Supplement to Great Expectations and The Uncommercial Traveller

SPOILER ALERT

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Ackroyd once again blends Dickens’s personal situation and mindset before and during the writing of the novel at hand with Dickens’s participation, if you will, in the action of the tale – “Pip is Dickens, but Dickens is not Pip”! (160) Without giving too much away Ackroyd sets the tone and helps us understand the author’s aim and his technique for achieving that aim. 

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Chesterton discusses Dickens’s novel as “Thackerayan” in that it utilizes themes and motifs that are typical of the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray.  Specifically, Chesterton points to Great Expectations as being “a novel without a hero (à la Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or Pendennis) and it is about snobbery (“It is an extra chapter to [Thackeray’s] The Book of Snobs). Dickens, however, ultimately comes out as the greater of the two novelists – “Compared to the rest of Dickens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens.”

Note: Thackeray is an odd choice of comparison because in 1858, two years before Great Expectations was written, he and Dickens had a major falling out and would not reconcile until a few months before Thackeray’s death in 1863.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22362/pg22362-images.html#EXPECTATIONS

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Also of interest

Pam Morris
Dickens’s Class Consciousness: A Marginal View
Chapter 5 “Great Expectations: A Bought Self”

“Dialogic engagement with the hegemonic golden images of success, wealth, and contentment, and their silenced reverse of poverty and crime, is displaced into the wholly appropriate fairytale form of Great Expectations. Clearly this novel constructs a parodic fable aimed at an ironic exposure of national enchantment with the myth of great expectations for all. The narrative not only unmasks the interconnection of money, crime, and power hiding beneath glamorous spectacle, but also it stages a scandalous return of the repressed and criminalized poor.” (108)

Morris gives us a very good overview of the contemporary British mindset leading up to and during the writing of GE which informs the mindsets of the novel’s characters. Expectations (mainly of the poorer classes though definitely not limited to them) based upon the “spectacle of wealth” and the “the dream of a consumerist life-style” (105) were/are rarely achieved without collateral damage. 

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Linda Raphael
"A Re-Vision of Miss Havisham: Her Expectations and Our Responses"

“Thus, readers have generally considered Miss Havisham’s isolation as self-inflicted, but probing into the causes of her tortured manner of living reveals the workings of a complex system which has made her reclusiveness inevitable.” (403)

Raphael gives us an explanation of Miss Havisham. She, like just about everybody else in the novel, had great expectations that failed to materialize - “. . . the remains of the aborted wedding . . . visibly enact a gap between opportunity and desire which frequently occurred in the lives of Victorian women.” (402). Like Pip, Miss Havisham’s expectations were presented to her as a child and formed her character before she was mature enough to comprehend their import - “The tragedy of [Miss Havisham’s] life is  . . . that she failed to understand the system that works against her.” (410) 

Of note in this article is an explanation for the bitterness and violence of Mrs Joe who “may identify with and comprehend Miss Havisham” more than Pip or we may, at first, suppose. Raphael says of Miss Havisham, though it seem equally true of Mrs Joe, “Not only does her existence bear a constant reminder of failed expectations, but it is a testimony to the necessity for and the effects of repression under a system which denies individuals full rights to self-development and undercuts principles of moral conduct with greedy self-interest.” (409-410)

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The Uncommercial Traveller

I offer this as a follow up to Ackroyd’s comments quoted in Boze’s introduction. I hope you all take the time to read the Uncommercial Traveller’s essays, especially if you’ve read Sketches by Boz. While I agree with Ackroyd that this collection is not as lighthearted as the Sketches, I most certainly agree that “there are aspects of [them] which are not to be found in any of his novels, and there are reflections or observations here which are invaluable for any proper understanding of Dickens.” (152) They are indeed “extraordinarily interesting for the light they throw both upon Dickens himself and upon a now almost forgotten time.” (151)