[Harold Bloom, Sarah Robbins] Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Bloom’s GUIDES Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations CURRENTLY AVAILABLE 1984 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn All the Pretty Horses Beloved Brave New World The Chosen The Crucible Cry, the Beloved Country Death of a Salesman The Grapes of Wrath Great Expectations Hamlet The Handmaid’s Tale The House on Mango Street I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Iliad Lord of the Flies Macbeth Maggie: A Girl of the Streets The Member of the Wedding Pride and Prejudice Ragtime Romeo and Juliet The Scarlet Letter Snow Falling on Cedars A Streetcar Named Desire The Things They Carried To Kill a Mockingbird Bloom’s GUIDES Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations Edited & with an Introduction by Harold Bloom . . No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. p. ISBN 0-7910-8168-0 (alk. I. Great expectations. All rights reserved. cm. paper) 1. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume. Charles. Bloom. -. II.8--dc22 2004015305 Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Dickens. 1812-1870.chelseahouse. Series.© 2005 by Chelsea House Publishers.com Contributing editor: Sarah Robbins Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Layout by EJB Publishing Services Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.(Bloom's guides) Includes bibliographical references. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes.G687 2004 823'. www. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Harold. First Printing 135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Great expectations / [edited by] Harold Bloom. PR4560. a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. Morris on Narration and Pip’s Moral Bad Faith Joseph A. Said on Australia.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. 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. British Imperialism. Garden. and Dickens’s Victorian Businessmen Works by Charles Dickens Annotated Bibliography Contributors Acknowledgments Index 7 9 12 15 19 47 47 51 54 59 65 72 76 80 84 88 92 97 100 104 105 110 113 115 . 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. Hynes on Star. Dickens’s Use of the Pathetic Fallacy. . Since Estella actually is Magwitch’s daughter. or the overwhelming passion for the beautiful. in Pip. relates this erotic aspiration to the novelist’s love affair with Ellen Ternan. in part. and his hope was fulfilled: David and Pip are very different personages. pragmatically speaking. as David and Dickens do. as David does. Dickens’s best biographer. there is something of an incest barrier between Pip and Estella. and unattainable Estella. Pip does not become a novelist. before he began to write Great Expectations. seems more worthy of Dickens’s respect and is endowed by the novelist with a more powerful imagination than the novelist David Copperfield enjoys. Edgar Johnson. though Pip consciously cannot be aware of this. mocking. or at least works in a more unimpeded fashion to liberate itself. David’s consciousness seems much freer. and Pip also does not submit to sentimentality. an actress quite young enough to have been his daughter. David Copperfield. We are asked to believe that David Copperfield concludes the novel as a fully matured being.Introduction HAROLD BLOOM Charles Dickens reread his autobiographical novel. Still. Compared to Pip’s incessant and excessive sense of guilt. Why does Pip have so pervasive a sense of guilt? Several critics have remarked that. one can wonder whether Pip is not a better representation of Dickens’s innermost being than David is. part of myself”: there is as 7 . but we are left with considerable doubts. from the personal past. and Magwitch has adopted Pip as a son. Yet Dickens’s anxiety was justified. perhaps because he is more distanced from Dickens. love always emanates from guilt. both of these first-person narrators are versions of Dickens himself. He hoped thus not to repeat himself. and only acute self-awareness on the novelist’s part kept Pip from becoming as autobiographical a figure as David had been. whether the love be for the father-substitutes Joe and Magwitch. And yet he is conscious that she is “part of my existence. Pip. who is fatherless but keeps faith at last both with Joe and with the memory of Magwitch. through acceptance of loss. Dickens revised this into the present conclusion. What matters in that maturation is not that guilt has been evaded or transcended. Both Estella and Pip seem doomed to go on expiating a guilt not truly their own. Though this is a little ambiguous and just evades sentimentality. One critic. even self-fathered.occult a connection between Pip and Estella as there is between Heathcliff and the first Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” the guilty need to fail. she has remarried. Dickens disowns part of that psychic achievement when he creates Pip. as the cost of Pip’s confirmation as an achieved self. and each sees in the other a suffering that cannot be redressed. and she traces the same self-punishing pattern in Estella’s marriage to the sadistic Bentley Drummle. he disciplined himself into doing in Great Expectations. it is highly inappropriate to what is most wonderful about the novel: The purgation. Dickens originally ended the novel with a powerful unhappiness: Pip and Estella meet by chance in London. relates Pip’s self-lacerating temperament to Freud’s “moral masochism. Shuli Barzilai. however implicitly. in which Pip prophesies that he and Estella will not be parted again. whether or not it was truly Charles Dickens’s. What Dickens could not bring himself to do in David Copperfield. Self-made. 8 . Unfortunately. that has carried Pip into an authentic maturity. but that the reader has come to understand it. Portsea. By 1824 increasing financial difficulties caused Dickens’s father to be briefly imprisoned for debt. Dickens never forgot Maria.” Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. a 9 .” Other novels were serialized in magazines before appearing in book form. then worked for various newspapers. saintly heroines in his novels—such as Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop—who die at an early age. Catherine’s sixteen-year-old sister Mary lived with them. in monthly installments in Bentley’s Miscellany. In 1836 a collection of articles contributed to various periodicals appeared in two volumes as Sketches by “Boz. and then back to London in 1822. England. but she died after a few months. first the True Sun (1832–34) and later as a political reporter for the Morning Chronicle (1834–36). This was followed by the enormously popular Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37). Memories of this painful period in his life were to influence much of his later writing. Oliver Twist. on February 7. the Pickwick Papers first appeared in a series of monthly chapbooks or “parts. Dickens himself was put to work for a few months at a shoe-blacking warehouse. the second of eight children of John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. At the beginning of his marriage. with whom he had ten children before their separation in 1858. The shock of this loss affected Dickens permanently. in particular the early chapters of David Copperfield. and she served as the model for Dora in David Copperfield. and Mary would be the model for many of the pure. In 1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. After studying at the Wellington House Academy in London (1824–27). 1812. near Portsmouth. but her family opposed any contemplated marriage. Like many of Dickens’s later novels. In 1833 Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell. Between 1837 and 1839 Dickens published a second novel. to Chatham in 1817.Biographical Sketch Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport. The family moved to London in 1814. Dickens worked as a solicitor’s clerk (1827–28). in which appeared his novels The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. a paper of the Radical party to which he contributed “Pictures of Italy” after visiting Italy in 1844 and again in 1845. This was followed in 1838–39 by Nicholas Nickleby. Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–41). including David Copperfield (1849–50). sometimes of his 10 . two volumes of impressions that caused much offense in the United States. In 1842 he and his wife visited the United States and Canada. and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). In 1843 Dickens published A Christmas Carol. The Battle of Life (1846). Micawber (in David Copperfield). The Cricket on the Hearth (1846). the first in a series of Christmas books that included The Chimes (1845). His novels and stories have been both praised and censured for their sentimentality and their depiction of “larger-than-life” characters. improvement of education. In 1850 he started the periodical Household Words. which is characterized by sympathy for the oppressed and a keen examination of class distinctions. Much of his later work was published in these two periodicals. Throughout his life. in 1859 it was incorporated into All the Year Round. which appeared monthly between 1846 and 1848. Little Dorrit (1855–57). and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). Dickens threw himself vigorously into a variety of social and political crusades. These interests find their way also into his work. a novel set partly in America. and reform of the copyright law (American publishers were notorious for pirating his works and offering him no compensation). Early in 1846 he was for a brief time the editor of the Daily News. such as Pickwick or Mr. Bleak House (1852–53). A Tale of Two Cities (1859). which Dickens continued to edit until his death.new periodical of which he was the first editor. the status of workhouses. such as prison reform. During the last twenty years of his life Dickens still found time to direct amateur theatrical productions. He then wrote Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). Hard Times (1854). Dickens then founded his own weekly. During a visit to Switzerland in 1846 Dickens wrote his novel Dombey and Son. and after returning Dickens published American Notes (1842). Great Expectations (1860–61). 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. 11 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 Great Expectations’s original ending was considerably more melancholy.” wrote Swinburne.says that Great Expectations differs from Dickens’s other novels. argue that Estella. “The defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadow on a sunlit sea. few remember that the novel once closed with a remarried Estella’s encounter with Pip on a Picadilly street and their final. After finishing the last installment of the book in June 1861. In a letter to Forster.” 14 . 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. novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Today the novel is popular— well-read and widely taught. in name and spirit. arguing that the hero and heroine are “really live and interesting characters with human faults and failings. Dickens wrote. is an amalgam of Ellen Lawless Ternan. critics had differing opinions on the revised ending. but the novel was a tremendous commercial success. A century and a half later. a 20-year-old actress with whom Dickens had an affair following his divorce. “This was the author’s last great work. unambiguous parting soon after. “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could. And Dickens’s controversial decisions in writing the serial have faded into the annals of history.” Some critics. 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. Dickens and Ternan were united in the end. Although like Pip and Estella. including Wright. the exhausted Dickens brought the proofs to his friend. When Pip reminds him of a young daughter he lost. sparking an eternal feud. threatening the boy. has been raised with the intention of enacting her guardian’s revenge on men. and Mrs. gentlemanly criminal and former associate of Magwitch. Magwitch aims to earn a fortune to repay the boy by making him a gentleman through secret contribution. An educated.. his sister and brother-in-law. the adopted charge of Miss Havisham.. Abel Magwitch. no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.” she tells him that “I have no heart. Compeyson is responsible for Magwitch’s capture at the end of the novel. first encounters young Pip in the marshes and then. Estella. She endures an unhappy marriage to Bentley Drummle. He also uses his wiles to attract Miss Havisham and eventually to jilt her. Soon she decides that Pip will suffer the wrongs that she herself endured when her marriage was called off only minutes before the ceremony. who dies eleven years later.List of Characters Pip. a convict who worked with and was later betrayed by Compeyson. is an orphan living with Mr. An heiress and the owner of Satis house. 15 . Compeyson uses his looks and his manners to shift blame to Magwitch during a trial. Joe Gargery. Miss Havisham employs young Pip and delights in watching him play with Estella. begs for food and a file.no softness there. he is delighted when he learns he has a secret benefactor who wishes to make him a gentleman. Upon encountering Pip after she has been “educated for a lady. Realizing with disgust his “commonness” once he encounters Miss Havisham and Estella. the protagonist of the novel.” (237). Orlick lures Pip to a sluice-house in the marshes and attempts to kill him. and often shrill. Pip first encounters Herbert Pocket—the son of Miss Havisham’s cousin. Pip’s dark shadow throughout the book. Mrs. 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. and confrontational. she is silenced when Orlick strikes her in the back of the head. Later. Jaggers’s association with Miss Havisham leads Pip to believe that she is in fact his benefactor.” Dissatisfied with her station in life. He is responsible for the attack on Mrs. Joe. Cold and cruel with his clients and frugal with his emotions and lifestyle.” This effort is often conducted with the help of a cane she calls “Tickler. baiting Pip with mention of Magwitch. more than twenty years his elder. who never loses a chance to remind her charge that she “brought him up by hand. the two become close companions and Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel. he lives with Herbert. Matthew Pocket—as a “pale young gentleman” lurking in the courtyard at Satis house. earnest blacksmith and Pip’s brotherin-law. who endures marriage to a shrill woman without complaint. jealous. Orlick first works as a day laborer in Joe’s forge and later works as a porter at Satis house. 16 . Once Pip is informed of his intentions to be made a gentleman. Joe is Pip’s sister. his pride and love for Pip supersede Pip’s callous shunning of his former social status. He brings Estella to be adopted by Miss Havisham. and he never forgives Pip for ruining his chances of wooing Biddy.” Herbert wants to make a fortune as a merchant so that he can marry Clara Bailey. He develops an association with Compeyson. Jaggers is involved with the dirty business of being an “Old Bailey” attorney—therefore he frequently washes his hands with scented soap.Joe Gargery is an honest. which is housed in an imitation castle he shares with his aging father. He first delivers Pip to Miss Havisham’s house. more delicate features and mannerisms and is extremely devoted to his mother. Wemmick is Jaggers’s middle-aged clerk. Drummle courts Estella and eventually marries her. 17 . When Mrs. 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. One of Pip’s earliest confidantes. Pip and Herbert solicit Startop’s help in attempting to smuggle Magwitch out of London. Wemmick is in love with the middle-aged Miss Skiffins. and Pip must seek him out at home in order to get the advice for which he is looking. After Pip’s is educated to be a gentleman by the generosity of Magwitch. Matthew Pocket is one of Pip’s tutors and a chief civilizing force from his life. Pumblechook is a merchant obsessed with money and possessions.Educated at Harrow and Cambridge. humility.” (190) When Jaggers encounters Drummle he is impressed by the man’s mannerisms and nicknames him “Spider. The professional life. Biddy moves in with the Gargerys to keep house. Drummle is one of Pip’s classmates and an “old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture. who has younger. earnest. Joe’s uncle. Powerful though inarticulate. and his personal life. Startop is Pip’s other classmate. in which he maintains a “post-office mouth” and an obsession with “portable property”. Pumblechook advertises that he was Pip’s earliest benefactor. Biddy helps Pip with his lessons and he is put at ease by her simple. His desire to help Pip out of certain predicaments is precluded by his professional life. Joe is attacked.” To Pip’s horror. who divides his life quite neatly into to compartments. Mr. When Pip comes to see one of his productions. Molly bore his daughter. Wopsle is startled to see a man lurking behind Pip—Compeyson. Wopsle is a church clerk and frustrated preacher who falls into playacting and moves to London shortly after Pip does. at which point Estella is placed in the care of Miss Havisham and Molly becomes Jaggers’s housekeeper.Magwitch’s former lover. who is later revealed to be Estella. assuming the stage name of Waldengarver. 18 . She is acquitted of murder. He comments that his brothers “gave up trying to get a living. Morris contends that Pip’s insistence upon naming himself reflects his inability to be ruled by the past of his parents’ headstones. He has spotted Pip in the churchyard and demands. threatening death. Goldie Morgenthaler says. exceedingly early in that universal struggle. indicating another escape from the Hulks prison ships. “a life that is for the moment precedent to plot. at the first hint of dawn. 19 .Summary and Analysis Volume One Pip introduces himself to readers as Philip Pirrip. Pip stands on Christmas Eve. argues critic Peter Brooks. Nevertheless. afraid to sleep for fear of waking the next morning’s plan. Pip scurries back to the home of his sister and brother-in-law. Pip trips off to bed. reflecting on the tombstones of his parents—whom he never knew—and his five brothers. 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. published a year before Great Expectations. is essentially “unauthored”—and unencumbered by authority figures. but qualifies that with the statement that he calls himself Pip.” This plot begins to unfold when into Pip’s reverie bursts the voice of a rough-looking. and indeed necessarily in search of plot. A hero such as 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. that Pip bring to him some food and a file the next morning. he escapes with some morsels. Pip schemes to bring part of Christmas dinner to the convict. seems to be taken directly from the third chapter of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.” which. as Brooks says. This could be Dickens way of illustrating. Christopher D. Morgenthaler’s observations of Darwin’s effect on this work will surface later in the plot. Joe Gargery. gray uniformed man. when the sound of gunfire resounds. including brandy and a pork pie.” After supper. who is overcome with worry about the realization of the missing food. 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. After a mad chase. He strikes Pip and runs into the mist. with a badly bruised face and an iron chain encircling his leg. Pip indicates which way the man with the badly bruised face traveled and leaves his friend in the mist.. and likewise very much afraid from being away from home any longer. he finds his sister busy with Christmas preparations.On his way to the planned meeting spot. Pip is revealed and is startled to be caught in the convict’s sight. The adults pester Pip. When Mrs. Though Pip’s fear and guilt begins here. Joe announces the pork pie. Though Pip is frightened. and Joe’s Uncle Pumblechook. “If he had looked at me for an 20 . and with Pip hiding behind Joe during the spectacle. and Mr. Joe proposes that he. Pip is received by his sister as a criminal. Pip stumbles upon another man. Pip dashes away. dressed in a like gray uniform. Pip. They set out into the dismal marshes. half-expecting an awaiting constable. the soldiers simply want Joe’s help in repairing handcuffs for the escaped convicts. while Pip mentions the other man and the fact that he heard cannons in the middle of the night. Hubble and his wife. the wheelwright Mr. When Pip returns home.” (21) Dorothy Van Ghent argues that its genesis occurred before he committed any ill action. with his being “very much afraid of him again . He reminisces. the man ravenously east his food. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle join the soldier’s search. filing away at his iron. When attending church with Joe.. only to run into a party of soldiers. When the sergeants stop the conversation and light the torches. The Gargerys and Pip later share dinner with the church clerk. Pip wondering whether the convicts will think he brought the authorities. this guilt is only compounded after he commits theft and first realized as he watches the convict limp into the distance. When they meet. Upon finishing his task. allowing Pip to continue toward his convict. the convicts are found at the bottom of the ditch. the badly bruised convict accuses the other of murder. learns that he is unwanted on the premises. During a market day shortly thereafter.” (38) After an hour of travel. Pip’s young escort informs him that the name of the house is Satis—or enough—and leads him to a dressing room. that he lived in the house until he met Pip’s sister. as having been more attentive. Pip soon notices that everything meant to be white is faded and that the woman’s skin seems to hang off her bones. Wopsle’s great aunt. Joe promptly forgives him. On the way home. At Miss Havisham’s behest Pip plays “beggar my neighbour” with Estella. noting both Joe’s genuine humanity and the foundation of Pip’s kindness toward the convict. whom he describes as a “fine figure of a woman. Pumblechook responds to a prompt that Pip indeed stands downstairs. he saw Joe as his equal. the convict apologizes to Joe for taking food from his home.” (51) So the next morning. Pip. however. Joe says that he has never been to school. turns her eyes to her reflection in the looking glass and bids Pip to call the girl. and a window is raised.hour or for a day. I could not have remembered his face even afterwards. and leaves Pip in the hands of a young lady who meets him at the gate. They arrive at Miss Havisham’s together. and they deliver news of the convict’s confession to the awaiting visitors. practices his script by writing Joe a letter. Noting a bizarre clicking the convict’s throat. that his lack of formal schooling could be attributed to his wife’s disinterest in education. where a lady dressed in full wedding regalia awaits. Estella. a woman known throughout town for being “an immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers. Miss Havisham commands Pip to play. Pip declares that from that moment forward. One evening. who is being taught to write by Mr. Joe carries his exhausted young charge back.” in part for her efforts raising Pip. and when his response is a confused stare. Pumblechook announces that Pip is to play at the home of Miss Havisham. Critics make much of this exchange. Pip watches intently as the two men are loaded back onto the ship. Joe allows. and who led a life of seclusion. who labels him a 21 . a scrubbed and linen-bedecked Pip is delivered to Pumblechook’s shop. Only Pip notices this aberration. The next morning. The Three Jolly Bargemen. expressing his disdain about his commonness.“common labouring boy. But before their planned meeting. Miss Havisham represents in his hopes a sort of fairy godmother. In response to their ceaseless queries he spins a web of elaborate lies. 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. alleviating his frustrations by kicking the brewery wall. Pip is sent by his sister to call on Joe at the public house. The convict presents a fistful of change to Pip when Pip and Joe rise to leave. and Estella leads 22 . wondering aloud why he doesn’t cry when he seems as though he’d like to. After Estella leaves. The wad is proclaimed to be two one-pound notes. Joe is seated with Mr. which Mrs. Pip returns. He quickly confesses. in fact. his mind on the common nature of an association with convicts.” (60) When they are finished. ruminating on his status as a “common labouring boy. Only when Pip sees Joe does he begin to feel remorse. 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. and in doing so realizes that the strange man is. Gratefully finding Pumblechook away from his office. Miss Havisham requests his return and Estella brings him into the courtyard and contemptuously offers him food. Wopsle and “a secret-looking man” (75) Pip doesn’t recognize. At the appointed time. the three converse until the rum-and-water is brought to the table and the strange man stirs his drink with a file.” Pip returns home to find his sister and Pumblechook awaiting his arrival. Estella soon lets him out. Pip continues the four miles back to the forge. his convict. This man inquires after Pip’s origins. Pip’s sleep is fitful that night. Joe binds and stores under an ornamental tea pot. Many critics write that Pip’s experience of Satis house is that of living in a daydream. Pip resolves to ask Biddy to tell him everything she knows. bearing in mind that Pumblechook has himself never laid eyes on Miss Havisham. Pip observes his commonness with contempt. he honors her request for a kiss on the cheek. she explains that she shall be laid on the table when she is dead. Remarking that boys “are a bad set of fellows. Standing there. he complies. and insects. Pip gazes out at a neglected garden until he realizes he is under scrutiny. When the adults leave. Pip observes a long table set for a feast but riddled with mold. she asks him. until Estella summons him with a bell. as they walk. is to walk Miss Havisham around the room. Miss Sarah Pocket. the pale young gentleman bids him “good afternoon. he learns. dust. as to Pip’s purpose. in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table—which shall be done. but then she directs Pip to a neighboring room. and Pip is led back to the yard and fed in the same manner as before. Pip solemnly declares that he will never cry for her again. if he finds her pretty. shall sit at the head of the table. At the top of the stairs they encounter a burly soap-scented man who inquires. When he assents. 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. He observes these strange people called Camilla. “when they lay me dead. Matthew Pocket. Pip’s task. Estella enters with the adults Pip encountered downstairs. only to find the struggle unmentioned. and points out that the object buried under cobwebs is actually a wedding cake. Miss Havisham suggests that Estella and Pip play cards again.” Mentioning that her absent brother.” Meeting Estella in the courtyard. until he is instructed to call for Estella. Cousin Raymond. Miss Havisham summons Pip and Estella and says. who implores him to fight. Miss Havisham declares that upon her death all of these people—family members—shall surround the table and “feast upon me. When Miss Havisham enters. When Pip prevails. Seated in a 23 . Fitful about the incident with the pale young gentleman. she instructs Pip to continue walking her around the table. low-ceilinged room and instructs Pip to wait until he is called upon. biting the side of his forefinger. Estella slaps him forcefully and asks why he does not cry. Pip returns to “the scene of the deed of violence” (94) with trepidation. When Pip is left alone he encounters a pale young gentleman.” the man reminds Pip to behave himself.him into a gloomy. and though Estella never asks for another kiss. As Pip’s education continues. Miss Havisham bids them goodbye and remarks that Pip may not return.garden chair. where language is unique to character. Using the Battery as a study place. and then engages Mrs. Mrs. One evening Pumblechook comes to the Gargerys’ with the intention of discussing Pip’s prospects. Miss Havisham presents Pip with 25 guineas. Pip visits again and again. Wopsle. as Joe is now his master. Pip insists that some of Pip’s windfall be used to finance a celebration dinner at the Blue Boar. who leads them in. nervous blacksmith addresses Pip. she suggests that she will travel with them and stay at Pumblechook’s. Joe 24 . “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?” Instead of responding to Miss Havisham directly. When Joe responds that Pip has earned no premium with him. When he asks Joe if he should pay another visit to Miss Havisham. Pip thinks of Miss Havisham and Estella. When characters such as Joe or Magwitch speak in soliloquy. ashamed of his status and convinced that he shall never like Joe’s trade. the bumbling. which Pip is instructed to push. Miss Havisham asks Joe a series of questions. Mrs. Miss Havisham requests that Joe comes to visit her soon. and alone with Pip. Miss Havisham seems to delight in Pip’s attraction to her young charge. Pip returns to his bedroom that night. Joe and Pip continue straight on to Miss Havisham’s and are met by a nonplussed Estella. are common in Great Expectations. Pip imparts his knowledge to Joe. they suggest a world of colliding fragmented existences. Miss Havisham engages Pip in a discussion about his education and his future as Joe’s apprentice. Pumblechook insists that he’ll take Pip to Town Hall to have him officially “bound” to Joe. Van Ghent suggests. All the while. One day Miss Havisham again inquires the name of the blacksmith to whom Pip is to be apprenticed. He begins by suggesting how grateful Pip should be for the work that his sister has done. Joe is offended by her lack of invitation. to formerly thank her. he soaks up all he can from Biddy and Mr. Joe in a discussion about Miss Havisham’s influence. Joe’s foibles. They return to Pumblechook’s with the news. beginning with. hears this news. Wopsle. Joe and Orlick begin to struggle. he found Mrs. “educating for a lady. About a month later. upset by this decision.” (121) In giving the convict the file. just as George Barnwell. Joe. Mrs. who tells him the Hulks’ cannons are firing again. He has overtaken his destiny. the character in the play he read that night with Wopsle—he has murdered his nearest relative. Wopsle seeks out the cause of the ruckus. exchanges harsh words with Orlick. Pip imagines that either Orlick or his convict could be responsible for a tragedy of this magnitude. Joe an invalid. Pip is overcome by guilt. they see through the crowd to Pip’s sister. Joe stricken. a convict’s leg iron beside her. “to think that I had provided the weapon. who invites him to take tea in Pumblechook’s parlor and to engage in a reading of a popular tragic play.Though the incident renders Mrs. to give Pip a half-holiday for his visit. her temperament improves greatly. the three men are surprised to find a commotion at the Three Jolly Bargemen. Pip thinks he has essentially killed his sister himself. when Mr. and begins investigating the curious T-shape Mrs. Biddy comes to work in the kitchen. and when he arrived home at five minutes before ten. Van Ghent argues. when Mrs. he finds Joe and his journeymen sweeping up as though nothing has happened.” (116) When Miss Havisham seems to delight in Pip’s feeling of loss. Pip remains silent until Miss Havisham dismisses him. and when he returns. Joe helplessly draws on 25 . lying senseless on the floorboards because of a blow to the head. At Miss Havisham’s house Pip is greeted by Miss Sarah Pocket and the news that Estella has gone abroad. On his way home Pip runs into Mr. after some deliberation. Pip disappears upstairs to dress. they run into Orlick.agrees. The details of the evening emerge: Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen since eight o’clock. he is told that something violent has happened at Pip’s place. When they finally reach home. he protests until Joe grants a half-holiday to everyone. When Joe’s journeyman. Orlick. considering the implications of the convict’s actions. As under the cover of darkness the two walk home. Joe dissolves into an angry fit. On the way. seeks her out as a confidante. she is gracious to him. Biddy realizes that unable to spell Orlick’s name. As they walk and talk. Pip assembles with a group of men at the Three Jolly Bargemen to hear news of a popular murder. he is haunted by Miss Havisham and Estella. Pip attempts to rid himself of his disaffection for Jo and to sustain a desire for Biddy. the two run into Orlick. after. He again meets Sarah Pocket at the gate. At home. he introduces himself as Mr. hears that Estella remains abroad. Then the strange man asks after Joe Gargery and his apprentice. Nearing the churchyard. and when they come forward. Joe is signifying his hammer. As they sit. and Biddy insists that he never will. He tells her one Sunday afternoon that he wants to be a gentleman. Pip begins to notice a change in Biddy and. and Joe insists both that he would never stand in Pip’s way and that he doesn’t need compensation for his loss. a lawyer in London. insisting that he will be miserable if he continues to lead the type of life to which he has been bound. Joe says he bears an offer to relieve Pip from his indentures to Joe.a piece of slate. Mrs. Finally. Pip notices a strange gentleman opposite him. He laments the occasion of being called coarse and common. and accepts—after some deliberation—a guinea and another invitation for his next birthday. Pip laments his inability to fall in love with Biddy. Still. Biddy asks if Pip would like to become a gentleman to spite Estella or to win her. and confesses that Estella planted such ideas. she suggests that he might achieve his goal of spiting her if he stops caring about her words. admiring her persistence and her intellect. all the while. Jaggers says that part of the offer’s stipulations are 26 . when he is scheduled to pay another visit to Miss Havisham. Biddy admits that Orlick has always had the wrong intentions for her. Joe. Jaggers. 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. Four years later. knowing that he’s convicted a man who has not yet been heard. Pip falls into the routine of life as an apprentice until the arrival of his birthday. when Orlick was brought before Mrs. Contemplating this. Joe. Pip accuses her of being envious of his good fortune. and after an early dinner. Miss Havisham said should be at the head of the table when she is laid to rest—should be his tutor. Later Pip speaks to Biddy.” On Friday Pip puts on his new clothes and pays a visit to Miss Havisham. Matthew Pocket—the man. Pip remembers. and stockings have been ordered. who receives him festively. he dresses himself in his new clothes and feels melancholy despite their attempts to seem festive. and walks away. Early the next morning Pip dresses. On his last night. eats a hurried breakfast. and Pip feels sheepish when he hears Biddy and Joe discuss his pending absence. He lays his hand down on the finger post of the village and says goodbye. Biddy and Joe insist that they—as well as Wopsle and the Hubbles—might like to see Pip’s new “gen-teel figure. Visiting the tailor. Mr. Trabb. and when she makes him uncomfortable by suggesting that Joe was not simply backward and confused but proud. and Pumblechook pledges to keep Joe “up to the mark. Additionally. Once hats. Pip delivers the news of his good fortune. Pip approaches Pumblechook. They eat and drink to Pip’s sister’s health.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. He suggests that the tailor send his new clothes to Pumblechook’s so he is not made into a spectacle. Trabb’s reaction convinces Pip of the power of money. As their time together dwindles. strolls out to meet him in the marshes. Pip grows more appreciative of Joe and Biddy’s company. while Joe protests. 27 . Next the details of arrangement are laid out. she encourages him to always keep the name of Pip. Mr. who says she has heard from Jaggers that Pip has been adopted by an unnamed rich person. Biddy attempts to explain the news to Mrs. As she bids him goodbye. Jaggers says Joe is to be compensated for the loss of Pip’s services. insisting that no monetary compensation could suffice for the loss of a child. including the money set aside for Pip’s lodging and education and the fact that Jaggers should be considered Pip’s guardian. and twenty guineas shall be laid aside for Pip’s work-clothes.” Joe burns Pip’s documents of indenture. boots. including a group of poor Jews. at which point he should accompany young Mr. where a drunk minister of justice informs him four people are scheduled to be hung the following day. and arrives at Jaggers’s office only to find his guardian still in court. Mike. Checking back in at Jaggers’s office and finding him still gone. and eventually rebukes or casts them aside so that he and Pip can return to the office. then. and two casts of faces.” (165) Beyond he enters Newgate Prison and sees the Debtors’ door. the man himself seems an amalgam of mystery and violence. while lunching. There he finds a group of people also awaiting Jaggers’s arrival. He sits until he cannot bear the heat and the menacing looks of the two casts. and Wemmick leads Pip up a flight of stairs “which appeared to be slowly collapsing into sawdust. just outside Smithfield. “asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam. Pocket emerges with an apology and a cone-shaped wicker 28 . Like the objects in his office. Jaggers brings Pip into his office and. Jaggers appears and addresses all of the people. is asked to leave so that Pip can sit inside the office. such as a pistol. according to Steven Newman. Pocket until Monday.” In this first glimpse of his typical day at work. wondering about the odd objects inside. informs him that he is to stay at Barnard’s Inn with young Mr. After receiving details of his credit and allowance. informing the clerk that he’d like to take a walk. it is obvious that the man is incapable of discussing or considering. While Pip waits. enters Smithfield. young Mr. Barnard’s Inn is a shabby group of buildings. He takes a coach to Little Britain. Pip heads toward a square in the opposite direction. Pip makes his way toward Barnard’s Inn with Jaggers’s clerk. Pocket to his father Matthew’s house. Wemmick. Jaggers’s purpose in life. he stares around the office. Finally. After more than half an hour. a one-eyed client. a sword.” (173) Bidding him farewell.Volume Two Pip makes the five-hour journey to London and discovers a dirty city full of narrow streets. is to “extort the worst in everybody. Wemmick is surprised when Pip commits the social error of inviting a superior to shake his hand. she received a letter which canceled the entire thing. saying only that she is adopted and that “There has always been an Estella. she had a half-brother from her father’s second marriage to a cook.” (177) Herbert explains that Mr. in Hammersmith. Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel. Pocket. At that point. warned that she was doing too much for the man. and she was later pursued by a showy. she was left an heiress. Herbert instructs Pip on proper London table manners and shares what he knows about Miss Havisham. young Mr. As they eat dinner. Herbert says. Miss Havisham was so upset she ordered him out of her house forever. is that her intended acted somehow in concert with her scorned half-brother. He expresses no remorse. however. Miss Havisham’s cousin.basket of strawberries. All that is known. Charmed by Herbert’s easy manner. Once her father passed away. They encounter Mrs. the two settle in to an easy conversation. and has been brought up my Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex. and that the two men shared the profits. she stopped all the clocks. Jaggers is Miss Havisham’s businessman and solicitor and that his own father is Miss Havisham’s cousin. proud family. since I have heard of a Miss Havisham. at twenty minutes to nine. passionate man to whom she gave great sums of money for business ventures. On Monday morning Herbert brings Pip to his father’s house. “And you. Pocket says.” After they share a laugh. Pocket introduces himself as Herbert and discloses that at one time he may have been intended for Estella.” after the composer’s piece called the Harmonious Blacksmith. He explains that Miss Havisham comes from a rich. Pip notices that the man before him is none other than the pale young gentleman whom he fought at Miss Havisham’s. When Herbert’s father. declaring the girl “hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree. 29 . He pushes through the sticking door to show Pip around the meager apartment—as he points out furniture. “are the prowling boy. The day she was to marry the man.” young Mr. Herbert confesses that he does not know Estella’s origins.” (183) He explains that he works in a counting house and dreams of making a great fortune through trading. he has a long conversation with Mr. as the two returned to work. Wemmick invites him to stay at his home in Walworth and inquires whether or not Pip has yet dined with Jaggers. and Mr. Pip goes to Jaggers to ask for money to buy a few additional things. he remarks upon being questioned that Jaggers had never seen the place. In fact. After dinner—which includes the Pocket’s seven children as well as their widowed neighbor. When Pip says no. it’s professional: only professional.” (206) They arrive at Wemmick’s house. Indeed. A few days later. Pocket agrees. they would survive. Mrs. One day Pip proposes to go home with Wemmick for the evening. Wemmick suggests that when he does so soon. and Wemmick assures him that “it’s not personal.” (202) After. explaining that there are “seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about that watch. stresses how happy he is to see Pip. once Pip has settled in.surrounded by a chaos of children and nursemaids.” As they sit down first to punch in the arbour and then to supper. which looks like a miniature castle. Wemmick instructs Pip to look at Jaggers’s expensive gold watch. Wemmick grew more pragmatic and distant with each step. Pocket. he shall be sure to look at Jaggers’s housekeeper to see a “wild beast tamed.” (198) He explains that the casts that haunt Pip are the faces of famous clients who were executed. Pip remarks to Wemmick that he’s not sure how to understand Jaggers’ demeanor. and introduces him to two young men named Drummle and Startop. As they walk toward Walworth. the next morning. and after the two settle on an amount. Wemmick pays him twenty pounds. they walk to a police court to watch Jaggers work. Wemmick explains that hidden in the back are farm animals and crops. Pocket emerges. he addresses the problem of reconciling the dark. His 30 . criminal world with a higher world by compartmentalizing. but that it’s all his now. Mr. Wemmick explains that he got hold of his property little by little. Inside they meet a very old man whom Wemmick addresses as “Aged Parent. Pip asks if he might continue living in Barnard’s Inn with Herbert. Colier—the boys practiced rowing on the Thames. so that if the place was besieged. as he believes strongly in the separation of personal and professional matters. He then insists that he must go. She protests. that he and Pip are not compatible to be seen together in London. and though Pip offers to take Joe’s hat. as they eat. but finally is forced to reveal a wrist scarred and disfigured. Jaggers prepares to dismiss them. Whereas Jaggers might view life as evil. Realizing that Joe’s visit is scheduled for the next day. is an attractive one. proclaiming his classmate “one of the true sort” and nicknaming him Spider. Pip listens with dread to Joe’s heavy boots on the stairs. the housekeeper. Miss Havisham summoned him. Pip and his fellow students accompany Jaggers to his set of rooms in a stately yet poorly kempt house. and that Pip’s absence is felt. Joe says that it’s an honor to eat in the company of gentlemen. Pip thinks that “if I could have kept him away by paying money. Jaggers says that he owns the entire house. They greet one another. Then he mentions that a few nights earlier. Soon after. Joe comments on Pip’s maturity and describes Mr. says Newman. Jaggers remarks that few men have the power of wrist that Molly does. and discussed. As the hours pass. Wopsle. to show the boys her wrist. “like a bird’s-nest with eggs in it. he holds it carefully. The next morning. A month later. As they talk of the boys’ rowing and their strengths. that his sister is much the same. Pip notices the housekeeper. Wopsle’s play. I certainly would have paid money. asking Joe to relay a message that Estella has come home and would be glad to see him. Emphasizing his hope that he was somehow useful to Pip. Wemmick sees it in certain ways as checks and balances.Walworth character.” With his fractured speech. Drummle finishes his studies with the Pockets and returns to his family. 31 . but rarely uses more than what they see. Pip receives a letter from Biddy which says that Joe intends to visit London in the company of Mr. first drinking to Drummle. especially the way she keeps her eyes attentively on Jaggers. Pip’s guardian takes a peculiar interest in Drummle. in the kitchen nightly. he later warns Pip to avoid him.” (218) Herbert offers moral support by suggesting a breakfast that might please Joe. but only by dehumanizing himself is Wemmick able to survive the office. Jaggers implores Molly. . that I should innocently take a bad halfcrown of somebody else’s manufacture is reasonable enough. attributing his earliest fortunes to Pumblechook. When they are left alone in the garden. He hopes that he will never be able to go home again. who brings him to Miss Havisham and an elegant lady. as good money!” (225) When Pip arrives at Miss Havisham’s the next morning. as they continue toward London. suggest that Pip represents “the evolution of the human species away from its primitive origins. Pip realizes that the lady is Estella. thinking first with remorse that he should stay with Joe. It seems. but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make. he picks up a local newspaper that includes an article about him. These thoughts. the first words he hears are “Two-pound notes. Leaving by the afternoon coach. in fact. and that she was gratified by it..” It’s as though hopes of Pip’s progress are subverted by the reappearance of the convict. Discussing their 32 . Morgenthaler contends.. the convict doesn’t recognize Pip. “All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers. Though their eyes meet. Estella discloses that she saw the fight break out between Herbert and Pip long before.” Pip feels great guilt about his own developing prejudices and the excuses he gives himself for being unable to stay with Joe. and each proclaims the other to be much changed. Pip realizes that he was traveling with his convict. Commenting insolently that he has left the forge. Pip then meets Miss Sarah Pocket. When he awakens. but eventually deciding to stay at the Blue Boar. to be a harbinger of repressed thoughts and actions when the convict is seated on Pip’s coach.The next day Pip sets off for his Satis house. Brooks argues that this return home from London is the first in a series of repetitions—of attempted reparations for Joe. As he sits in the Blue Boar’s empty coffee-room. Pip considers whether he should return the twopound notes to the convict. who is shackled to another. Immediately before falling asleep on the coach. a feeling of coincidence tingles in the base of Pip’s spine. of knowledge seeking at Satis house. Orlick leads Pip into the hall. he is shocked when Orlick opens the door. Pip says into his pillow “I love her. he then returns to Barnard’s Inn. Pip insists that he would like to meet Clara. Herbert replies that he knew all along and that Pip should have patience in the absence of knowing Estella’s feelings for him. feeling as though the action is transporting him back in time. I have never had any such thing. He also insists that Estella cannot be a condition of Pip’s inheritance and suggests. I love her. that Pip detach himself from her. Pip is captivated by the act of pushing Miss Havisham’s chair once again.” (240) Jaggers arrives for dinner and asks Pip how many times he has encountered Miss Estella. 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. especially upon hearing of Jaggers’s reaction to Estella at dinner. Nervous about running into Pumblechook at the Blue Boar. When Pip returns to London. and Miss Havisham eagerly asks if Pip finds her beautiful and then implores that he love her.” (238) They return. Estella leaves the room to dress. describing love as “blind devotion. As they eat dinner. Seeing Herbert.. After Pip and Jaggers return to the Blue Boar.. Jaggers scarcely looks at Estella. Wopsle’s performance of Macbeth. and his performance of Macbeth is so poor that throughout he is 33 . even when she addresses him. utter submission . giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did. and the two friends set off to watch Mr. Pip walks into the marshes and runs into Trabb’s boy. unquestioning selfhumiliation. Pip confesses that he is in love with Estella. Estella says evenly that she has “not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. Pip should meet her at the coach. Herbert ventures to make himself agreeable again. he sends oysters and codfish to Joe as an act of repentance. 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.prospects of being groomed for one another. Wopsle has adopted the stage name of Waldengarver. who circles and taunts him. and Pip is surprised to learn that Jaggers will join them for dinner. Afterwards it is arranged that when Estella comes to London. When Pip deems such an action impossible. Pip is struck by Wemmick’s stiff manner. passing through Newgate-street and then Hammersmith. They travel by coach to Estella’s new lodgings. Estella informs Pip that he is to take her to Richmond. As they walk through the prison. so unlike when he is at home among the Aged.” These coincidences are ties that bind characters to one another. As they talk. that he plays Hamlet to Miss Havisham’s ghost. he must be condemned on the principle of guilt by association. Pip suggests to Herbert that they sneak out. where she is to live. Pip tries to rid himself of prison dust as he waits for Estella. Pip dreams that his expectations are canceled. When Pip sees Estella’s face. When they meet in the dressing room Pip consults with Herbert and then invites Wopsle back to Barnard’s Inn for supper. One day Pip receives a note from Estella which explains that she is London-bound. She talks resignedly about Miss Havisham’s wiles and about their own status as mere pawns of her plan. he notices a “nameless shadow” (264) hovering between them. in Surrey. regardless of reason.greeted by peals of laughter. Julian Moynahan argues that Dickens has entrapped his protagonist. where Pip points out the Pocket residence. When Wopsle finally leaves at two in the morning. where he runs into Wemmick. Pip observes aloud that Estella speaks of herself as though she were someone else. 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 waits for her at the coach-office. 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. that he is promised to Herbert’s Clara. 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. When Pip expresses surprise that Miss Havisham might part with Estella so soon 34 . This prison dust is yet another manifestation of the guilt and distain Pip feels for being so closely linked to a world of crime. Pip is tied to violence and crime. on his way to Newgate to consult with a client. Jaggers says no.” Biddy admits that she is still being pursued by Orlick. After dropping her off in Richmond. Pocket. These efforts. Pip and Biddy discuss her prospects now that she is no longer saddled with the responsibility of Mrs. and Pip is disturbed by this notion as well as the realization that Biddy has acquired a habit of repeating everything he says. When everyone finally leaves. When Pip asks whether his benefactor will be revealed to him on this day.after her return from the Continent. whose members dine expensively once every two weeks and quarrel among themselves. He does. he finds the funeral an ostentatious affair and Joe crippled with grief. and Trabb conducts the entire ceremony with a pomp that pains Joe. realizing with great shock that Mrs. who says he would have preferred to carry his wife to the church himself. and inquires after his lack of financial stability. for Pip. Joe’s is the first death through which he has lived. Pip returns home.” (276) to round the amount of their debt up to the nearest whole number. Pip returns to Hammersmith with a heavy heart. Pip is enjoying his busywork one evening when a letter. include the act of “leaving a Margin. considering airing his woes to Mr. When Pip’s twenty-first birthday arrives.” then “Pardon. and the next morning he sets off early. and soon deciding against it.” and then “Pip. with the news 35 . Biddy suggests that she might enjoy taking a teaching job. promising that he’ll visit soon. Jaggers summons him to his office. calls him Mr. Pip asks to spend the night in his childhood room. Estella insists that it’s simply part of the plan. present Pip with a 500-pound note. Joe. As he has grown accustomed to London. Biddy tells him that her last words were “Joe. however. When he arrives. 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. Biddy is very helpful. Pip. When Pip asks about the specifics of his sister’s final hours. Pumblechook and the Hubbles seem to relish the parade to the churchyard.. signed “Trabb & Co. When Pip and Herbert realize they have plummeted deeply into debt. they sit down at the table and calculate their affairs.” arrives bearing the news of his sister’s death. again Miss Havisham prods Pip about the way Estella uses him. Pip seeks Wemmick’s advice on how to help Herbert financially. The four share tea and toast and listen to the Aged read. Pip resolves to visit Wemmick there. Brandley who knew Miss Havisham before her seclusion. Herbert remarks that Jaggers’s presence made him feel as though he had committed a felony. middle-aged woman upon whom Wemmick seems to dote. That Sunday Pip sets out for Walworth in order to obtain advice about Herbert.that he will be presented with the same amount every year. Estella slowly begins 36 . Jaggers joins Herbert and Pip for dinner. Pip again inquires after his benefactor. who will hire Herbert and make him a partner without mentioning that he’s being paid to do so. and when he leaves. Pip observes Wemmick’s attempts to sneak an arm around Miss Skiffins.” and “Miss Skiffins. on his birthday. She then says that Miss Havisham wishes for Pip to accompany Estella to Satis house the day after next. lists the names of the bridges in London and advises that Pip would be better off throwing his money from one of them. and Jaggers is curt about his inability to answer such questions. and Estella mentions her worries that Pip will not heed the warnings she gives against his attraction to her. Pip receives a note from Wemmick which details the plan for Herbert—Pip will donate 100 pounds yearly to a merchant named Clarriker. being at the office and in his pragmatic mind frame. Miss Skiffins is a wooden. Pip is summoned to visit. Pip once again beseeches Wemmick about Herbert—giving more details this time—and the clerk is much more responsive. Pip sees more clearly the way Estella has been groomed to wreak Miss Havisham’s revenge on men. By the end of the week. he says that when the person comes forward. Wemmick. Miss Havisham’s arm linked through Estella’s. Jaggers’s responsibilities will be finished. Estella stays with a widow named Mrs. Realizing that he might get a different answer at Walworth. As the three sit by the fire. He makes pleasant conversation with the Aged until he is surprised by tumbling wooden flaps marked “John. When they arrive.” which Wemmick has rigged to amuse his father. Though Pip had terminated his official lessons with Mr. Pip escapes into the courtyard for an hour. Pip can see no evidence of the harsh words exchanged between Estella and Miss Havisham. Pip. Pip lets in the man. After the man makes some strange comments about Pip’s appearance. hears a footstep on the stairs. Pip cannot sleep through the night. he asks Pip how he has come to his fortune and then begins to make correct guesses as to the logistics. When Estella is reproached. one by one. Herbert travels to Marseilles on business.to detach herself. the convict gleefully 37 . and asks his business. When. they remain on good terms. which says that she danced with him several times. 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. he has moved with Herbert the Temple. When Miss Havisham laments Estella’s inability to return her love.” (312) By the time Pip turns 23. Drummle mentions that he has been keeping company with a woman named Estella. Feeling threatened and confused by the convict’s outpouring of affection and appreciation. she accuses her guardian of making her proud and hard. and Pip remains interested in reading. Pip demands evidence. Pip realizes that he is staring at his convict. and the next day Drummle produces a note in Estella’s hand. clutching a candle. insisting that she should not associate with characters such as Drummle. and moaning quietly. at a meeting of the Finches of the Grove. overcome by a feeling of loneliness. As Pip braces himself with shock. finishing with Wemmick’s name. who looks about sixty. Pocket. Soon after. and when he returns. The convict explains that he has traveled the world and worked at many trades. She defends herself by explaining that she “deceives and entraps many others—all of them but you. a week after Pip’s birthday. Estella is seated at Miss Havisham’s knee. Disturbed. The next day and upon subsequent visits. Pip confronts Estella at a ball in Richmond. Estella insists again that all of her failings are the result of her being taught to turn against the daylight. and at two o’clock in the morning he awakes to find Miss Havisham walking around the house. one of the Inns of the court. Upset. as long as money can buy it. worried about footsteps on the stairs and the convict nearby. he tells the old woman and her niece to modify breakfast. The watchman says that he thought another person was with his uncle—a working person. Thinking sadly of Estella. who. He informs the watchman that the man who asked for him was his uncle and inquires after other unknown visitors. It is the effect of the original encounter that propels Magwitch back from across the world to Pip. the convict’s proud dissent upsets Pip. The storms and the shock install in Pip a profound sense of despair. When the convict awakens. though he was tried there most recently. suggesting that even love can be Pip’s. he tells Pip that his real name is Abel Magwitch. he locks the convict in his room and falls asleep in a chair. as binding as the convict’s shackles. As the clock strikes six in the morning Pip lights the fire. after confirming that his benefactor was indeed Abel Magwitch of New South Wales. and then goes to see Jaggers.relishes the fact that he has created a gentleman. says that he 38 . Pip secures a lodging house for his so-called uncle. and the task of keeping his benefactor away from the prying eyes of his old neighbor woman and her niece seems arduous. Pip concludes that he must offer the man lodging and that he’ll have to confide in Herbert. and that he would not advertise the fact that he had returned from Australia. shortly thereafter. Volume Three Pip is troubled by the thought of an unexpected visitor lurking outside on the stairs. Pip asks whether anyone else is responsible for his fortune. as his uncle had arrived during the night. wearing dustcolored clothes. but that he came to call himself Provis during his travels. Pip gives him Herbert’s room. He said that he hopes he is not known in London. 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. When the convict asks for a place to stay. although Provis insists upon studying Herbert’s physiognomy before disclosure. a man named Compeyson. moral distinctions between categories are forever blurred. Compeyson’s character was celebrated. says Morgenthaler. Pip returns home to find Magwitch drinking rum. This man. one evening Arthur. whom Magwitch met twenty years earlier. During his employment with Compeyson Magwitch was tried and convicted of misdemeanor. saw the woman coming toward him with a shroud. Then he allows that Wemmick received a letter from a colonist named Provis interested in Pip’s address. This admission. They decide that the only thing to do is to convince Magwitch to leave England. Compeyson’s other partner was a dying man named Arthur who lived upstairs. while Magwitch was 39 . Darwin’s idea of interdependence of all things. Since Wemmick is out. 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. Even after his clothes are replaced. was good-looking and educated. is the revelation of the fairy tale turns inside out—the happy ending is provided by a member of low society. Magwitch assures the two young men that he’ll always have a “gen-teel muzzle on. the convict still seems untamed and mysterious.doesn’t want to hear any more about the situation. he was discouraged and told that he would unlikely be granted a pardon. who was perpetually haunted by the image of a mad woman dressed all in white. 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. Magwitch sits down to tell the boys the story of his life. Jaggers says that when Magwitch gave a distant hint of wanting to return to England. After that disclosure. and he soon took in Magwitch to be his partner in swindling. and Herbert says that although he understands Pip’s impulse to separate himself from Magwitch’s funding and friendship. including mention of the other convict Pip encountered in the marshes. perhaps. soon after the two men were together tried for felony. proving. the conversation is terminated. At the trial.” (341) Herbert and Pip discuss the situation. and promptly died. With Pip’s revelation and Jaggers’s confirmation. the three men sit by the fire as Pip explains the entire situation. the surly. Miss Havisham and Estella are surprised to greet Pip. and begs Miss Havisham do the lasting service for Herbert that he himself began. Pip expresses disdain that she has misled Herbert and Matthew Pocket as well as himself. he sees Bentley Drummle. For this. after a series of trials and escapes. As Magwitch stands smoking by the fire. has brought the convict to live with the father of his intended. Clara. Barley. who replies in kind that she doesn’t understand such a thing. Before Pip leaves he thinks he spots Orlick. Herbert. 40 . when the time is right. and he tells them that he’s discovered the secret of his patronage. He is told he can find her at Satis house. He moves through the gate and toward London and finds a note from Wemmick awaiting him at the Temple. the two men became mortal enemies. After spending the night at a rooming house in Covent Garden.implicated. Miss Havisham says that she brought him to Satis house as she might have any other chance boy. and explains that she will never leave his heart. drunk Mr. and that her association with Jaggers has nothing to do with Pip’s expectations. Pip sets off to find Estella the next day.’ ” Fearful and vowing not to mention Estella to Provis. He then professes his love for Estella. instructed by Wemmick to hide Magwitch until a plan can be constructed for his safe escape. They meet and exchange tense pleasantries until a waiter informs Drummle that the lady will not ride. Herbert pencils in the cover of a book. “ ‘ Young Havisham’s name was Arthur. Herbert. In response to Pip’s query. and Magwitch construct a plan—they will take Magwitch down the river by boat. Herbert says that the housekeeper is happy to have the company of Magwitch upstairs from Clara’s father. Pip sets off for Walworth. Pip. Pip begs her to bestow herself at the very least on someone more worthy. She admits that she is to be married to Bentley Drummle. urging him not to go home. Compeyson is the man who professed to be Miss Havisham’s lover. Wemmick tells Pip that Compeyson is living in London. noisy. Pip leaves Wemmick—noting from the tea service the imminent arrival of Miss Skiffins—and finds Herbert at the house Wemmick indicated. and as he passes the Blue Boar for breakfast and to clean up. in fact. Wemmick says. When he greets his former neighbor afterwards. was female. He agrees. Wemmick says that many years earlier. he then gleefully mentions that “our friend the Spider” has won the contest of Estella’s heart. as both Molly and the murder victim were tramps. When Jaggers summons his housekeeper. It was a case of jealously. and Miss Havisham begs Pip to explain the history behind his secret partnership with Herbert. They sign papers on their agreement and Miss Havisham begs him to write under her name. Jaggers says over lunch that Miss Havisham wishes to settle a matter of business with Pip. “I 41 . She says that if she gives him the money—900 pounds—Pip must agree to keep her secret as she has kept his own.” (386) Pip returns home and holds council with Herbert by the fire.Weeks pass without change and Pip begins to realize that Estella is married. He keeps a nervous and distanced watch over Magwitch. the housekeeper was tried and acquitted for murder. After the meal Pip asks Wemmick if he has ever seen Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. When Wemmick says no. One evening Pip dines alone and then takes in a Christmas pantomime in which Wopsle is featured. “like a ghost. Wemmick says. Pip is shocked that Compeyson was behind him. Pip returns to Satis house. He begins rowing regularly. so as to establish himself and his boat as a presence on the river. insisting that the marks on her hands were not those of fingernails but brambles. describing him as one of the two convicts they found in the ditch many years earlier. Pip runs into Jaggers. she is doubtlessly Estella’s mother. Molly. Pip reminds him of the time he was instructed to take notice of Jaggers’s housekeeper. The sex of the child. Pip is surprised to notice that the hands and eyes of the housekeeper were so familiar. who invites him to lunch with Wemmick. but Jaggers argued against that. he is shocked when Wopsle indicates that he recognized a man to have been sitting behind Pip. He says that the woman was also under strong suspicion of having destroyed her three-year-old child as revenge upon the man. One day soon after. and she asks if there is nothing she might do to serve Pip as she has his friend. that. Pip sets off to notify the family personally. leaving Jaggers to infer that some information was imparted by Miss Havisham rather than by Wemmick. Jaggers is startled. Pip goes to Little Britain and makes the arrangements with Jaggers and Wemmick for Herbert’s future. from New South Wales. “What have I done!” Pip asks after Estella. Jaggers maps out the story for 42 . They part. taking stock of the places where he felt such childish hope and pain. Magwitch told Herbert that the woman was vengeful to the point of murder. He rushes in and attempting to smother the flames with his coat and his hands. A surgeon arrives and pronounces her wounds serious and her shock potentially more fatal. and Pip says he has seen Estella’s mother in the past three days. Jaggers abruptly changes the subject. and that though she was acquitted. Then Pip discloses all that he knows. knew Estella’s mother. the woman swore that she would destroy the child. Fearful that he would be the cause of the child’s death. and Pip implores Wemmick— invoking his pleasant home and aging father—to urge his superior to be more forthright. 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. and that he knows her father: Provis.” (398) Pip insists that he has forgiven her. 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. and Miss Havisham cries despairingly and repeatedly. Pip mentions that he engaged Miss Havisham in a discussion of Estella’s origins. Magwitch was reminded of the little girl. who is in Paris.forgive her. and Miss Havisham says that she doesn’t know whose child she was but that Jaggers brought her when she was two or three. Back at Barley’s house. unlike Miss Havisham. As he looks into the window. Magwitch hid himself. The surgeon promises to write to Estella. he seems Miss Havisham throw herself onto the fire. and Pip walks through the brewery. saying later that he. Herbert says that when Pip was seven and ran into Magwitch in the churchyard. he burns himself. and is captured. who represents the true criminal in Great Expectations. sniveling. Finding Pip nowhere they retired to the Blue Boar. he picks up a hammer. He calls out to see if anyone is nearby. and so they tried to find him at Miss Havisham’s. Moynahan argues.” (415) Pip settles Herbert’s affairs. Jaggers dismisses him. and uncomplaining Joe was. Pip shouts and struggles with all his might. When a client appears. stopping at Satis house to inquire after Miss Havisham. shortly thereafter. where he and Clara hope to live. He engages the landlord in a unwitting conversation about his own history. insisting “I’ll have no feelings here. they receive a post from Walworth which tells them the escape should be plotted for Wednesday. Orlick represents the 43 . with Pumblechook cited as his earliest benefactor. honest. and sees Orlick emerge from the struggle and run into the night. Pip receives an anonymous note which summons him to the old marshes in order to receive information about his uncle Provis. and then taking dinner in an inn. They work side by side. by Orlick. It is Herbert and Startop come to his rescue. Stopping first to drink. Jaggers returns once again to his work. 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. It is Orlick. he realizes how much of an impostor Pumblechook was. and they assure Pip that he has the next day to rest before the journey. As Pip listens. They say that in Pip’s haste he dropped the letter. walks in. and Herbert tells Pip that his career is progressing such that he might establish a branchhouse in Cairo. Pip leaves immediately. A few days later. for his origins are mysterious and he has no regret for any of his actions. he realizes. and how good. and in some ways. and heard from Trabb’s boy that Pip had been seen going in the direction of the sluice house. not Magwitch. Pip walks through the marshes and seeing a light in the old sluice house. Herbert suggests they engage Startop in the plan.Pip and asks for whose benefit the secret should be revealed. which Pip had often mentioned. hears voices. and they begin to construct a detailed scheme which provides for Pip’s injured hands. When Pip fails to provide an answer. and he is immediately placed in shackles. injured badly. Magwitch dives into the river to attack him. After a struggle. but then. Soon they hear a policeman call for the arrest of Abel Magwitch. “It was like my own marsh country. they want the same things. At Police Court the next day. They stop that night at a rundown inn. Pip is not bothered by news that his inheritance shall be appropriated by the state. and in many ways. dragging the boat up. They see a Rotterdam steamer that will take them away. 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. He claims that there had been a struggle underwater. but that he didn’t drown Compeyson—he simply disengaged and swam away. Pip notices the galley. On Saturday Pip returns to 44 . and with a dim horizon. only Magwitch surfaces. Herbert offers Pip a clerkship. he wants to take his life both literally and figuratively. the reader may be compelled to see Pip more harshly than Pip might ever see himself. That night Pip notices two men looking into their boat. Pip promises to stand by his benefactor. They set off and stop at Clara’s house for Magwitch. unites victim and criminal. he mentions the delights of freedom and compares life’s fleetingness and fluidity to the river’s. Jaggers is convinced Magwitch will be found guilty. When he confronts him in the sluice-house. Noticing the face of Compeyson onboard. As they begin to row. But with this parallel drawn. and Pip says that he must leave the question open for a little while. The next morning a bright sunrise inspires the men to begin their journey. At this time Herbert explains that he and Clara must leave for Cairo. in the early afternoon. and swallows people whole. and the landlord mentions a seeing a four-oared galley.” (438) Ghent argues that the river is one of the most prominent demonic symbols in Dickens—it unites classes. “flat and monotonous. and the next morning it is decided that Pip and Magwitch will set off early.” Pip thinks. Moynahan says. reveals evidence.shadow of Pip—they are both ambitious. who seems grateful and relaxed. including four thousand pounds to Matthew. and perhaps reminding some among the audience. In his abject state he begins hallucinating. One Sunday. and that she distributed her wealth among the Pockets.. how both were passing on. When words fail his benefactor. but I bow to yours. with the laws of the universe. the two take a little walk and find.his lonely home and finds Wemmick on the stairs. He asks if Pip will meet him at the Castle on Monday morning. 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. telling of Pip’s recovery. Though Jaggers put in an application for a trial postponement given the state of his client. “I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty. Pip tells him. to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err. Magwitch is found guilty and sentenced to death. that he knows of Magwitch’s child. and Pip promises not to mention a word of the festivities in Little Britain. inside a church. the 45 . which render futile both actions and attempts at interpretation. and his debt is so great that he is arrested and carried off to prison. seeing Miss Havisham and Orlick and finally Joe. and when he does. that she was still alive. and that he loves her.” (458) Pip falls ill himself after Magwitch’s death. Magwitch says. Miss Skiffins and a wedding party. Pip knows the end is near.. immediately before death. linking both together. Pip’s evolution is apparent in his observation of “the broad shaft of light . He also tells Pip Orlick was arrested and thrown into the county jail for robbing Pumblechook. In response. When Joe composes a note to Biddy. with absolute equality. Pip goes to visits the ailing Magwitch in prison. Pip finally snaps out of his feverish haze and realizes that Joe actually is sitting at his bedside. such as the law. Brooks argues that Magwitch’s statement before the court is Dickens way of contrasting human plots. The two are married.” (458) As the days wear on. Pip realizes that Biddy has taught Joe to write. having come to nurse him back to health. looking for him. Joe says that Miss Havisham died about a week after Pip took ill. she hopes. Pip’s emergence from brainfever finds him a child again—in the care of Joe. 1996. Penguin Classics. upon meeting Joe and Biddy.still-weak Pip and Joe go for an outing. Finally. In some ways. 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. Pip realizes that Joe is gone. Great Expectations. in better shape. After admitting to Biddy that he has not forgotten Estella. about her unhappy life and the news that her cruel husband. and Pip must address his lost innocence head on. As he continues to stroll pensively. readying for an auction. discovering. ed. He walks through the overgrown garden in the mist and thinks of Estella. Bentley Drummle. she has lost everything. Still. She declares herself greatly changed and admits that excluding the grounds. absolved of all his mistakes. Biddy insists that Pip must marry. and Pip tries to tell Joe the story of Magwitch—Joe. He returns to find Satis House in a state of disarray. She says that she has been bent and broken. he goes back to his old home. They take hands and walk out of the ruins together. Pip sells his few possessions and takes a partnership with Herbert. He has left only a note and a receipt indicating that he had paid all of Pip’s debt. Pip goes to revisit the site of Satis house one last time. Pip encounters Pumblechook. little by little. Upon rising the next morning. Estella’s figure appears in the distance. 46 . Work Cited Mitchell. Stopping at the Blue Boar. Charlotte. but that she is. but Pip tells her that he’s already an old bachelor. that he arrived on their wedding day. is not interested in revisiting painful memories. Returning to London. innocence is lost. Eleven years later he returns to Joe and Biddy. 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. who is very rude to him. however. and finds a young child—that they’ve named Pip— sitting before the hearth. died two years earlier. Mrs. She deliberately torments Pip all through for the fun of it. It is not surprising that the unfortunate Bentley Drummle. I should guess. * * * Of course Dickens with his imagination could invent amiable women by the dozen. We doubt whether he ever knew a little Dorrit. * * * It is not necessary to suggest a love affair. but somehow he could not or would not bring them to life as he brought the others. was separated from his wife and free to make more intimate acquaintances with women than a domesticated man can. is obliged to defend himself from her clever malice with his fists: a consolation to us 47 . In my youth it was commonly said that Dickens could not draw women. that Estella is a born tormentor. for Dickens could get from a passing glance a hint which he could expand into a fullgrown character. She is a much more elaborate study than Fanny. The point concerns us here only because it is the point on which the ending of Great Expectations turns: namely.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.1 Gissing put a stop to that by asking whether shrews like Mrs. fools like Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Finching. were not masterpieces of woman drawing. warped spinsters like Rosa Dartle and Miss Wade.2 And they are all unamiable. So is Estella. when he let himself go in Great Expectations. Gargery. 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. but Fanny Dorrit3 is from the life unmistakably. and thinking of them as ridiculous idealizations of their sex. Mrs. and. a recent one. Macstinger. The people who said this were thinking of Agnes Wickfield and Esther Summerson. Raddle. Dickens. whom she marries in the stupidity of sheer perversity. of Little Dorrit and Florence Dombey. the tragedy of Great Expectations will lose some of its appeal. for the real Estellas can usually intimidate the real Bentley Drummles. In it he does not muddle himself with the ridiculous plots that appear like vestiges of the stone age in many of his books. whereas to the genteel Dickens being a warehouse boy was an unbearable comedown. a trace of the old plot superstition in Estella turning out to be Magwitch’s daughter. There is. Wells. Wells’s father an incongruous means of livelihood in the shape of a small shop. 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. 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.for Pip’s broken heart. from Oliver Twist to the end. I cannot help speculating on whether if Dickens had not killed himself prematurely to pile up money for that excessive family of his. The story is built round a single and simple catastrophe: the revelation to Pip of the source of his great expectations. At all events the final sugary suggestion of Estella redeemed by Bentley’s thrashings and waste of her money. Compare the case of H. Wells hated being a draper’s assistant as much as Dickens hated being a warehouse boy. but it provides a touchingly happy ending for that heroic Warmint. shopkeeping did not present itself to the young Wells as beneath him. and did not blame his mother for regarding it as the summit of her ambition for him. most justly. and living happily with Pip for ever after. he might not have reached a stage at which he could have got as much fun out of the blacking bottles as Mr. Still. our nearest to a twentieth-century Dickens. 48 .4 Apart from this the story is the most perfect of Dickens’s works. Wells got out of his abhorred draper’s counter. but he was not in the least ashamed of it.5 Fate having imposed on that engaging cricketer Mr. but not altogether a credible one. provoked even Dickens’s eldest son to rebel against it. it is true.G. for in it he never raises the question why Pip should refuse Magwitch’s endowment and shrink from him with such inhuman loathing. 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. Magwitch no doubt was a Warmint from the point of view of the genteel Dickens family and even from his own. but Pip never prays. 6 Inspired by an altogether noble fixed idea. and church means nothing to him but Mr. Wopsle’s orotundity. has no culture and no religion. The basic truth of the situation is that Pip. good or bad. but his creator says no word in criticism of that ephemeral limitation. when Pip tells a monstrous string of lies about Miss Havisham. and his conduct. 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. If all that came of sponging on Miss Havisham (as he thought) was the privilege of being one of the Finches of the Grove. but Victor Hugo would have made him a magnificent hero. and there is no prevision of it in Great Expectations. he need not have felt his dependence on Magwitch to be incompatible with his entirely baseless self-respect. who has gentility but neither culture nor religion. In this he resembles David Copperfield. another Valjean. It is curious that this should not have occurred to Dickens. advises him to say a repentant word about it in his prayers. at least he had a better claim to be a parasite on Magwitch’s earnings than. Pip’s world is therefore a very melancholy place. His feeling is true to the nature of snobbery. If Pip had no objection to be a parasite instead of an honest blacksmith.Dickens never reached that stage. like his creator. for nothing could exceed the bitterness of his exposure of the futility of Pip’s parasitism. on Miss Havisham’s property. This is why Dickens worked against so black a background after he was roused from his ignorant middle-class cheery optimism by Carlyle. 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. Joe Gargery. * * * [B]ut at least he preserved his intellectual 49 . as he imagined. always helpless. Raddle: vitriolic landlady in Pickwick Papers. Mrs. in adversity. Wells (1866–1946). 2. Mrs. popular histories. Wells—no Trabb’s boy—loathed his job and ran away at sixteen to become an usher—a teaching assistant. hell-bent on a second marriage. Polly). who marries into the Merdle plutocracy. Notes 1. and hysterics. Miss Wade: a head-strong young woman in Little Dorrit. in love with the voluptuary son of the house. after his father. termagants. Wells free-associated drapery with the tuxedos and tailcoats of the very rich who passed in front of the shop. in prosperity. spurns her for not being a male and. As Shaw suggests. Little Dorrit’s go-getting older sister. which has been determined by the past. “Almost as unquestioning as her belief in Our Father and Our Saviour was her belief in drapers. began life as a draper’s apprentice at thirteen. see also p. and novels about lower-middle-class life (Kipps. 500 in the original text. David’s tutelary angel and second wife—Orwell calls her “the real legless angel of Victorian romance. In his introduction to the novel in the Macmillan Edition (1904).” Little Dorrit: the self-sacrificing heroine of the novel named for her. chapter 21) is often cited as evidence of Dickens’s grasp of abnormal types. 3. Assorted shrews. who is born and raised in debtors’ prison and continues to hover as ministering angel over her family after their release. 4. The true causation. Mr. founded on the preposterous error as to causation in which the future is determined by the present. Dickens’s sentimental heroines: Agnes Wickfield: daughter of the Canterbury solicitor with whom David Copperfield boards while at school. a shopkeeper and part-time professional cricketer. Tono Bungay. Mrs. 50 . is always the incessant irresistible activity of the evolutionary appetite. Mrs. given to nonstop twaddle. per Wells himself. Rosa Dartle: the repressed and masochistic house-companion in David Copperfield. For his judgment on the conclusion of Great Expectations. whose “History of a Self-Tormentor” (book 2. H.innocence sufficiently to escape the dismal pseudo-scientific fatalism that was descending on the world in his latter days. whose father.G.” As Shaw also suggests. comes to depend on her samaritan surveillance. Nickleby: the hero’s mother. was crippled in an accident and his mother had to abandon the Wells’s failing china shop to work as a housekeeper. Macstinger: imperious widow in Dombey and Son. Florence Dombey: the humiliated daughter of the purseproud Dombey clan. the prolific author of science fiction. of course. 5. the repugnance with which I shrank from him. The money is not the product of a crime. this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorised by Magwitch in the churchyard. the central figure in Victor Hugo’s novel of social repression Les Misérables (1862). probably. 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. throughout this part of the book one feels “Yes. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and. Dickens identifies with Pip. GEORGE ORWELL ON MAGWITCH AND THE PANTOMIME OF THE WICKED UNCLE * * * Dickens * * * shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him. the dread I had of him. that is just how Pip would have behaved. but it is an ex-convict’s money and therefore “tainted”.” But the point is that in the matter of Magwitch. either. it has been honestly acquired. etc. When he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict. it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. “The abhorrence in which I held the man. could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast”. 51 . 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. Don Quixote—characters who are more pathetic than the author intended. etc.6. he falls into frenzies of disgust. and his attitude is at bottom snobbish. but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. Jean Valjean. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe. So far as one can discover from the text. * * * As soon as he comes up against crime or the worst depths of poverty. There is nothing psychologically false in this. Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did. The escaped convict. but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. may think himself comfortable and safe. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. There is a good example of this in the opening chapter of Great Expectations. Dickens’s most successful books (not his best books) are The Pickwick Papers. as you may think I am. which is not a novel.( . 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. There’s a young man hid with me. and went on in these fearful terms: “You bring me. may be warm in bed. which are not funny. The scene starts terrifyingly enough. I ain’t alone. roasted and ate. Magwitch. Now. from Pip’s point of view. may tuck himself up. because the burlesque which he is never able to resist is constantly breaking into what ought to be serious situations. at that old Battery over yonder. smothered in mud and with his chain trailing from his leg. I am keeping that young man from harming you at the present 52 . grabs the child. tomorrow morning early. suddenly starts up among the tombs. of getting at a boy. and at his heart. and your heart and liver shall be tore out. That young man hears the words I speak. and at his liver. ) Significantly. no matter how small it is. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself. and Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities. and you shall be let to live. A boy may lock his door. turns him upside down and robs his pockets. You fail. The convict. in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. You bring the lot to me. or you go from my words in any partickler. may draw the clothes over his head... and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me. As a novelist his natural fertility greatly hampers him. or any person sumever. has just captured the six-yearold Pip in the churchyard. You do it. that file and them wittles. The picturesque details were too good to be left out. and buy five thousand doubleGloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each. Even with characters who are more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some seductive phrase.] 53 . what do you say?” Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. the double-Gloucester cheeses. As usual.3 But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone. but wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently. He is all fragments. Chapter 4: the “appalling sums” Murdstone forces him to learn. and his exaggerated gratitude. present payment. because Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. [Editor. Murdstone. “If I go into a cheesemonger’s shop. Not that it matters very much. Every time this note is struck. or. if one sees him through the child’s eyes. he would have made it five thousand cashboxes. is in the habit of ending David Copperfield’s lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic. but with great difficulty.” it always begins. all details—rotten architecture. Moreover. into an appalling monster. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Dickens’s imagination has overwhelmed him. Mr. Note 3. Later in the book he is to be represented as neither. is to be incredible because of just this speech. no starving and hunted man would speak in the least like that.moment. It turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle. although the speech shows a remarkable knowledge of the way in which a child’s mind works. the unity of the novel suffers. Once again the typical Dickens detail. Now. To begin with. for instance. on which the plot turns. its actual words are quite out of tune with what is to follow. but clearly the parentless protagonist frees an author from struggle with preexisting authorities. He thus profits from what Gide called the “lawlessness” of the novel1 by starting with an undefined. As in so many nineteenth-century novels. and superseded in the first paragraph. The process of reading that text is described by Pip the narrator as “unreasonable. For what the novel chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search for a beginning. not least of all for its beginning. and indeed necessarily in search of plot.” 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 . condensed. apparently unauthored. thus undetermined by any visible inheritance. of entry into language) could only make of the name. a speechless tongue: a catachresis that points to a moment of emergence.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. Philip Pirrip. the names that have already been displaced. left to him by the dead parents. the hero is an orphan. Dickens begins as it were with a life that is for the moment precedent to plot. 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. * * * There may be sociological and sentimental reasons to account for the high incidence of orphans in the nineteenth-century novel. “So. allowing him to create afresh all the determinants of plot within his text. I called myself Pip. rule-free character and then bringing the law to bear upon him—creating the rules—as the text proceeds. and came to be called Pip” (chapter 1). With Pip. the monosyllabic Pip. The “authority” to which Pip refers here is that of the tombstone which bears the names of his dead parents. where Pip describes how his “infant tongue” (literally. 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. was Pip. with scattered cattle feeding on it. Tobias. as aware of his existence through the emotion of fear. were dead and buried. (chapter 1) The repeated verbs of existence—“was” and “were”—perform an elementary phenomenology of Pip’s world.. 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. was the marshes. and the problematic of identity are bound up here in ways we will further explore later on. “Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice. and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing. the father-to-be. alien.name—which he has already distorted in its application to self— involves a misguided attempt to remotivate the graphic symbol. and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry. or articulated sound. was the sea—..3 the moment in which his consciousness seizes his existence as other. Loss of origin. infant children of the aforesaid. and that Philip Pirrip. late of this parish. wife of the above. and that Alexander. Bartholomew. locating its irreducible objects and leading finally to the individual subject as other. as Pip begins to cry: a cry that is immediately censored by the command of the convict Magwitch. that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard. and also Georgiana. and that the low leaden line beyond was the river.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. the fearful intrusive figure of future authorship who will demand of 55 . were also dead and buried. mimetic specifically of origin. The question of reading and writing—of learning to compose and to decipher texts—is persistently thematized in the novel. and Roger. At such a time I found out for certain. Abraham. and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard. fear that then appears as the origin of voice. to make it directly mimetic.. misreading. intersected with dykes and mounds and gates. ( .8 If we acknowledge Pip’s experience of and with Magwitch to be the central energy of the text. as he will discover only two-thirds of the way through the novel.Pip: “Give us your name. with its flat tone and refusal of romantic expectation. and find that the revision. 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. it is significant that the climax of this experience. Pip will in the first part of the novel be in search of a plot. 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. and the novel will recount the gradual precipitation of a sense of plot around him. The pages that follow may simply be obiter dicta. of that first recapture of Magwitch already repeated in Mr. Wopsle’s theatrical vision: 56 . Alien. at the point of entry into the language code and the social systems it implies. bears traces of a hallucinatory repetition of the childhood spell—indeed.. the moment of crisis and reversal in the attempted escape from England. as celibate clerk for Clarrikers. the creation of portents of direction and intention. unauthorized. with its tentative promise of reunion between Pip and Estella. self-named. “unbinds” energies that we thought had been thoroughly bound and indeed discharged from the text. it is important to note how this beginning establishes Pip as an existence without a plot. ) 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. at the very moment of occurrence of that event which will prove to be decisive for the plotting of his existence.” * * * For purposes of my study of plot.. the final effort to master painful material from the insistent past. She is living now. but possibly also a last effort at self-delusion: “You had a child once. whom you loved and lost. She is a lady and very beautiful. Pip emerges from this scene with an acceptance of the determinative past as both determinative and as past. Pip’s stated resolution has none of the compulsive energetic force of the passage just quoted. (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. I saw the steersman of the galley lay his hand on the prisoner’s shoulder. Still in the same moment. of course. I saw that the face disclosed was the face of the other convict of long ago. 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. and saw that both boats were swinging round with the force of the tide. to console the dying Magwitch. It is interesting to note that where the “dream” plot of Estella is concerned. but is rather a conventional romantic fairy-tale ending. which prepares us for the final escape from plot. She lived and found powerful friends. and saw that all hands on board the steamer were running forward quite frantically.In the same moment.. and felt the boat sink from under me.. hence the disappearance from the novel of its most energetic plotters—it is resolution in the register of repetition and working through. an unbinding that is indeed perceptible in the rather embarrassed prose with which the revision begins: “Nevertheless. I saw the prisoner start up. a conscious fiction designed. Still in the same moment.. Still in the same moment. and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the galley. I knew while I said 57 . and heard a great cry on board the steamer and a loud splash in the water. And I love her!” (chapter 56). lean across his captor. I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that I shall never forget. chapter 3). been cured of it: life that is left over. most famously in The Counterfeiters (1925). “I think” (Latin).] 58 . By hitching an English (or any other modern) noun. Gide’s alter ego expresses his opinion—by now. of movement and desire. pronoun. “‘Reading’ in Great Expectations. the most lawless” (Gide uses the English word).” [Editor. [Editor. even so. a commonplace—that “of all literary genres.” PMLA 91. the unbinding of energy that has been bound and led to discharge. no. On the theme of reading in the novel. 259–65.] 2. 2 (1976). 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. that the novel most appropriately leaves us. or article to the verb.these words. any new aspirations. the novel remains the freest. It is with the image of a life bereft of plot. Yes. renounced plot. For Gide the behaviour and function of the characters reveal themselves by trial and error. “things said in passing. the writer arrives at some such meaning as “awareness” or the cognate “cogitation. For Estella’s sake” (chapter 59). for her sake. that I secretly intended to revisit the site of the old house that evening alone. “Edouard Explains His Theory of the Novel” (part 2. thanks largely to Gide.] 8. André Gide (1869–1951) preached and practiced the subversion of conventional plot constructions and character definitions in nearly all of his later works. What follows the recognition of Magwitch is left over. Notes 1. 3. 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. 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. and any renewal of expectation and plotting—such as a revived romance with Estella—would have to belong to another story. see Max Byrd. Literally. the undoing of anything already done. In the central chapter of The Counterfeiters to which Brooks refers.” [Editor. 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. “We’re just a happy family. which makes no bones about people being “things.”) The heir of the “century of progress” is the twentiethcentury concentration camp. while the human engines of its welfare groveled and bred in the foxholes described by Marx in his Capital. women. under the gross and transparent lie that its activity is its happiness. DICKENS’S USE OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY. correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men. and children by the millions—a process brought about by industrialization. with their common formula. as well as of totalitarian strategists.DOROTHY VAN GHENT ON THE CENTURY OF PROGRESS. and he sought an extraordinary explanation for it.” For though the scene is a potent symbol of childish experience of adult obtuseness and sadism. colonial imperialism. and things (the things that money can buy or that are the means for 59 . 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. 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. sitting in her satin and floral decay in the house called Satis. a process which abrogated the primary demands of human feeling and rationality. its welfare and fun and “play”—a publicity instrument that is the favorite of manufacturers and insurance agencies.” Dickens’ intuition alarmingly saw this process in motion. 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. People were becoming things. points her finger at the child and outrageously tells him to “play. 5 (Hauntingly we see this discordance in the scene in Great Expectations where Miss Havisham. Even a meek little muffin has to be “confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover. and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner. metaphysical order can be established only if we think of things as turning themselves into people. demands constant attention and the greatest quickness of eye and hand to catch it neatly as it tumbles off. looking down through the skylight of Jaggers’ office in London. People were being deanimated. have felt out and imitated. This picture. 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. 60 . and another into the doorway. where Pip goes to spend the night. and the saying illustrates the malicious sensibility with which things.” and a hat. in their relationship with each other and with people. set on a mantelpiece. was a picture of a daemonically motivated world. in Dickens. acting under a “dark” drive similar to that which motivates the human aberration.making money or for exalting prestige in the abstract) were becoming more important than people. twist themselves in order to spy on Pip like police agents who presuppose guilt. A four-poster bed in an inn. but its ingenuity is such that it finally manages to fall into the slop basin. There is an old belief that it takes a demon to recognize a demon. 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. and things were usurping the prerogatives of animate creatures—governing the lives of their owners in the most literal sense. Houses. the secret of the human arrangement. in which the qualities of things and people were reversed. robbed of their souls. putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace. is a despotic monster that straddles over the whole room. where a mechanical appearance of smiling is required of him. 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. The device is not used arbitrarily or capriciously. 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. the atoms of the physical 61 . like Jaggers’ huge forefinger which he bites and then plunges menacingly at the accused. And as Wemmick’s job has mechanized him into a grinning slot. and his huge forefinger. or by such an exaggeration of or emphasis on one part of their appearance that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part. whose subject is the etiology of guilt and of atonement. as humanity has leaked out of it.Dickens’ fairly constant use of the pathetic fallacy6 (the projection of human impulses and feelings upon the nonhuman. Dickens’ devices for producing this transposition of attributes are various. or Wemmick’s post-office mouth. 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. is the Law’s mystery in all its fearful impersonality. * * * 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. 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. * * * Through the changes that have come about in the human. which is profoundly mysterious in a world of dissociated and apparently lawless fragments. In this book. so oppression and fear have given the convict Magwitch a clockwork apparatus for vocal chords. or the clockwork apparatus in Magwitch’s throat that clicks as if it were going to strike. Jaggers is the representative not only of civil law but of universal Law. with its own obscure daemonic motivation. standing waiting for Estella in the neighborhood of Newgate. 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. it leaves him to fulfill the more subtle spiritual destiny upon which he has begun to enter. though it fatally injures Magwitch. that “shameful place.universe have become subtly impregnated with daemonic aptitude. Pip. * * * What brings the Convict Magwitch to the child Pip. while. closely and apprehensively observed. it swallows Compeyson. Pip (or let us say 62 .” “all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam. it may throw the murderer and his victim in an embrace. honeycombed stone. 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. green dank deposit. Upon the river. drowning people as if by intent. deeds and the results of deeds. is more than the convict’s hunger. is one of the most memorable in Dickens. disgorging unforeseen evidence. rubbed off on him from the environs. because it establishes itself so readily to the imagination as a daemonic element. and he tries to beat it out of his clothes. public persons and private persons. 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 is perhaps the most constant and effective symbol in Dickens. rotten wood. At the end of Great Expectations. Smithfield. The river has a malignant potentiality that impregnates everything upon it—discolored copper. chemically or physically changing all it touches. in the graveyard. The river scene in this section. one cannot escape its action. however fragmentized and separated.” seems to “stick to him” when he enters it on his way to the prison. and smothered in mud. so that blind nature collaborates daemonically in the drama of reprisal—is deep and valid in this book. What brings Magwitch across the “great gulfs” of the Atlantic to Pip again. as binding as the convict’s leg iron which is its recurrent symbol. The inversion of natural order begins here with first selfconsciousness: the child is heir to the sins of the “fathers.” for Pip is an Everyman) carries the convict inside him.” nor as that of some public institution. and that the apparition presents itself to a child is as much as to say that every child. 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 apparition is that of all suffering that the earth can inflict. is their profoundly implicit compact of guilt. and stung by nettles. whatever his innocence. the mysterious warnings of his approach on the night of his reappearance. as the negative potential of his “great expectations”—Magwitch is the concretion of his potential guilt. inherits guilt (as the potential of his acts) for the condition of man. the concreteness of the effect of the act not only upon the conceiving heart but upon the atoms of physical matter. that is. The multiplying likenesses in the street as Magwitch draws nearer. in a world literally turned upside down. * * * Pip first becomes aware of the “identity of things” as he is held suspended heels over head by the convict. at the moment of revelation in the story.simply “the child. coming over the sea. external or in thought. and cut by flints. public or private.” Thus the crime that is always pervasive in the Dickens universe is identified in a new way—not primarily as that of the “father. and lamed by stones. 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. but as that of the child— 63 . Thenceforth Pip’s interior landscape is inverted by his guilty knowledge of this man “who had been soaked in water. and torn by briars. ” Magwitch—to murder in the socially chronic fashion of the Dickens world. as if he were a thing. But the “relative” whom Pip. Joe but his “father. The guilt of the child is realized on several levels. for the world’s guilt is his guilt. and snobbery is a denial of the human value of others. but we see this Everyman as he 64 . Joe and Pumblechook and Wopsle—as if he were a felon. At the literal level. and it is this leg iron. Pip’s guilt is that of murder. Joe. for he steals the file with which the convict rids himself of his leg iron. The child is the criminal.the original individual who must necessarily take upon himself responsibility for not only what is to be done in the present and the future. Pip is. destined to murder is not Mrs. like George Barnwell. lurid accusatory texts. He is treated. Pip experiences the psychological form (or feeling) of guilt before he is capable of voluntary evil. which consists in the dehumanization of the weak. but what has been done in the past. so that the child does inevitably overtake his destiny. Joe is attacked) wanting only to murder his nearest relative. adopting the venerable criminality of society. they are able to feel virtuous and great. in the widest symbolic scope of intention. after all. manipulable by adults for the extraction of certain sensations: by making him feel guilty and diminished. as George Barnwell murdered his uncle. inasmuch as the past is part and parcel of the present and the future. Symbolically. he is treated by adults—Mrs. and he can expiate it in his own acts. which was. with which Orlick attacks Mrs. fetters like sausages. 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. to murder his nearest relative. picked up on the marshes. however. the ordinary mixed human being. This is the usual nightmare of the child in Dickens. one more Everyman in the long succession of them that literature has represented. a young George Barnwell (a character in the play which Wopsle reads on the night when Mrs. is. a vision of imminent incarceration. and it is for this reason that he is able to redeem his world. that is. or in moral acquiescence to such murder. Pip’s guilt is that of snobbery toward Joe Gargery. These are the possibilities that are projected in the opening scene of the book. specifically a protection against hair oil (imported from the Indonesian seaport Makassar). when the young child. chapter 12 (1856). toward the black marshes. the search for a superabundance of love and the drive for power. citing the Public Health Reports for 1865–66. But Pip’s ambition is passive. attacks the appalling living conditions of English workingmen. book 1. 5. 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.develops from a child. 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. watches the convict limping off under an angry red sky. Coverlets draped over the backs of chairs and sofas to keep them from soilure. See esp. He only becomes active and aggressive after he has ceased to be ambitious. the gibbet. volume 3. Notes 4. JULIAN MOYNAHAN ON PIP’S AGGRESSIVE AMBITION AND THE DARK DOUBLES ORLICK AND DRUMMLE In Great Expectations. As a formal term in literary criticism. that is. part 4. the phrase first appears in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters. and the savage lair of the sea. How then does 65 . as in its legendary prototypes. section 5. and his destiny is directed by the ideals of his world—toward “great expectations” which involve the making of Magwitches—which involve. in a still rotating landscape. in which Marx. murder. 6. the theme of ambition is treated under the two aspects of desire and will. left with a burden on his soul. chapter 25. yet simultaneously presents through patterns of analogy a dramatic perspective in which the apparent opposites are unified.. has 66 . And Orlick is bound to the hero by ties of analogy as double. We are dealing here with an art which simultaneously disguises and reveals its deepest implications of meaning. the evidence of his ‘viciousness’ if you will. is embodied in the story in a number of ways. Pip tells us over and over again that he feels contaminated by crime. The evidence for the hero’s powerdrive against the authority-figures. The only clue to this unity which is given at the surface level of the narrative is Pip’s obsession of criminal guilt. Orlick. ( . 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. with a method which apparently dissociates its thematic materials and its subject matter into moral fable-cummelodramatic accompaniment. ) 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. Ambition as the instinct of aggression.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. alter ego and dark mirror-image. as the pitiless drive for power directed against what we have called authority-figures is both coalesced and disguised in the figure of Orlick.. 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. 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. thus far. He is not accident-prone. Mrs. Pip has the motive of revenge—a lifetime of brutal beatings and scrubbings inflicted by his sister—but Orlick. 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. or at all events that as her near 67 . humiliated. her approving and hypocritical relation by marriage. He continues to be important in any attempt to set forth the complete case. or authority-figure to Pip the boy or Pip the man. and Pumblechook. Joe after she has provoked a quarrel between him and his master. is a very dangerous young man. patroness. Joe. receive their punishment from the hands of Orlick. Mrs. Joe hurts Pip and is hurt in turn by Orlick. judged on the basis of what happens to many of the characters closely associated with him. All are punished. * * * We might begin with the apparently cynical remark that Pip. All of these characters. Estella is exposed through her rash marriage to vaguely specified tortures at the hands of her brutal husband. with the exception of Estella. Mrs. stand at one time or another in the relation of patron.been the figure whose implicit relations to the hero have constituted the chief clue to the darker meaning of Pip’s career. Joe is bludgeoned. including Estella. Drummle. bludgeons Mrs. the cruel foster-mother. Let us group these individual instances. a journeyman who does not even lodge with the Gargerys. but a great number of people who move into his orbit decidedly are. or thwarted Pip in some important way. Pumblechook has his house looted and his mouth stuffed with flowering annuals by a gang of thieves led by Orlick. * * * Furthermore. but there are also some significant correlations to be made in which he does not figure. I was at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister. all of these characters. Miss Havisham goes up in flames. All in some way have stood between him and the attainment of the full measure of his desires. have hurt. is a criminal psychopath. With regard to Pumblechook’s chastisement. Estella receives her chastisement at the hands of Bentley Drummle. Orlick’s end is missing from the book. Drummle. like Orlick. as an aspect of the hero’s own far more problematic case. he escapes with a relatively light wound. Pumblechook’s punishment is nicely proportioned to his nuisance value for Pip. and Drummle demonstrates how deserving he is of this distinction when he tries to brain the harmless Startop with a heavy tumbler. it can be shown that Drummle stands in precisely the same analogical relationship to Pip as Orlick does. essentially. the most striking feature is not that Orlick should break into a house. popularly known to be under obligations to her. 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. But the most impressive evidence that Orlick and Drummle are functional equivalents is supplied by the concrete 68 . His case needs no final disposition because he has only existed. How does this fit into the pattern we have been exploring? In the first place. Why not Trabb’s? One answer might be that Trabb has never stood in Pip’s light.relation. a connoisseur of criminal types. we are never told that Pip reported Orlick’s murderous assault on him or his confessions of his assault on Mrs. treats Drummle as ‘one of the true sort’. Despite the fact that there is enough accumulated evidence to hang him. Joe to the police. it seems that Orlick simply evaporates into thin air after his punitive role has been performed. Actually. Although we are told near the end of the novel that Orlick was caught and jailed after the burglary. but that he should break into Pumblechook’s house. 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. At Jaggers’s dinner party the host. Since he has never succeeded in doing him any great harm with his petty slanders. 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 money stands for both the biological and the material aspects of Pip’s love for Estella. I’ve put away money only for you to spend” (GE p. nor yet separate her from “the innermost life of my life” (GE. money substitutes for semen as the stuff out of which life is created. This is. the plot of hidden identity is fundamentally opposed to Darwinism. In the same way. Pip. the conception of time as moving in one direction only—into the future—rather than being a reanimation of the past.12 Great Expectations may appear to be a fairy tale. the source of Pip’s money.. The infusion of Magwitch’s money into Pip’s young life creates a relationship analogous to paternity. the plot of Dickens’s early novel Oliver Twist.. 257). but it is a fairy tale turned inside-out. In fact. the idea of adaptation. this plot depicts the lower-class hero as belonging biologically to a higher station than the one to which circumstances have assigned him. and. Traditionally. You’re my son . money— that most equivocal of external factors.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. Jaggers refers to Magwitch as the fountainhead. Magwitch himself makes the point: “Look’ee here. of what is fit and not fit. Heredity has been discarded. As Gillian Beer points out. 337). in fact. and the one most commonly associated with metaphors of breeding—has taken its place as a determinant of human identity.11 In this father–son relationship. p. finally. The novel is essentially a Cinderella story in which the fairy godmother turns out to be a convict. and therefore the generating force behind his birth as a gentleman. one of the novel’s most obvious intentions is to overturn the fairy-tale plot of hidden identity. which insists on the opposite—that all human 72 . I’m your second father. Pip writes that he cannot dissociate Estella from all his hankerings after money and gentility. nor is it exclusively associated with crime. But this reassessment goes beyond Pip’s discovery that his sudden wealth allies him to the underworld rather than to the aristocracy. neither is it Manichaean to quite the same 73 . Magwitch belongs to the underclass of the underworld. which had previously been a major preoccupation in all of Dickens’s fiction. no matter how advanced they may think themselves to be. by overturning the plot of hidden identity. is no longer simply black in this novel. While the world of Great Expectations is not totally amoral. but the fortune he makes Down Under will support Pip at the topmost reaches of the social scale. who sin in their hearts rather than in their deeds. 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. Great Expectations maintains that the upper-class world of the gentleman is implicated in the criminal domain of the underclass. among other things. That class is here presented as more important for the base position it occupies in society than for its anti-social behavior. share the same lowly animal origins. There is a concomitant reassessment of the very nature of that underworld and its relationship to the rest of society. the concept of criminality has here been generalized to include such flawed beings as Pip himself. In fact. Evil. because it bases its demonstration of the inherent kinship between human beings on the interrelationship between the criminal world and its noncriminal counterparts. is redolent of complicity and interdependence. Because its emphasis is on the social position of the convict rather than on his criminality. a meditation on the low.beings. This makes Great Expectations. Where Oliver Twist defines the genteel and the criminal spheres as distinct. Great Expectations constitutes a reassessment of Oliver Twist. contrary. far from being mutually exclusive. Great Expectations neutralizes the moral dimension of crime. and antithetical.13 Thus. as is the natural world in The Origin of Species. and that the relationship between the two. This interrelationship results in a redefinition of the manner in which Dickens depicts the criminal class in this novel. . the moral distinctions between categories of behavior have become blurred and overlapping. In fact. 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. 246). It is he who recognizes Magwitch as a “poor miserable fellow-creatur” (GE.. “I’m wrong in these clothes. the kitchen. p. of not having adapted to one’s environment. He says. he is also its embodiment of the affective ideal in human nature. The same is also true of Joe. p. The idea of not fitting. and therefore cheating and distorting the next generation—as Miss Havisham does to Estella—owes something to Darwinism. he is clumsy on stairs. He is uncomfortable in anything but his work clothes. and this includes all the conventions associated with “polite” society. or off th’ meshes” (GE. lies in her being against Nature. 411).extent as in the earlier novels. Nor is Miss Havisham the only character who is not well adapted to her surroundings. although in his case. Yet Joe is not merely the novel’s symbol of the natural man. the more 74 . Her brooding solitary mind has grown diseased. in her trying to shut out the sun and secluding herself “from a thousand natural and healing influences” (GE. Pip tells us. Miss Havisham’s crime. we are told. Dickens introduces the notion of adaptation or fitness. ) In another echo of Darwinism. p. And he is uncomfortable anywhere out of his natural element—the country and the forge. The city—that ultimate symbol of human civilization—is his nemesis. Clothes provide the most obvious example of Joe’s inability to cope with civilization. p. 71). I’m wrong out of the forge. ( . he learns to read only with difficulty. Joe and Magwitch may legitimately be viewed as substitutes for one another. Instead. 411). Pip’s brother-in-law. His boots are too big. Joe is a natural in the sense that any form of behavior which forces him away from his essential nature is uncomfortable to him. it depends on the surroundings. in A Tale of Two Cities. a reiteration and reenactment in other terms of previous injustices. It cannot save Pip from the harshness of his sister’s upbringing. Pause you who read this. and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold. This is a statement of both randomness and inevitability. And Pip is ashamed to be connected to both of them. ( . a substitution of one class by another. and it cannot serve Pip as a model for getting along in a world which is more complicated than mere goodness will allow for. 101). and what occurs after that day will never resemble what went before. ) To illustrate this new attitude toward time.. and while this is generally defined as a good. for instance. and think how different its course would have been. A single chance day may unavoidably alter the course of a lifetime. Joe’s love for Pip is more truly selfless. Dickens evokes the metaphor of a chain: “That was a memorable day to me. it is the same with any life. but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day” (GE. Both Joe and Magwitch are men who act with their hearts. Even the altruism of Magwitch’s love for Pip is complicated by his wish to “own” a gentleman. Imagine one selected day struck out of it. p. 75 . that would never have bound you. This is a decidedly different conception of time from that which pertained. 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. but it is also inept. With Magwitch the ambivalence is built into the ambiguities of the plot—the man is a thief and a convict. But.. where so momentous a historical event as the French Revolution was described as essentially a roll-over. without consequences for change in the future. Here the past is equated with fate.so since both are surrogate fathers to Pip. there is also something to be said against such behavior. of thorns or flowers. for it made great changes in me. MORRIS ON NARRATION AND PIP’S MORAL BAD FAITH The problem of Pip’s moral bad faith. we accept without question that this conscience is functioning within an autonomous. in turn. but I do hope to show the existence of fundamental contradictions in the novel. After a discussion of the general relation between narration and bad faith. Another example of this kind of conflation can be found in the Victorian euphemism for orgasm. the allusions Pip makes as narrator. 79. both in his actions and in his narrative assessment of his past conduct. achieved. 63. The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House.” 13. has long troubled critics. And yet analysis of the varnished side of Great Expectations shows that it is precisely these assumptions that have been called into question. created self. 12. 76 . is probably the most famous and influential conflation of biological notions with financial ones. “spending. Hillis Miller calls “varnishing.” that is.Notes 11. continuous. and the letters sent in the novel. even in the very attempt to establish Pip’s conscience as a center. 1962). Aristotle’s condemnation of usury in his Politics as unnatural breeding “because the offspring resembles the parent. the novel’s famous opening. p. I examine. even about his self. All references to Dickens’s novels are to the Penguin editions and will be cited parenthetically in the text. The polemical connotations of “deconstruction” are nothing to the purpose here. Beer. CHRISTOPHER D. aporia whose logical reconciliation seems impossible to articulate.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. so much so that in recent years very probing questions have been asked about the depiction of his moral character. 2 Pip’s bad faith works this way in Great Expectations: because we so often attend to the serpentine maneuvers of his conscience. the authorial establishment of some putative center for a work which simultaneously conceals evidence that would invalidate such a center. p.” quoted in Bernard Grebanier. even as he egocentrically worries what “little Pip. Peter Brooks hints at such a contradiction when he cites Sartre’s remark that all autobiographies are obituaries. at the end of the novel.” his only posterity. I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that night. but that claim is everywhere contradicted by his actions. Pip still condescends to Joe even as he benefits from his ransoming. Selfhood has always already been the narrator’s fictive construct. Instead. As narrator. We were equals afterwards. After concluding 77 . 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. at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him. Similarly distorted appraisals of his past conduct surface in his comments on Biddy. Estella. as we will see. (7. even when he claims to be acting altruistically. After learning the selfless rationale for Joe’s acquiesence in Mrs. 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. will think of him. Pip claims to have developed a solicitude for Joe. 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. 52)3 But nowhere afterwards are they “equals. excluding the margins of experience. and Magwitch.” Pip writes: Young as I was.” On the contrary. as we had been before.I Pip’s relation with all characters is self-serving. I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart. and in his narration he occasionally covers this seemingly irreducible egotism with a veneer of disingenuous contrition. there never was an original self apart from language to suffer such distortion. One example is his relation with Joe. Pumblechook. Joe’s “government. but afterwards. but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. of thorns or flowers.” The problem is not simply one of mixed metaphors. Instead. But it is the same with any life. (9. 78 . he is no longer responsible for his actions. Words mark the conversion of the synchronic into the diachronic. to humiliation. that lacks the capacity to “bind. The chain is the privileged metaphor here. But in this paragraph. to wealth.) Yet even more important than the passage’s self-serving function are its contradictory metaphors for life. and think how different its course would have been.the account of his first visit to Satis House and his new perception of Joe’s thick boots and coarse hands. to articulate is to be caught in a signifying chain. too. formative events. historical determinism and a narration that could transparently trace these. Pause you who read this. a Piaget. Imagine one selected day struck out of it. and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold. who believes in formative events and irrevocable stages of development. And yet a life is also a “course. language seems incapable of articulating both diachrony and synchrony simultaneously. It is against this background that we should understand the novel’s famous opening. for it made great changes in me. implying absolute continuity. what Pip struggles to express cannot be expressed: the act of narration already excludes it. Pip struggles to articulate the determinative value of this first exposure to class. Pip writes: That was a memorable day to me. (We may note in passing that the metaphor of the chain also serves to exculpate Pip: after this point. in which Pip reads his name from the dead letters of the tombstones. In retrospect Pip speaks as a developmental psychologist.” a movement through time. 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. that would never have bound you. September 25–27. Duckworth. Taken together with the recent deconstructive readings of Dickens by Dianne F. Colin Manlove. 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).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. 4. 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. 1953). 2. Ira Konigsberg (Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities. in “Dickens’s Great Expectations: Pip’s Arrested Development. in “Neither Here Nor There: Uneasiness in Great Expectations. 114.” Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 61–70. All references to Great Expectations are from the Oxford Edition (London: Oxford University Press. in “The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations. ed. Fiction-making is therefore inherent in the guilt and desire of existence. In 1984. 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). however. 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. continues. Julian Moynahan. 1. this critical tradition which calls into question the status of Pip’s “self ” seems well established.” in American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age.” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 60–79. which sees the novel as finally valorizing the self.” PMLA 95 [1980]: 234–45) and Alistair M. Peter Brooks’s study in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in the Narrative (New York: Alfred A. See note 7. the repressed. 1984). 3. Knopf. dramatizes Freud’s dynamic tension between eros and thanatos (139). analyzed the ambivalence of Pip’s troubled relations with all characters. to a point of “alienation from the real world” (77. argues that repression causes Pip to “misread the plot of his life” (130) and that the return of Magwitch. West Virginia University. “The Ethics of Reading: Vast Gaps and Parting Hours. J. 1981). Brooks.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 [1978]: 110–30). an alternative tradition. also fundamentally psychoanalytic. Hillis Miller. Judith Weissman and Steven Cohan.” American Imago 38 (1981): 105–26. Sadoff (“Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit. argued that the very possibility of Pip’s storytelling is dependent on a repression which “manifests itself as something other than itself” (123). 1986. 34. 79 . (“Little Dorrit and the Question of Closure. Chapter and page numbers are given in parentheses.” Dickens Studies Annual 13 (1984): 115–24. finally. More recently. a Freudian reading. 78). A man would die to-night lying out on the marshes. HYNES ON STAR. and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death. and then we went to the door to listen for the chaise-cart.. and see no help or pity in the glittering multitude” (p. and the frost was white and hard. And then I looked at the stars. 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. 49).g. On the night when Mrs. 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. 80 . the hearth. and an awakened Pip aware of his and Estella’s tie with Magwitch. GARDEN. before their various interwound conversions. by extension. It was a dry cold night. All of these contrasts are implicit—retrospectively— in the symbolic opposition between warm hearth and dry. starlit night. between Joe’s warmth and the others’ cold manipulation of one another. and. Estella’s name is immediately relevant. the difference between a deluded Pip with his eyes on a star (Estella). Pip. I thought. she speaks of a fact which in one or another degree is true for Magwitch. AND FIRELIGHT IMAGERY Dickens’ fondness for light imagery crops up once more in the way he uses stars. and what on earth I was expected to play at” (p. the pitiless gaze of Estella before her chastening marriage. hard. there is a fine contrast evident between fire and starlight—a contrast made while Joe and Pip wait for Mrs. and Miss Havisham as well. 366). Joe will announce Miss Havisham’s invitation to Pip. and the wind blew keenly.JOSEPH A. This section suggests all sorts of contrasts: e. frosty. white. the difference between the book’s many “prisoners” with and without one another’s help. When Estella says that it is not in her nature to love (p. cold. Joe’s arrival: “Joe made the fire and swept. as distinct from the gaze of an Estella restored to the human race even as Pip is restored. of course. without throwing any light on the questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s. whereas Biddy knows that he will not be able to reconcile his promise with his gentlemanly pretensions. Get hold of portable property’ ” (p. just as Miss Havisham does. and says to Pip that the “‘bright eyes somewheres. as if she were going out into the sky” (p.” and of how inhumanly cold he has become. Estella’s “light [a candle] came along the dark passage [in Satis House] like a star” (p. 251). Thus. 202). and go out by a gallery high overhead. 117. 242). 241. Pip is deceiving himself in telling both himself and Biddy that he will come frequently to visit Joe. after meeting Estella. and valuable as property owned and used by Miss Havisham (pp. 273). dear boy. Only with Magwitch’s return does Pip become aware of the game he has been “playing. in clear—if subdued—light. Thus. 63). which continually remind us of the real coldness and inhumanity of the particular illusion shown in this book. despite the “ashes” of Miss Havisham’s “bridal feast.. offered by stars. and ascend some light iron stairs.. and presumably seeing all things. 245. whose “‘guiding star always is. like the gems. beautiful. humbly seeking forgiveness of each other. prettier than ever.52). including love.” and that lady’s looking like a “figure of the grave. “the stars were shining beyond 81 . and I was under stronger enchantment” (p. In the context. 237. Magwitch regards her as jewel-like property. 288). the juxtaposing of Estella and Miss Havisham’s jewels reminds us that Estella.” “Estella looked more bright and beautiful than before. shall be yourn. admired by all who see her’ ” (p. and thus crassly echoes the sentiments of the “city” Wemmick. 325). 145–146). 59). speaking unknowingly of his own daughter. stars eventually help to signal Pip’s and Estella’s coming to their senses. Such are some of the associations. 89. if money can buy ‘em’ ” (p. Pip regards the stars as “poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my life” (pp.. like these jewels. brilliant. is cold. later “I saw her pass among the extinguished fires [of the brewery]. wot you love the thoughts on . Estella is “ ‘ out of reach.. This contrast between illusion and reality is shown again in Pip’s statement that “Biddy . see also pp. Interestingly. look[ed] at me under the stars with a clear honest eye” (p. throughout the book. more “tranquil.” “shoots.” but very real promise left to them after they have shed all misleading glamour. out of shape and of a different colour. Like stars. the inhuman. 491. like a pudding. Estella’s “once proud eyes” manifested a “saddened softened light”. Further.e. and these ugly growths in Newgate and in Miss Havisham’s yard. and had a new growth at the top of it. the evening mists were rising now. gardens here are almost always associated with the illusory. But Pip the dupe misses the symbolic similarity between himself as unnatural plant raised by others’ manipulations. I saw no shadow of another parting from her” (pp. stars here symbolize the very illusions which Pip and Estella have healthfully dropped. quite appropriately. Miss Havisham’s is “a rank garden” (p. and the moon was coming. and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me. This last use of stars. and “as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge. Dickens’ choice of endings is both psychologically and symbolically valid. and the evening was not dark”. 264–266) as distinct from his strolling about the little garden of natural growths in Walworth (pp. and one box tree that had been clipped round long ago. 90). as if that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt” (p. This paradoxical but perfectly accurate use of symbol appears also in the way gardens are treated. 80. Significantly. Dickens’ decision to accept Bulwer-Lytton’s suggestion for the ending: i. 63) wherein one looks “upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks. is not in violation of the characters’ experiences or of the star symbol elsewhere. then. rather than oppose.the mist.” and other growths in his Newgate “greenhouse” (pp. Pip the man sees ugliness and unnaturalness for what they are. then. so. as well as the cooler. the unnatural.. stars have symbolized illusion. 208–211). In my opinion. This same confusion turns up again as Estella tries to tell Pip that his devotion to her is based upon illusion. though different from the consistent use of stars throughout the book. see also p. even as he was earlier appalled by the “city” Wemmick’s walking calmly through a “garden” full of “plants. 493). the stars here support. since they are walking 82 . the destructive. By way of partial recapitulation.through Miss Havisham’s decayed garden. see pp. 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. 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. In his right mind. candle-light. for whom “it [the garden] was all in bloom” by virtue of Estella’s accidentally brushing against his shoulder (pp. as distinct from the candle-lit atmosphere typical of the poorly seen and illusory. the ruin all about them is as nothing to Pip. Joe. and how he prefers to suffer the inconveniences imposed upon him by Mrs. 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. rather than to fight back and take the risk of causing her as much pain as his father inflicted 83 . When Joe tells little Pip how he married Mrs. Joe and gladly assumed responsibility for her infant brother. and this is why. 406). of course. 490–493). Dickens was right to conclude the novel as he did. The last of these remains. Stars and garden work together symbolically to suggest neither a burgeoning of young love nor the permanent improbability of all love. 238–241). or firelight. so finally and just as credibly they see the garden both as it seemed and as it suggests belated growth and renewal. and I think it accurate to say that firelight is easily the most prevalent and important symbol in Great Expectations. but rather the mutual emotional rejuvenation made accessible by mutually suffering for illusions. Just as Pip and Estella see the stars for what they seemed and for what promise they still hold. Pip sees the garden for the anti-Paradise which it has been in his life (p. 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. Firelight is always the atmosphere which signals truth or reality. again. 490. I should like to tell you something’” (p.. 45–49).upon his mother. he is notably poking and stirring the fire all the while. Again. Pip penitently sits “down in the ashes at [Joe’s] feet” (p. 69). 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. but Dickens’s experiments with stream-ofconsciousness in Great Expectations may be responsible to some degree for the book’s effect on modern readers. has from time to time been mentioned in connection with Dickens’s writing but never traced in any detail throughout the novels. It may not be the complex novel that twentieth-century readers of Joyce and Woolf have grown to expect. but into Dickens’s general style as well. it is curious that stream-of-consciousness. and thereby—as I hope to establish—letting us know that such selflessness is the moral burden of the novel (pp. And when he has told Joe that he lied. 70).. for he was throughout his life a 84 . ANN B. the center and symbol of truth. a strictly literary technique related in a general way to the surrealistic movement. Great Expectations in particular would seem to have many of the characteristics of the technique. Joe. ) Since the term “surrealism” can be applied to different art forms and can thus have several different meanings. Joe is hereby made into a sort of smithy-confessor. ( . dose examination of which not only provides greater insight into the workings of the novel. he refers to the fire in a way that appears quite gratuitous except as symbol: “ ‘ Before the fire goes out. That Dickens should arrive at simple forms of stream-ofconsciousness is not surprising. after Pip has delivered himself of some splendid lies in describing his first visit to Satis House. 19 However.” Dickens skillfully renders an individual consciousness. 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. and other melodramatic stock-in-trade. ) The direct interior monologue aims at representing the contents and processes of the mind as they exist at prespeech levels. arch-villainy. 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. Dickens often let his imagination play upon macabre or sadistic situations.” Stone recognizes that in his later novels Dickens was capable of representing consciousness by the interior monologue technique. in Great Expectations. 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. However. ( . flights and pursuits. and asserts that in some of his lesser-known short pieces he came close to the interior monologues of the twentieth century.” 1 8 In the direct interior monologue the narrator is invisible and “paring his nails. 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 . mystery.. 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.conscious manipulator of readers’ emotions both as a writer of novels and as a public reader of them. as Stone asserts. Well aware of the attraction of repulsion.”1 In spite of the restrictions imposed by Victorian society. His pleasure in exciting and controlling his audience frequently led him to indulge in descriptions of violence.. certainly not a “lesser-known short piece. and private associations are strongly evident. and Roger. and that Alexander. 86 . intersected with dykes and mounds and gates. were also dead and buried. and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry. and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard. (2) In both excerpts there is a freedom and fluidity of syntax which correspond to the darting impressions within the frightened child’s mind. and that Philip Pirrip. were dead and buried. Dickens does strive to maintain a degree of narrative coherence while depicting the images and associations of Pip’s mind. was Pip. trembling.and tries to find his place in it. I was seated on a high tombstone. that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard. For example. My most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things. Abraham. I say.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. but with a young boy staring at five graves and indulging in two aspects of mental activity: memory and imagination. and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing. was the marshes. and that the low leaden line beyond was the river. Tobias. seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. and also Georgiana wife of the above. the infant children of the aforesaid. and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church came to itself. At such a time I found out for certain. was the sea. late of this parish. discontinuity. but the qualities of rambling thought. with scattered cattle feeding on it. while he ate the bread ravenously. the book begins not with the depiction of some grand action. Bartholomew. In the instant I had seen a face that was strange to me. Pip. (319) 87 . Mr. is there not?” I called out. “What floor do you want?” “The top. or the point of view can shift to third person. There is nothing the matter?” “Nothing the matter.” “That is my name.” said a voice from the darkness beneath. looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. the indirect monologue fulfills its function as Humphrey defines it by creating in the reader “a sense of the author’s continuous presence. Scenes can be more dramatized. and its circle of light was very contracted. In other words. It was a shaded lamp. When a footstep is heard on the stair. so that he was in it for a mere instant. I took up my reading-lamp and went out to the stairhead.” returned the voice. Remembering then. Thus. “There is some one down there.”21 The arrival of Magwitch at Pip’s London abode late at night is such a scene. “Yes.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 led into it by following the impressions and reflections of Pip as he sits alone. I stood with my lamp held out over the stair rail. The reader is more aware of the author’s presence. there is a wider use of descriptive and expository techniques. Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my lamp. the reader goes in and out of the character’s mind. to shine upon a book. and then out of it. for all was quiet. and he came slowly within its light. for though unspoken material is still presented as if it were directly from the consciousness of a character. And the man came on. the reader is drawn out of Pip’s consciousness and into a scene which is partly dramatized and partly mental. that the staircase-lights were blown out. looking down. he is not strictly imprisoned within it. 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 he is infinitely conditioned. p. the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me” (GE. 285).conditioned. p. His parents are tombstones. even his adherence to Magwitch is as much a reaction to the influence of another as his love for Estella is. and later from Magwitch. acts as his chorus: “We have no choice. The eighteenth-century orphan has been turned around. the orphan in Great Expectations has become a thing. The convict image that always follows him seems more suggestive of this incessant coercion than it is of guilt. The legacy he bestows on Herbert and forces Miss Havisham to maintain is his one autonomous act. Pip returns to the eighteenth-century idea of the orphan as artifact. He has gone from self-made man to made man. Having no soul. he 91 . 354). but emphasizes his loss of power: “The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made. This zombie-like creature is the opposite of the early Victorian orphan. pursued by the creature who had made me. despite the emphasis of Dorothy Van Ghent’s brilliant essay. The repetition of “you and I” is mechanical. Once Pip is “made” a gentleman. was not more wretched than I. sepulchral. His being is not organically shaped by inheritance. having become manipulated by rather than manipulator of events. He avoids seeing Joe and Biddy. Pip sins only in thought or by omission. Never once does he act independently. however hidden. he is “making” another as he has been “made. Even more chilling are the words she intones to Miss Havisham: “I am what you have made me” (GE. you and I” (GE. all his moves are charted for him according to stipulations delivered by Jaggers. whose mysterious origins were suggestive of infinite Being. The idea of Pip as artifact is further emphasized by the fact that none of the people who manipulate him are his parents. and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion. you and I. whose automaton-like qualities are only an exaggeration of Pip’s.18 After all. In an odd inversion of the Frankenstein image. p. 322). and here. but when he does. emphasizing the identities they lack by insisting on them. We are not free to follow our own devices. but to obey our instructions. but never actually does so.” Estella. He wishes to run away from the forge. 1933). with his ‘disagreeably sharp and suspicious’ eyes. creaking boots’ (which laugh for him ‘in a dry and suspicions way’). hopes. The most terrifying part of Great Expectations is Pip’s lack of the initiative to sin. feelings and beliefs are merely so much tinsel draped river their contemptible vices. there is no room for the fruit of the soul growing on the tree of God. In a state of infinite conditioning. thoughts. burly figure. bright. his ability to conduct only a cross-examination. The English Novel: Form and Function (New York. Jaggers himself of course tells its much. He is a man whose private nature is totally subdued to his public personality. and his general manner which. Dorothy Van Ghent. Like Alex. before which the glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased’. The protective coloring of the orphan was always a sham. he is a made man even when he hugs his own evil to himself. responding to their love with love as he responds to everybody’s emotions. Yet he is by no means drily matter-of-fact. ‘great. is ‘only professional’. 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. as Wemmick tells us meaningfully. Anthony Burgess’ clockwork orange. This aspect of Jaggers is seen most vividly in Chapter 29 where he broods over the whist table.never actively cuts them. never a conversation. and a man who delights in ‘seeing through’ people as though their individual colourings. Notes 17. On the 92 . 125–38. An analysis of Dickens’ many uses and variations of this paradigm would constitute a long article in itself. pp. coming out ‘with mean little cards at the ends of hands. 18. By observing these details we can build up an astonishingly vivid and complete impression of the man. 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. of faces peculiarly swollen. 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. but. above all. This repressed sadism throws a revealing light on Jaggers’s attitude to Molly’s daughter. And it illuminates the nature of his interest in ‘the spider’ Bentley Drummle. more than this. a sword in a scabbard. ‘A wild beast tamed’. an unconscious witness to some obscure. The books in the dining room reflect crime. Any thought in the reader that such emotion is uncharacteristic of the mail is immediately curbed partly by the intensely dramatic circumstances (Jaggers. of Jaggers’s professional skill. And the house is dark and dingy. not easily evident in his public manner. its ornamental ‘carved garlands on the panelled walls’ reminding Pip of nooses. Jaggers’s public self conceals and controls a temperament both sensual and sadistic. we can detect from the furniture of his office and house strange and concealed currents of the man’s passion.contrary. Estella. his absorption in crime is partly an expression of his interest in that self. when her loveliness was before him. and twitchy about the nose’. Wemmick calls her. several strange-looking boxes and packages. 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. These are images of mystery and violence. crime and yet more crime. Pip observes him ‘look at her from under his thick eyebrows. and raise them a little. controlled sadism in the man. in Chapter 29. Pip describes the office as ‘a dismal place’ and it contains disquieting things: ‘an old rusty pistol. Yet there is reason as well as neurosis behind this grim view of humanity as Dickens makes clear in Chapter 52. And. there is the housekeeper: a living witness (as the casts of hanged men were (lead witnesses). He surrounds himself with images that either flatter or reflect his darkest self. with those rich flushes of glitter and colour in it’. 93 . and two dreadful casts on a shelf. busy collecting false witnesses. 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. an advocate for the underworld. As Pip says when he sees him ‘at it’ in court: ‘Which side he was on. cast out. for all its realism. defended. and that all he saw of children. and growing up to be hanged.for perhaps the first time in his life. (Chapter 24. Nevertheless.’ And Jaggers’s profession is consistent with this complex character. put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned. their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. as we see in Chapter 20 where his client Mike. whipped. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar. He is an attorney.) ‘After such knowledge. this view is not the whole 94 . transported. I only knew that when I stole out on tiptoe. for he seemed to me to be grinding the whole place in a mill. forsworn. where they were held up to be seen. was. by his denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and justice in that chair that day’. He defends the deprived and the depraved. quite convulsive under the table. bedevilled somehow. is compelled to submit to examination). for. offends him not by lies but by careless phraseology. he was not on the side of the bench. I couldn’t make out. to develop into the fish that were to come to his net—to be prosecuted. qualified in all ways for the hangman. he was making the legs of the old gentleman who presided. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life. made orphans. neglected. he had reason to look upon as so much spawn. He is unscrupulous in his methods. 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. What forgiveness?’ It would be shallow to call Jaggers’s view of life cynical. Jaggers has no interest in legal justice. It is this awareness of the best that dignifies hip’s experience. it never rivals or obscures it. Pip’s other contact in Little Britain is Jaggers’s clerk Wemmick. ‘brushes the Newgate cobwebs away. Pip. and pleases the Aged’. responsibility. Mr. and finally becomes a married man with prospects of quiet contentment.truth. But we mustn’t be hoodwinked by the charm of the Walworth Wemmick into forgetting his twin. Jaggers’s vision lends perspective to the central theme. “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. There are areas of compassion. triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came out. He regards him as an idiot for not taking advantage of a profitable payment for Pip’s services. Joe. We can perhaps gauge his nature best if. that it cannot comprehend. In Walworth he pulls up the drawbridge of his miniature castle. love. magnanimity.” said Wemmick. The Little Britain Wemmick is very different. is beyond Jaggers’s understanding. And he is certainly a most attractive character—at least his Walworth self is. Living continually with the worst in humanity he has ceased to believe in the best. In Little Britain he endorses Jaggers’s values and scorns anything that ‘smells of mortality’. for instance. Dickens never allows Wemmick’s domesticity to appear sentimental. He shows genuine devotion to his father. No wonder the contemporary reviews almost unanimously voted Wemmick the comic triumph of the novel. He salts it with Wemmick’s oddity (‘“Now. From Wemmick’s point of view this course works perfectly. Likewise he is ‘querulous and angry’ with Pip for letting Magwitch’s wealth escape him. instead of regarding the Walworth twin as 95 . He feels no tension between his two lives and he never allows the one to affect the other. His method is simply to shelve the problem and lead a double life. And Wemmick also presents an answer to the problem of reconciling sub-world with upper world. proves a staunch friend to Pip. ‘there’s not much bad blood about. came up to a corner of the bars. The sickening detail about the hat 96 . He is wholly materialistic. He regards his clients as specimens rather than individuals. This chapter contains one of the most shocking scenes in the novel. ‘—small. in Chapter 32. self-interest and ‘portable property’. I should say. as I write) in a well-worn olive-coloured frock-coat. 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. Indeed. keen. in London. By simplifying humanity in this way he can confront the worst unmoved. ‘Oh! I don’t know about bad blood’.’ ‘That makes it worse. returned Mr. And because he lacks Jaggers’s savage vision of corruption his desiccated attitude to humanity is perhaps more frightening. For it is by dehumanizing himself that Wemmick survives at the office. ‘You may get cheated. His conversation with Pip in Chapter 21 is as revealing as his reptilian features: ‘He had glittering eyes. Wemmick. Pip notices that. With a peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion.’ said I. and eyes that went wandering about when he tried to fix there.’ ‘You think so?’ returned Mr.’ ‘If there is had blood between you and them. and murdered.’ Pip tells us. He studies men as clinically as a surgeon.’ Pip’s horrified description captures the man’s mixture of terror and bravado exactly. to soften it off a little.’ Jaggers sees life as essentially evil. Wemmick. we regard the Little Britain twin is de-humanizing the Walworth one. They’ll do it. if there’s anything to be got by it. and black—and thin wide mottled lips’. ‘Much about the same. Wemmick reduces it to a matter of profit and loss. robbed.humanizing the Little Britain twin. who’ll do that for you. But there are plenty of people anywhere. Wemmick introduces Pip to a condemned man: ‘a portly upright man (whom I can see now. But Wemmick regards him merely as a dead plant to be stripped of its remaining useful attributes. pride in one’s craft—accrue to this residual economic order. 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. when the novel was published. 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. unswerving loyalty. Still. Like Jaggers. 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. not their strength. ‘ “ a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle.suggests more potently than any analysis a bold temperament congealing at the prospect of death. when the novel was set. although not as uncommon in rural areas in the 1820s. the simple blacksmith.”’ but it is a sign of weakness when a castle is forever in a state of siege. who dresses in the clothes of drowned men. Joe. for example. The values associated with Joe—integrity. Staging the contrast as one between country and city helps to reduce the sense of incongruity for readers. the incompatibility of this ideal with modern existence is dramatized at the end of the novel. Wemmick serves chiefly as a foil to Pip’s more profound experience. As Joe says in Chapter 57. represents a nostalgic portrait of a figure from an earlier era. 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 . thus serving as an implicit critique of the more highly developed dominant economy of London. a phase of capitalism fast disappearing in 1861. in fact. His only consolation. pre-Victorian mode of early capitalism and Pip matures into a thoroughly up-to-date middle-class Victorian. with his post-office mouth and his invariable advice to look after “portable property. is that now he “lived frugally. The character who has the best claim to that role is a minor figure. If Joe is a holdover from a rural. and paid my debts.” to use Wemmick’s words (273). If a divided self were Wemmick’s only distinctive characteristic. so the answer to the question in my title must be: No. Mr. A model of businesslike decorum at the office. Pip’s summary of those eleven years represents the most “Victorian” moment in the book. and the public. then is there anyone in the novel who might be said to fore shadow postmodernism? I am happy to say that there is. although a favorite with readers down through the years: Wemmick. shyly courts Miss Skiffins. one of the hallmarks of the “modern” self. but we had a good name. the thing that enables him to hold up his head when he thinks of how badly he has behaved. Pip clears them up without delay: “I must not leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House. We were not in a grand way of business.in his company’s colonial branch in Cairo. Jaggers’s clerk conflates enough incongruous cultural signs in his humble person to become a veritable icon of the Dickens icon. or that we made mints of money. Pip is not postmodern. That person is not Pip. and lovingly tends to his house and garden. between the self in its “private and personal capacity. The split between these two incarnations is so profound that Pip speculates that there must be “twin Wemmicks” (356). a condition that Marx famously identified as a consequence of urban capitalism. “modern man. then he would be an unusually pure representative of a single historical type.” he is an entirely different man at home.” If the reader had any doubts about the middle-class positioning of this Victorian ethic. and worked for our profits” (436). This kind of alienation was.” But 98 . A division of this kind. professional self is seen often enough today but is hardly restricted to postmodernism. where he indulges his Aged P. With Wemmick as a guide. and my own Jack of all Trades” (200). which is discharged punctually at nine o’clock every evening. and he has proposed dividing cultural beliefs along temporal lines into the “residual. as misshapen—and comical—as “Great HairSpectations” at the local mall.” including a forger’s pen and “a distinguished razor or two” (201). dominant. he takes pride in bringing to life a cliché. As Wemmick proudly explains. and my own carpenter. In short. for the people’s enjoyment” (200).” In Dickens’s novel. which Wemmick has transformed into a miniature Gothic castle.Wemmick’s interest hardly stops there. and a cannon. a simulacrum. Raymond Williams has pointed out that no era is ever characterized by a single ideology. He lives in a simulacrum of another era.” His treasures “were mostly of a felonious character. Inside the castle is Wemmick’s prized “collection of curiosities. The collection is a treasury of Victorian murder. as odd as Rick Geary’s postmodern comic book of that name. one can identify traces of at least five different epochs. after my son’s time. a theme park version of feudal England. including mock fortifications. Wemmick’s home is a postmodern pastiche. After visiting some of the houses preserved by the British National Trust. It is a little wooden cottage. a flag. a moat with its own drawbridge. Wemmick has turned his house into a literal incarnation of the saying “A man’s home is his castle. with their mismatched architectural styles and their (far more expensive) collections of curiosities. each competing with the others for cultural space: (1) the “feudal” freehold of 99 . And like today’s theme parks. I sometimes wonder if they did. and my own plumber. perfect in every detail. “I am my own engineer. one begins to notice that Great Expectations itself is a palimpsest of different cultural periods. and emergent. as far as is possible in a suburb of nineteenth-century London. His home at Walworth is his other claim to fame. and my own gardener.” His mode of existence—inside this simulacrum—reproduces the economic conditions of a “freehold” (200). The Aged P is so proud of his son’s accomplishment that he thinks “it ought to be kept together by the Nation. SAID ON AUSTRALIA. “dark” phase of social criticism. with their clear connections to the fortunes of empire. Abel Magwitch.. 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. Only at the end of the twentieth century have people begun to focus on discontinuity itself. who. and (5) the “postmodern” world of simulacra and pastiche. and the social commentary on modern urban alienation. the ethical growth of Pip.Wemmick’s castle. can any marriage be too far-fetched? EDWARD W. BRITISH IMPERIALISM. Where Dickens’s contemporaries saw the novel as a return to the comic types and affectionate portraits of his youthful fiction. because the lawyer 100 . The discontinuity among these layers contributes to many of the novel’s most enduring effects: the comedy of Wemmick. using [a] well-known and very great novel. pays back his young benefactor with large sums of money. When Elvis comes calling for Estella. modernist critics perceived a new. the tenderness toward Joe. AND DICKENS’S VICTORIAN BUSINESSMEN Let me say a little here about what I have in mind. Early in life he helps a condemned convict. Yet few readers before today have ever read them as signs that there is “no consensus about reality.. (3) the “Victorian” middle-class values of Pip’s mature years. after being transported to Australia. (4) the “modern” alienation that splits Wemmick into twin selves. seeing in Dickens a foreshadowing of the “incompatible realities” of postmodernism.” The more usual procedure has been to single out one strand and elevate it as the master discourse of the text. 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. (2) the preindustrial capitalism of Joe’s forge. Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is primarily a novel about self-delusion.. though Magwitch is in fact unacceptable. whereas I believe that it belongs in a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow. but as participants in it. that would also function as a colony replacing those lost in America. Most. through the novel and through a much older and wider experience between England and its overseas territories. in 101 . unwanted excess population of felons to a place.involved says nothing as he disburses the money. and fatally ill—as his surrogate father. Australia was established as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century mainly so that England could transport an irredeemable. Miss Havisham. apprehended. 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. The pursuit of profit. In the end. and what Hughes calls social apartheid together produced modern Australia. readings of this remarkable work situate it squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction. has been his patron. unwelcomed by Pip because everything about the man reeks of delinquency and unpleasantness. Magwitch then reappears illegally in London. Pip is reconciled to Magwitch and to his reality: he finally acknowledges Magwitch—hunted. a “white” colony like Ireland. but they could hardly. originally charted by Captain Cook. not as someone to be denied or rejected. Pip persuades himself that an elderly gentlewoman. though. a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not the repatriation of transported English criminals. in which we can locate Magwitch and Dickens not as mere coincidental references in that history. Yet in Magwitch “Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. the building of empire. being from 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. if not all. They could succeed. or incorporates the others. return. one social space authorizing another. soldiers chart the vast and relatively empty continent each in a discourse that jostles. which produced an Elysium for gentlemen. They could expiate their crimes in a technical. and intentions accumulate the strange territories and gradually turn them into “home. spoken for. nor did it presume or forecast a tradition of Australian writing. expressing the fullness and earned integrity of an Australian history that became independent from Britain’s in the twentieth century. Botany Bay is therefore first of all an Enlightenment discourse of travel and discovery. ethnographers. interpreters like Hughes and Carter expand on the relatively attenuated presence of Australia in nineteenthcentury British writing. inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages. and Patrick White. which in fact came later to include the literary works of David Malouf. as all Dickens’s fiction testifies. 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).” 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. legal sense. displaces. Peter Carey. an Eden for laborers in the 1840s (Carter 202–60). What Dickens envisions for Pip.the real sense. charts. on the other. but they cannot be allowed a “return” to metropolitan space. Carter’s exploration of what he calls Australia’s spatial history offers us another version of that same experience. But Great Expectations was not written with anything like the concern for native Australian accounts that Hughes or Carter has. convicts. profiteers.” is roughly equivalent to what was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia. Here explorers. being Magwitch’s “London gentleman. yet. is meticulously charted. which. an accurate reading of Great Expectations must note that after 102 . The prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but imperial: subjects can be taken to places like Australia. So on the one hand. then a set of travelling narrators (including Cook) whose words. But it is only in recent years that these connections have taken on interpretative importance.. A new Pip appears. because of their complex affiliations with their real setting. they are more interesting and more valuable as works of art. also called Pip. To lose sight of or ignore the national and international context of.Magwitch’s delinquency is expiated. portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoes. so to speak. this time not as an idle gentleman but as a hardworking trader in the East. wayward relatives. and frightening outsiders have a fairly normal and secure connection with the empire. and vengeful convict. because of their worldliness.. the beneficiaries (like sexual. 103 . after Pip redemptively acknowledges his debt to the old. populated with lesser people of color. since nearly all of Dickens’s businessmen. religious. Thus even as Dickens settles the difficulty with Australia. 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. less laden than the old Pip with the chains of the past—he is glimpsed in the form of a child. say. Pip is hardly an exceptional figure. Dickens’s representations of Victorian businessmen.. 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. Pip himself collapses and is revived in two explicitly positive ways. In his new career as colonial businessman. A new generation of scholars and critics—the children of decolonization in some instances. bitterly energized. where Britain’s other colonies offer a sort of normality that Australia never could. and the old Pip takes on a new career with his boyhood friend Herbert Pocket. another structure of attitude and reference emerges to suggest Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient. 1846. Pickwick Papers.” 1833. The Haunted Man. Barnaby Rudge. 1843. 1843–4. A Child’s History of England. 1846. Little Dorrit. The Chimes. Oliver Twist. 1855–7. Bleak House. 1864–5. David Copperfield. A Christmas Carol. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 1836. 1851–3. The Old Curiosity Shop. 1842. 104 . 1849–50. The Cricket on the Hearth. 1838–9. 1836–7. American Notes. Martin Chuzzlewit. 1844. A Tale of Two Cities. 1854. The Battle of Life. 1870. 1845. Dombey and Son.Works by Charles Dickens “A Dinner at Poplar Walk. Great Expectations. 1846–8. 1859. 1841. 1840–1. Pictures from Italy. 1837–9. Sketches by Boz. 1852–3. Hard Times. 1861. Nicholas Nickelby. 1848. Our Mutual Friend. Janice. The Language of Dickens.” and describes how a character’s approach to inanimate objects reveals their conflicts or mindsets Carlisle. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism Since 1836.” Cary. Brook. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations. and essays that cover a broad spectrum of current theoretical approaches. This work contains an authoritative text of Great Expectations. This thousand-plus page study delves into both Dickens’s public and private lives. G. Ford. in sections such as “Substandard Grammar” and “Substandard Vocabulary.. The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. George. This book concerns the speech of Dickens’s characters. John.Annotated Bibliography Ackroyd. gender. Dickens. London. Peter. It also discusses Dickens’ tendency to “break his characters into fragments. including Joe Gargery’s. biographical as well as historical contexts. 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. ed. Ackroyd contends that Dickens was the first to introduce the language of the Romantic poets into the novel. and deconstructionist critiques. Martin’s Press. 105 . Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. 1973. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Faber & Faber. 1955. 1990. London: Andre Deutsch.L. psychoanalytic. 1970. 1996. including feminist. He also says that his dramatic readings revolutionized the art form. A study of Dickens’s affects on his audiences. House contends that Dickens shared Magwitch’s belief that money can make a gentleman. Humphrey. and Gabriel Pearson. The Life of Charles Dickens. according to some critics. London: Chapman & Hall. he argues against the assumption that the base of Great Expectations is class consciousness. London: Oxford University Press. John. eds. this three-volume work is part biography and part critical appraisal. to the steamer chartered so as he might accurately render Magwitch’s attempted escape. Other essays herein also mention Great Expectations. Christopher Ricks’s “Great Expectations. Great Expectations was a welcome return to some of Dickens’s earlier stylings. House. The Dickens World.” which connects Estella with Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend. John. Forster. Dickens and the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. in fact. including Angus Wilson’s “The Heroes and Heroines of Dickens. this book addresses along the way both the evolution of the author and the reading public. 3 vols. Drawing on letters and anecdotes.” 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. Ford argues that Dickens doesn’t stick to a time-honored fictional formula. 1962). 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. 106 . to Dickens’s exhaustion following the book’s completion. Forester’s memories help chart the evolution of Great Expectations from Dickens’s initial idea. 1872–4. Gross. Norton & Company. Martin. London. and eventually must disregard societal pressures and surrender to “selfhood. This modern biography deals extensively with the relationship between Dickens and Charles Lever. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. which contends that Pip is the archetypal Dickens hero. Great Expectations: Charles Dickens. 1977. New York: W. but never completely blind to his own fallibility. Edgar. 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. This work contains a close reading of Great Expectations that is particularly sympathetic to Pip—a character certainly plagued by fears and inadequacies. this book contains a quite detailed and documented chapter on Great Expectations. Dickens the Novelist. J. F. including The Scarlet Letter and Pilgrim’s Progress. Leavis. including its serial runs in both Harper’s 107 .D. Great Expectations. Chatto & Windus. 1985. 1970. Hillis. revised edition London: Allen Lane. Often called one of the most influential studies of Dickens’s novels. Miller argues. This is a thorough and comparative study of all versions of Dickens novel. It draws parallels between Great Expectations and other books.Johnson..” Rosenberg. Pip must confront the conflicts created by money and rank. Milton Keynes: Open University Publications. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. Edgar. This work is part of a course on “the Nineteenth Century Novel and Its Legacy. 1958. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. A Norton Critical Edition. and Q. 1999. Leavis.R.W. Graham.” Miller. Fantasy and Novel-Making Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1986.Weekly and in All the Year Round.C. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales. 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. Thomas Hardy’s essay on “Food and Ceremony. ed. to film adaptations. George J.” and several other essays and exhibits. to Dickens biographies and bibliographies. 1979. Arguing for a strong focus on the fairy-tale approach Dickens took to his writing. New York: Garland.” which appeared in All the Year Round and which concerns a protagonist strikingly similar to Pip. Grenville Murray’s preface to The Roving Englishman. A comprehensive listing of scholarship. Stone. The Life of Charles Dickens. criticism. Wright. Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography. Stephen. Worth. and a variety of criticsm. Wall. Harry. A critical anthology that contains the original ending of Great Expectations. It also contains background information. and appreciation of Great Expectations. 1935. this book suggests Orlick’s role as devil and Magwitch’s role as Pip’s double. Charles Dickens. from the time the book was published in 1861. London: Butler & Tanner. The work also suggests two possible works which directly influenced the writing of Great Expectations: E. context-setting facts. Thomas. The appendix gives a dated list of when each installment of the serial appeared in All the Year Round. and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Dickens-edited short story “The Ghost in the Garden Room. Penguin Critical Anthologies. He draws the conclusion that Estella is actually a model for 108 . 1970. 109 . pointing out that Ellen Lawless Ternan’s initials are present in the heroine’s first name.Dickens’s lover Ellen Ternan. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. The Western Canon (1994). A Map of Misreading (1975). Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the American Book Review.Contributors Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982). and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International Prize. Kabbalah and Criticism (1975). He is the author of over 20 books. Pygmalion (1913). ArtNews. Dreams. first revolutionized the Victorian stage and later became concerned with dramas of ideas. including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959). and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels. This British essayist and novelist is the author of Homage to Catalonia (1938). Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. Glamour. The Visionary Company (1961). In 1999. and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). How to Read and Why (2000). Yeats (1970). Irish playwright and critic. and Newsday. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). Blake’s Apocalypse (1963). and Saint Joan (1923). among them Man and Superman (1903). and she is currently at work on a novel. George Orwell is best known for his satirical and political writings. Animal Farm (1946). a 1998 National Book Award finalist. and Resurrection (1996). The American Religion (1992). Sarah Robbins has an MFA in fiction writing from New School University. He is the author of many plays. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002). George Bernard Shaw. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. 110 . She is a New York City-based writer and editor. she is the author of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian 111 . Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield. Vermont. Nina Auerbach is the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Hynes has written “Image and Symbol in Great Expectations” which was published in ELH journal. Her special area of concentration is nineteenth-century England. In addition to his work on Dickens. Critique. He is the author of Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. Dobie is the director of the Louisiana Writing Project State Network and former director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana. Joseph A.H. She is professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Lawrence (1966). since 1996. Ann B. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review.Peter Brooks is University Professor at the University of Virginia. including Reading for the Plot (1984) and Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000). he has published books on narrative and narrative theory. and Film Criticism. L. 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). Selected Poems (May 1991). She is the author of Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like (1999) Christopher D. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. and AngloIrish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (2000). Morris has been the Charles A. Julian Moynahan is Professor of English Emeritus at Rutgers University. Goldie Morgentaler is an Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge. and Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (2003). which is considered to be one of the finest works of scholarship on the novel. including The Question of Palestine (1979). Jay Clayton is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. and Reflections on Exile (2000). and Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress (2002). He is the author of many books. Our Vampires. Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (1993). 112 . the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. was also president of the Modern Language Association in 1999. Stephen Newman has written Great Expectations (1975). Time and the Literary (2002). The Politics of Dispossession (1994). He twice received Columbia’s Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. Edward Said. Ourselves (1997). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.Women Writers (1993). "The Bad Faith of Pip's Bad Faith: Deconstructing Great Expectations" by Christopher D.Acknowledgments "Introduction to Great Expectations" by Bernard Shaw. Reprinted by permission. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed.W. 641-644. 707-721. 648-654. From Nineteenth-Century Fiction (25). From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Reprinted by permission. Norton & Company. Dobie. "Repetition.W. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate. and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations" by Peter Brooks. Pp. "Early Stream-of-Consciousness Writing: Great Expectations" by Ann B. Reprinted with permission from Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 38. Edgar Rosenberg. Repression. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. 632-641. Morris. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Pp. "On Great Expectations" by Dorothy Van Ghent. © 1999 W. Inc. Pp. Pp. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations by Edgar Rosenberg (ed). © 1999 W. Norton & Company. © 1940 by George Orwell. © 1999 Thomson Learning. Pp. 654-663. Inc. Inc. "The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations" by Julian Moynahan. "Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations" by Goldie Morgentaler. Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors.W. No. From ELH 54: 4 (1987). Norton & Company. 113 . Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. © by Rice University. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. © 1999 W. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 4 (Autumn 1998). "Charles Dickens" by George Orwell. 941-955. 679-689. Edgar Rosenberg. Reprinted by permission. Pp. Reprinted by permission. Reprinted by permission. 621-623. Janice Carlisle. 114 . Hynes. 258292. From ELH (30). From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. 1963): Pp. Originally published by Alfred A. Martin's Press. Ltd. 3 (September. Jump & W. 79-85. Knopf.H. Janice Carlisle. 395-419. Inc. "Image and Symbol in Great Expectations" by Joseph A. Mason (eds). 405-416. 524-526.4 (March. © 1975 Stephen Newman. Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century" by Jay Clayton. Reprinted by permission. "Is Pip Postmodern? Or. From Notes on English Literature. © 1996 Bedford Books of St. Pp. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. No. "Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)" by Stephen Newman. © 1996 Bedford Books of St. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. "Two Commentaries on Great Expectations: From Deconstruction to Postcolonialism" by Edward Said. Pp. 1971): Pp. Martin's Press. Reprinted by permission. © by University of California Press. Reprinted by permission. From ELH 42: 3 (1975). From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. © by The Johns Hopkins University Press. John D. Pp. Pp. and Chatto & Windus. "Incarnations of the Orphan" by Nina Auerbach. 91. Shuli. 69. 104 Barzilai. 10. 46. Peter on Great Expectations. 56. 44 Pip’s father-substitute. 80. 13 Ambition theme in Great Expectations. 46. 72 Bentley Drummle in Great Expectations crimes of. 101–2 speech. 10. 16 Clayton. 90. 35. 104 Brontë. 56. 7. 69 mannerisms. 72. 25. 88–92 B Barnaby Rudge. 22. 49. 77. Edward. 10. 15. 19. 71. 54–58 Bulwer-Lytton. 69 death of. 25. 74 All the Year Round (periodical). 14. 75. 37. 72. 62 and Miss Havisham. Emily Wuthering Heights. 26. 104 Beer. 48. 26–27 and Pip. 97–100 Compeyson in Great Expectations. 10. 8 innocence. 32. 95. 15–17. 8 Brooks. Thomas. 46–48. 82 C Carey. 49 Carter. 24–27 Bildungsroman. 17. 71 and Joe. 12. 104 Auerbach. 40–41. 10. 101 as secret benefactor. 17. 57. The. 15 and Orlick.Index characters are alphabetized by their first names A Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations. Nina on the orphan theme in Great Expectations. 45. 77. 56. 44. 19–22. A. 43. 7–8. 81 and Joe. 77 on the plot of Great Expectations. 10. 50. 65–71. 45. 45. 61 convict. 51–52. 37. 93 death. Peter. 24. 15. 91 and Orlick. 55. 40–41. 101 clockwork throat. 86–87. 102 Carlyle. The. 104 Clara Bailey in Great Expectations. 104 Christmas Carol. 67–70 dark shadow of Pip. 52–53 Acceptance of loss theme. 44–45. 67 Biddy in Great Expectations. 15. 31. 30–31 marriage to Estella. 58. 16 115 . 44. 32. 101 escape. 69 and Pip’s education.103 daughter. 17. 8. 39–41. 62–65. 81 death. 90–91. 16. 38–39. 42. 74–75. 101–2 Chimes. 13 Bleak House. Paul The Road to Botany Bay. 100–1. 18. Gillian on Great Expectations. 72–73. 65–71 American Notes. 37–39. Jay on postmodernism in Great Expectations. 57. 64. 62. 8 Battle of Life. 17. 15. 10. 61. 15. 83 capture. 18 betrayal of Magwitch. 46 Adaptation theme in Great Expectations. 90. 33–36. 70–72. 14. 7. 14. 38. 53. Catherine Hogarth. Sigmund. 25–26. 67–68. 38–39. 17. Ann B. 43–45. 100–3 human discordance in. 45. 75 postmodernism in. 7. 47–48 unhappiness of. 80 parents. 7 David Copperfield in David Copperfield. 7–9 Dora in. 61 . 49. 61 graveyard. 93 G Great Expectations. 34. 93 and Pip. 72–73. 63. 67. 47 biography. 29. 10. 7–8. 82 violence in. Charles Origin of Species. 15. 45. 19. 70 critical views. 7 Day’s Ride. 11 imagination. 10. 71. 45–48. 104 D Darwin. Micawber in. 56–58. 100 story behind. The. 8. 12. 53–58. 59–65 language. 29. 47–103 historical aspects of. 14 Guilt and atonement theme in Great Expectations. 19. 8. 93 Newgate prison. 62 Smithfield. 104 Dobie. 34–37. 13. 70–71 writing of. 10–11 use of pathetic fallacy. 72–76 plot of. 21. 7. 9 Dickens. 9 critics. 40–41. 46–48. 56–58. 62 Dickens. 39. 104 autobiographical content. 104 autobiographical content. 70. 8. 48. 15. 13 summary analysis. The. 9–11 birth. 15. 11 theatrical productions. 12–14 stream of consciousness in. 10. 36–38. 84–88 Dombey and Son. 104 E Eliot. 72–76 David Copperfield. 14. 97–100 self-delusion of. 13 Decipherment theme in Great Expectations. 14. 9 Mr. 33. 12. 10. 31–32. 48. 46 F Fatal Shore. 85 inconsistent characters. 91 marriages. 24–25. 77. 81. 13 character list. 22–23. 84–88 structure of. 62 Jaggers’ office. 47–49. 15–18 coincidences in. 19–20. 60. 16. 100 Miss Havisham’s influence on. 18. 101 narrative of. 24 The Origin of Species influence on. 62 the river. 55 Demonic symbolism in Great Expectations exaggerated character features. 18. 88. 28. 13 116 Estella in Great Expectations. 80–83 tormentor. 11–12 death. Charles affairs of. The (Hughes). George. 34. A (Lever). 7–8. 39. 19–46 two endings of. 19. 74. 7–8. 59–65 works by. on the stream of consciousness in Great Expectations. 40–42.Cricket on the Hearth. 10. 31–34. 101–2 Freud. 90–91 and star imagery. 22. 83–84. 12. 53 consciousness of. 62. 51–53 public readings. 18. 77. 34. 104 Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. 28–38. 25. 58–59. 51. 44 help to Magwitch. 45. 49 Humor. 27. 61 housekeeper. 80 death. 70. 78. Carl.of great expectations. 70–71. 52 Hynes. Mr. Joseph A. 15. 16. 64. 18 mannerisms. 89 and Estella. 29. 91 honesty and warmth. Edgar. Miss in Great Expectations. 46. 42–43. 16. 24–25 Joe Gargery. 98. 37. 83 attack on. Mrs. 7–8. 74–75. Robert The Fatal Shore. 17. 32–33. 102 Martin Chuzzlewit. 97–98 Pip’s father-substitute. 81 and Biddy. 98 Master Humphrey’s Clock (weekly). Mary model for heroines. 31 speech of. Charles A Day’s Ride. 83–84 garden. 71. 16. 10. 95. 101–2 Hugo. 71. 91 revenge on men. 24. 80. 71. 72 Joe Gargery. 40–43. 15. 43. 38–45. 67. 46. 21 jealousy of. 17. 27–30. 35 disinterest in education. 10. 62–64. 80 Johnson. 88 L Lever. 104 Marx. 31. 33–34. 36 and Satis house. on imagery in Great Expectations. 80–81. 15. 80–84 I Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. 24–26. 27. 81. 16–17. 24–25. 10 Hughes. 7–8. in Great Expectations. 43. 51. 80–83 J Jaggers in Great Expectations. 7 Joyce. 15. David. 32–34. 81–83 Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations desires of. 64. 103 and Pip. 82–83 star. 28–31. 70 Pip’s. 92–97 as Pip’s counsel. 59. 49. 19–20. 89–90 sufferings of. 104 M Malouf. 13 Hogarth. 91–96 forefinger. 75. 70. James. 60. 49. 91. 21. 9 Imagery in Great Expectations firelight. 11. 9 Household Words (periodical). 16. 45. 78. 67–69 death. 38–44. 84 Jung. 71. 67. 77. 15–16. 17. 26. 23. 40. 60. 31. 32–33. 52. 10. 74. 66. 13 Little Dorrit. 35. 104 Havisham. 84. Victor. 21–22. 27. 73. 90 Historical novels. 20. 26–27. in Great Expectations. 49. 10 Matthew Pocket in Great Expectations 117 . 33–36. 46. 83–84. 67. 16. 25–27. 93 murderer’s. Karl. 36. 91–92 H Hard Times. 24. 22. 10. 68–69. 19–20. 22. The. 21. 100 dirty business of. 90 pride of. 7–8. 72–76 Morris. 104 P Paroissien. 93 and Jaggers. 104 Pip in Great Expectations ambition of. 77. 39. 13. 27–28. 18. 73. 30–31. J. 86–87. 37–46. 43–44 on The Orgins of Species influence on Great Expectations. 28. 16. 64 attack on Pip. 9 Oliver Twist. 72–76 Orlick in Great Expectations. 25. 56. 31 Morgenthaler. 66–70 dark shadow of Pip. 86 injuries. 37. 9–10. 104 The Origin of Species (Darwin) 118 influence on Great Expectations. Christopher D. 10. 25. 9. 12. 90. 59–65. 52. 23. 32. 31–33.” 15. 43. 82–84.” 10. 41 and Estella. 39. 30–31. 72. 51 consciousness. 10. David. 40 arrest of. 55–56. Joe. 64. 104 N Narrative. 48. 16. 16. 11. 12 Pickwick Papers. 93–97 imagination and hallucinations. 65–71 Orphanhood theme in Bleak House. 21. 16. 65–71 education. 57 loss. The. 43–45 looking back of. 88–92 Orwell. 101 identity of things. 76 Molly in Great Expectations crimes of. 51–52. 70–71. 32.and Miss Havisham. 43. 29. 12. Great Expectations direct monologue. 19–22. 81. 19. 87 Pip’s. 35. 87–88 third person. 16 and Compeyson. 32. 34 Newman. 43 and Biddy. 37 father-substitutes of. 40. 24. 65–71 Mystery of Edwin Drood. 19 on Pip’s moral bad faith. 104 Little Nell in. 51–53 Our Mutual Friend. 19. 8 and “commonness. 46. 104 O Old Curiosity Shop. 65–71 authentic maturity. 90 in Great Expectations. 34. 33. 37 Miller. 84–85. 92–97 Nicholas Nickleby. 31 on Jaggers and Wemmick in Great Expectations. 22. 72–73. 34 on the theme of ambition in Great Expectations. 16 crimes of. 18. 12. 85–89 dark doubles of. 18. 19. 24. 25–26. 101–3 . The. 76–79. 89–90. 56. Julian on Great Expectations. 90–91. 17. 74–75. 7. 85. 26–27. 45 attack on Mrs. 50 and Magwitch. 54. 45 tutor. 28. Steven on Great Expectations. Goldie on Great Expectations. 62. 76–79 Moynahan. on Great Expectations. 66 indirect monologue. 85–88 stream of consciousness. 12–13. 87 Newgate prison in Great Expectations. 17. 87–88 first person. 41. 7. 104 “Pictures of Italy. Hillis. 10. 44. George on Dickens’s inconsistent characters. 19. 76–79 naming of self. 36. 91–92 Postmodernism foreshadowing in Great Expectations. 20. 19. 98. Harry. 98 divided life of. 64. 52. 100 secret benefactor. 31–38. 90–91. 104 Ternan. 62–64. 16–17. 49. 56. 22. 56. 73–74 and commodification of people. 51.G. 54. 26. 7–8. 38. 95. Raymond. 100–3 Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations at Satis House. 48. 75 W Wells. Patrick. 59–65 on Great Expectations. 102 Williams. 88. 21–22. Ellen. 41–42 “aged parent. 62. 44 Victorian. 22. 45. 77 plans for Pip. 30 violence against. 39. 44. 22 high. 72–74 and class snobbery. 10. 100–2 sense of guilt. 23. 13 Road to Botany Bay. 95 unification. 47–50 Sketches of Boz. 32. 20. 48 Wemmick in Great Expectations. 32–34. 45–48. 97–100 Pumblechook in Great Expectations. 35–40.” 30. 28. Anthony. The (Carter). 84 119 . 66. 57. 101–2 Van Ghent. 56. 92–97 post-office mouth. 25. 33. 75. 90 passion for Estella. 73. 7. 43. 12 on the class snobbery in Great Expectations. A. 47–51. 36. 27. 78. 78. George Bernard. Virginia. 45. on the historical aspects of Great Expectations. Dorothy on Dickens’ use of pathetic fallacy. 17 robbery of. 68–69 Stone. 91 on Pip’s identity of things. 64 obsessions of. 103 Trollope. 17. 40–42. 7–8. 17. 44. 26–31. 32 Shaw. 103 Startop Great Expectations. 17. 43 mannerisms. 24. 35. 13. 24–25. William Makepeace. 95. 64. 27. 40. 72 and metaphor of chain. 27. 97–98. 59–65 S Said. 20. 31. 13 Society in Great Expectations civilized. 25. 66. 15–17.. 82. 21–26. 38. 13 V R Realism domestic. 98 White. 85 Surrealism.” 13. 104 Smithfield market in Great Expectations. 58. 13 Time theme in Great Expectations. 88 T Tale of Two Cities. 15. 69. 99 Woolf. 84. 81–82. 45–46. 75. 91. 13 “Newgate. 91. 36. 27. 34.moral bad faith. 60. 95–100 mannerisms. 80–83. 85. 70–71. H. 9. 61 and Miss Skiffins. 14 Thackeray. 67–71 criminality of. Edward W. 37. 90–91 rise in social status. 64 playacting. 18. 8 . 56 120 as Wadengarver. 49. Thomas. 13–14 Wuthering Heights (Brontë). Mr. 33–34 Wright.Wopsle. 33. 18. 41. 31. 27. 20–22. 24–25. in Great Expectations.