Wherein The Dickens Chronological reading Club 2022-24 Introduces Great Expectations and (the optional read) The Uncommercial Traveller, our twenty-second and twenty-third reads as a group.
(Banner Image: By F.A. Fraser, via the Victorian Web.)
By Boze
Hello, friends. What is the cost of social mobility? How do you rebuild a life after being shipwrecked by your own folly? Who truly loves you, and what do you owe them in return?
But first, a few quick links:
- Historical Context
- Thematic Considerations
- A Note on the Illustrations
- Reading Schedule
- Additional References & Adaptations
- General Mems for the #DickensClub
- A Look-Ahead to Weeks One and Two of Great Expectations
- Works Cited
Historical Context – Dickens and London in 1860 and 1861
The year was 1860. Dickens had just finished writing A Tale of Two Cities, which would prove to be his bestselling novel—the bestselling novel of all time, in fact—and was embarking, though he didn’t know it at the time, on the final decade of his life. A decade that would see the publication of his last two novels, the beginnings of a novel that would never be finished, and an accident from which he never recovered.
Dickens had recently separated from Catherine, and his cruelty towards her—he had accused her in the local press of being mentally unwell—had alienated even his most sympathetic associates. It’s in these years that we see the dissolution of the fellowship that had gathered around Dickens during his earliest success. Angela Burdett Coutts distanced herself after imploring him to be reconciled with Catherine. Playwright Mark Lemon became estranged and Thackeray began editing a rival periodical, Cornhill, which cut into the circulation of All the Year Round.
One of the remarkable things about Dickens, in retrospect, is how he managed to get anything written given the social obligations, family quarrels and, especially in his later years, strains on his health and nerves that made demands on his time and energy. Between the end of the Tale and the beginning of Great Expectations he was suffering from neuralgia, an acute and persistent pain in his side that foreshadowed the stroke that would end his life, and a mysterious ailment that demanded the application of silver nitrate. (In a letter to Wilkie Collins, he raised the hope that a “tumble into the sea” might restore his health—“but I suppose there is no nitrate of Silver in the Ocean?”)
Meanwhile, even apart from the unpleasantness with Catherine, and no doubt fueled by it, the rest of his family was beginning to fracture. His daughter Katey was betrothed to Wilkie Collins’s younger brother Charles Allston Collins, a much older pre-Raphaelite who was in poor health. Dickens opposed the marriage, perhaps sensing that Katey had pursued the relationship in the hopes of escaping a suffocating home life. Mary (“Mamie”) Dickens later claimed that on the day of the wedding she found her father on his knees in the bride’s bedroom, sobbing into her gown, and that Dickens then said to Mamie, “But for me, Katey would not have left home.” As if to vindicate the Shakespearean maxim about sorrows coming in battalions, ten days after the wedding his brother Alfred—“the steady one who had never caused him any trouble,” according to Slater—died suddenly, leaving a widow and five children for whom Dickens felt obligated to make provision. On top of all this, Dickens’s sons were beginning to make their own way in the world and, invariably, proving to be disappointments. (Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List, has tackled this period in a recent novel entitled The Dickens Boy, which imagines how Dickens’s youngest child, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, might have felt when his father nudged him into migrating to Australia.)
London was changing, too. The London of hamlets and stagecoaches was fast becoming the London of trains and omnibuses and gas lamps so familiar from late Victorian fiction. Dickens walked sometimes along the newly built Embankment remembering the marshes and estuaries that he had described so vividly in novels like Dombey and Son, and which were now gone. That London had been absorbed into the new imperial capital, as surely as the old rookeries had been cleared away to make way for the broad thoroughfares of New Oxford Street and Queen Victoria Street. As Ackroyd says so beautifully:
“And so, even as Charles Dickens strolled along the new esplanade of the embankment, London was being transformed. It was no longer the city which he had known as a child and young man. This was now becoming the London of wide streets and underground railways, the orderliness and symmetry of the old Georgian capital quite displaced by the imperialist neo-Gothic of mid-Victorian public buildings. Something of the old compactness had gone for ever and with it, too, the particular gracefulness and colour of the previous century. In its place rose a city which was more massive, more closely controlled, more organised. The metropolis was much larger but it was becoming emptier, as the suburbs around London took up some of the displaced population, and it was also much more anonymous; it was a more public city, the seat of empire and of commerce, but it was also a human one. It is not possible to see Ebenezer Scrooge or Miss Havisham, Fagin or the Artful Dodger, in the new thoroughfare and squares of the 1860s; this was no longer the wild and barren place of Dickens’s imagination, nor was it the extravagant and eccentric locale where all his characters had met and moved together. And yet Dickens never ceased to live in that old city … It was the city that had made him. It was the city which had almost destroyed him but which had then raised him up. It was the city of his dreams and the city of his imagination. In his work it is the city that will live for ever.”
Thematic Considerations
What fascinates me about Great Expectations is how methodically Dickens dismantles the Dickens formula. I’ve spoken ad nauseam on this blog about the Dickens Plot, a fine-tuned and even more commercially successful version of the traditional hero’s journey, in which a child born into unpleasant circumstances sets out into the world seeking independence, an escape from poverty and abuse, and typically finds fortune, maturity and domestic bliss. The Dickens Plot had reached its most perfect form in David Copperfield, which intriguingly Dickens read again shortly before beginning the writing of Great Expectations because he feared repeating himself. Not only does he avoid repeating himself, he almost inverts the arc of that book. Where David’s journey brings him fame, love and social renown, Pip’s journey brings dejection and humiliation. But in that humiliation there is a kind of wisdom. Dickens in this book is effectively Johnny Cash making the video for Hurt at the end of his life, pondering the meaning of his success, and asking whether in the end it was worth it.
It is also the most dream-like, the most hallucinatory, the most fairy-tale-infused of all Dickens’s novels. Two or three times in his career Dickens wrote a piece that seemed not so much to have been written as transcribed, that seemed to have existed before Dickens; before time itself. A Christmas Carol is one such work and Great Expectations is another. As Claire Tomalin writes, “It did not come from research or the theatre but out of a deep place in Dickens’s imagination, which he never chose to explain, and perhaps never could, and it is all the better for that … Great Expectations is not a realistic account of how the world was but a visionary novel, close to ballad or folktale. The orphan boy, with dead parents and siblings in the graveyard in the marsh, has a cruel elder sister who treats him like a male Cinderella. He encounters monsters—Magwitch, Orlick, Miss Havisham, Jaggers and the nameless man with a closed eye and a file—and he can’t tell which threatens and which favors him. His innocence becomes tarnished by money and what it seems to promise. He neglects the good spirits who protect him—Joe the blacksmith and Biddy the simple schoolteacher—and is lured by Estella, a Belle Dame sans Merci.”
That Ending
Without going too much into spoilers, we’ll just say that Dickens wrote two endings for Great Expectations and the two endings are very different. The original ending is melancholy, fraught with rejection and disappointment, in keeping with the tone and themes of the rest of the book. In its own way, this ending is strikingly original, subversive even, challenging the famously tidy and upbeat endings of Dickens’s previous novels.
But alas, this is not the ending that appears in most printed editions of the novel. And for that we can thank Edward Bulwer-Lytton, famously one of history’s worst novelists. Bulwer-Lytton, “in what has rather cruelly been called his only lasting contribution to English literature,” according to Slater, leaned on Dickens to change the ending because he felt the original was too gloomy. Dickens, who typically ignored literary advice offered by lesser writers (which is to say, all other writers), obliged him in this instance for commercial reasons—while he seems to have favored the darker ending, he came to suspect that the reading public would disagree and that it would hurt future sales of the novel. Critics have been almost uniformly scathing in their criticisms of the newer, happier ending. Claire Tomalin has called Bulwer-Lytton’s meddling a “foolish moment,” while Slater calls it “astonishing” and laments the loss of the “brilliantly economical downbeat ending … an ending that resonated perfectly with this novel of ruined loves and lost illusions.”
The Uncommercial Traveller
Rach and I would like to encourage everyone to join us in reading Dickens’s 1861 book of sketches, The Uncommercial Traveller. We’ve been reading a chapter aloud each night and are reveling in the unfettered rovings of Dickens’s journalistic imagination. It’s sort of a darker companion and book end to Sketches by Boz, written at the start of his career, a series of reflections on the new London that was coming into being, a London in whose streets he was taking increasingly lengthy night-time walks fraught with reflection and regret.
If that doesn’t grab your interest, perhaps Peter Ackroyd’s glowing description will do it:
“They are wonderful pieces which, if they had to be characterised, might take as their motto the words which Dickens had just used in his Christmas story when he deemed himself to be haunted by the ghosts of his childhood innocence. Over the next few months he wrote essays in which he raised once more the spectre of a lost past. The spectre of lost childhood … It remains as it was, always present and always being invoked. As it is in these essays themselves, sixteen of them written between January and October of 1860—essays concerning the Paris Morgue and the bodies of the dead; concerning broken sleep; concerning his lonely walks through the streets of London at night; concerning sad and dismal metropolitan neighbourhoods; concerning suicides and paupers at Wapping; concerning the figure of ‘the very queer small boy’ who is the spirit of his own infancy; concerning the lonely chambers in the Inns of Court; concerning the deserted churches in the City of London, St James Garlickhithe, St Michael Paternoster Row, St Martin Vintry, St Michael Queenhithe; concerning his visit to his childhood haunts from which he returns with his early imaginations ‘…so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!’; concerning the grim and frightening stories of his childhood nurse. These are chronicles of sometimes desolate and unhappy wandering, filled with nostalgia, solitude, weariness and melancholia (even his letters in this period are much quieter and much plainer, less buoyant with the vivacity of Dickens’s inventiveness). The wanderings of a man haunted by his past and by images of death.”
A Note on the Illustrations
Great Expectations was published almost simultaneously in both All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly. In the former, no illustrations were included; John McLenan provided forty plates for Harper’s Weekly, and you can find more detailed information about the McLenan illustrations from Philip V. Allingham here. Later editions would produce an abundance of illustrations, including those of Charles Green and Harry Furniss.
Reading Schedule*
*Note: We will read Great Expectations over the course of 6 weeks (followed by a 2-week break), with a summary and discussion wrap-up every other week. Great Expectations was published almost simultaneously in both All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly. But As ATYR is Dickens’s own publication, we are basing our publication dates on that schedule.
| Week/Dates | Chapters | Notes |
| Weeks 1 & 2: 12-25 March, 2024 | Chapters 1-21 | Our portion during the first two weeks was published in weekly parts in All the Year Round between 1 Dec, 1860 and 23 Feb, 1861. |
| Weeks 3 & 4: 26 March to 8 April, 2024 | Chapters 22-42 | Our portion during Weeks 3 & 4 was published in weekly parts between 2 March and 25 May, 1861. |
| Weeks 5 & 6: 9-22 April, 2024 | Chapters 43-59 | Our portion during Weeks 5 & 6 was published in weekly parts between 1 June and 3 Aug, 1861. |
| 23 April to 6 May, 2024 | BREAK | Zoom meeting re: Great Expectations. |
| 7-27 May, 2024 | (Optional Read) The Uncommercial Traveller | No wrap-ups for this read; only a discussion under the placeholder post for those who are joining in. |
Additional References and Adaptations
There have been a number of screen adaptations of Great Expectations, including the much-lamented 2023 BBC miniseries that, in keeping with the BBC’s recent output, attempts to put a “darker” spin on the story. I’m personally very fond of the 1946 David Lean film adaptation (starring Sir Alec Guinness as the adult Herbert Pocket and Jean Simmons, who would play Miss Havisham in 1989, as Estella), which has been called the most perfect of all Dickens adaptations—only marred somewhat by a disappointingly melodramatic ending. I also much enjoyed the 2012 film directed by Mike Newell, which functioned as a Harry Potter cast reunion. (This makes Newell the second Harry Potter director to direct an adaptation of Great Expectations, the other being Alfonso Cuaron who moved the action to present-day Florida.) Rach and I are quite looking forward to watching the 1981 BBC serial helmed by the Classic Doctor Who team, who also produced beloved ‘80s adaptations of Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, and David Copperfield and have never disappointed us.
For those who would like to follow along with Rach into Dr. Christian Lehmann‘s deep dive into this novel, the playlist can be found here.
General Mems for the #DickensClub
First of all, a huge “thank you” to all who joined in for our Zoom chat on A Tale of Two Cities!
SAVE THE DATE (and let us know which works for you): We’re looking at either Sat, April 27 or Sat, May 4 for our chat on Great Expectations.
If you’re counting, today is Day 799 (and week 115) in our #DickensClub! This week and next, we’ll be beginning Great Expectations, our twenty-second read as the group. Please feel free to comment below this post for the first and second weeks’ chapters or use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter.
No matter where you’re at in the reading process, a huge “thank you” for reading along with us. Heartfelt thanks to our dear Dickens Fellowship, The Dickens Society, and the Charles Dickens Letters Project for retweets, and to all those liking, sharing, and encouraging our Club, including Gina Dalfonzo, Dr. Christian Lehmann and Dr. Pete Orford. Huge “thank you” also to The Circumlocution Office (on twitter also!) for providing such a marvellous online resource for us.And for any more recent members or for those who might be interested in joining: the revised two-and-a-half year reading schedule can be found here. If you’ve been reading along with us but aren’t yet on the Member List, we would love to add you! Please feel free to message Rach here on the site, or on twitter.
And for any more recent members or for those who might be interested in joining: the revised two-and-a-half year reading schedule can be found here. If you’ve been reading along with us but aren’t yet on the Member List, we would love to add you! Please feel free to message Rach here on the site, or on twitter.
A Look-Ahead to Weeks One and Two of Great Expectations (12-25 March, 2024)
This week and next, we’ll be reading Chapters 1-21 of Great Expectations. Our portion during the first two weeks was published in weekly parts in All the Year Round between 1 Dec, 1860 and 23 Feb, 1861.
Feel free to comment below for your thoughts this week and next, or use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter.
If you’d like to read it online, you can find it at a number of sites such as Gutenberg.
Works Cited
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. Yale University Press, 2011.
Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens: A Life. Penguin Books, 2011.
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 
SUCH a marvelous intro!! I have loved rereading Great Expectations with you–and am looking forward to yet another go-round, as we read it with the whole group–and am particularly loving The Uncommercial Traveller! You and Ackroyd absolutely sell it! 😀
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve been waiting for this day for so long! You see, Great Expectations is one of my top three favorite Dickens books, the other two being Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol, and sometimes I think it’s my favorite. I know not everyone agrees with that. I’ve met people who loved the book and people who hated it. Hopefully, everyone in this group will find it OK at least. (I’m not saying that because I want everyone to agree with me. I just want everyone to enjoy the group.)
It’s interesting that each of the three first person narrators in Dickens’s major novels (David Copperfield, Esther Summerson and Pip) is a delusional character in some way. Esther is trying to convince herself that the woman who raised her was really a good person and that she’s not bothered by her facial disfigurement. These self-delusions aren’t immoral, except maybe in the sense of being dishonest, and she never abandons them. David Copperfield believes that Steerforth is a wonderful person, and that Dora is his one true love. He’s over these delusions by the time he writes his autobiography but when he writes about believing them at the time, he does so as if he still believes them, only giving occasional hints that his mind has changed since then. (You could argue he never entirely loses his delusions about Steerforth.) I don’t want to get into Pip’s delusions at this early point but when he narrates, he makes it clear that he’s disgusted by them in retrospect or, at the least, by his behavior while he was under them.
That brings me to something interesting about Great Expectations in the context of Dickens’s life. From what I understand, he always blamed the collapse of his marriage on his wife even though every biographer has called this libel. (Of course, I haven’t read every biographer. I’m not really that interested in biographies. If anyone feels I’m oversimplifying the historical consensus, feel free to comment about it.) But the narrator in Great Expectations is so defined by his guilt and so ashamed of his past actions and attitudes that it’s hard not to wonder if Dickens felt the same way about himself. Maybe that was just a coincidence though or maybe he felt guilty subconsciously. Who can say?
Anyway, this is a debatable position, but Pip is my favorite of Dickens’s first-person narrators. Esther’s narration has its strong points, but it can also get kind of irritating. David the narrator is loveable, but he can get a little repetitive and I don’t think we ever entirely lose our condescension toward his character. There are people out there who find the character of Pip insufferable, but I think the fact that he so clearly renounces his vices makes me respect him and I find his narration to be maybe the peak of Dickens’s eloquence.
This is controversial but I prefer the final, “official” ending of Great Expectations on the whole. I won’t get into why until we actually reach the ending though. Don’t want to get into spoilers.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Dear Fellow Inimitables!
We are embarking on another Dickensian journey: reading “Great Expectations” and, as inclined, “The Uncommercial Traveller.” I’m eager to join you on this adventure.
Boze, you set the stage for reading GE wonderfully—kicking things off with those great questions you posed at the opening, igniting my curiosity.
By the way, I had no idea that “Tale of Two Cities” was the best-selling novel of all time. Did I understand that right?
Your depiction of Dickens’ emotional and mental mindset at the time he was writing GE is so helpful—trying to imagine how his irrepressible literary genius continued to emerge under such lamentable circumstances and conditions, including his deteriorating health. A man born to write!
I delighted in the comparison to the “inimitable” Johnny Cash at the end of his life, questioning his success and whether it was all worth it. Great parallel!
Claire Tomalin’s penetrating insight nails the basic tragic sense of GE corresponds closely to what I have long-since experienced in encountering GE: “He neglects the good spirits who protect him—Joe the blacksmith and Biddy the simple schoolteacher—and is lured by Estella, a Belle Dame sans Merci.” I always find that I want to shake Pip out of his stuporous state!!!
I would like to join you and Rachel in your “reveling in the unfettered rovings of Dickens’s journalistic imagination,” “The Uncommercial Traveller.” Ackroyd’s perspective, indeed, puts the final nail in the coffin (not the best image methinks!).
Thanks much for this rich introduction and thanks to Rachel and The Stationmaster for their excellent first comments—including the comparison of the first-person narrators.
Onwards, Fellow Inimitables! Once more into the breach!
Blessings,
Daniel
P.S. I’m eager to learn from Dr. Lehmann, who is always rich, deep, and fully delightful.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This sentence is one of the reasons I consider Great Expectations to be Dickens’s best written book. “Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine medicine…” LOL. I also love this bit.
“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean that but rather the contrary.
I feel like Mrs. Joe has more depth than other shrewish wife characters in Dickens. While there’s no excusing the way she treats Joe and Pip, we gradually get the idea that her anger comes from some deep-seated insecurity. She seems terrified by the idea that her husband and brother might not need her. She also has rather a tragic backstory, seeing how she lost her parents and all her siblings but Pip though I can’t say that makes her all that sympathetic, given how she treats her remaining brother.
Dickens does such a wonderful job of conveying Mrs. Joe’s angry, unpleasant personality with these descriptions of her doing things that are ostensibly innocent, even nice.
My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib,—where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,—using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.
Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the old one, and uncovered the little state parlour across the passage, which was never uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper, which even extended to the four little white crockery poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other. Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
There’s obvious (and hilarious) irony in Uncle Pumblechook eagerly anticipating a pork pie right after swine have been used as an example of gluttony. But there’s a deeper irony to the scene that the reader can only realize after they’ve read the whole book. The adults come across as insufferably obnoxious with the way they lecture Pip about how he should be grateful to them. (Note that Joe is the only adult who’s happy about Pip potentially enjoying the pie. The others are just interested in it for themselves.) But the lesson that Pip ends up needing to learn in this story is that he should be more grateful, just not to the characters who are telling him to be more grateful. In fact, if you look at the plot of Great Expectations from a distance, cock your head and squint, it resembles the biblical parallel to which Wopsle alludes. (“Swine, were the companions of the prodigal.”)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I meant to write “parable,” not “parallel.” Stupid typos!
LikeLike
What a wonderful introduction to what is one of his most complex, engaging novels. I have been so looking forward to this read, and while I cannot definitively state that it is my favourite Dickens novel, it seems that this one holds a place that is very special in my heart.
I was thinking about the context of the writing of the novel, Nicholas Cambrige in his book Bleak Health, talks a lot about the illnesses that were plaguing Dickens as he reaches the end of his life, and I have seen suggestions that the silver nitrate might have been to treat an STI, a result of the bachelor lifestyle he embarked on in the immediate aftermath of leaving his wife (his letters especially to Wilkie Collins at that time are quite interesting in that respect).
What also interests me is the fact that he wrote this book to be a sensation, as he needed to get the sales of All the Year Round back up after they dropped when he began serialising A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance by Charles James Lever, which was a dismal failure, resulting in, as Dickens wrote to Lever, a rapid and continuous drop in sales. There was, as Dickens said ‘but one thing to be done’. Dickens himself intended to devote the opening pages of All the Year Round to his new novel. And this Great Expectations was born.
Looking forward to commenting further as I begin it!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dickens foreshadows the theme of public appearances early on with the contrasts he draws between Pip, Joe and Biddy’s everyday clothes and their Sunday dress.
I love Joe Gargery! He’s my favorite of Dickens’s lower class, salt of the earth characters, even over Miss La Creevy and the various members of the Peggotty family. Even his one moral failing, his failure to protect Pip from Mrs. Joe, makes him endearing in his humanity. His insistence that his father was “that good in his hart” in spite of everything is the first example in the book of someone being loved who doesn’t deserve it. We’ll get a lot more examples later. Pip’s patronizing attitude towards Joe when he learns that he can’t read foreshadows his unfortunate trajectory.
As much as I appreciated Dickens’s writing and as endearing as I found Joe, I wasn’t really sure on my first read whether I was going to really like Great Expectations-until I met Miss Havisham! She’s probably my favorite Dickensian villain bar none. It’s such a great touch that we never hear that she’s crippled in any way, but she refrains from walking unaided in front of people. Satis House is also awesomely creepy. Miss Havisham also strikes me as a surprisingly relatable villain. I suspect that a lot of us when our hearts are broken have the urge to wallow in bitterness and never move on from it. Most of us don’t follow through on the urge though or if we do, we don’t make as much of a career out of it as she does. It’s interesting that she says when her corpse will be laid on the bride’s table, still in her bride’s clothes, it “will be the finished curse upon him.” Presumably, by “him” she means the man who broke her heart. But why would it bother him if she never changed her clothes or cleaned her house after learning of his treachery? Isn’t that actually giving him the ultimate power over her? Of course, it is. But I think that’s how we feel sometimes when somebody really hurts us. We feel that if our whole lives aren’t defined by that pain, it’s saying what the perpetrators did wasn’t so bad and letting them off the hook, even though what we really do by not moving on is hurt ourselves. (I know this take is different from Linda Raphael’s interpretation of Miss Havisham but, eh, I call ’em as I see ’em.)
Though Dickens sought to avoid repeating David Copperfield in Great Expectations, it’s interesting that both books’ protagonists in their youth are plagued by adults who pose math problems to them.
I love the visual metaphor of Pip seeing-or thinking he sees-Estella walking along the tops of the casks in the old brewery but being unable to catch up to her. Walking on tops of the casks is the kind of undignified thing a regular kid might do for fun. Pip doesn’t realize it yet but what he really wants is find Estella vulnerable and connect with her, but he never can do so.
I wonder if Pip’s tall tales about Satis House are supposed to be metaphors for his feelings of class envy. (He fantasizes about having cake and wine with Miss Havisham and Estella but only dares to imagine himself behind the black velvet coach while they’re seated inside?) He also imagines Miss Havisham feeding dogs. He himself was given food “as if (he) were a dog in disgrace.” Could that be playing itself over and over in his mind, but he can’t bear to admit it, so he transfers his treatment to actual dogs? Maybe.
It’s hard to tell (on a first read anyway) whether Pip’s fight with the pale young gentleman is supposed to be comical or creepy. I don’t mean that as a criticism. Any confusion on the reader’s part matches the confusion Pip himself feels.
Some people find it incomprehensible that Pip could so love the cruel and capricious Estella, but it makes sense to me, taking his background into consideration. After all, the main model for marriage he’s had in his life so far has been a relationship where the woman is always insulting and abusing the man, loudly maintaining that he’s beneath her. Maybe Pip thinks that’s what romance is supposed to be like.
The main message of Great Expectations is that people should be honored for their virtue, not their wealth or social status. You’d expect Miss Havisham as the main villain to be the ultimate example of not doing so. (Well, you can argue another antagonist we’ve only met briefly at this point in the book is really the main villain, but Miss Havisham is most prominent one.) Counterintuitively though, she’s actually implied to be a very good judge of character. She keeps Pumblechook at a distance and sees through her gold-digging relatives but seems to like Pip (in a sadistic she-loves-torturing-him way) and respects Joe.
I wonder what would have happened if Mrs. Joe had been invited to Satis House as she wished to be. Would she have had a nervous breakdown in front of Miss Havisham like her husband did or would she have been more equal to the occasion? It’s interesting that both Pip and Joe lie about their first experiences at Satis House, almost as if it has some evil influence on visitors. Pumblechook also lies about his relationship with Miss Havisham (or tries to avoid telling the truth anyway) but I’d expect that from him.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The tract “ornamented with a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and entitled TO BE READ IN MY CELL” that someone in court gives Pip foreshadows some of Dickens’s social commentary later in the book.
I love this bit.
“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack just now, if you would give me a half-holiday to-morrow, I think I would go uptown and make a call on Miss Est—Havisham.”
“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain’t Estavisham, Pip, unless she have been rechris’ened.”
Don’t tell me Joe isn’t intelligent!
The annoying way Wopsle and Pumblechook seem to accuse Pip or murdering his benefactor like George Barnwell reflects badly on them of course, but they’re actually right in a way. Pip isn’t going to murder anyone, but he arguably lacks appreciation for his benefactor, Joe Gargery, and is going to betray him in a way. (There’ll be another benefactor in the book whom Pip won’t appreciate.)
Earlier in the book, Pip was annoyed by the condescending way adults in his life expected him to be grateful to them but in Chapter 17, he ends up doing the same thing to Biddy by saying to her that she “never had a chance” before she came to work for his family. Fortunately, he seems to realize his mistake right away and seeks to correct it, demonstrating that for all he’s an antihero, Pip is far from the worst person in the book. Dickens stresses though that his attitude toward her is still rather patronizing and entitled though.
Biddy is one of my favorite Dickensian heroines! (Estella may be the leading lady but she’s not a heroine if you know what I mean.) You’ve got to love the way she throws Pip’s unthinking insult back at him.
“If I could have settled down,” I said to Biddy, plucking up the short grass within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my feelings out of my hair and kicked them into the brewery wall,—“if I could have settled down and been but half as fond of the forge as I was when I was little, I know it would have been much better for me. You and I and Joe would have wanted nothing then, and Joe and I would perhaps have gone partners when I was out of my time, and I might even have grown up to keep company with you, and we might have sat on this very bank on a fine Sunday, quite different people. I should have been good enough for you; shouldn’t I, Biddy?”
Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for answer, “Yes; I am not over-particular.”
She also has some of the most applicable wisdom from any Dickens book.
“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.
“I don’t know,” I moodily answered.
“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think—but you know best—that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think—but you know best—she was not worth gaining over.”
Biddy’s words are great to remember when somebody charismatic insults you, making you want to prove something to them. But, as the book acknowledges, this advice can be very hard to follow even knowing that it’s right intellectually. I’m not much of a people person, so this hasn’t ruined my life like it does Pip’s, but I’ve felt some of what he feels (in a nonromantic way.) I’ve heard charismatic people make disparaging comments about people like me. I’ve also taken a look at other opinions those people have expressed and have decided they’re good opinion is not worth courting. But the comments still bug me when I recall them. Is there a cure? I don’t know of it and Pip, even in retrospect, doesn’t seem to know it either.
Does anyone in Dickens Club still remember Little Dorrit? It occurs to me that Biddy’s advice relates to that story. William Dorrit wants to win society over. Fanny Dorrit wants to spite the society that snubbed her. And Little Dorrit herself cares nothing for society’s words (though, like Biddy, she does care a lot about people-if I may make the distinction between “society” and “people.”)
Looking even further back, Pip can be compared to Nancy from Oliver Twist. She knew Bill Sikes was ruining her life but couldn’t stop loving him anyway (or felt that she couldn’t; there might be a difference) just like Pip with Estella.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Brilliant analysis, Boze!
But I confess to liking the happier ending. I guess I’m just a sentimental slob at heart. 😀
LikeLiked by 2 people
Mr. Jaggers, with his desire to keep everything all business, strikes me as a creepy version of Mr. Lorry from A Tale of Two Cities. The way he makes everyone in the Jolly Bargemen doubt what they believed minutes ago in Chapter 18 is such a great introductory scene. It’s a pity it has to be cut from most adaptations for time. There’s no reason we know for him to demonstrate his “lawyer powers” in that scene. He seems to just enjoy unnerving people and he’s very good at it. Because of this, it feels good to see Joe stand up to him and call him out on it, embarrassing as this must be for Pip.
I’ve heard that it was believed at one point that reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards could summon the Devil. That’s what Jaggers means when he says Wopsle had perhaps done that thing that day.
I actually agree with Pip that “the clergyman wouldn’t have read that about the rich man and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had known all.” I think he should have preached on the text, “Faithful are the wounds of friend” (like Biddy) “profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (like Pumblechook or Miss Havisham.”
Dickens drops some obvious hints that being a gentleman isn’t all it’s cracked up to be with Pip’s disappointment over London and Barnard’s Inn. More subtly, he hints at the seemingly creepy Wemmick’s true nature with his physical description. “I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints.”
The swollen and twitchy face molds Jaggers keeps are a detail from the book that isn’t necessary to the plot at all, but which is so memorable that every adaptation keeps it. Speaking of adaptations…
If Dickens Club members are looking for good adaptations, I’d like to offer my two cents here. Even though all the miniseries are longer and have time to include more than the movies, I find them to range from “meh, whatever” to “meh, ‘s OK.” I prefer the 1946 movie and the 2012 one to any of the miniseries.
Except one!
The 1989 miniseries (not to be confused with the 1988 miniseries or the 1998 movie) is my favorite adaptation by a long shot. I know it may sound crazy to say that the Wonderful World of Disney made a better Great Expectations miniseries than the BBC ever did, but what can I say? It happened! Not only does this series have great locations, sets and cinematography (for a TV serial of its time anyway) but it has the best adult Pip (though not the best young Pip), probably the best Joe, the best Biddy and definitely the best Miss Havisham. Unfortunately, this miniseries isn’t streaming anywhere that I can find. (Not in English anyway.) And last I checked the only DVDs were region 2 DVDs which don’t play on every player. At the moment, the miniseries can be watched on YouTube or Archive.org. It could be taken down though at any moment. Normally, I would want people to pay for it honestly but since whoever owns it isn’t selling it, I advise everybody to check it out on the sites I mentioned before it gets copyright claimed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I regret that in my above comment, I praised the 1989 Great Expectations miniseries without talking about its writing. The scripts by John Goldsmith, who also wrote adaptations of The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield, are very faithful to the book while still feeling creative and not like a boring cut-and-paste job. They do a great job of taking Pip’s thoughts that the narrator tells us about in the book and working them into conversations in ways that feel natural. The writing is one of the main things that makes the 1989 miniseries my favorite adaptation of Great Expectations.
LikeLiked by 1 person
See “Supplement to Great Expectations & the Uncommercial Traveller” post for articles mentioned here.
After reading Morris’s article “Dickens’s Class Consciousness”, I got to wondering about the word “common” and Pip’s struggle against being “common”. The word “common” is interesting because it at once binds us to each other and sets us apart:
Per dictionary.com
Common – of or relating to a community at large (Public); belonging to or shared by two or more people/things; occurring or appearing frequently (Familiar); Widespread, General
versus
Common – characterized by a lack of privilege or special status; falling below ordinary standard (second-rate); lacking refinement (Coarse)
Further, per the Synonym Chooser feature: Some common synonyms of common are familiar, ordinary, plain, popular, and vulgar. While all these words mean ‘generally met with and not in any way special, strange, or unusual,’ common implies usual everyday quality or frequency of occurrence and may additionally suggest inferiority or coarseness.
Pip never thought of himself as common until Estella labeled him as such in her dismissive way. In terms of Morris’s article and the notion of a “national enchantment with the myth of great expectations for all” (108), it seems to me that Pip’s belief that being a gentleman with expectations will make him uncommon (and therefore better) is a pretty common belief. Our common desire to be and to do better is what keep us, as a species, alive and thriving. Pip’s error is in being ashamed of his commonness and in tangling up his desire to be uncommon to Estella’s opinion. I think we will find that commonness is the – dare I say it – common thread in this story. I think we will find that seemingly disparate characters have commonalities and that what at first appears uncommon is, in fact, common and vice versa in both senses of the word.
Point in fact, Chapter 12 – “One day soon after the appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to me, with the impatient movement of her fingers, “There, there, there! Sing!” I was surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor. It happened so to catch her fancy that she took it up in a low brooding voice as if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it became customary with us to have it as we moved about, and Estella would often join in; though the whole strain was so subdued, even when there were three of us, that it made less noise in the grim old house than the lightest breath of wind.”
That is, “it became customary” (i.e., common) for the “strange” and “incomprehensible” (i.e., uncommon) Miss Havisham and the equally incomprehensible Estella to sing a common blacksmith’s song in unison (i.e., in common) with a “common laboring boy”! (Ch 8, 9) How easily the common and uncommon meld into one.
***
I’d like to champion Mrs Joe for a moment though she is a shrew and not very likable. The Raphael article, “A Re-Vision of Miss Havisham: Her Expectations and Our Responses”, started me thinking about not just how “Mrs Joe may identify with and comprehend Miss Havisham” (409-410), but what clues we are given in the text that she does, in fact, do so.
Mrs Joe is never given a first name but is always referred to as Pip’s sister or in reference to her married status and her husband – she has no identity of her own. She is “more than twenty years” older than Pip, so, if Pip was around 7 when he met the convict in the graveyard (per Dickens’s Working Notes), and then another 3-4 years pass before Pip goes to Miss Havisham’s and then another few pass until he is apprenticed (generally apprenticeship begins between 10-14 years old (wikipedia)) – this makes Mrs Joe somewhere in her mid-30’s when she is attacked. (Please, check my math.)
Extracting her backstory from the information Pip gives us we discover a woman who had little say on the direction of her life would take. She, like Pip, has 5 dead brothers lying in the cemetery with her parents. Where she falls in the sibling line is not told, but one can assume that she had witnessed at least some of those siblings die and, it follows, witnessed her mother’s pregnancies and her parents’ grief over the lost child(ren). That those other children were boys and were “wanted” or “preferred” over girls is perhaps something she may have sensed. In what order and when her parents died is also not told, though obviously her father died after the conception of Pip and her mother after the birth of Pip (perhaps in childbirth). We are not told what Mr Pirrip’s profession or calling was, so we don’t know how well off the family was, except that they were able to provide inscribed tombstones for their 5 dead children and for the parents. (Compare this to Joe’s comment about being unable to spare the money to inscribe his father’s tombstone. (Ch 7)) Of her young life we know nothing, however, she has somehow learned to be “a very clean housekeeper” and has social graces enough to be able to be “gracious in the society of Mrs Hubble” and guests of a certain caliber (the Hubbles, Uncle Pumblechook, Mr Wopsle) and has airs enough to keep a “little state parlour” separate from everyday use. (Ch 4)
So here we have a young woman, “not a good-looking woman”, “tall and bony” (Ch 2), who, at “more than twenty years of age”, is left orphan along with an infant/toddler brother for whom she is the sole provider and caregiver. Whatever dreams she may have had for her life, dreams perhaps of becoming less common, were dashed by the fact of her own and her infant brother’s need. By the grace of God comes Joe Gargery whose own backstory makes him sensible to her need. And though he offers her a much needed lifeline, he is not, perhaps, the knight in shining armor she had hoped for (but he is!). He is the village blacksmith with the well-known baggage of a drunken, work-averse father who beats him and his mother and makes a public spectacle of their domestic troubles (Ch 7). No doubt Mrs Joe saw marriage to Joe as a coming-down in the world though, again no doubt, she probably had no other option. These frustrations spill out in her interchange with Pip:
“If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?”
“You did,” said I.
“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.
I whimpered, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother.” (Ch 2)
She has no children of her own – whether by her own careful family planning or by divine intervention we don’t know. If by her own planning, well, we can read a lot into her choice not to engage in relations with her husband ranging from her mindset to her mood. If by divine intervention we can only praise the Lord for sparing additional innocents of her wrath!
So in her defense she’s holding on to a lot of repressed – and no so repressed – anger. The only claim to fame she has – having raised Pip by hand – is inextricably tied to another (male) person. Any agency she may have had or wished to have was nipped in the bud when she was laden with that charge. She did not accept it gracefully and she’s been taking it out on every man around her ever since. Except Uncle Pumblechook not simply because he is well-to-do but because he alone complements and commiserates with her. Nevertheless, she holds on to this fame for dear life because SHE did it! Despite all the trouble (she believes) it caused her, SHE did it. She took up the challenge and she did it despite what it cost her – and don’t you forget it!
But her sacrifice doesn’t give her comfort. Though she constantly reminds everyone of her sacrifice, she feels she doesn’t get the credit or recognition for it that she deserves. Joe and Pip just can’t understand that Mrs Joe – after, gee, having her future usurped by her parents’ deaths, saddled with an infant/toddler brother, marrying probably the only option available to her for shear life, receiving no thanks from anyone (except perhaps Uncle Pumblechook, whose thanks doesn’t matter) – should feel angry and hurt and frustrated and overlooked. This is made obvious by her reaction to the slight she feels in not being included in the invitation to Miss Havisham’s:
“When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister ‘went on the Rampage,’ in a more alarming degree than at any previous period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously thought she was fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing, got out the dustpan,—which was always a very bad sign,—put on her coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush, and cleaned us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the back-yard. It was ten o’clock at night before we ventured to creep in again, and then she asked Joe why he hadn’t married a Negress Slave at once? Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a better speculation.” (Ch 12)
After all she’s sacrificed and done, is it too much to ask to be invited up to the big house to see the splendors there, especially since SHE is Pip’s sister, his blood, and not simply his prospective master? Instead, she is shut out, unthought of – not even given the benefit of being overlooked and ignored.
As we get to know Miss Havisham better and learn her backstory, we will see, I think, commonalities with Mrs Joe’s backstory, expectations, and reality. It is in this “that Mrs Joe may identify and comprehend Miss Havisham in ways Pip does not” and also may explain and uncover “the reasons for his sister’s acts against him”. (409)
All this being said, Mrs Joe could have been nicer – which is, I think, what she realizes after being hit on the head with a hammer. Her duty was to take care of her infant/toddler brother, she did the exact right thing; her error was in not graciously accepting and executing the charge. In other words, when presented with an opportunity to emulate Esther Summerson she chose instead to replicate Sally Brass.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It’s really easy to forget this but Pumblechook actually does mention Mrs. Joe’s first name randomly in the second to last chapter. I have no idea why Dickens did that.
The character whose first name I wonder about is Miss Havisham. It’s not unusual for Dickensian characters to be only known by their surname but she’s so memorable, everything about her invites speculation. Guesses that have adapters have made include Ada, Amelia and Eleanor. (I guess people like the idea of her name beginning with a vowel.) The 2011 miniseries actually has her name Estella after herself, in keeping with how she wants to live through the girl, whom she intends to have do the things she wishes she could do.
LikeLike
No matter how ridiculously long I make my comments there’s always something I forget!
Given the overarching message of Great Expectations, you’d expect Dickens to populate Pip’s village with positive characters. But except for Joe and Biddy, the villagers (Trabb, Pumblechook, the Hubbles, Wopsle and his great-aunt) are all satirically portrayed negative characters, just as pathetic and avaricious as the relatively higher-class Sarah Pocket, Raymond, Camilla and Georgiana. And, on the flipside, we’ll see in our next section of reading that some members of the gentry in London are sympathetic, even positive characters.
There’s a great quote from the movie, The Tale of Desperaux, about how a character loved the parts of his favorite book that he didn’t expect. What I described in the above paragraph is one of the things I didn’t expect about Great Expectations.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I find it interesting that Miss Havisham’s clocks are stopped at “twenty minutes to nine” and not at forty minutes past eight. “Twenty minutes to nine” indicates something yet to come – an expectation – whereas “forty minutes past eight” indicates something that’s already happened. Miss Havisham’s lives in perpetual stagnate expectation – she looks forward to a time (both twenty minutes to nine and her marriage) that can/will never come. Her face “had dropped into a watchful and brooding expression” – again expectation and stagnation. “Brooding” is a great word here meaning both sullenly thoughtful and to sit on or incubate (as on eggs) – expectations and stagnation.
LikeLiked by 1 person