Wherein The Dickens Chronological Reading Club wraps up Weeks 1 & 2 of Great Expectations, our 22nd read; with a chapter summary, discussion wrap-up, and a look-ahead to weeks 3 & 4.
(Banner Image: By Charles Green. Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham for Victorian Web.)
by the members of the #DickensClub, edited/compiled by Rach
Happy Wednesday, Friends, and a huge “thank you” for your patience with this 2-day delay. But after a week of book packing and mailing, and goodbye visits to family and friends, Boze has now completed his move from Texas to Oregon! We are exhausted but happy, and are listening to our second round of Great Expectations this year.
Thank you for keeping the conversation lively these past 2 weeks! Such wonderful insights & expressions of affection for this novel. Before we get into it, here are the quick links:
- General Mems
- Great Expectations, Chs 1-21: A Summary
- Discussion Wrap-Up (Weeks 1-2)
- A Look-Ahead to Weeks 3 & 4 of Great Expectations (26 March to 8 April, 2024)
General Mems
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 814 (and week 117) in our #DickensClub! This week and next, we’ll be continuing with Great Expectations, our twenty-second read as a group. Please feel free to comment below this post for the third and fourth weeks’ chapters or use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter. For a link to Boze’s marvelous introduction to Great Expectations and The Uncommercial Traveller, click here. Chris shared some wonderful supplemental materials, which can be found here.
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.
Great Expectations, Chs 1-21: A Summary
(Illustrated by Marcus Stone for the “Library Edition” of 1862. Images below are from the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery.)
“As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them…my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.”
We begin our story in a churchyard on Christmas Eve, in “the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.” Pip, an orphan and one of the surviving siblings who are buried at this churchyard with his parents, is accosted by a convict who threatens him with a certain dangerous “young man” unseen by Pip, hungry for Pip’s heart and liver—unless Pip fetches a file and “wittles”.
This Pip does after an evening of the agony at his home, under the eye of his ever-angry and ever-dissatisfied sister, knowing he must go back to the marshes to fulfill his promise to the escaped convict. Pip has been raised “by hand” (in more ways than one) by his sister, often on the “Ram-page,” angry at life, with “Tickler” to hand. (Tickler is “a wax-ended piece of cane” used to hit Pip with.) His sister’s husband is Joe Gargery, a hen-pecked blacksmith with a heart of gold.
“If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at once…”
“It was a rimy morning, and very damp,” when Pip, though guilty at taking anything and at deceiving Joe, steals a savory pudding from his sister’s pantry while all are asleep, along with some brandy and part of his own meal of bread and butter. When he returns to the convict–who seems to have forgotten about “the young man” he had threatened Pip with–the convict seems troubled by Pip’s having seen another convict that is known to him. Pip shows concern for the convict’s welfare, which seems to touch him. Pip returns home as the convict frees himself from the shackles.
Pip remains in terror of his sister and of some Constable coming to apprehend him. Meanwhile, “Mrs Joe” entertains guests—including Uncle Pumblechook and Mr Wopsle—for for Christmas dinner. Pip is poised to run from the room when Mrs Joe is getting ready to serve the pie that he took, but he is stopped by soldiers coming in, asking for Joe’s assistance in fixing their handcuffs. They are seeking the escaped convicts (guns from the prison ships had been fired earlier in warning), and Pip and Joe join in the search. The convicts are discovered and apprehended while in combat with one another in the marsh. Pip is surprised when his convict declares himself to be the one who stole the food and the file—thus covering for Pip.
Feeling ashamed that he never told Joe the truth of what happened, Pip’s life continues on, drearily to himself. He continues his learning at Mr Wopsle’s school, with the ineffectual great-aunt of Mr Wopsle, and much more by the help of his friend Biddy. One day, Mr Pumblechook arrives with the news that Pip is to go and play at the home of Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who in a great house. Mrs Joe is overjoyed too, thinking this could be the making of Pip’s fortune.
After a morning of being tested on math by Uncle Pumblechook, Pip is taken to Satis House, Miss Havisham’s mansion. A beautiful but rude girl comes to open the gate, and makes it known that Pip only is requested, sending Pumblechook off. The girl—we soon learn that this is Estella—takes Pip through the house to where a woman sits by her mirror, as faded as the old wedding dress she is wearing, near a clock stopped twenty minutes before nine. Time has stopped here—stopped on the occasion of a wedding that almost—but didn’t—take place. She is a woman in white, surrounded by white, haunted by having been abandoned at the altar long ago.
“But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.”
This is Miss Havisham.
“‘Do you know what I touch here?’ she said, laying her hands, one upon the other, on her left side.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ (It made me think of the young man.)
‘What do I touch?’
‘Your heart.’
‘Broken!’ She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it.”
Miss Havisham orders Pip to play cards with Estella—and Pip is ashamed that the latter is mocking and contemptuous of him and his class.
Pip invents stories about how things went when he returns home, though he reveals the truth to Joe later. Joe considers it better to lead a straight path in life and not to try and mix with those like Miss Havisham and Estella; Pip, however, is smitten with imaginings of how his life might be different.
Pip works all the harder at his lessons with Biddy’s help, but finds himself more and more discontented. One day, Pip sees a man stirring his drink with the file that Pip had stolen, and this man gives Pip two pounds, which are later acquired by Mrs. Joe.
But Pip is invited again to Satis House in celebration of Miss Havisham’s birthday, surrounded by parasitic relatives. In the garden, Pip encounters a pale young man who wants to fight him, and Pip knocks him down easily.
Pip visits regularly for some months, raising his hopes that Miss Havisham intends to help raise him in the world. He expresses his discontent—even of Joe—to Biddy. And when Miss Havisham offers to help Pip with his formal apprenticeship to Joe, Pip’s hopes seem to be dashed. (Pip is ashamed when Joe accompanies him to Satis House and is very out of place and awkward there, and Estella laughs at them.) Underlying all of this, Miss Havisham seems to have some more sadistic motive in having Pip over…
“Estella was always about…Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me; sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we were alone, ‘Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?’ And when I said yes (for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of Estella’s moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like ‘Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!’”
Time passes, and Pip is becoming a young man, disappointed with his apprenticeship and his dashed hopes. He wishes to visit Satis House but is discouraged by Joe. A fellow worker at the forge, the hateful Orlick, is a constant torment to Pip. Orlick gets into a heated argument with Mrs Joe about his taking of a holiday, and Joe defends his wife against the hateful man. One evening, after visiting Miss Havisham and learning that Estella has gone abroad, Pip agrees to be taken to Pumblechook’s. On his walk home later he sees Orlick hiding, and hears guns from the prison ships, just as on the night of the escaped convicts. He finds, upon returning home, that Mrs Joe has been viciously attacked, causing severe brain damage. She has become disabled and is able to communicate little, but simply draws a “T” upon a slate to represent her attacker—which Biddy suspects is Orlick, due to its resembling a hammer. Escaped convicts are suspected by those in charge of the investigation; however, they are unable to find the culprit.
Biddy becomes Mrs Joe’s nurse and moves in with them. She also becomes Pip’s confidante—and perhaps, a conscience he can’t quite listen to—about his dissatisfaction with a blacksmith’s life and his love for Estella, though she advises him to keep away from her.
In the fourth year of Pip’s apprenticeship to Joe, at the Three Jolly Bargemen pub, Wopsle is reading from a newspaper regarding a murder trial and Pip recognizes the man who is questioning Wopsle: he had seen this man among those who were present at the day of Miss Havisham’s birthday party. He learns that this is the lawyer Mr Jaggers, and Jaggers informs Joe and Pip that the latter has a benefactor—who requests to remain anonymous. Pip is to inherit a fortune, and is therefore to move to London to become a gentleman, aided by Matthew Pocket, a cousin of Miss Havisham’s. Because of these connections to Satis House, Pip assumes that Miss Havisham is behind the change in his fortunes, and his dreams look like they are coming true.
“No more low wet grounds, no more dykes and sluices, no more of these grazing cattle—though they seemed, in their dull manner, to wear a more respectful air now, and to face round, in order that they might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great expectations—farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood, henceforth I was for London and greatness: not for smith’s work in general and for you! I made my exultant way to the old Battery, and, lying down there to consider the question whether Miss Havisham intended me for Estella, fell asleep.”
Pip regrets his own snobbery after his final days at home—including his uppity manner towards Biddy, who had so long been a help to him and his sister—as he is fitted for a new suit of clothes by the Tailor Mr Trabb—accompanied by the “audacious” Trabb’s boy, who has a chip on his shoulder and is determined to let everyone know that he’s as good as anyone—in preparation for his travel.
His expectations of London prove a mixed satisfaction, as the noise and stench of Smithfield are at first overwhelming. Pip is introduced to Jaggers’s clerk, Wemmick, who then introduces Pip to the affable Herbert Pocket, a poor gentleman destined for the shipping merchant trade and the son of the man who is to instruct Pip. Pip and Herbert immediately hit it off, and they are to room together. They come to realize good-humouredly that Herbert is the very same pale young man with whom he had fought long ago at Satis House.
Discussion Wrap-Up (Weeks 1-2)
Miscellany; What We Loved
Daniel starts off the conversation with enthusiasm for the journey ahead, and praise for Boze’s introduction:
And a delightful note about Uncle Pumblechook from the Stationmaster:
“Expectation & Stagnation”: Pip, Class Envy, Expectations and Disappointments
Daniel responds to Boze’s introduction and the assessment of Pip from Claire Tomalin:
And the Stationmaster considers the metaphorical implications of Satis House, and Pip’s “great expectations” regarding it:
Later, he comments on how even the physical descriptions of the settings and characters surrounding Pip might reflect a disappointment with the expectations of what it is like to be a “gentleman”:
It is possible that even the way Dickens writes about the clock reflects Miss Havisham’s–and perhaps, eventually, Pip’s–“perpetual stagnate expectation”?
Dickens’s “Writing Lab”: the Narrators in Dickens; Dickens as the “Haunted Man”; the “Sensation” Novel
The Stationmaster analyzes the different narrators in our reads so far, and how each “is a delusional character in some way”:
Deborah comments on the “wonderful introduction,” and considers Dickens’s own poor health at the time of the writing of this novel, as well as the “sensation” aspect, “as [Dickens] needed to get the sales of All the Year Round back up”:
Character Spotlight: Biddy
Here, the Stationmaster praises Biddy as a favorite Dickensian heroine:
Character Spotlight: Joe Gargery
And here he discusses our dear Joe, a wonderful example of “Dickens’s lower class, salt of the earth characters”:
Character Spotlights & Doubling: Mrs Joe and Miss Havisham
The Adaptation Stationmaster considers the “deep-seated insecurity” of Mrs Joe:
And do we have some “doubling” in Mrs Joe and Miss Havisham? Here, Chris champions Mrs Joe, one who hasn’t been given many opportunities in life, and who “has no identity of her own”:
Here, the Stationmaster expresses his love for the eerie Miss Havisham and her house:
On “Commonness”
Chris considers the word “common” after reading the article on “Dickens’s Class Consciousness”:
Beginning Our Conversation on the Ending…
Without giving away details, a couple of members have already responded to the notes on the novel’s ending that Boze shared with us in the introduction. Here’s the Stationmaster:
And Gina is a fan of the updated ending:
A Recommendation from The Adaptation Stationmaster…
Boze and I are eager to watch the 1989 miniseries of Great Expectations recommended here by the Stationmaster! I will put a link below to where it can be currently found on YouTube:
A Look-Ahead to Weeks 3 & 4 of Great Expectations (26 March to 8 April, 2024)
This week and next, we’ll be reading Chapters 22-42 of Great Expectations. Our portion during Weeks 3 & 4 was published in weekly parts in All the Year Round between 2 March and 25 May, 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.
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 
Here’s a fun bit of commentary on the arbitrary rules of gentility from Herbert.
“I don’t know why it should be a crack thing to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was and brew. You see it every day.”
“Yet a gentleman may not keep a public-house; may he?” said I.
“Not on any account,” returned Herbert; “but a public-house may keep a gentleman.”
Mrs. Coiler is great! It’s almost a pity she doesn’t play a bigger part in the story.
Belinda Pocket, who’s also hilarious, reminds me of Dora Spenlow, not in her personality, mind you, but in her backstory and marital situation.
While Matthew Pocket is much more likeable than the rest of his family, always excepting Herbert, there are signs he’s not perfect. He’s a nicer parent than his wife but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his kids and just throws money at them. The description of him looking at them “as if he couldn’t make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn’t been billeted by Nature on somebody else” can even be interpreted as implying he resents them. He’s also implied to be something of a hypocrite since “his treatises on the management of children and servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes” but he can’t seem to manage his own. Thus, while with the Jellybys in Bleak House, all the family’s problems are blamed on the wife/mother and the husband/father is portrayed as purely a victim, with the Pockets, only about 80 to 85% of the family’s problems are blamed on the wife/mother.
I love the way Dickens uses the way they read books to give us an immediate idea of Startop and Drummle’s characters, with the former “reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge” and the latter being “so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book as if its writer had done him an injury.” In general, while Startop isn’t as developed a character as Herbert or Drummle, Dickens paints quite a vivid picture of him.
I wonder if Jaggers’s offices being called Little Britain is supposed to mean anything. Is it supposed to be an allegory for the United Kingdom?
I love this insight from Pip. “So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.” That’s true of me. I tend to lose my temper and lash out the most at people whom I objectively think I should really just ignore, making a fool of myself in the process.
There are critics out there-not a lot of them but a few-who accuse Dickens, for all that he praises Joe, of taking a condescending attitude toward him. It’s true that Joe is portrayed as on the clownish side but IMO, the book would not be as great without that. If he were perfectly suave and sophisticated in Chapter 27, it would be impossible to relate to Pip’s feelings. As it is, we despise Pip for being embarrassed of and aloof toward such a great person, but we can also see how we might react that way under the same circumstances. Also, characters who are both humorous and dramatic tend to be my favorites, so Joe being awkward just makes him the more memorable and endearing to me.
I find this description intriguing.
“Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down.”
Could it be that Estella is momentarily attracted to Pip and then is reminded by the shoe of the fate Miss Havisham suffered through love? Could she be laughing at what she considers her own lapse of judgement? The description kind of makes me think so (I’m not sure why else Dickens would lay on emphasis on that shoe) but, in general, I believe we should believe Estella when she says she’s not attracted to Pip and only sees him as a potential friend-if that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In her chapter entitled “How We Must Read ‘Great Expectations’” Dr Q.D Leavis discusses, in part, that “Dickens is always to be seen asking questions as to the why of human conduct” and that one of the ways he approaches this question is to “habitually examine[ ] alternatives – people he posits who in the same situation have responded to it in opposite ways and so become different persons with, alternatively, tragic or relatively happy outcomes”. She gives as example Esther Summers and Miss Wade who share the backstory of being an illegitimate orphan girl dealing with the stigma of a guilty mother but who respond in a completely different ways – Esther “by acceptance and docility”, Miss Wade “by aggression and resentment”. (280-281, Dickens the Novelist by F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis, 1970)
I’d like to suggest that Estella is another sister of Esther Summerson and Miss Wade in that she too is an orphan girl who must deal with the stigma of a socially outcast (in her case, adoptive) mother. Like Esther (for most of the story) and Miss Wade, Estella does not know who her real mother is or why they had been parted (I hesitate to say “abandoned” because we do not know the specifics of the mother/child separation and, as in Esther’s case, this word may not apply).
Unlike Esther, Estella is not at all concerned with who or what her real mother is because the topic never comes up – compare this to Esther’s situation wherein Miss Barbary takes every opportunity to upbraid Esther with her mother’s disgrace. Esther is conditioned by this rebuke to monitor her own behavior in an effort to mitigate this disgrace. Estella behaves more like Miss Wade – who refers to her parentage only to note that she grew up with an unrelated “supposed grandmother” and “no recognised relation” (LD Bk 2 Ch 21) – in that her position gives her the opportunity to study other people’s behavior – Miss Wade: “It showed me many new occasions on which people triumphed over me, when they made a pretence of treating me with consideration, or doing me a service”; Estella: “You [Pip] had not your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that is soft and soothing. I had. You did not gradually open your round childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a woman [Camilla] who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up in the night. I did.” (GE Ch 33)
Like Esther’s Miss Barbary, Estella’s mother figure, Miss Havisham, comes with weighty baggage. But whereas Miss Barbary is cold and severe, Miss Havisham in her own odd way seems to love Estella. Miss Wade’s supposed grandmother takes care of her, educates her but enables her whims and temper much like Miss Havisham does Estella.
All three of these women – Esther, Miss Wade, Estella – are strong, independent, resilient, yet vulnerable and insecure. What makes them different from each other is the way they respond to and interact with others. Esther is kind, compassionate, thoughtful, adaptable, tolerant, level-headed, with only occasional snippiness and snobbery. Miss Wade is combative, defensive, intolerant, suspicious, paranoid, even her sympathy and kindness to Tattycoram come with many strings attached. Estella is haughty, sarcastic, realistic, unsentimental, almost mechanical in that she seems to do nothing of her own volition but always in response to her conditioning.
Perhaps the lesson to be taken from these comparisons is “spare the rod, spoil the child” because it is Esther, with the disciplinarian parent figure who holds her accountable, whom Dickens exalts as the epitome of virtuous womanhood. But I think Dickens also shows that nature plays a role equal to nurture in determining behavior, for I think no amount of discipline would have softened Miss Wade but would only have hardened her the more, whereas for Estella . . . but we shall see.
And then Estella takes on sisterhood of a different kind, this time partnered with Miss Havisham. She and Miss Havisham are the counterparts of both Edith Skewton Grainger and Mrs Skewton, and Alice Marwood and Good Mrs Brown of Dombey and Son. Estella’s and Miss Havisham’s argument in GE Ch 38 is a parallel to that of Edith and Mrs Skewton in D&S Ch 27 and Ch 30, and that of Alice Marwood and Good Mrs Brown in D&S Ch 34. The elder woman takes the younger one to task for not showing proper respect or love for what the elder believes she has done for the younger while the younger woman rebukes the elder one for raising her to be sold at market. The younger woman then chides the elder one for being shocked that the younger one is not pleased, happy, contented, grateful, loving about being raised so. Had Estella and Miss Havisham somehow been walking “out upon the Downs” in Brighton on that fateful day in D&S Ch 40 when Edith and her mother happen upon Alice and her mother, no doubt Estella, like Edith, would have seen “upon [Alice’s] face some traces which she knew were lingering in her own soul, if not yet written on that index; but, as [Alice] came on, returning her gaze, fixing her shining eyes upon her, undoubtedly presenting something of her own air and stature, and appearing to reciprocate her own thoughts, she felt a chill creep over her, as if the day were darkening, and the wind were colder”, and she too would have locked eyes with them “until . . . awakening [as] from a dream, [she] passed slowly on.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is interesting that Estella is so insistent about the social hierarchy when, for all she knows, she could have been of illegitimate birth.
LikeLike
You know whom I forgot to comment about? Herbert Pocket. He’s something of a foil to Pip. They were both summoned to Satis House by Havisham as boys, and both were disdained by Estella. Both also were brought by dysfunctional couples. (“May I ask you if you have ever had an opportunity of remarking, down in your part of the country, that the children of not exactly suitable marriages are always most particularly anxious to be married?”) And both are bad with money. But Herbert was never attracted to the heartless Estella. He’s interested in Clara who fulfills every expectation of a Dickens heroine. Pip sometimes talks as if he had no choice but to fall in love with Estella, but Herbert’s story suggests this may not have been so.
Trabb’s boy isn’t nearly as benevolent a character as Biddy, but he also serves as a conscience to Pip. When he sweeps over Pip’s feet “to express equality with any blacksmith,” he suggests that having money and property randomly dumped in his lap doesn’t make him anyone special. He mockingly imitates Pip by pretending to snub people and saying, “Don’t know yah, don’t know yah, ‘pon my soul, don’t know yah!” at the exact point in the story that Pip is acting like he doesn’t know Joe. (DON’T READ THIS NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE WHOLE BOOK BEFORE.) Perhaps it’s no accident on Dickens’s part that he ends up saving Pip’s life later though characteristically he might not have done so if he knew it was his life.
Pumblechook can also be seen as an ironic conscience. Every bad thing he leads people to believe Pip is doing is something he does but to Joe, not Pumblechook.
The description of the hecklers at Wopsle’s performance remind me of YouTube videos circa the 2000s that would riff on (what the YouTubers considered to be) bad movies. An older generation might be reminded of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I guess some things never change. My favorite part (besides the costume supervisor criticizing Wopsle’s performance for not showing off the stockings enough) is when Wopsle’s Hamlet instructs one of the players not to “saw the air thus” and the sulky audience member calls out, “And don’t you do it, neither; you’re a deal worse than him!” If you’ve seen Hamlet deliver that line when portrayed by a large ham like David Tennant or Kenneth Branagh-total air sawers both-you’ll know exactly what that audience member was thinking. I hasten to add I enjoyed watching the performances I mentioned, and I really don’t blame actors for indulging in hamminess when playing Hamlet. (You can’t say the character doesn’t lend himself to it; he’s got “ham” right there in his name!) But it does tend to make his advice to players rather eyebrow raising.
I also love the description of the neighbors “all but cheering” for Mrs. Joe’s funeral procession. Pip feeling softened towards his sister after her death because “the day must come when it would be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me” foreshadows what he will later say to another character who needs forgiveness.
We’ve sort of discussed this already but the parallels between Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham bear repeating. Mrs. Joe by bringing Pip up “by hand” and Miss Havisham by adopting Estella were doing kind things but were also being cruel and exploitive to these children. And both were angry at them for not being grateful enough. If Mrs. Joe had been in her right mind on her deathbed and had complained about Pip not being there for her more, he might have answered with Estella’s words. “Who taught me to be proud? Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?”
P.S.
It’s nice to hear that little Jane Pocket has a boyfriend. Hopefully, she’ll escape from her terrible family someday.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d like to comment more soon, but just wanted to respond to the above comments. I just love the comparisons here to Dickens’s previous characters: the Jellybys and the Pockets; Miss Wade to Estella, etc. And Herbert as foil to Pip.
Agreed, Stationmaster, about that moment in Wopsle’s play, and sawing the air with his hand! Love that.
This section is hard to read in regards to Joe and Biddy; Pip is really insufferable, though Dickens manages to make him relatable too. But it is so painful!
LikeLike
Estella really is a fascinating character. As an adult, she doesn’t seem to take pleasure in getting men to love her and then breaking their hearts the way she did as a child. But she still does so, so she’s still evil. Her problem with tormenting so many men isn’t that it’s cruel but that it bores her. Yet she continues to do so out of a sense of obligation to Miss Havisham. But isn’t that sense of obligation a “sentiment,” one of those things she claims she doesn’t have?
When I was rereading the big fight between Estella and Miss Havisham in Chapter 38, it occurred to me that a parallel can be drawn between the former’s treatment of the latter and Pip’s treatment of Joe. When Joe visits him, Pip receives him with technical graciousness and says all the right things about how he’s glad to see him and he doesn’t want him to call him “sir” and how Joe, not Pumblechook, was his friend in childhood. But his manner makes it crystal clear that he doesn’t really want Joe there and he especially doesn’t want to be seen with him. Likewise, Estella talks about how she owes everything to Miss Havisham and does whatever she tells her to do but she also obviously doesn’t love her in the way Miss Havisham wishes. Unlike Pip, she doesn’t even pretend to do so. (It’s such a great touch that she calls her “mother-by-adoption” rather than “mother.”)
A big theme in Great Expectations is loving people who don’t deserve it. Pip’s love for the unworthy Estella is presented as a bad thing whereas Joe and Biddy’s love for the unworthy Pip is presented as a good thing. I think the reason may be that Pip doesn’t just love Estella. He worships her whereas Joe and Biddy, while they’ll drop anything to help Pip, are less crazy. Both of them explicitly reject the idea of remaking their entire identities so that they’ll be the kind of people Pip wants for friends. (“It ain’t that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work.”) Pip, on the other hand, makes it his entire life’s goal to become the kind of person Estella might love. As David Copperfield might say, she’s the guiding star of his existence.
Don’t read the rest of my comment if you haven’t read Chapter 39 yet!
I did not see that plot twist coming when I first read the book! I mean, I knew the convict was going to become important to the plot at some point since Dickens devoted the first six chapters of the book to him and kept reminding us of him every so often. And I was pretty sure Miss Havisham wasn’t Pip’s secret benefactor since there was no way she would ever do something that nice. But I figured it must be one of the Pockets for reasons I could not fathom. The benefactor’s identity is obvious in retrospect. Am I the only one who didn’t see it coming? I’d love to read about others’ first experiences reading the book. (I’d love it if anyone else would join this discussion actually. It feels kind of lonely in Dickens Club right now.)
It sounds like Magwitch was haunted by images of Pip just as Pip was haunted by images of Estella and as Arthur Havisham was haunted by images of his sister. (“When I was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like, I see yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here’s the boy again, a looking at me whiles I eats and drinks!’ I see you there a many times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes.”) But in Magwitch’s case, unlike the others, the visions actually inspired him to do something generous albeit something generous that ended up spectacularly backfiring.
Of course, Magwitch’s motives weren’t entirely unselfish. It seems like he became Pip’s patron partly out of gratitude and love and partly to spite the snobby colonists with their “blood horses” much as Miss Havisham adopted Estella partly out of love and partly “to wreak revenge on all the male sex.” But unlike Miss Havisham or other exploitive characters in the book, Magwitch is aware of this element of selfishness in his generosity and apologizes whenever he senses he’s gone too far, promising not to “be low” if he can help it.
Compeyson’s wife is an intriguing minor character. If adaptations include her at all, they seem to make her a villain, but Dickens implies that she’s to be pitied (Magwitch says her husband mostly kicked her), even admired. (Apparently, she had compassion on Arthur Havisham, and he called her “a good creetur.'”)
The main message of Great Expectations is arguably that people need to judge less by social standing and other superficial things, so Compeyson makes for an appropriate main villain since he’s able to exploit the justice system using only his appearance and his social standing. (As I wrote before, Miss Havisham feels more like the main villain to me, but Compeyson is probably the main one, technically speaking.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stationmaster, I love this here: “A big theme in Great Expectations is loving people who don’t deserve it.” In a sense, it’s not so much that someone is “unworthy”–I always think of Hamlet’s line, “use every man after his desserts and who would ‘scape whipping?”–but perhaps that the love and perceptions are misguided, misplaced. I think, connected to this, that the theme of it lay in the title itself: “Great Expectations.” The Expectation versus the Reality.
Anyway, these are just a few thoughts…I’m sure there are many more samples of “great expectations,” but these are some that come to mind.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As to the participation, Stationmaster, I have a feeling that things will continue fairly quiet here until we get to Our Mutual Friend. Several members have some things going on that will interrupt their participation, including Dana and Daniel’s month-long trip to Oxford that they’re getting ready to take in a week and a half! 🙂 I’m SO excited for them–but I think we’ll be missing them here until OMF. Also, I know Henry is returning to join us at that time, too. And I very much doubt that we’ll have more than a tiny handful of folks (me, Boze, Chris?) reading the optional The Uncommercial Traveller. Hope you can join us, Stationmaster! But totally understand if you just want to focus on the novels. All that’s to say, though, I am guessing that we’ll have a fairly quiet group until about the end of May/early June.
LikeLike
I am finally getting to watch Dr Christian’s marvelous lecture series on Great Expectations, and I just had to share this image, and the connotations of Pip’s name.
LikeLike