress”, House asserts
that Pip’s behaviour is pretentious and his self-
improvement shallow. “It comes to little more
than accent, table manners and clothes.” Clothes,
the proverb may claim, “maketh the man”. They
do not, House insists, make the gentleman. Pip
reads books, grants House, but we are never told
what books and we can assume they are nothing
like the ones an undergraduate would be reading
at one of the two great universities. Pip, at the end
30
of his career, is still what Estella called him at the
beginning: “common”. It is merely that the
commonness is more expensively garbed. He is
not a gentleman but a “gent”: no more the real
thing than Wemmick’s castle is Blenheim Palace.
House’s disapproving opinion of Pip finds some
confirmation in the very complex way Dickens
presents his hero – or, to put it more exactly, in the
way the older Pip presents the younger Pip. When,
for example, after coming into his “expectations”,
he is pursued through the streets of Rochester by
Trabb’s boy, the tailor’s assistant, Pip is mortified
by the boy’s behaviour. The boy behaves like a
kind of satirical alter ego, mocking Pip for his
new-found status:
31
however, is less Pip’s snobbery than his hyper-
sensitivity. He is uneasily aware that he is not
quite the genuine article, as this episode and many
others suggest. (Drummle is particularly adept at
rubbing this raw spot.) He knows he will never
match his friend Herbert in grace and style: “he
[Herbert] had that frank and easy way with him
which was very taking” (22); he expressed “in
every look and tone, a natural incapacity to do
anything secret and mean”; “he carried off his
rather old clothes much better than I carried off
my new suit”.
The argument that Great Expectations is a
“snob’s progress” is incisively and comprehensively
countered by Q.D. Leavis in what is perhaps the
most influential essay ever written on Dickens’s
novel. In her provokingly entitled “How we must
32
read Great Expectations” – must? – she argues
that Humphry House and critics who see the book
as he does are simply “unable to appreciate the
delicacy, subtlety and intention of Dickens’s
searching investigation into Pip’s feelings,
successfully presented in all their complexity and
psychological truth”. Those who label Pip a snob
fail to understand how someone like him would
have felt in the early 19th century, or Dickens’s
own belief both that, in Leavis’s words, “there was
a respectable content in the idea of a gentleman”
and that Pip “did well to leave behind him the
limitations of the village and the vulgar little world
of the market town, as Dickens saw them”.
It may be true that Mrs Leavis’s own situation
made her unusually sensitive to Pip’s plight.
Brought up strictly in the Jewish faith, she fell in
33
love – with one of the 20th century’s most
eminent literary critics, F.R. Leavis – and
“married out”. So aggrieved were her family that
they had the service of the dead read out for her,
in effect casting her out. Whether or not this made
her more sympathetic to Pip’s self-transformation,
she is surely right that Dickens
34
John Mills (left) as Pip and Alec Guinness as Herbert Pocket
in David Lean’s 1946 film adaptation
None of this is to excuse all Pip’s behaviour.
His treatment of Joe and Biddy has been attacked
by many critics, and rightly. He behaves badly,
even disgracefully, especially to Joe. But what
choice does he have? Is it realistic to believe he
could have done anything else?
Joe represents everything that is best about life
in rural Kent: he is gentle and affectionate, and his
constancy and generosity to Pip help mitigate the
worst excesses of the dreadful Mrs Joe (never
given a first name since this might make her seem
more sympathetic). He is associated from the
beginning with the fire and the forge – we first
see him poking the fire and early on he shields
Pip from Mrs Joe’s wrath in the chimney-corner:
in the novel’s symbolism, says Robin Gilmour,
the fire and the forge “are the source of positive,
life-giving energies, opposed to the ‘extinguished
fires’ of the defunct brewery in the sterile Satis
House” – though fire also eventually destroys
Satis House and its mistress: Dickens’s symbolism
was rarely simple.
Originally conceived by Dickens as “good-
natured” and “foolish”, Joe grows in stature to
become the “gentle Christian man”, whom Pip
blesses in his illness and recognises as possessing
a “great nature” – a nature which Pip betrays in
pursuit of his expectations. As Gilmour says,
however, “it is in the nature of Pip’s effort to
cultivate himself that it should involve a betrayal
36
of Joe”; he could not have escaped the forge
without such a betrayal.
Gentle and affectionate he may be, but Joe is
also limited and moreover, in his effort to preserve
domestic harmony, does little to protect Pip from
Mrs Joe’s “rampages”, much less, as Pip is aware,
than he could do. Joe’s limitations, and his
inadequacy as a father figure, are exposed in the
theft of the food and the file. Pip feels he ought to
tell Joe about the deed, but knows he can’t.
37
velvet coach.”
Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one
another – as they well might – and both
repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”
“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella – that’s her
niece, I think – handed her in cake and wine at
the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all
had cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up
behind the coach to eat mine, because she told
me to.
“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr.
Pumblechook.
“Four dogs… and they fought for veal-cutlets
out of a silver basket.” (9)
38
When Pip later hears his sister relate
the story to Joe, and find that he too proves
credulous, the young fantasist is “overtaken by
penitence… Towards Joe, and Joe only, I
considered myself a young monster.” The
realisation that Joe is as easily taken in as his
sister and that his horizon is equally limited,
appears, in Robin Gilmour’s words,
39
his age must have felt. Dickens indeed makes us
feel it with him.
Pip himself, the mature recorder of his own
exemplary history, does not deal tenderly with
himself, recording mercilessly every least
attractive impulse, but we should notice that these
are mitigated always by generous misgivings,
permeated by uneasy self-criticism, and contrary
movements of feeling of a self-corrective kind.
Pip does not mean – never means – to drop
Joe; on the contrary, he endeavours at first to help
Joe and to fit him for “a higher sphere”,
attempting, without success, to teach him to read
and feeling aggrieved when Biddy says that Joe
will never go along with his plans. As time runs
out before he is due to leave, Pip becomes, as he
himself puts it, “more and more appreciative of
the society of Joe and Biddy” (19); the night
before he leaves he “had an impulse to go down
again and entreat Joe to walk with me in the
morning. I did not.” Through all this Pip makes
clear he was at the time “aware of my own
ingratitude” – not the kind of thought one
associates with a snob – and almost leaves the
coach to walk home for another evening there. In
the circumstances, as a number of critics
suggested, few of us could be confident of
acquitting ourselves better. Pip is separated from
the forge not just by what is bad about it, but by
what is good too: Joe’s simple code of living is as
40
frustrating to his youthful intelligence, curiosity
and sympathy – what he calls his “pitying young
fancy” – as Mrs Joe’s nastiness. But cutting
himself off from Joe’s love as he becomes more
self-aware is a source of constant painful remorse.
While Pip himself might have been inclined to
endorse Humphry House’s verdict of his social
pretensions, it grossly oversimplifies Dickens’s art
to call Great Expectations a “snob’s progress”. It
does justice neither to the complexity and subtlety
of Dickens’s story, nor to the way it is told.
41
Why does Pip feel so drawn
to Satis House?
Unlike some Victorians, Dickens never
romanticises the notion of self-improvement. In
his famous, best-selling manual, Self-Help (1859),
Samuel Smiles argues that “every man’s first duty
is, to improve, to educate, to elevate himself”. The
process of self-improvement, he says, should not
be undertaken to bring worldly wealth so much as
to strengthen character and give the individual a
sense of dignity and independence. A critic of
snobbery, he argues that the “True Gentleman” is
essentially classless: “The inbred politeness which
springs from right-heartedness and kindly feeling
is of no exclusive rank or station.”
In the real Victorian world, however, it was not
so easy to turn oneself into a gentleman without
becoming involved in questions of class, a fact of
which Dickens was well aware: for all Smiles’s
disclaimers, Dickens knew that that the impulse to
improve was usually fuelled, if not inspired, by
social and sexual ambitions. It is no accident that
Pip inherits his fortune rather than having to
make it himself: Dickens wanted his hero to enjoy
the “rewards” of self-improvement without having
to work for them; that way, he could concentrate
on the social and sexual implications, and the
inherent paradoxes of the self-improvement idea.
From the moment of his first visit to Satis House,
42
CRITICS ON
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
“
Great Expectations: Alliance between atmosphere and
plot (the convicts) make it more solid and satisfactory
”
than anything else of Dickens known to me
E.M. Forster, in his notebook, 1925
“
Dickens did in fact know that Great Expectations was
his most compactly perfect book
”
George Bern=ard Shaw, 1937
“
Psychologically, the latter part of Great Expectations
is about the best thing Dickens ever did
”
George Orwell, 1948
“
Snobbery is not a crime. Why should Pip feel
like a criminal?
” Julian Moynahan, 1960
“
The most important things about Great Expectations
are also the most obvious – a fact that is fortunate for
the book but unfortunate for the critic
”
Christopher Ricks, 1962
“ ”
To read Great Expectations is, first of all, to listen to it
David Gervais, 1984
43
Pip’s desire to improve himself is caught up with
sexual and social fantasies.
At Satis House, Pip’s feelings of guilt and moral
confusion are at the same time compounded by a
sense of shame: Miss Havisham and Estella make
him feel inadequate; his hands, he learns, are
coarse and his boots too thick. Estella treats him
with disdain – “He calls the knaves Jacks, this
boy!” she says as they play cards (8), and she
dumps his dinner on the ground “as if I were a dog
in disgrace”, an especially humiliating gesture in
that it reminds Pip of the way his convict ate like a
44
dog. A boy of only seven or eight, Pip can’t help
but be impressed by his new surroundings. For all
her unpleasantness, Estella and Satis House offer
an undreamt-of alternative to the “dull
endurance” and “flat colour” of his life in the
marshes: “whoever had this house,” he thinks,
“could want nothing else”. He is determined to
become worthy of Estella and sets out to educate
himself before becoming aware that he has any
“expectations”. Suddenly, his life is enriched:
45
How could my character fail to be influenced
by them? (12)
46
More significantly, Bentley Drummle, who
eventually marries Estella, is like an upper-class
equivalent of Orlick, a comparison brought home
to us in chapter 43, when Pip sees Drummle
through a window, “seizing his horse’s mane, and
mounting in his brutal manner”. The “slouching
shoulders and ragged hair of this man, whose back
was towards me,” writes Pip, “reminded me of
Orlick”. The name Bentley Drummle, with its
combination of “bend”, “drum” and “pummel”
implies his tendency to violence; his function in
the scheme of the novel, as Robin Gilmour puts it,
is “to remind us that violence and brutality are not
confined to life on the marshes” but also exist “in
the supposedly refined society of London”.
Estella’s marriage to Drummle is an important
clue to her character. This “proud and refined” girl,
the incarnation, for Pip, of the civilised life, can
prefer Drummle to him because there exists in her
a violent animal nature to which Pip is blind. We
know this already, from the fight in which Pip beats
Herbert – “the pale young gentleman” – at their
first meeting in chapter 11. Unseen by either of
them, Estella is watching and when she comes
down to Pip afterwards “there was a bright flush
upon her face, as though something had happened
to delight her”. She offers to let him kiss her, and
he does, and while he feels “the kiss was given to
the coarse common boy as a piece of money might
have been, and that it was worth nothing”, it is
47
more significant than that; it goes to the heart of
what Gilmour calls “the supreme paradox” of Pip’s
life: “Estella can only respond to him when he
exhibits those qualities of physical force and
animal aggression which, in order to win her, he is
at pains to civilise out of himself.”
Gentility, the novel suggests, involves
alienation and repression; it means, for Pip,
cutting himself off from the vital energy and warm
instinctive life symbolised by the fire at the forge.
Indeed, immediately after describing the “bright
flush” on Estella’s face, Pip tells us how, on his
walk home, he sees in the distance “Joe’s furnace…
flinging a path of fire across the road”.
48
our friend the Spider… either beats, or cringes. He
may cringe and growl, or cringe and not growl; but
he either beats or cringes. Ask Wemmick his
opinion.” Wemmick’s opinion is the same. It is an
opinion the novel itself also seems to endorse.
Most of the main characters of Great
Expectations can be put into one, or sometimes
both, of Jaggers’s categories. Beating is a constant
in the book. The song Pip sings at the forge and to
Miss Havisham makes it almost a part of everyday
life: “Beat it out, Old Clem”; Orlick is beaten by
Joe in a fight, then beats Mrs Joe, who is herself a
beater. But when she has been battered by Orlick,
she cringes to him, as Molly cringes to Jaggers.
Great Expectations, it might be said, is a rare
exercise in thinking about sadism and masochism
in human relationships, relationships between
parent and child as well as those between adults.
Perhaps the only parent–child relationship in
the book that is normal is the one between
Wemmick and his Aged P, but that, as A.L. French
points out, exists behind a raised drawbridge and,
besides, the Aged P is stone-deaf so can’t really
communicate with his son, nor his son with him.
There is even the implication, says French, that
affection in human relationships “may depend on
not communicating”.
Pip’s sensibility is fixed early; he is a kisser of
rods, or, in Jaggers’s phrase, a “cringer”, and it’s
not hard to see why: tyrannised for years by his
49
sister, like Joe, he ends up behaving like Joe: “if
there’s something in Joe that enjoys being
dominated,” says French, “there is no less
something in Pip which feels drawn to Estella for
the very reason that she ill-treats him”.
Joe’s own background is important. He is, he
tells Pip, the son of a drunk who stopped him from
going to school and “hammered” him and his
mother; his image of his mother is of a woman
“drudging and slaving and breaking her honest hart
and never getting no peace in her mortal days”. He
doesn’t want to put Mrs Joe in the position of his
53
him. It was but a day gone, and Joe had brought
the tears into my eyes; they had soon dried, God
forgive me! soon dried. (29)
54
solitary victim, defined by those things more
distant, contemplating his own contemplation of
them and his inability to reach them or even read
them. At this moment, he is a boy looking for a
glittering star; he is looking to freeze to death.
55
become emotionally frozen in early life, unable to
develop or change. This is precisely what happens
to Miss Havisham. Sometimes dismissed as a
fairytale witch or a mere adornment – Mrs
Leavis calls her a “picturesque convenience” –
she is in fact, says A.L. French, “the most striking
of the many striking images Dickens finds of
emotional arrest”.
In this case, the arrest is a deliberate and
conscious adult decision – a way of taking revenge
on a world “that has let one down, while in fact
taking revenge on oneself for one’s inadequacy,
the inadequacy consisting of having been let
down”. Arguably, it is Miss Havisham’s self-
destructiveness which Dickens is showing when
Pip, in his hallucination in chapter 8, sees her
“hanging… by the neck” from “a great wooden
beam” in the deserted brewery, as though she had
committed suicide – which, in a sense, she has.
Herbert Pocket later tells Pip, in chapter 22, that
“she was a spoilt child” whose mother died “when
she was a baby” and whose father “denied her
nothing” – which helps explain why she is so
affected when Compeyson jilts her. When she gets
Compeyson’s letter, normal life for her stops, and
she trains Estella to do to men what he has done
to her, while training Pip to be to Estella what she
has been to Compeyson.
Her success in this shows when Pip visits Satis
House in chapter 38:
56
The candles that lighted that room of hers were
placed in sconces on the wall. They were high
from the ground, and they burnt with the steady
dullness of artificial light in air that is seldom
renewed. As I looked round at them, and at the
pale gloom they made, and at the stopped clock,
and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon
the table and the ground, and at her own awful
figure with its ghostly reflection thrown large by
the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I saw in
everything the construction that my mind had
come to, repeated and thrown back to me. (38)
57
What is the significance of
Magwitch?
Pip has been harshly judged for his reaction on
finally discovering that his patron is not Miss
Havisham but Magwitch. Why, asks Ross H.
Dabney, does he “recoil in horror” from
Magwitch? “Pip’s horror is not openly explained,
although there is the suggestion that it is founded
on the connection established between criminality
and his own fortune.” Christopher Ricks thinks
Pip behaves not just strangely but badly.
The righteous indignation of these
critics is odd given the pains Dickens takes in the
novel to show precisely why Pip would recoil in
horror from such a revelation. Not to sympathise
with his “sickened sensations” is profoundly to
misunderstand the novel, protests Q.D. Leavis.
Modern critics tend to share her view. Pip’s
reaction is far from simply being one of genteel
squeamishness about Magwitch’s eating habits
and manners, though Dickens’s evocation of his
personality and speech – “there was Convict in
the very grain of the man” (40) – is brilliantly
sustained. It reflects his sudden awareness that
everything he has believed, and striven for, is an
illusion: he has never known Magwitch as
anything other than a violent criminal; his hopes
had all been that his benefactor was Miss
Havisham, a lady (in his eyes); all the facts, as he
58
saw them, seemed to suggest it.*
Now, in an instant, his hopes are dashed. He
has no claim on Estella at all. How can he possibly
offer to her a father-in-law like this? He has been
plucked from his life at the forge and condemned
to an uneasy, purposeless life in London – part of
his patron’s stipulation being that he should not
need to earn his own living. At a stroke, and just as
he is going peacefully to bed, his efforts have come
to nothing. Moreover, it is quickly clear to Pip that
Magwitch’s bequest has been made less from
gratitude than as a way of getting his revenge on
*The facts which didn’t, such as the overheard conversation
on the stagecoach between two of Magwitch’s fellow convicts,
were ignored.
59
society. (Vengeance, of course, is also the motive
of Estella’s patron.) Magwitch, or Provis, behaves
as if he owns Pip, turning the ring, which he has
paid for, on Pip’s finger, taking the watch out of
his pocket and demanding to be read foreign
languages.
60
Miss Havisham’s, which isn’t destined for him. In
the circumstances, the critics who condemn Pip’s
behaviour would probably have felt the same
sense of horror.
Dickens’s art has led up to this moment from
the beginning. The secret bond between Pip and
Magwitch is established in the early chapters, and
Pip is always being reminded of Magwitch, and of
what Robin Gilmour calls “the ambiguities
surrounding his rise in station”. Convicts
constantly appear. When Pip first returns to his
home town in chapter 28, for example, he travels
on the coach with two, recognising one of them as
the man who had given him two one-pound notes
at The Three Jolly Bargemen in chapter 10.
61
Herbert, who has come to see him off, reacts with
revulsion – “What a degraded and vile sight it is!”
– and Pip can see why he thinks this:
62
I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my
fear was altogether undefined and vague, but
there was a great fear upon me. As I walked on to
the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding the
mere apprehension of a painful and disagreeable
recognition, made me tremble. I am confident
that it took no distinctness of shape, and that
it was a revival for a few minutes of the terror
of childhood. (28)
63
Robert De Niro and Jeremy Kissner in a 1998 film
adaptation of the novel directed by Alfonso Cuarón
TE N FACT S
A B OUT GRE AT E X PECTAT ION S
1.
Great Expectations, the 13th of Dickens’s 15
completed full-length novels, was written in the
most tormented year of his life. He had broken up
from his wife, contracted venereal disease and
still not established a sound – adulterous –
relationship with the young actress, Ellen Ternan.
Biographers have speculated that Ternan’s early
behaviour to him influenced his portrayal of the
cold, ungiving, tantalising Estella.
64
2.
Great Expectations is one of only two Dickens
novels to be written in the first person – the other
is David Copperfield (though he uses the
autobiographical form in part of Bleak House).
3.
There are, it is calculated, some 16,000
characters in Dickens’s fiction and some 180
identifiable characters in Great Expectations.
Oddly, we do not know the names, or full names,
of two characters who play an important part in
the plot: “Mrs Joe” and “Trabb’s Boy”.
4.
By the best reckoning we can make Pip is born in
1802 (some 10 years before Dickens) and his first
encounter with Magwitch takes place in 1809.
His second encounter – and the crisis in the
action – takes place when he is 23: in 1825, or
thereabouts. The novel begins during the
Peninsular War. Pip is 13 when the Battle of
Waterloo is won. He grows up during the Regency
and the novel climaxes in the turbulent time
before the great Reform Act of 1832. None of this
history is alluded to in Great Expectations.
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which covers the same
historical period (1812—28), is replete with
socio-historical reference.
65
5.
The “hulks” – decommissioned navy vessels –
came into use after the American revolution,
which made transportation to that former colony
impossible. Australia then became a favourite
destination. Prior to their passage, convicts were
held in these makeshift and famously unhealthy
floating prisons, moored in the Thames and
Medway estuaries. The last hulk was burned at
Woolwich in 1857, shortly before Great
Expectations was written.
6.
In his notes for the novel (few of which survive)
Dickens worked out the ages of the principal
characters at the climax: Pip, Estella, and Herbert,
all 23; Magwitch, 60; Compeyson, 52; Miss
Havisham, 56; Biddy, 24; Joe, 45; Jaggers, 55;
Wemmick, 50. Mrs Joe, we may calculate, is some
20 years older than Pip.
7.
Pip is an inveterate reader, but we only know one
book he has read. In chapter 40 he says that the
reappearance of Magwitch in his life recalls “the
imaginary student pursued by the misshapen
creature”. He has read Frankenstein, published in
1818, seven years before Magwitch’s return.
66
8.
In chapter 44 Pip undertakes a midnight walk
from Rochester to London, a distance of 26 miles.
It was a feat Dickens, a fanatic walker, often did
himself – typically at night. (He was a light sleeper
who couldn’t nod off at all unless his head was
pointing due north. To make sure of this he always
carried a compass with him; if necessary, beds
were shifted.)
9.
One mystery of the novel is how Magwitch, the
convict, manages to swim to shore from the Hulks
with a “great iron” (a shackle) on his leg. The
answer may be that Dickens (a good swimmer
himself ) intended to endow Magwitch with
superhuman power.
10.
Dickens loved to include private jokes in his
fiction. The unpleasant Bentley Drummle who
marries Estella, for example, is named after a
publisher whom Dickens believed had exploited
and cheated him as a young author. He never
forgot or forgave “the Brigand of Burlington
Street”, as he called Richard Bentley.
67
1831 a boy of 10 was publicly hanged for arson.
The Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist is tried in an
adult court, and transported (for stealing
handkerchiefs). He is lucky to escape joining
Fagin at the end a rope in front of a jeering crowd.
And as Pip leaves the misty marsh to commit his
first criminal act, he looks up and sees “a gibbet
68
with some chains hanging in it which had once
held a pirate”. Suspended over Pip throughout the
novel is Mrs Joe’s grim prophecy that he is “born
to be hanged”, a fate made much more likely by his
entanglement with Magwitch.
Nor does his criminal career stop in his seventh
year with the absconded pork pie. Magwitch, by
returning to London from Australia, where he has
been sentenced to remain for the course “of his
natural life”, commits a second capital crime and
it is Pip’s bounden duty to report him to the
authorities. “It is Death!” as he sombrely tells Pip –
death dangling at the end of the hangman’s rope he
was earlier lucky to escape.
Instead of doing what an honest citizen should,
Pip, once he learns the truth, makes himself an
accomplice by giving Magwitch shelter, a false
identity, and providing the means to escape
English justice in Europe. On his way to Holland,
Magwitch commits another capital crime, his
third, and the one for which he is condemned to
hang, when he murders Compeyson. Pip is
criminally involved in all this.
In the real world, Pip would have been – at
the very least – questioned by the authorities
and, most likely, have faced court proceedings
and quite likely have gone to prison, or have
been himself transported, for helping Magwitch.
Dickens decided not to complicate his novel
by pursuing this, but Pip’s criminality is real
69
nonetheless, a dark fact which is powerfully there
in his indelible sense of having done wrong.
The links between Pip and Magwitch are
shown in subtle as well as obvious ways. There is a
symmetry in that they have parallel childhoods,
geographically: whereas Pip begins his life in
Kent, Magwitch begins his in Essex, on the other
side of the Thames. And just as the novel begins
with Pip remembering the moment in the
graveyard when he first recognised the “identity of
things”, so Magwitch has a similar moment of
recognition about about his own childhood when
he tells Pip his story:
70
made by Mrs Joe, who tells Pip: “People are
put in the Hulks because they murder, and
because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of
bad.” The idea of forgery, and swindling, is
important: it suggests Pip’s alienation, says
Connor: he gives up a world which is true for one
which is false.
There is further irony in the fact that the man
Pip first sees as a wild beast is in his way a
nightmare version of the Victorian self-made man.
Magwitch has set out to make money with a
single-mindedness which makes his career in
Australia a bizarre parody of an economic success
story. “ I lived rough,” he tells Pip, echoing the
paternal hopes of first-generation wealth, “that
you should live smooth; I worked hard so you
should be above work.” (39)
And Magwitch, we finally discover, is not only
Pip’s benefactor but the father of Estella, the
“proud and refined” girl whom Pip loves and sees
as the very emblem of civilised life. Underneath
she is not proud and refined at all, but shares
her father’s animal energy and passion. Indeed
the “moral pattern” of Great Expectations, says
Robin Gilmour,
71
girl he loves. The wheel has come full circle; the
girl who had been the inspiration for his attempt
to improve himself is found in the end to be the
daughter of a transported convict and a “wild
beast tamed” (24), a woman so violent and
powerful that she has been able to strangle
another woman with her bare hands. And what in
a lesser novelist would be a melodramatic linkage
is here a symbolic structure of deep imaginative
power and social implication.
72
How corrupt is the world
Dickens shows us in Great
Expectations?
The dating of Great Expectations is important.
Pip, like Dickens himself, is born at the beginning
of the 19th century into a world which was
distinctly more brutal and unforgiving than the
world of the 1860s when the novel was written:
not only was life precarious – Pip and his sister
are the only survivors of a family of nine – but the
criminal code was cruel and primitive with its
infamous hulks, squalid jails and readiness to hang
children as young as ten years old.
Pip’s first sight in London, significantly, is
Newgate, where “an exceedingly dirty and
partially drunk minister of justice” tells him that
for half a crown he can witness a trial before the
Lord Chief Justice:
74
the morning to be killed in a row. This was
horrible, and gave me a sickening idea of
London... (20)
75
narrow and dirty”, words which apply as much to
its spirit as its physical characteristics, and Pip’s
description of “the great black dome of Saint
Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone
building which a bystander said was Newgate
prison”, leaves us in no doubt that this is a world
in which prison matters more than church. Nor is
it an accident that Dickens places Mr Jaggers’s
office in “Little Britain, just out of Smithfield”, the
lawyer’s corrupt practice being an allegory for the
official life of Britain itself.
Q.D. Leavis thinks – though her view is by no
means generally accepted – that Jaggers may be
“Dickens’s greatest success in any novel”. Pip’s
introduction to his office reveals that his abilities
and labour are almost entirely devoted to the
cause of defeating rather than serving the purpose
of justice, for which he has earned not just wealth
but a high reputation. When Pip sees Jaggers at
work in a police court, “he seemed to be grinding
the whole place like a mill”, terrifying prisoners,
witnesses and officials. With his characteristic
gesture of chewing his forefinger, he lives for the
exercise of power, bullying everyone around him –
“he even seemed to bully his sandwich as he ate
it,” says Pip. (20) Jaggers is “the letter of the law”
personified. If the law, under the provisions of the
so-called “Bloody Code” (abolished in 1835),
hangs children and petty thieves, so be it. That is
the law. Jaggers is as much an instrument of it as
76
Jean Simmons as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s 1946 adaptation
the sword in the hand of the blindfolded statue
of Justice. Two “ghastly” death masks of men
whom, as a prosecutor, he sent to the gallows,
preside over his office. His housekeeper, Molly
(Estella’s mother), is bound to him, as a prisoner
not a servant, by his having “got her off” from a
charge of murder. One of the more horrible
moments in the novel is the scene at the
dinner party Jaggers gives for Pip, Herbert and
Drummle in which he forces Molly to show her
“disfigured” wrist (presumably the sign of an
attempted suicide):
78
“If you talk of strength,” said Mr Jaggers. “I’ll
show you a wrist. Molly, let them see your wrist.
Her entrapped hand was on the table, but she
had already put her other hand behind her waist.
“Master,” she said, in a low voice, with her eyes
attentively and entreatingly fixed upon him.
“Don’t.” (26)
79
seems to feel guilty: he is constantly washing his
hands as if to avoid being contaminated by the
horrors he deals with in his everyday life. There is
a deliberate echo here of Pontius Pilate.
Moreover, the soap we are told is scented – a
sinister detail. (Pip smells him before he sees him,
when they first meet on the stairs at Satis House.)
While he represents something hard and inhuman
at the core of British society, he is clearly aware
that he is operating in a perverted and unjust
system which he feels powerless to change, even if
he wished to.
80
In a rare moment of confidence he explains to
Pip how it might be that a lawyer like himself
might get a child from a woman who can’t confess
to being the mother – because it will go against the
evidence produced at her trial – and so give the
child to Miss Havisham who wants to adopt a girl:
81
madness as distinctive, in its way, as Miss
Havisham’s. It is this which enables him to
survive. Like Jaggers, he has been party to having
men, women and children hanged who did not
deserve to die – and part of him is dehumanised
to the extent that he seems no longer flesh
and blood:
82
interpretation of what has happened, the “official”
version being very different from the version Pip
knows. And when the judge passes sentence of
death on the “two-and-thirty men and women” at
once, we know that at least one of them has been
made a criminal by the refusal of his society to do
anything for him but drive him first to steal from
hunger and from there to prison and a life of crime.
83
the scene is stressed further with Pip’s reference to
the dispersal, by the flames, of “the heap of
rottenness and all the ugly things that sheltered
there”. (49)
The intensity of this episode prepares the way
for the extraordinary scene which follows: another,
equally melodramatic – and equally symbolic –
encounter, this one between Pip and Orlick in the
sluice-house on the marshes. Leavis thinks there
are clear echoes here of Pilgrim’s Progress, a book
which was very popular in Dickens’s time. In John
Bunyan’s story of a pilgrimage through the Valley
of the Shadow of Death, the hero, Christian, has to
meet and overcome Apollyon, the Devil’s advocate.
Once he has Christian at his mercy, Apollyon tells
him to prepare to die and confronts him with
charges of his guilt, just as Orlick does to Pip. Like
Christian, too, Pip admits to his sins, hopes for
forgiveness, faces death by flames and is wounded;
and like Christian his assailant is only routed after
he has given up hope.
Modern critics have paid a lot of attention to
Orlick, their emphasis being less on Pilgrim’s
Progress than on the idea that Orlick in the novel is
acting out Pip’s suppressed desires, even behaving
as Pip’s “double” in a Jekyll and Hyde fashion. His
career runs parallel to Pip’s: he works for Joe at the
forge, as Pip does; he assaults Mrs Joe but Pip is
linked to the assault, too, and feels responsible,
because he has supplied the weapon; he goes to
84
Satis House as a gatekeeper after Pip has begun
visiting Miss Havisham; he lusts after Biddy, whom
Pip seriously thinks about marrying; and he helps
the unpleasant ex-convict (Compeyson) after Pip
has begun to help Magwitch. In all these ways he
appears to shadow Pip, and, in his own perverted
way, seeks to better himself.
There are unconscious parallels, too. Orlick’s
hatred for Mrs Joe is, perhaps, the conscious
expression of what Pip himself might feel towards
his sister: she has beaten him often enough. And
what Orlick does to Mr Pumblechook at the end of
“We sat down on a bench that was near,” By F.A. Fraser c. 1877. The
publishers Chapman and Hall called the reprint for which the
etching was commissioned the Household Edition, capitalising on
fond memories of Dickens’s 1850s’ weekly journal Household Words
85
the novel, when he breaks into his house, reflects
an anger which Pip himself might reasonably feel
towards a man whose patronising, bullying and
unpleasantness he has cause to know all too well.
In his influential 1960 essay, “The Hero’s Guilt:
the Case of Great Expectations”, the critic Julian
Moynahan sees Orlick and his activities as
standing for Pip’s guilt, or, to use T.S. Eliot’s term,
as being the “objective correlative” for that guilt.
Unlike Pip, Orlick is “unmotivated, his origins…
shrouded in mystery, his violence… unqualified by
regret”, but the parallels between them are too
strong to be anything other than deliberate.
Up to a point Orlick seems not only to dog Pip’s
footsteps, but also to present a parody of Pip’s
upward progress through the novel, as though he
were in competitive pursuit of some obscene great
expectations of his own.
Somehow Pip cannot keep Orlick out of his
affairs. When Magwitch first appears in London,
Orlick is crouching in the darkness on the landing
below Pip’s flat. And when Pip first tries to arrange
Magwitch’s escape down the Thames, his plans
are thwarted by the trick which brings him down
to the marshes to face Orlick in the hut. Moynahan
writes:
86
Miss Haversham and Pip
87
was favoured, and he was bullied and beat. Old
Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it.
You done it; now you pays for it. (53)
88
becomes a reproduction and re-enactment of
infantile experience; not simply a recall of the
primal moment, but a reliving of its pain and
terror, suggesting the impossibility of escape
from the originating scenarios of chidhood, the
condemnation forever to replay them.
89
Is Great Expectations a
misogynist novel?
Women don’t come well out of Great
Expectations. Mrs Joe, the first woman to occupy
centre stage, is a sadist who curses, whips and
batters her luckless brother. While we may not
want to see her dead, we can be forgiven for
wanting to see her get some of what she dishes
out to the men in her family. And after Orlick has
clubbed her into imbecility she does, in fact,
91
and savage view of women – and biographers
have convincingly made the point that he did.
Lucy Frost, in her essay “Taming to Improve”,
argues it is only the women of “received
Victorian ideas, pale allegories animated from
without” who flourish in the landscape of Great
Expectations – Herbert’s pliable and faintly
present Clara and Joe’s Biddy. By “animated
from without”, Frost means they are not
intensely realised as characters, unlike their
more cruel counterparts. “They are neither
interesting nor memorable, and yet it is into their
company that Dickens tries to drive his strong
females.” The “strong females” have to be tamed
to become more like Biddy and Clara, and they
are tamed by violence.
In the early chapters, Mrs Joe is a frustrated
woman imprisoned by her domestic role, a
neurotic who has no scope for gratifying her
desires and enlivens her life by taking out her
frustrations on those around her. There is a
sexual element in this, says Frost:
92
morally regenerated and converted into a placid
goodness. Orlick gets her permamently off “the
Ram-page” and gives her an entirely new
personality. Can we really believe in the change?
And why does she then become so bizarrely
attached to her tormentor? Her behaviour is
certainly not normal and, again, there is a degree
of sexual perversity, says Lucy Frost, whether or
not Dickens recognises it. In her new effort to be
genial to Orlick, Mrs Joe, says Pip,
93
thing happens to Estella who – having once
watched two men fighting with sexually-charged
pleasure – is later tamed by a man who uses her,
as Pip puts it, “with great cruelty”.
Estella is more complicated than Mrs Joe.
Self-protectively remote from affection, she is an
illustration, says Frost, of Dickens’s belief that
childhood could warp someone’s inner life to such
an extent that sexuality and intelligence are
severed from feelings. (Psychopathy, modern
medicine calls it.) She is fatalistic, cynical and
emotionally frigid, and Dickens insists on this
frigidity, persistently showing that Pip is naïve in
believing she is not impervious to love. Estella
herself says that her coldness is her “nature… the
nature formed within me”. Well aware of her own
peculiarity, she reminds Pip of it time after time.
She may be cleverer than he is but she is not clever
enough to repair the emotional damage of her
own childhood.
94
composure”, saying, in a schoolroom analogy
which underlines her coldness:
95
Dickens’s revised ending of the novel is, arguably,
more sentimental than his original ending, both
suggest that Estella has been chastened. The
second ending is especially physical and brutal:
96
Of all the women in the novel, the most mutilated
is Miss Havisham, and Frost finds her conversion
as implausible as Mrs Joe’s or Estella’s, though she
allows that the scene in which Pip holds her down
during the fire is psychologically acute. Pip, says
Frost, is here releasing his own destructive feelings
towards her but doing so in an act which can be
construed as morally affirmative, because
life-saving:
97
at the end may not be entirely convincing but its
significance can be overdone: as the feminist
critic, Hilary Schor, has pointed out, the novel is
written from Pip’s point of view; we only see
Estella through his eyes. And while she has been
“bent and broken” by Drummle, as she admits,
there is no evidence, except in Pip’s imagination,
that she has discovered a capacity for real warmth.
Nor does Miss Havisham’s conversion bother
all feminist critics. She is mad; everyone is
inconsistent, mad people especially so; nothing in
the narrative suggests she is incapable of regret,
and her regret is only felt when she realises the
terrible destruction she has caused. One line of
98
argument, indeed, sees her as reflecting a wider
dilemma of Dickens’s time. Elaine Showalter
argues in The Rise of the Victorian Madwoman:
99
In their groundbreaking study, The Madwoman in
the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar see the
representative woman of the time not as plucky
Jane Eyre, but as Mr Rochester’s mad wife,
Bertha Mason, whose rebellion has turned on
herself and who is imprisoned in an upstairs room
in Mr Rochester’s house. The madwoman is, in
extreme form, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, the
image of what society of the time did to women.
Linda Raphael joins forces with them in seeing
Miss Havisham’s choice – if it can be called a
choice – to live in the inner space of Satis House,
“enduring the fetid atmosphere which threatens
also to engulf young Estella”, as repeating “the
100
fate of many Victorian women”. The images
surrounding her – the remains of the aborted
wedding – “visibly enact a gap between
opportunity and desire” which frequently
occurred in the lives of girls brought up to be
“ladies”. Spoilt in childhood by an over-protective
father, used to getting her own way, and with a
limited understanding of the world, Miss
Havisham is brought up unfitted for anything
except marriage, and clearly susceptible to the
smooth-talking, public-school educated
Compeyson, who is aided in tricking her by her
jealous half-brother. There were many who
suffered like Miss Havisham, says Raphael, even if
they didn’t all go mad, and, like them, Miss
Havisham doesn’t really understand why she acts
as she does and or why she is so bitter:
101
Expectations are as psychologically damaged as
the women, and also meet unhappy ends. Nor
does the book play down the effects of male
violence – quite the opposite – or suggest that it
can lead to any lasting “improvement”: Mrs Joe
and Miss Havisham both die and Estella, we
know, will never be normal.
Dickens’s view of women may have been a dark
one when he wrote Great Expectations but so too,
it seems, was his view of men. Miss Havisham’s
madness – concealed by a daily charade in which
she appears sane – mirrors Wemmick’s
schizophrenia; her failed expectations anticipate
and mirror Pip’s. None of the principal female
characters in the novel ends up happy, but then
nor, with the exception of Joe, do any of the men.
102
How plausible is the ending
of the novel?
Pip’s rescue by Trabb’s boy from Orlick’s clutches
is an important moment in the shedding of his
illusions. Dickens delicately indicates this by
having him wake up the next morning to find the
mists have cleared: London appears bright and
glittering in sunlight, “with church towers and
spires shooting into the unusually clear air”. It may
be overstating it to say, as Q.D. Leavis does, that
having faced death the night before, amidst
feverish imaginings of being despised by Estella
and her children, he can now be “reborn”. But
there is an element of symbolism here: he is
subjected to tests by both fire (with Miss
Havisham) and water (falling into the Thames
with Magwitch) and is then finally ready to give up
his worldly dreams and not only to accept
Magwitch but to work for his benefactor’s escape.
The journey down the river with Magwitch
“freshened me with new hope”, he says, though it is
the hope of a life without great expectations. His
sole aim is to help Magwitch and he holds the
convict’s hand, as he does later at the trial – a
gesture which, as Dickens knew, would not have
been allowed in a real Victorian court.
103
generously, towards me with great constancy
through a series of years. I only saw in him a
much better man than I had been to Joe. (54)
104
been a more suitable companion for Pip than for
Joe is fantasy. Whatever American critics might
think, says Q.D. Leavis, Dickens believed that
“there are real distinctions to be made, based not
on money or birth but on cultivation and
intelligence and talent”. Pip’s aspirations to be a
gentleman may have been based on illusions, and
certainly don’t bring him happiness, but the idea
that he would be better off returning to the society
of Gargerys, Wopsles, Trabbs, Pumblechooks,
Hubbles and Orlicks is ridiculous.
Pip hasn’t “foirfeited” his right to marry Biddy.
She would be quite unsuitable for him, and he
himself never suggests he believes she could make
him happy: he offers to marry her to make amends,
and to show how humble he has become. It is an
offer made out of guilt, not out of love.
Dickens’s decision to marry Biddy to Joe was
surely the right one, as was his decision to change
the ending of the novel, about which there has been
much dispute. Originally, Estella was made to
marry a new character, specially introduced for the
purpose, after Drummle’s death – the middle-aged
doctor who tried to protect her from Drummle’s
brutality. She was then to bump into Pip
accidentally in London, walking with Joe and
Biddy’s boy – and to kiss the boy, thinking
him Pip’s.
On the advice of a friend – the novelist Edward
Bulwer-Lytton – Dickens changed this ending to
105
one which seems both more realistic and, in a
novel arranged so carefully, more in line with its
pattern. That they meet at Satis House is no more
of a coincidence than much of what happens in the
novel; nor does it seem implausible that Drummle
should have contrived to leave her a poor widow,
with nothing but Satis House, though it is never
explained how this came about. Like Pip, she has
been humiliated and endured great misery, and
they now have a common past which, as Leavis
says, “fits them for each other and no one else”.
When Pip tells Magwitch, before he dies, that he
has a daughter he also says that he loves her; his
loyalty to his benefactor, if nothing else, would
make him return to Estella and try to look after
her. It is likely that Estella, for her part, would be
less unhappy with Pip than with anyone else.
For any lobotomised Victorian reader this
second ending might be construed as “happy”,
though if it is why is Pip’s tone, narrating the story
in middle age, so full of melancholy? When Pip
says “We are friends”, Estella replies less positively
“And will continue friends apart”. They leave “the
ruined place”, hand in hand, however, in a “broad
expanse of tranquil light” – the scene is
reminiscent of Adam and Eve at the end of
Paradise Lost – and Pip ends by insisting: “I saw
the shadow of no parting from her”. Dickens
agonised over this line. He had originally written “I
saw the shadow of no parting from her but one”,
106
crossing out the “but one” at the last minute,
deliberately to leave the ending more ambiguous.*
The word “shadow” is interesting: Pip evokes it
only to deny it but it hints that what Pip and
Estella have been through leaves them with only a
limited capacity for happiness. Yet the ambiguity of
the ending suggests that while their expectations
have been dashed, it is at least possible to have
expectations, and difficult to live without them.
107
chained – is as much a prison for its occupant as
Newgate, the first building Pip sees in London. He
has come to the city with great expectations and
high hopes. “I felt that I was free,” he jubilantly
exclaims. He discovers, when the source of his
expectations is revealed, that he is as much a
prisoner as Magwitch was. Estella is a prisoner of
Miss Havisham. As she tells Pip: “We have no
choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We
are not free to follow our own devices, you and I.”
There are a series of references and allusions to
Hamlet in Great Expectations, a play which
suggests that Denmark is a prison and which is
about, among other things, the way the past shapes
the present. Pip dreams of playing Hamlet, though
knowing only five words of the play, Miss
Havisham’s half-brother, Mr Arthur, fantasises
about her as being all in white with white flowers in
her hair, an unmistakable allusion to Ophelia, and,
in one of the book’s funniest scenes, Mr Wopsle
gives a dreadful performance of the prince (chapter
31). Hamlet cannot free himself from what the
ghost of his father wants him to do: Magwitch,
rising up from behind the gravestones, has the
same effect on Pip, and when Magwitch returns he,
like the Ghost in Hamlet, comes in the dark, though
heralded not by a “bell… beating” the hour but by
the church clocks of London striking it. “I doubt if
a ghost could have been more more terrible to me,”
Pip writes, when he realises who his visitor is.
108
As A.L. French says, Great Expectations is full
of situations in which parents, or their substitutes,
dominate and indeed determine their children –
not merely what they do but who they are.
109
psychological and moral determinism. There is a
side to Dickens, says French, which wants to
believe that people can grow and mature, and that
suffering can be beneficial, and make the victims
of it kinder, sweeter and more tolerant, but the
overall message of the book, despite the novelist’s
conscious intent, is more downbeat, and more
dismaying in its implications. It is more akin to
Wemmick’s description of Jaggers’s methods:
“suddenly – click – you’re caught”. Other modern,
post-structuralist critics take a similar view. The
novel is full of prisons, says Jeremy Tambling –
even Wemmick’s castle is a “prisonous” house –
and full of victims. Pip may see himself, in his
own mind, as an oppressor, but he is actually a
victim and, while he may lose his illusions, he
never really reaches any degree of “normality”.
He remains something of the child – his name,
a diminutive, establishes that; he is never in a
position, he feels, of equality with anyone else;
his dreams of the file, of Miss Havisham hanging
from the beam, of playing Hamlet without
knowing more than five words of the play, his
nightmarish sense of phantasmagoric shapes
perceived in the rushlight in the Hummums,
and his sense of being a brick in a house-wall,
or part of a machine “waiting to have the engine
stopped, and my part in it hammered off” – all
proclaim his “secret madness”. His sense of
criminality is fed by virtually each act and its
110
consequences that he undertakes.
And though he says nothing about himself at
the time of writing, there is no evidence in the
book that Pip has changed since his experiences,
or that his emotional state has developed. “You
made your own snares, I never made them,” says
Miss Havisham, but it is manifestly untrue as she
herself acknowledges when, before dying, she
entreats Pip to take a pencil “and write under my
name, I forgive her”. Pip’s snares have been made
for him, by Mrs Joe, by Magwitch, by Miss
Havisham, and the book suggests there is nothing
he can do about it. Like the other main characters
in the novel, he has been shaped by the world into
which he was born. Indeed, says Tambling, Great
Expectations “comes close to suggesting that in an
understanding of society, the concept of the
individual is unhelpful”. Individual identity is a
social construct, arising from the experiences the
individual undergoes.
“Pip is forced to recognise that not only are the
objects of his desire unattainable, but also that his
desires are not really his own,” says Steven
Connor. Rather, he acts out the desires of other
people, or their desires are acted out through him.
“It is Magwitch’s desire that Pip should become a
gentleman, and Miss Havisham’s desire that he
should love and be abandoned by Estella.” What
Great Expectations gradually displays, argues
Connor, is Pip’s “alienation from himself”. The
111
revelations that Magwitch is his benefactor and
that Miss Havisham only really wishes to break
his heart both show “Pip’s marginality in his own
life”. Pip himself says the same thing when he tells
Miss Havisham, after learning the truth about his
“expectations”, that the events of his life are “not
my secret, but another’s”.
But Magwitch and Miss Havisham aren’t the
originators of their own desires either: Magwitch’s
is the adoption of what Connor calls “a
generalised social ambition” which makes no
sense for him to fulfil in person – society has
driven him to it as a form of revenge; Miss
Havisham’s desire comes from a wish to inflict on
another the pain she herself has suffered. Like
Jeremy Tambling, Connor sees the narrative of
Great Expectations as showing how little freedom
individuals really have to make their own lives and
how much the characters are shaped by what
happens to them.
Earlier critics, such as Dorothy Van Ghent,
anticipate these post-structuralist arguments
when they point out that Dickens’s world is not a
naturalistic one. The characters may seem
relatively uncomplicated, taken separately – but
Great Expectations suggests it is a mistake to see
them as separate entities; people’s lives are
intertwined; each character seems to flow into
others; personalities merge, one into another.
Pip’s childhood echoes Magwitch’s; it is almost as
112
if Magwitch becomes Pip’s guilt in a concrete form
– as if he comes to live inside him. In the marshes
at the beginning, Magwitch threatens the
trembling Pip with a “young man” who, he says, is
hiding nearby:
113
can never be lost; it is as if the two men are
somehow organically connected. Another
example of doubling is Molly and Miss Havisham.
Molly is Estella’s mother, Miss Havisham her
substitute mother; the former is a murderess –
Herbert describes her as “a young woman, a
jealous woman, and a revengeful woman,
revengeful, Handel, to the last degree”. The desire
for revenge connects her strongly to Miss
Havisham. Miss Havisham is also connected to
Estella. “In the sense that one implies the other,”
writes Dorothy Van Ghent, “the glittering frosty
girl Estella, and the decayed, and false old woman,
Miss Havisham, are not two characters but a
single one.” Great Expectations is full of such
parallels and doubling, and it is through this that
118
reinforced, one might argue, by the emphasis on
dreams: Pip is constantly dreaming – he even
dreams of his expectations being cancelled and of
having “to give my hand in marriage to Herbert’s
Clara”. It is reinforced, too, by the atmosphere
Dickens creates. The novel opens in mist,
“towards evening” and closes, also in mist, at the
same time of day. Much of what happens takes
place either at night, or in half-light, when people
can’t see clearly what is in front of them.
Great Expectations is a masterpiece, probably
the masterpiece, of what is called Dickens’s dark
period. Its picture of a society rooted in savagery
offers few of the compensations to be found in the
more comforting pages of Oliver Twist or David
Copperfield. It is a society whose hallmarks are
violence and isolation, where the idea of
gentlemanliness, however laudable in principle, is
one based on illusions; its vision is one of a world
in which our actions are determined by our pasts,
by the opportunities we’ve had, and by the
language we’ve learnt. In the way it raises
questions about individuality and determinism,
it is a very modern novel, much admired by
modernist critics and not surprisingly it continues
to generate passionate debate and to retain its
status as one of the most admired works of
19th-century fiction.
119
A SHORT CHR ONOLOGY
`
120
1856 Buys Gad’s Hill Place, Kent, where he will write
Great Expectations
1858 Separates from his wife and the mother of his ten
children after meeting the young actress Ellen
Ternan, with whom he has fallen in love. Begins
gruelling national tour, doing public readings of his
work
121
BIBLIOGRAPHY
122
Schor , Hilary M. , Dickens and the Daughter of the
House Cambridge University Press, 1999
Van Ghent , Dorothy, The English Novel: Form and
Function, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953
123
INDEX
A Critics 4, 43
Ackroyd, Peter 28
Aged P 49 D
Arthur, Mrs 108 Dabney, Ross H. 58, 104
Atlantic Monthly 4 David Copperfield 65, 119
Australia Debtors’ prison 9, 11, 107
Magwitch’s return from 8, 71, 99 Defoe, Daniel
underworld 19 Moll Flanders 75
Dickens, Charles
B biographers 45, 100
Balzac, Honoré de 19 blacking factory 11, 14
“Beating and Cringing” (essay) 24 class, and 32–3, 42
Biddy 36, 90 dark period
Bildungsroman 12 gentility, views on 10–9
Blackwoods 4 humour, use of 16–8
Bleak House 65 orphans 16–7
Bloody Code 60, 76 portrait 41
Brooks, Peter 88 religion, and 79–80
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward social commentator
ending changed 105 symbolist, seen as 88
Bunyan, John wife, leaving 14, 45
Pilgrim’s Progress, The 84 working (description by son
Charley) 68
C Dickensian, The 113
Character shaped by events 112 Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes) 118
Chesterton, G.K.12 doubling
Christmas Carol, A 4 Molly and Miss Havisham 114
Clara 92, 96 Pip and Orlick 83, 113
Cohen, William A. Wemmick (at home and at office)
Collins, Philip 75 114
Collins, Wilkie 4 Drummle, Bentley
Compeyson description by Pip 78
jilting Miss Havisham 8, 56, 101 original in real life 67
Connor, Steven 70–1 Orlick, similarity to 47
Convicts 49, 61 “Spider” 78
Corruption 74 violent tendency 47
Crime 18, 25
Balzac quote 19 E
Criminal Eliot, George 104
Pip as 63, 68 Adam Bede 29
Criminals Mill on the Floss, The 12
Oliver Twist, in 14 Silas Marner 29
Criminal Code, The 59, 74–5 Ending
Critical theory, modern 114 ambiguity 9, 107
feminist 90 original version 96, 105
post-structuralist 110 plausibility 103–7
Estella Gilmour, Robin 13, 28, 36, 47, 61–2
animal nature 47 Idea of the Gentleman in the
coldness towards Pip 7 Victorian Novel, The 13
disdain of Pip 44 Great Expectations
heartbreaker 7 beating as theme 24, 49
marriage to Drummle 47 Bildungsroman, as 12
prisoner of Miss Havisham 107 coincidence and improbability 8,
revenge on men 53 115
Expectations critics 30
illusions, as 83 doubling 83, 113–4
truth about Pip’s 63 education in 22–3
ending103
F facts about 64–7
Fielding, Henry film adaptations (stills) 5, 15, 35,
Jonathan Wild 75 64, 73, 77
Film adaptations (stills) 5, 15, 35, 64, guilt as central theme 19
73, 77 irony 63
Forge/forgery, wordplay on 70 key exchange 10
Forster, John 12, 16 literacy as leitmotif 22
Life of Charles Dickens 100 misogyny, accusations of 90
Foucault, Michel 116 “moral pattern” 71
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) 66 opening scenes 20
French, A.L. 23, 49, 56, 109 prisons 107
Freud, Sigmund 22, 27 sadism 49, 79
Frost, Lucy sex 42, 50–52, 92, 117
“Taming to Improve” (essay) 92 “snob’s progress”, 30
solitary hero 20
G summary of plot 6–9
Gargery, Joe suspense 5
Biddy, marriage to 50 TV adaptation 30
gentle nature 36 view of life in 107–11
limitations of 37 violence 48, 50
Pip, affection for 29 Guilt 19, 78, 105
treatment of
Gay, John H
Beggar’s Opera, The 75 Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 108
Gentility 14, 48 Hand, upbringing by 28, 98
Vanity Fair, in 10–1 Hands, importance of 98–9
Gentleman Hanging 25, 56, 60
Compeyson, leniency towards 8 Hardy, Thomas
Drummle, by birth Jude the Obscure 30
Herbert as born 62 Havisham, Miss
Pip’s aspirations to become 7, 10, bridal dress 6
72, 105 clocks stopped 57
Victorian idea of 10, 13, 33 death in fire 8
Gervais, David 43 love, views on 53
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar original in real life 44–5
Madwoman in the Attic, The 100 preserving Satis House 6
House, Humphry 41 Australia 8, 71, 99
The Dickens World 30 death 79
Household Words 44, 85 Estella’s father 71
Hubble, Mr 23 Hamlet’s ghost, like 108
Hulks 6 Pip’s benefactor 8
Provis, alias 8
I revenge on Compeyson 8
Illustrations significance of 58–73
Dickens, Charles 41 Marshes 6, 26, 89, 112
Victorian sketch from 85 Misogyny, accusations of 90, 102
Mist in opening scene and ending
J 119
Jaggers, Molly
at work in court 76 Estella’s mother 78
bullying of Molly 78 murderess 91, 96
Little Britain, office in 76 Moynahan, Julian 43, 86
methods 110
opinion of Drummle 48 N
Pontius Pilate, echo of 80, 98 naturalism, lack of 114
Jailfever 9 Newgate prison 4, 59, 79
James, Henry 50 background to other novels 75
Joe, Mrs Pip’s first sight of London, as
attack by Orlick 7 107
name 36
prophecy about Pip 69 O
sadist 91 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 63
sexual frustration 92 Oliver Twist 14, 16, 32, 60, 68, 119
violence against men 50 opening scene 20
Orlick, Dolge
K attack on Mrs Joe 7, 91
Kucich, John Pip’s shadow 83
Repression in Victorian Fiction Orphans 16–7
90 Orwell, George 38, 43
Our Mutual Friend 28, 98
L
Language P
Lawrence, D.H. 50 Paradise Lost (John Milton)
Leavis, F.R. 34 reminiscence of 106
Leavis, Q.D. 19, 26, 32–4, 58, 76, Parent–child relationship 49, 113
103, 105 Pip
Little Britain 76 Biddy, asking to marry 104
Little Dorrit 98 childhood 89, 104, 112
Lucas, John 4 Clara, dream of marrying 119
criminal behaviour 63, 68–9
M “cringer” 49
Madwoman in Victorian imagina- Estella, relationship with 48–57
tion 99 gentleman, aspirations to
Magwitch, Abel become 7, 10, 72, 105
guilt 22 Skiffins, Miss 17
hand, upbringing by 28, 98 Smiles, Samuel
Havisham, parallels with Self-Help 42
Miss 55 Snobbery 72
London 23, 75 “Snob’s progress” 30–41
Magwitch, bond with 61
narrative voice 24, 78 T
reliability as narrator 78–80 Tambling, Jeremy 110
Orlick Taming of the Shrew, The (William
attack by 8 Shakespeare) 93
shadow, as 83 Ternan, Ellen 14, 45, 64
snob 29 Thackeray, William Makepeace
Pocket, Herbert Book of Snobs 34
Clara 92 feuds with Dickens 33
expectations, lack of 7 Pendennis 12
fight with Pip 47 Vanity Fair 11
gentleman, as born 62 Thames 26, 100
Pocket, Matthew 23 Tickler 28
Provis (Magwitch alias) 8 Tomalin, Claire 45
Prison Trabb’s boy
debtors’ 9, 11, 107 mocking Pip 31
Foucault’s emphasis on 116 rescue of Pip 100
Newgate 4, 59, 75, 79, 107 Transportation 59–61
Satis House as 107 Trollope, Anthony 33, 68
Pritchett, V.S. 20, 117 TV adaptation 30
Pumblechook, Mr 23, 37
U
Q Underworld
Queer theory 51–52 Australia 19
Cohen, William A. 117 David Copperfield, in 17
Oliver Twist, in 14
R Universal guilt 19
Raphael, Linda 101
Ray, Gordon 11 V
Ricks, Christopher 43, 58 Van Ghent, Dorothy 21
Roscoe, W.C. 11 Victorian society, nature of 19
Violence 28,50
S
Satis House W
fire 50–51 Wemmick, Mr 7, 31, 81, 82, 102
lure of 42 Wilson, Angus 4
Pip’s first visit 55 Witches 91
Pip’s second visit 46, 56–7 Women
prison, as 107 Dickens’s view of 102
Schor, Hilary 54, 98 taming of 93
Sex 42, 50–2, 92, 117 treatment of 91
Shaw, George Bernard 4 Wopsle, Mr 28, 108
Showalter, Elaine 99
First published in 2012 by
Connell Guides
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Chippenham
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-907776-03-8
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