Anyone who doubts (as most writers do not) that some books have wills of their own, ideas about their shape and destiny and about the paths they mean to take, routes along which an author may feel less like the navigator than like a compliant traveling companion—anyone who has reservations about this may consider how many masterpieces have welled up from the gap between a writer’s intentions and the book that resulted. Working on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy imagined recording the deserved punishment that was visited upon a sinful woman—and gave us one of literature’s most deeply sympathetic heroines. Melville conceived of Moby-Dick as one of the ripping travel adventure yarns he’d told so successfully before, until his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne suggested he might want to steer his literary voyage toward the deeper waters of metaphysics.
In October 1860, when Charles Dickens was writing the first chapters of Great Expectations, he described his plans in a letter to his friend and future biographer John Forster:
The book will be written in the first person throughout, and . . . you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too—and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragicomic conception that first encouraged me.
As commonly happened in his career, Dickens’s aesthetic goals were being heavily influenced by practical considerations. The weekly journal All the Year Round, which Dickens had founded in 1859, and which he co-edited and had made popular with serializations of his own novel A Tale of Two Cities and of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, had recently suffered a precipitous and worrisome drop in circulation. This decline was attributed to the public’s steadily waning interest in the novel that the magazine was currently serializing, A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance, by Charles Lever, a once-esteemed novelist who has had the misfortune to be remembered as the man whose failure inspired Dickens to step in and speed up the writing and publication of Great Expectations.
In Dickens’s view, the suspenseful, funny, audience-pleasing story he meant to write, and which would be kicked off by the grotesque confrontation between a plucky, frightened boy and an escaped convict, could function as a sort of literary life preserver, thrown out to rescue All the Year Round from going under and drowning.
In an earlier exchange of letters, Forster had expressed some reservations about the pressure that it would exert on his friend to write another big novel in segments to be published weekly, and about the effects that this pressure might have on the work itself. Dickens, who had already decided upon his novel’s title, explained how much depended on his decision—nothing less than the survival of the magazine in which he had a great emotional and financial stake.
The sacrifice of Great Expectations is really and truly made for myself. The property of All the Year Round is far too valuable, in every way, to be much endangered. Our fall is not large, but we have a considerable advance in hand of the story we are now publishing, and there is no vitality in it, and no chance whatever of stopping the fall, which on the contrary would be certain to increase. . . . By dashing in now, I come in when most wanted.
At the start of his lecture on Bleak House, Vladimir Nabokov wrote:
If it were possible I would like to devote the fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens. However, my job is to direct and rationalize those meditations, that admiration. All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
Many things amaze us about the life and work of Charles Dickens: his energy and productivity, the depth and range of his vision, the beauty of his sentences and the freshness of his wit, his ability to combine a prodigious literary career with parallel lives in the theater and as an editor, publisher, and traveler, to keep up a voluminous correspondence, to make his own business arrangements, to undertake charitable projects, and to head a household that included ten children. Also unusual and admirable is the consistency of his ability to inspire, with such deceptive effortlessness, that tingle between the shoulder blades. But what most impresses many of his readers, and surely what most astonishes writers, is that he wrote and published his long, complicated, densely populated, elaborately plotted, and thematically ambitious novels in weekly or monthly serial installments.
Accustomed to the luxury of time and leisure, the freedom to do major and minor revisions, to produce multiple drafts, to have months or years in which to add or delete a single comma, we can barely comprehend the imagination and the technical skill required to compose an eight-hundred-page masterwork in regular installments of a length determined not by the needs of the artist but for the convenience of the printer. Though Dickens wrote notes for some of his novels and sketched out the conclusion of Great Expectations in advance, this working method demanded a prodigious ability to keep a large cast of characters and an elaborate narrative constantly in mind. The astonishment we feel when we contemplate this strenuous mode of composition has, in my opinion, been best expressed in the question posed about Dickens, in an introduction to David Copperfield, by the novelist David Gates. “Was he a Martian?”
As Dickens plotted another novel about the social and moral development of a boy into a man, he reread David Copperfield and told Forster that he “was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.” His reason for going back to the earlier book, written a decade before, was “to be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions.”
Perhaps he shouldn’t have worried so. Because in those intervening ten years, Dickens’s life and mood—and the man himself—had been greatly changed. He had separated from his wife, Catherine, an acrimonious rupture in the course of which he had forced his children to side with him against their mother. He had weathered a public scandal involving rumors that his sister-in-law Georgina was the mother of his sons and daughters, as well as gossip (the truth of which has been alternately established and challenged) that he had taken as his mistress the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. His daughter Kate had married a man she didn’t love, in order, Dickens believed, to escape her father’s troubled household. He had begun to suffer from attacks of painful rheumatism and facial neuralgia. His brother Alfred died of tuberculosis at thirty-eight, and Dickens’s sons were beginning to show signs of having inherited the flaws that had landed their paternal grandfather in debtors’ prison.
Later, Dickens would tell Forster that the “never-to-be-forgotten misery” of these years (the late 1850s) had revived in him the “certain shrinking sensitiveness” that he’d experienced during the now famous humiliation of his early life, when, at the age of twelve, the fragile boy had been forced to work ten hours a day, six days a week, pasting labels on bottles of boot and stove polish, in full view of the public, in the window of a London blacking factory.
Though it addresses many of the same concerns—class mobility, urban life, the ways in which children are nurtured or (more often) mistreated, the effort required to solve the riddle of one’s own nature and identity—Great Expectations is in every way a darker book than David Copperfield. Despite Dickens’s stated intention—to write something funny and “exceedingly droll” that would reinvigorate the readership of All the Year Round with its grotesquerie and humor—Great Expectations is among the most melancholy of his novels, and the one in which we may find confirmation of our most troubling doubts (so contrary to the aspirational spirit of the Victorian age) about the possibility and limits of self-improvement.
Great Expectations is rich in set pieces, in scenes so vivid and fully imagined, so nearly complete in themselves, that we can shut the book and be sure that, whether we like it or not, an image or sequence has been branded forever on our psyches. Perhaps the most indelible of these is the picture of Miss Havisham’s room, where the clocks have been stopped and the light forbidden to enter, a domestic interior permanently frozen in some quasi-psychotic attempt to turn back time to the moment when the bride-to-be’s heart was broken by the suitor who disappeared on her wedding day. No matter how familiar we are with the brushstrokes with which Dickens paints this deliriously creepy setting, no matter how many times we have read the novel and how well we think we know it, it’s thrilling to be guided once more along the banquet table and past the disgusting remains of the wedding cake:
A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air—like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite indistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember it seemed to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
There is, of course, no substitute for reading the novel, but I do want to recommend, to lovers of Great Expectations, the 2011 BBC miniseries based on the book. The casting of the remarkable Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham suggests something that, as far as I know, has never been intimated by any of the previous cinematic or theatrical adaptations of the novel: namely, that Miss Havisham was, and—regardless of the ruined state in which Pip meets her—is still a great beauty. Utterly mad and ferociously vengeful, but lovely nonetheless.
Quotable aphorisms and astute psychological observations are liberally sprinkled throughout the novel. Worried that Joe’s country manners may arouse the contempt of the despicable boor Bentley Drummle, Pip observes, “So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.” Even as the plot speeds us forward, we pause to reflect on the psychological incisiveness of moments such as the one in which Pip’s guilt over leaving Joe and Biddy for London makes him resent them for their grief about his departure.
There are extraordinary flights of dialogue, thrilling passages such as the one that records the giddy rhetoric of euphemism and avoidance with which the lawyer Jaggers avoids mentioning certain truths of which both the speaker and the listener are uncomfortably aware, and moments when a single word (kindly Herbert Pocket reassures an insecure actor that an abysmal performance of Hamlet has gone “capitally”) tells us all we need to know about the person who has said it. Though Dickens has been accused of using verbal and physical tics as a means of creating caricatures without having to delve beneath a shallow and quirky surface, the gestures and habits of speech in Great Expectations are particular and telling. The way in which Pip catches the convict at the Three Jolly Bargemen stirring his rum-and-water with a file—a bold and secret reference to the stolen tool with which Pip helped free Magwitch—is among the most inspired examples of a small but meaningful physical gesture anywhere in fiction.
Landscape and weather are described in a seemingly effortless shorthand that makes it seem as if it were the easiest thing in the world to get nature and climate down on the page without resorting to cliché. We are introduced to characters in homes and places of business furnished with Dickens’s astute and unfailing awareness of how decor reflects the deepest reaches of our souls. We are invited to compare the playhouse-cottage that Wemmick has created for himself and his aged father with the self-serious crepuscular gloom of his employer’s office.
There are scenes of action and high suspense. Magwitch’s botched escape, near drowning, and rescue from the Thames can be studied as a model for the clarity and order that allow us to follow a scene of roiling, fast-paced, densely populated, and potentially confusing action. There are touching events, such as the death of Pip’s sister, a formerly brutal woman brought low by an assault that alters the plot and determines one of its many dramatic turns. And there are satisfying parallels, among them the likeness between Pip’s sister’s deathbed apology and the repentance of the novel’s cruel queen bee, Miss Havisham.
Though the tightly constructed plot and massive cast of characters are appealing enough in themselves, the general reader, the writer, and the literary critic can find further entertainment in tracking an elaborate web of patterns and themes through the novel. Fathers and sons, names and naming, generosity and selfishness, lying and sincerity, crime and punishment, love and sacrifice, sex and class, imprisonment and freedom, cowardice and courage, and forgiveness and revenge are just a few of the many threads with which Dickens stitches together his grand design. Though the book is full of mysteries and questions, discovering their solutions doesn’t mean that we enjoy it less on rereading, after we know where the plot is going and what secrets will be revealed. That knowledge only increases our admiration for how cleverly Dickens succeeds at keeping his readers in the dark until the light of truth illuminates the book’s many shadowy corners. For example, we repeatedly marvel at the skill with which Dickens piles on evidence to persuade us that Pip is correct in what he believes—what he wants to believe—about the identity of his benefactor.
You can open the book at random and find that the scene you are reading is thematically and structurally related to every other scene in the book, and functions like a column or beam to support the whole. Take, for example, Pip’s visit, in chapter nineteen, to Uncle Pumblechook, the self-important dealer in corn and seeds who so often takes false credit for Pip’s good fortune that, by the end, he seems convinced that he is actually responsible. Earlier, Pumblechook’s treatment of Pip has ranged from dismissive to mocking to abusive, reminding us how much of the novel (how much of Dickens’s fiction) deals with the mistreatment and powerlessness of children.
During the Christmas dinner, interrupted by the arrival of the soldiers hunting for Magwitch, Pumblechook regales the company by speculating on what would have happened if Pip had been born a pig: “Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his frock to get a penknife out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have shed your blood and had your life.” Like almost everyone at the start of the book, Pumblechook feels free to manhandle the boy; one measure of young Pip’s helplessness is how often he is touched against his will and roughed up by the adults. When Pip visits, Pumblechook feeds him crumbs, waters his milk, and compulsively and punitively quizzes him on the multiplication tables so that “his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic.”
Inevitably, we are reminded of all this by the enormous change that occurs in Pumblechook when Pip, now under the protection of his mysterious benefactor, appears at his door in the finery newly acquired from the tailor and haberdasher. The former adult bully has been transformed into the obsequious peer and “dear friend.” Instead of pulling Pip from his chair and crudely rumpling his hair, Pumblechook grasps both of the boy’s hands in his; instead of starving him on a diet of crumbs and watered milk, Pumblechook offers him a choice of chicken or tongue, “one or two little things had round from the Boar, that I hope you may not despise.” Instead of reminding Pip of how fortunate he is to have enjoyed the harsh child-rearing practices of Mrs. Joe, Pumblechook invites Pip to look down upon the simpletons who have raised him.
So many of the novel’s themes—the powerlessness of children, the supreme importance of class, the ways in which our real or perceived social standing affects the ways in which we are treated—are evoked in this scene, which ends with a passage that reveals a great deal about Pip’s character: specifically, his dangerous susceptibility to the seductions of flattery and kindness, no matter how false or ill intentioned.
Then he asked me tenderly if I remembered our boyish games at sums, and how we had gone together to have me bound apprentice, and, in effect, how he had ever been my favorite fancy and my chosen friend? If I had taken ten times as many glasses of wine as I had, I should have known that he never stood in that relation towards me, and should in my heart of hearts have repudiated the idea. Yet for all that, I remember feeling convinced that I had been much mistaken in him, and that he was a sensible, practical, good-hearted, prime fellow.
In addition to all this, the scene of Pumblechook’s metamorphosis from tormentor to toady is extraordinarily funny. For, as Dickens promised Forster, there is plenty of humor in Great Expectations—sly turns of phrase, satirical observations, entertaining disasters such as the dismal performance of Hamlet that Pip and Herbert attend.
Often, in his work, Dickens—who hated disorderly households and was obliged to live in one as long as he remained with his understandably harried wife—finds great hilarity in depicting domestic chaos. Here, the joke is at the expense of the family of Matthew Pocket, whose wife is so obsessed with social position that Flopson and Millers, her inattentive servants, have assumed complete command of the home, much to the disadvantage of the neglected and imperiled baby.
Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for he was a most delightful lecturer on domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of the baby’s having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply externally or to take as a tonic.
There is much to be laughed at chez Matthew Pocket, and in a city and countryside populated by genial clowns, blowhards, and poseurs. But for all of its humor, Great Expectations is, as I have said, an intensely sad book. Dickens famously changed the ending on the advice of his friend and colleague Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who proposed altering the last meeting between Pip and Estella from an obviously final conversation to a more hopeful scene in which Pip takes Estella’s hand and sees “no shadow of another parting from her.” Even so, we feel that this ending, unlike that of David Copperfield or Little Dorrit, is not the sort of conclusion that allows us to cheer a happy couple’s ultimate emergence from adversity and darkness into harmony and light.
Despite the changed ending, we feel that Pip has lost Estella, just as he has lost his money, the care and help of Magwitch, and everything he might conceivably desire or value. What makes it all the more heartbreaking is that he had sacrificed all this largely because of his own faults and failings, most of which he is conscious of but powerless to change: cowardice, snobbishness, thoughtlessness, disloyalty, misplaced ambition, and the complete lack of any idea of what it might mean to love someone and be loved in a way that goes beyond the adolescent pangs of unrequited longing.
At the same time, we notice (and it’s one of the wonders of the book) that none of this makes him any less understandable and sympathetic. In his dealings with Magwitch, near the end of the novel, he develops and demonstrates a new capacity (or perhaps just shows an untapped one) for sacrifice, gratitude, and compassion. But it’s too little, too late. Pip jumps into the Thames to save Magwitch, just as Dickens jumped in, with his novel, to save All the Year Round. Dickens did better than his hero: the magazine lasted till the end of his life, and he bequeathed it to his son Charley.
Throughout his career, Dickens worked and reworked the question of class mobility, seen from within and without, a topic with which he was intimately and painfully familiar. One of the most affecting scenes in Little Dorrit occurs when its heroine, having recently come into money, is on her way to Italy and struggling to reconcile her present incarnation with her recent past life as the angel of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Part of the scene’s power derives from our sense that Dickens is writing autobiographically, that he knows all too well how confusing and disorienting it is to have been poor—and to become wealthy.
But Little Dorrit is a good poor girl, and later a good rich one, whereas Pip is the creation of a writer who has learned that even the best of us may act from motives that mix decency with selfishness, irresponsibility, shallowness, pettiness, and desperation. For all his great expectations, for all his dreams and hopes and fears, Pip is never going to be anyone but himself—and that’s a problem. Society is another problem, as are class divisions and institutional lying. But Pip’s life, we feel, could have turned out more happily, or at least more satisfyingly, if he hadn’t so readily bought into the richest desires, the brightest baubles, the least rewarding or worthy behaviors.
The fate that keeps our higher selves bashing against the prison walls of our small, ignoble impulses is a difficult reality for anyone to absorb. And even as the novel draws us in, enthralls and amuses us, it’s always a little melancholy to watch Pip compelled to face those aspects of his personality that we know he will have to confront. I’ve often wondered why Great Expectations should have become one of the two Dickens novels (along with A Tale of Two Cities) most often assigned to high-school-age students. Perhaps because it’s one of his shorter books, among the most tightly plotted.
Actually, kids should read it—and keep on rereading it throughout their adulthood. It’s fun, it’s got an engaging plot, it’s smart and beautifully written. We feel we would have been among those nineteenth-century readers who returned, in droves, to buying the weekly issues of All the Year Round. In addition, it’s a novel that gives us plenty to ponder. It’s never too early or too late to meditate on the subject of what Pip discovers about the extent to which his all-too-human nature has affected the odds of his ever getting, or even knowing, what he wants from the world.