Charles Dickens’s

Great

Expectations

Bloom’s

GUIDES

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Charles Dickens’s

Great

Expectations

Edited & with an Introduction

by Harold Bloom

Bloom’s

GUIDES

2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross

Communications.

www.chelseahouse.com

Contributing editor: Sarah Robbins
Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi
Layout by EJB Publishing Services

Introduction

2005 by Harold Bloom.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
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permission of the publisher.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

First Printing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Great expectations / [edited by] Harold Bloom.

p. cm. -- (Bloom's guides)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-7910-8168-0 (alk. paper)

1. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. Great expectations. I. Bloom, Harold.

II. Series.
PR4560.G687 2004
823'.8--dc22

2004015305

Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and
secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally
appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no
editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find
bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments
sections of this volume.

Contents

Introduction

Biographical Sketch

The Story Behind the Story

List of Characters

Summary and Analysis

Critical Views

George Bernard Shaw on the Unamiable Estella

and Pip as Function of Class Snobbery

George Orwell on Magwitch and the Pantomime

of the Wicked Uncle

Peter Brooks on the Beginning and Ending:

Pip Before Plot and Beyond Plot

Dorothy Van Ghent on the Century of Progress,

Dickens’s Use of the Pathetic Fallacy, and
Pip’s “Identity of Things”

Julian Moynahan on Pip’s Aggressive Ambition

and the Dark Doubles Orlick and Drummle

Goldie Morgentaler on Darwin and Money

as Determinant

Christopher D. Morris on Narration and

Pip’s Moral Bad Faith

Joseph A. Hynes on Star, Garden, and Firelight Imagery

Ann B. Dobie on Surrealism and Stream-of-Consciousness

Nina Auerbach on Dickens and the Evolution

of the Eighteenth-Century Orphan

Stephen Newman on Jaggers and Wemmick:

Two Windows on Little Britain

Jay Clayton on Great Expectations as a Foreshadowing

of Postmodernism

Edward W. Said on Australia, British Imperialism,

and Dickens’s Victorian Businessmen

100

Works by Charles Dickens

104

Annotated Bibliography

105

Contributors

110

Acknowledgments

113

Index

115

Introduction

HAROLD BLOOM

Charles Dickens reread his autobiographical novel, David
Copperfield, before he began to write Great Expectations. He
hoped thus not to repeat himself, and his hope was fulfilled:
David and Pip are very different personages. Yet Dickens’s
anxiety was justified; both of these first-person narrators are
versions of Dickens himself, and only acute self-awareness on
the novelist’s part kept Pip from becoming as autobiographical
a figure as David had been. Still, one can wonder whether Pip
is not a better representation of Dickens’s innermost being than
David is. Compared to Pip’s incessant and excessive sense of
guilt, David’s consciousness seems much freer, or at least works
in a more unimpeded fashion to liberate itself, in part, from the
personal past. Pip does not become a novelist, as David and
Dickens do, and Pip also does not submit to sentimentality, as
David does. We are asked to believe that David Copperfield
concludes the novel as a fully matured being, but we are left
with considerable doubts. Pip, perhaps because he is more
distanced from Dickens, seems more worthy of Dickens’s
respect and is endowed by the novelist with a more powerful
imagination than the novelist David Copperfield enjoys.

Why does Pip have so pervasive a sense of guilt? Several

critics have remarked that, in Pip, love always emanates from
guilt, whether the love be for the father-substitutes Joe and
Magwitch, or the overwhelming passion for the beautiful,
mocking, and unattainable Estella. Dickens’s best biographer,
Edgar Johnson, relates this erotic aspiration to the novelist’s
love affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress quite young enough to
have been his daughter.

Since Estella actually is Magwitch’s daughter, and Magwitch

has adopted Pip as a son, pragmatically speaking, there is
something of an incest barrier between Pip and Estella, though
Pip consciously cannot be aware of this. And yet he is conscious
that she is “part of my existence, part of myself”: there is as

occult a connection between Pip and Estella as there is between
Heathcliff and the first Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights. One critic, Shuli Barzilai, relates Pip’s self-lacerating
temperament to Freud’s “moral masochism,” the guilty need to
fail, and she traces the same self-punishing pattern in Estella’s
marriage to the sadistic Bentley Drummle. Both Estella and
Pip seem doomed to go on expiating a guilt not truly their
own, whether or not it was truly Charles Dickens’s.

Dickens originally ended the novel with a powerful

unhappiness: Pip and Estella meet by chance in London; she
has remarried, and each sees in the other a suffering that
cannot be redressed. Unfortunately, Dickens revised this into
the present conclusion, in which Pip prophesies that he and
Estella will not be parted again. Though this is a little
ambiguous and just evades sentimentality, it is highly
inappropriate to what is most wonderful about the novel: The
purgation, through acceptance of loss, that has carried Pip into
an authentic maturity. What matters in that maturation is not
that guilt has been evaded or transcended, but that the reader
has come to understand it, however implicitly, as the cost of
Pip’s confirmation as an achieved self. What Dickens could not
bring himself to do in David Copperfield, he disciplined himself
into doing in Great Expectations. Self-made, even self-fathered,
Dickens disowns part of that psychic achievement when he
creates Pip, who is fatherless but keeps faith at last both with
Joe and with the memory of Magwitch.

Biographical Sketch

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport, Portsea,
near Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of
eight children of John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. The
family moved to London in 1814, to Chatham in 1817, and
then back to London in 1822. By 1824 increasing financial
difficulties caused Dickens’s father to be briefly imprisoned for
debt; Dickens himself was put to work for a few months at a
shoe-blacking warehouse. Memories of this painful period in
his life were to influence much of his later writing, in particular
the early chapters of David Copperfield.

After studying at the Wellington House Academy in London

(1824–27), Dickens worked as a solicitor’s clerk (1827–28), then
worked for various newspapers, first the True Sun (1832–34)
and later as a political reporter for the Morning Chronicle
(1834–36). In 1833 Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell,
but her family opposed any contemplated marriage. Dickens
never forgot Maria, and she served as the model for Dora in
David Copperfield.

In 1836 a collection of articles contributed to various

periodicals appeared in two volumes as Sketches by “Boz,”
Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. This was
followed by the enormously popular Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club (1836–37). Like many of Dickens’s later novels,
the Pickwick Papers first appeared in a series of monthly
chapbooks or “parts.” Other novels were serialized in
magazines before appearing in book form. In 1836 Dickens
married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children
before their separation in 1858. At the beginning of his
marriage, Catherine’s sixteen-year-old sister Mary lived with
them, but she died after a few months. The shock of this loss
affected Dickens permanently, and Mary would be the model
for many of the pure, saintly heroines in his novels—such as
Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop—who die at an early age.

Between 1837 and 1839 Dickens published a second novel,

Oliver Twist, in monthly installments in Bentley’s Miscellany, a

new periodical of which he was the first editor. This was
followed in 1838–39 by Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens then
founded his own weekly, Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–41), in
which appeared his novels The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby
Rudge. In 1842 he and his wife visited the United States and
Canada, and after returning Dickens published American Notes
(1842), two volumes of impressions that caused much offense
in the United States. He then wrote Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–44), a novel set partly in America.

In 1843 Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the first in a

series of Christmas books that included The Chimes (1845), The
Cricket on the Hearth (1846), The Battle of Life (1846), and The
Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). Early in 1846 he
was for a brief time the editor of the Daily News, a paper of the
Radical party to which he contributed “Pictures of Italy” after
visiting Italy in 1844 and again in 1845. During a visit to
Switzerland in 1846 Dickens wrote his novel Dombey and Son,
which appeared monthly between 1846 and 1848. In 1850 he
started the periodical Household Words; in 1859 it was
incorporated into All the Year Round, which Dickens continued
to edit until his death. Much of his later work was published in
these two periodicals, including David Copperfield (1849–50),
Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit
(1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations
(1860–61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65).

Throughout his life, Dickens threw himself vigorously into a

variety of social and political crusades, such as prison reform,
improvement of education, the status of workhouses, and
reform of the copyright law (American publishers were
notorious for pirating his works and offering him no
compensation). These interests find their way also into his
work, which is characterized by sympathy for the oppressed and
a keen examination of class distinctions. His novels and stories
have been both praised and censured for their sentimentality
and their depiction of “larger-than-life” characters, such as
Pickwick or Mr. Micawber (in David Copperfield).

During the last twenty years of his life Dickens still found

time to direct amateur theatrical productions, sometimes of his

own plays. He also became involved in a variety of
philanthropical activities, gave public readings, and in 1867–68
visited America for a second time. Dickens died suddenly on
June 9, 1870, leaving unfinished his last novel, The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, which was first published later that same year.
Several editions of his collected letters have been published.
Despite his tremendous popularity during and after his own
life, it was not until the twentieth century that serious critical
study of his work began to appear. Modern critical opinion has
tended to favor the later, more somber and complex works over
the earlier ones characterized by boisterous humor and broad
caricature.

The Story Behind the Story

Charles Dickens set out to compose what Bernard Shaw called
his “most compactly perfect book” during a tumultuous time of
upheaval and change in his native England. During the second
half of the nineteenth century, when Dickens’s career had
flowered, the world’s center of influence shifted from France to
London, whose population tripled during the time of Queen
Victoria’s reign—and society shifted from one of ownership
and property to one of manufacture and trade. While the
beginning of the nineteenth century and the effects of the
Industrial Revolution brought poverty and persecution for the
laboring class, a series of reforms in the 1830s and 1840s
helped to stabilize both the economy and the population.
Factory acts restricted child labor and limited hours of
employment, and the erection of the Crystal Palace in 1851
celebrated the beauty—rather than the strife—of the
Revolution’s technological innovation. Charles Darwin’s
treatise The Origin of Species, published in 1859, put this
progress in the context of evolution and natural selection. And
so, in 1860, the story of a boy’s confusion-riddled rise from
impoverished orphan to city gentleman grew slowly from a the
seed of Dickens’s letter to his friend John Forster, describing “a
little piece I am writing ... Such a very fine, new, and grotesque
idea has opened upon me ... I can see the whole of a serial
revolving around it, in a most singular and comic matter.”

Great Expectations is at once an elegy for the lost innocence

of lower-class rural population—who, like the Gargerys of
Rochester, toiled in the countryside of his childhood—and a
critical analysis of the broadening gap between illusion and
reality that came with the hopefulness of reform, social
mobility, and ever increasing commerce. In order to
successfully render this transformation, Dickens’s scholar
David Paroissien says the author needed to use first-person
narration and maintain a dual focus: “Pip looks back to those
events of his life set in Regency England but tells them from a
present he belongs to, the now of the relating time.” Through

his protagonist, Pip, Dickens sought to define and question the
motivations and forces behind a rise in social status and the
prejudices surrounding the divide between high society and the
base criminal world. An advocate of free trade, Dickens was
sickened by the cruelty overcrowded London inflicted upon its
inhabitants. His depictions of Smithfield market and Newgate
prison serve as reminders of the filthy, teeming, bloody world
of questionable justice during this era. But since Pip’s story
begins not in the present time but rather in the early part of the
century, Dickens appealed to readers by depicting Pip as
looking back from a current perspective, with some of the
knowledge and maturity that wouldn’t be available to a young,
“common labouring boy” in the beginning of the century.

Reader faith and investment was necessary for a writer who

constructed his plot as a series of bite-sized chunks. As the
editor of the weekly journal All the Year Round, Dickens had to
contend with the journal’s plummeting sales following the
failure of novelist Charles Lever’s serialized publication of his A
Day’s Ride. Great Expectations appeared in weekly installments in
both All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly from December
1860 to August 1861. This format, though challenging for the
writer, brought him a broad readership that only improved his
career. Dickens used the serial constraints as structural features
in the novel, shaping plot around his need to have a continual
series of beginnings and endings and maintaining suspense
throughout the work. Great Expectations does not fall neatly
into any particular genre. It does have aspects of domestic
realism—which by 1860 was characteristic of Dickens’s
contemporaries such as Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope—but in
different moments also resembles a variety of Victorian
subgenres, including the historical novel; a “silver-fork” fiction
dealing with high society; a “Newgate” sensationalist or crime
novel; and, perhaps most obviously, the Bildungsroman.

Seeing the autobiographical nature of Great Expectations is

easy with the knowledge that Dickens, like Pip, once lived in
the marsh country, was employed in a job he despised, and
experienced success in London at an early age. These
similarities may be the reason why biographer Thomas Wright

says that Great Expectations differs from Dickens’s other novels,
arguing that the hero and heroine are “really live and
interesting characters with human faults and failings.” Some
critics, including Wright, argue that Estella, in name and spirit,
is an amalgam of Ellen Lawless Ternan, a 20-year-old actress
with whom Dickens had an affair following his divorce.
Although like Pip and Estella, Dickens and Ternan were united
in the end, Great Expectations’s original ending was considerably
more melancholy. After finishing the last installment of the
book in June 1861, the exhausted Dickens brought the proofs
to his friend, novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Lytton
argued that the Dickens’s first and considerably shorter
ending—in which Pip encounters Estella remarried and
unambiguously leaves her forever—would be too disappointing
for readers. In a letter to Forster, Dickens wrote, “I have put in
as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt
that the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.”

When the novel was published as a whole that July, critics

had differing opinions on the revised ending, but the novel was
a tremendous commercial success. A century and a half later,
few remember that the novel once closed with a remarried
Estella’s encounter with Pip on a Picadilly street and their final,
unambiguous parting soon after. Today the novel is popular—
well-read and widely taught. And Dickens’s controversial
decisions in writing the serial have faded into the annals of
history. “This was the author’s last great work,” wrote
Swinburne. “The defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as
spots on the sun or shadow on a sunlit sea.”

List of Characters

Pip, the protagonist of the novel, is an orphan living with Mr.
and Mrs. Joe Gargery, his sister and brother-in-law. Realizing
with disgust his “commonness” once he encounters Miss
Havisham and Estella, he is delighted when he learns he has a
secret benefactor who wishes to make him a gentleman.

Estella, the adopted charge of Miss Havisham, has been raised
with the intention of enacting her guardian’s revenge on men.
Upon encountering Pip after she has been “educated for a
lady,” she tells him that “I have no heart...no softness there,
no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.” (237). She endures an
unhappy marriage to Bentley Drummle, who dies eleven years
later.

An heiress and the owner of Satis house, Miss Havisham
employs young Pip and delights in watching him play with
Estella. Soon she decides that Pip will suffer the wrongs that
she herself endured when her marriage was called off only
minutes before the ceremony.

Abel Magwitch, a convict who worked with and was later
betrayed by Compeyson, first encounters young Pip in the
marshes and then, threatening the boy, begs for food and a file.
When Pip reminds him of a young daughter he lost, Magwitch
aims to earn a fortune to repay the boy by making him a
gentleman through secret contribution.

An educated, gentlemanly criminal and former associate of
Magwitch, Compeyson uses his looks and his manners to shift
blame to Magwitch during a trial, sparking an eternal feud. He
also uses his wiles to attract Miss Havisham and eventually to
jilt her. Compeyson is responsible for Magwitch’s capture at the
end of the novel.

Joe Gargery is an honest, earnest blacksmith and Pip’s brother-
in-law, who endures marriage to a shrill woman without
complaint. Later, his pride and love for Pip supersede Pip’s
callous shunning of his former social status.

Mrs. Joe is Pip’s sister, more than twenty years his elder, who
never loses a chance to remind her charge that she “brought
him up by hand.” This effort is often conducted with the help
of a cane she calls “Tickler.” Dissatisfied with her station in life,
and often shrill, jealous, and confrontational, she is silenced
when Orlick strikes her in the back of the head.

Pip’s dark shadow throughout the book, Orlick first works as a
day laborer in Joe’s forge and later works as a porter at Satis
house. He is responsible for the attack on Mrs. Joe, and he
never forgives Pip for ruining his chances of wooing Biddy. He
develops an association with Compeyson; baiting Pip with
mention of Magwitch, Orlick lures Pip to a sluice-house in the
marshes and attempts to kill him.

Jaggers is an intimidating and prominent criminal lawyer in
London who assumes the role of Pip’s legal guardian once
Magwitch decides to support him in secret. Jaggers’s
association with Miss Havisham leads Pip to believe that she is
in fact his benefactor. Cold and cruel with his clients and frugal
with his emotions and lifestyle, Jaggers is involved with the
dirty business of being an “Old Bailey” attorney—therefore he
frequently washes his hands with scented soap. He brings
Estella to be adopted by Miss Havisham.

Pip first encounters Herbert Pocket—the son of Miss
Havisham’s cousin, Matthew Pocket—as a “pale young
gentleman” lurking in the courtyard at Satis house. Once Pip is
informed of his intentions to be made a gentleman, he lives
with Herbert; the two become close companions and Herbert
nicknames Pip “Handel.” Herbert wants to make a fortune as a
merchant so that he can marry Clara Bailey.

Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Matthew Pocket is one of
Pip’s tutors and a chief civilizing force from his life. He has
become estranged from his family because of his pragmatism at
a time when Miss Havisham was giving large amounts of
money to the man who eventually jilted her.

Wemmick is Jaggers’s middle-aged clerk, who divides his life
quite neatly into to compartments. The professional life, in
which he maintains a “post-office mouth” and an obsession
with “portable property”; and his personal life, which is housed
in an imitation castle he shares with his aging father. His desire
to help Pip out of certain predicaments is precluded by his
professional life, and Pip must seek him out at home in order
to get the advice for which he is looking. Wemmick is in love
with the middle-aged Miss Skiffins.

One of Pip’s earliest confidantes, Biddy helps Pip with his
lessons and he is put at ease by her simple, earnest, humility.
When Mrs. Joe is attacked, Biddy moves in with the Gargerys
to keep house.

Joe’s uncle, Pumblechook is a merchant obsessed with money
and possessions. He first delivers Pip to Miss Havisham’s
house. After Pip’s is educated to be a gentleman by the
generosity of Magwitch, Pumblechook advertises that he was
Pip’s earliest benefactor.

Powerful though inarticulate, Drummle is one of Pip’s
classmates and an “old-looking young man of a heavy order of
architecture.” (190) When Jaggers encounters Drummle he is
impressed by the man’s mannerisms and nicknames him
“Spider.” To Pip’s horror, Drummle courts Estella and
eventually marries her.

Startop is Pip’s other classmate, who has younger, more
delicate features and mannerisms and is extremely devoted to
his mother. Pip and Herbert solicit Startop’s help in attempting
to smuggle Magwitch out of London.

Magwitch’s former lover, Molly bore his daughter, who is later
revealed to be Estella. She is acquitted of murder, at which
point Estella is placed in the care of Miss Havisham and Molly
becomes Jaggers’s housekeeper.

Mr. Wopsle is a church clerk and frustrated preacher who falls
into playacting and moves to London shortly after Pip does,
assuming the stage name of Waldengarver. When Pip comes to
see one of his productions, Wopsle is startled to see a man
lurking behind Pip—Compeyson.

Summary and Analysis

Volume One

Pip introduces himself to readers as Philip Pirrip, but qualifies
that with the statement that he calls himself Pip. He begins his
tale at the moment he first has an impression of the “identity of
things”—as a seven-year-old child standing among the nettles
in the marshy Cooling churchyard. Pip stands on Christmas
Eve, reflecting on the tombstones of his parents—whom he
never knew—and his five brothers. He comments that his
brothers “gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in
that universal struggle,” which, Goldie Morgenthaler says,
seems to be taken directly from the third chapter of Darwin’s
The Origin of Species, published a year before Great
Expectations. Morgenthaler’s observations of Darwin’s effect
on this work will surface later in the plot.

A hero such as Pip, argues critic Peter Brooks, is essentially

“unauthored”—and unencumbered by authority figures.
Christopher D. Morris contends that Pip’s insistence upon
naming himself reflects his inability to be ruled by the past of
his parents’ headstones. This could be Dickens way of
illustrating, as Brooks says, “a life that is for the moment
precedent to plot, and indeed necessarily in search of plot.”
This plot begins to unfold when into Pip’s reverie bursts the
voice of a rough-looking, gray uniformed man. He has spotted
Pip in the churchyard and demands, threatening death, that
Pip bring to him some food and a file the next morning. Pip
scurries back to the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Joe
Gargery, only to be met with his sister’s rebukes for his
impudence and a reminder of the fact that she brought him up
“by hand.” After supper, Pip schemes to bring part of
Christmas dinner to the convict, when the sound of gunfire
resounds, indicating another escape from the Hulks prison
ships. Pip trips off to bed, afraid to sleep for fear of waking the
next morning’s plan. Nevertheless, at the first hint of dawn, he
escapes with some morsels, including brandy and a pork pie.

On his way to the planned meeting spot, Pip stumbles upon

another man, dressed in a like gray uniform, with a badly
bruised face and an iron chain encircling his leg. He strikes Pip
and runs into the mist, allowing Pip to continue toward his
convict. When they meet, the man ravenously east his food,
while Pip mentions the other man and the fact that he heard
cannons in the middle of the night. Pip indicates which way the
man with the badly bruised face traveled and leaves his friend
in the mist, filing away at his iron. Though Pip’s fear and guilt
begins here, with his being “very much afraid of him again ...
and likewise very much afraid from being away from home any
longer,” (21) Dorothy Van Ghent argues that its genesis
occurred before he committed any ill action. Pip is received by
his sister as a criminal; this guilt is only compounded after he
commits theft and first realized as he watches the convict limp
into the distance.

When Pip returns home, half-expecting an awaiting

constable, he finds his sister busy with Christmas preparations.
When attending church with Joe, he completely ignores the
liturgy and is preoccupied instead with the question of whether
he will be apprehended for his theft or saved from the wrath of
the convict. The Gargerys and Pip later share dinner with the
church clerk, Mr. Wopsle, the wheelwright Mr. Hubble and his
wife, and Joe’s Uncle Pumblechook. The adults pester Pip, who
is overcome with worry about the realization of the missing
food. When Mrs. Joe announces the pork pie, Pip dashes away,
only to run into a party of soldiers.

Though Pip is frightened, the soldiers simply want Joe’s help

in repairing handcuffs for the escaped convicts. Upon finishing
his task, Joe proposes that he, Pip, and Mr. Wopsle join the
soldier’s search. They set out into the dismal marshes, Pip
wondering whether the convicts will think he brought the
authorities. After a mad chase, the convicts are found at the
bottom of the ditch, and with Pip hiding behind Joe during the
spectacle, the badly bruised convict accuses the other of
murder. When the sergeants stop the conversation and light
the torches, Pip is revealed and is startled to be caught in the
convict’s sight. He reminisces, “If he had looked at me for an

hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face even
afterwards, as having been more attentive.” (38) After an hour
of travel, the convict apologizes to Joe for taking food from his
home; Joe promptly forgives him. Critics make much of this
exchange, noting both Joe’s genuine humanity and the
foundation of Pip’s kindness toward the convict. Noting a
bizarre clicking the convict’s throat, Pip watches intently as the
two men are loaded back onto the ship. On the way home, Joe
carries his exhausted young charge back, and they deliver news
of the convict’s confession to the awaiting visitors.

One evening, Pip, who is being taught to write by Mr.

Wopsle’s great aunt, practices his script by writing Joe a letter.
Joe says that he has never been to school; that he lived in the
house until he met Pip’s sister, whom he describes as a “fine
figure of a woman,” in part for her efforts raising Pip. Joe
allows, however, that his lack of formal schooling could be
attributed to his wife’s disinterest in education. Pip declares
that from that moment forward, he saw Joe as his equal.
During a market day shortly thereafter, Pumblechook
announces that Pip is to play at the home of Miss Havisham, a
woman known throughout town for being “an immensely rich
and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded
against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion.” (51) So the
next morning, a scrubbed and linen-bedecked Pip is delivered
to Pumblechook’s shop. They arrive at Miss Havisham’s
together, and a window is raised; Pumblechook responds to a
prompt that Pip indeed stands downstairs, learns that he is
unwanted on the premises, and leaves Pip in the hands of a
young lady who meets him at the gate.

Pip’s young escort informs him that the name of the house is

Satis—or enough—and leads him to a dressing room, where a
lady dressed in full wedding regalia awaits. Pip soon notices
that everything meant to be white is faded and that the
woman’s skin seems to hang off her bones. Miss Havisham
commands Pip to play, and when his response is a confused
stare, turns her eyes to her reflection in the looking glass and
bids Pip to call the girl, Estella. At Miss Havisham’s behest Pip
plays “beggar my neighbour” with Estella, who labels him a

“common labouring boy.” (60) When they are finished, Miss
Havisham requests his return and Estella brings him into the
courtyard and contemptuously offers him food. After Estella
leaves, Pip observes his commonness with contempt, alleviating
his frustrations by kicking the brewery wall. Estella soon lets
him out, wondering aloud why he doesn’t cry when he seems as
though he’d like to. Gratefully finding Pumblechook away
from his office, Pip continues the four miles back to the forge,
ruminating on his status as a “common labouring boy.”

Pip returns home to find his sister and Pumblechook

awaiting his arrival. In response to their ceaseless queries he
spins a web of elaborate lies, bearing in mind that
Pumblechook has himself never laid eyes on Miss Havisham.
Only when Pip sees Joe does he begin to feel remorse. He
quickly confesses, expressing his disdain about his
commonness, and Joe—incredulous that neither a group of
dogs nor a game involving flags comprised Pip’s visit—explains
that the only sure way to becoming a gentleman is through
truthfulness. The next morning, Pip resolves to ask Biddy to
tell him everything she knows. But before their planned
meeting, Pip is sent by his sister to call on Joe at the public
house, The Three Jolly Bargemen. Joe is seated with Mr.
Wopsle and “a secret-looking man” (75) Pip doesn’t recognize.
This man inquires after Pip’s origins; the three converse until
the rum-and-water is brought to the table and the strange man
stirs his drink with a file. Only Pip notices this aberration, and
in doing so realizes that the strange man is, in fact, his convict.
The convict presents a fistful of change to Pip when Pip and
Joe rise to leave. The wad is proclaimed to be two one-pound
notes, which Mrs. Joe binds and stores under an ornamental tea
pot. Pip’s sleep is fitful that night, his mind on the common
nature of an association with convicts.

Many critics write that Pip’s experience of Satis house is that

of living in a daydream; Miss Havisham represents in his hopes
a sort of fairy godmother. Dorothy Van Ghent suggests that
Miss Havisham’s commanding Pip to play is an illustration of
Dickens’s response to society’s increasing commodification of
people. At the appointed time, Pip returns, and Estella leads

him into a gloomy, low-ceilinged room and instructs Pip to
wait until he is called upon. Pip gazes out at a neglected garden
until he realizes he is under scrutiny. He observes these strange
people called Camilla, Cousin Raymond, Miss Sarah Pocket,
until Estella summons him with a bell; she asks him, as they
walk, if he finds her pretty. When he assents, Estella slaps him
forcefully and asks why he does not cry. Pip solemnly declares
that he will never cry for her again. At the top of the stairs they
encounter a burly soap-scented man who inquires, biting the
side of his forefinger, as to Pip’s purpose. Remarking that boys
“are a bad set of fellows,” the man reminds Pip to behave
himself. Miss Havisham suggests that Estella and Pip play cards
again, but then she directs Pip to a neighboring room.
Standing there, Pip observes a long table set for a feast but
riddled with mold, dust, and insects. When Miss Havisham
enters, she explains that she shall be laid on the table when she
is dead, and points out that the object buried under cobwebs is
actually a wedding cake. Pip’s task, he learns, is to walk Miss
Havisham around the room; he complies, until he is instructed
to call for Estella. Estella enters with the adults Pip
encountered downstairs. Miss Havisham declares that upon her
death all of these people—family members—shall surround the
table and “feast upon me.” Mentioning that her absent brother,
Matthew Pocket, shall sit at the head of the table, she instructs
Pip to continue walking her around the table. When the adults
leave, Miss Havisham summons Pip and Estella and says,
“when they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s
table—which shall be done, and which will be the finished
curse upon him—so much better if it is done on this day!” (89)
Pip and Estella then play cards, and Pip is led back to the yard
and fed in the same manner as before. When Pip is left alone
he encounters a pale young gentleman, who implores him to
fight. When Pip prevails, the pale young gentleman bids him
“good afternoon.” Meeting Estella in the courtyard, he honors
her request for a kiss on the cheek.

Fitful about the incident with the pale young gentleman, Pip

returns to “the scene of the deed of violence” (94) with
trepidation, only to find the struggle unmentioned. Seated in a

garden chair, which Pip is instructed to push, Miss Havisham
engages Pip in a discussion about his education and his future
as Joe’s apprentice. Pip visits again and again, and though
Estella never asks for another kiss, Miss Havisham seems to
delight in Pip’s attraction to her young charge. One evening
Pumblechook comes to the Gargerys’ with the intention of
discussing Pip’s prospects. He begins by suggesting how
grateful Pip should be for the work that his sister has done, and
then engages Mrs. Joe in a discussion about Miss Havisham’s
influence. One day Miss Havisham again inquires the name of
the blacksmith to whom Pip is to be apprenticed. Miss
Havisham requests that Joe comes to visit her soon, and alone
with Pip.

Mrs. Joe is offended by her lack of invitation; she suggests

that she will travel with them and stay at Pumblechook’s. Joe
and Pip continue straight on to Miss Havisham’s and are met
by a nonplussed Estella, who leads them in. Miss Havisham
asks Joe a series of questions, beginning with, “You are the
husband of the sister of this boy?” Instead of responding to
Miss Havisham directly, the bumbling, nervous blacksmith
addresses Pip. Joe’s foibles, Van Ghent suggests, are common
in Great Expectations, where language is unique to character.
When characters such as Joe or Magwitch speak in soliloquy,
they suggest a world of colliding fragmented existences. When
Joe responds that Pip has earned no premium with him, Miss
Havisham presents Pip with 25 guineas. Miss Havisham bids
them goodbye and remarks that Pip may not return, as Joe is
now his master. They return to Pumblechook’s with the news.
Pumblechook insists that he’ll take Pip to Town Hall to have
him officially “bound” to Joe. Mrs. Pip insists that some of
Pip’s windfall be used to finance a celebration dinner at the
Blue Boar. Pip returns to his bedroom that night, ashamed of
his status and convinced that he shall never like Joe’s trade.

As Pip’s education continues, he soaks up all he can from

Biddy and Mr. Wopsle. Using the Battery as a study place, Pip
imparts his knowledge to Joe. All the while, Pip thinks of Miss
Havisham and Estella. When he asks Joe if he should pay
another visit to Miss Havisham, to formerly thank her, Joe

agrees, after some deliberation, to give Pip a half-holiday for
his visit. When Joe’s journeyman, Orlick, hears this news, he
protests until Joe grants a half-holiday to everyone. Mrs. Joe,
upset by this decision, exchanges harsh words with Orlick;
when Mrs. Joe dissolves into an angry fit, Joe and Orlick begin
to struggle. Pip disappears upstairs to dress, and when he
returns, he finds Joe and his journeymen sweeping up as
though nothing has happened.

At Miss Havisham’s house Pip is greeted by Miss Sarah

Pocket and the news that Estella has gone abroad, “educating
for a lady.” (116) When Miss Havisham seems to delight in
Pip’s feeling of loss, Pip remains silent until Miss Havisham
dismisses him. On his way home Pip runs into Mr. Wopsle,
who invites him to take tea in Pumblechook’s parlor and to
engage in a reading of a popular tragic play. As under the cover
of darkness the two walk home, they run into Orlick, who tells
him the Hulks’ cannons are firing again. On the way, the three
men are surprised to find a commotion at the Three Jolly
Bargemen; when Mr. Wopsle seeks out the cause of the ruckus,
he is told that something violent has happened at Pip’s place.
When they finally reach home, they see through the crowd to
Pip’s sister, lying senseless on the floorboards because of a blow
to the head.

The details of the evening emerge: Joe had been at the

Three Jolly Bargemen since eight o’clock, and when he arrived
home at five minutes before ten, he found Mrs. Joe stricken, a
convict’s leg iron beside her. Pip imagines that either Orlick or
his convict could be responsible for a tragedy of this
magnitude; considering the implications of the convict’s
actions, Pip is overcome by guilt, “to think that I had provided
the weapon.” (121) In giving the convict the file, Pip thinks he
has essentially killed his sister himself. He has overtaken his
destiny, Van Ghent argues, just as George Barnwell, the
character in the play he read that night with Wopsle—he has
murdered his nearest relative.Though the incident renders
Mrs. Joe an invalid, her temperament improves greatly. About a
month later, Biddy comes to work in the kitchen, and begins
investigating the curious T-shape Mrs. Joe helplessly draws on

a piece of slate. Finally, Biddy realizes that unable to spell
Orlick’s name, Mrs. Joe is signifying his hammer. Still, when
Orlick was brought before Mrs. Joe, she is gracious to him.

Pip falls into the routine of life as an apprentice until the

arrival of his birthday, when he is scheduled to pay another visit
to Miss Havisham. He again meets Sarah Pocket at the gate,
hears that Estella remains abroad, and accepts—after some
deliberation—a guinea and another invitation for his next
birthday. At home, Pip begins to notice a change in Biddy and,
admiring her persistence and her intellect, seeks her out as a
confidante. He tells her one Sunday afternoon that he wants to
be a gentleman, insisting that he will be miserable if he
continues to lead the type of life to which he has been bound.
He laments the occasion of being called coarse and common,
and confesses that Estella planted such ideas. Biddy asks if Pip
would like to become a gentleman to spite Estella or to win
her; she suggests that he might achieve his goal of spiting her if
he stops caring about her words. As they walk and talk, Pip
laments his inability to fall in love with Biddy, and Biddy insists
that he never will. Nearing the churchyard, the two run into
Orlick; after, Biddy admits that Orlick has always had the
wrong intentions for her. Contemplating this, Pip attempts to
rid himself of his disaffection for Jo and to sustain a desire for
Biddy; all the while, he is haunted by Miss Havisham and
Estella.

Four years later, Pip assembles with a group of men at the

Three Jolly Bargemen to hear news of a popular murder. As
they sit, Pip notices a strange gentleman opposite him, biting
the side of his forefinger. The stranger asks the crowd if they
know whether any of the witnesses have been cross-examined
and whether they feel a man’s conscience can rest, knowing
that he’s convicted a man who has not yet been heard. Then
the strange man asks after Joe Gargery and his apprentice, and
when they come forward, he introduces himself as Mr. Jaggers,
a lawyer in London. Joe says he bears an offer to relieve Pip
from his indentures to Joe, and Joe insists both that he would
never stand in Pip’s way and that he doesn’t need compensation
for his loss. Jaggers says that part of the offer’s stipulations are

that Pip always bears the name “Pip” and that the name of the
person who is his benefactor may not be revealed until a time
of his benefactor’s choosing. Next the details of arrangement
are laid out, including the money set aside for Pip’s lodging and
education and the fact that Jaggers should be considered Pip’s
guardian. Matthew Pocket—the man, Pip remembers, Miss
Havisham said should be at the head of the table when she is
laid to rest—should be his tutor, and twenty guineas shall be
laid aside for Pip’s work-clothes. Additionally, Jaggers says Joe
is to be compensated for the loss of Pip’s services, while Joe
protests, insisting that no monetary compensation could suffice
for the loss of a child.

Biddy attempts to explain the news to Mrs. Joe, and Pip feels

sheepish when he hears Biddy and Joe discuss his pending
absence. He suggests that the tailor send his new clothes to
Pumblechook’s so he is not made into a spectacle. Biddy and Joe
insist that they—as well as Wopsle and the Hubbles—might like
to see Pip’s new “gen-teel figure.” Joe burns Pip’s documents of
indenture, and after an early dinner, strolls out to meet him in
the marshes. Later Pip speaks to Biddy, and when she makes
him uncomfortable by suggesting that Joe was not simply
backward and confused but proud, Pip accuses her of being
envious of his good fortune. Visiting the tailor, Mr. Trabb, Pip
delivers the news of his good fortune; Mr. Trabb’s reaction
convinces Pip of the power of money. Once hats, boots, and
stockings have been ordered, Pip approaches Pumblechook,
who receives him festively. They eat and drink to Pip’s sister’s
health, and Pumblechook pledges to keep Joe “up to the mark.”
On Friday Pip puts on his new clothes and pays a visit to Miss
Havisham, who says she has heard from Jaggers that Pip has
been adopted by an unnamed rich person. As she bids him
goodbye, she encourages him to always keep the name of Pip.
As their time together dwindles, Pip grows more appreciative of
Joe and Biddy’s company. On his last night, he dresses himself
in his new clothes and feels melancholy despite their attempts to
seem festive. Early the next morning Pip dresses, eats a hurried
breakfast, and walks away. He lays his hand down on the finger
post of the village and says goodbye.

Volume Two

Pip makes the five-hour journey to London and discovers a
dirty city full of narrow streets. He takes a coach to Little
Britain, just outside Smithfield, and arrives at Jaggers’s office
only to find his guardian still in court. Mike, a one-eyed client,
is asked to leave so that Pip can sit inside the office. While Pip
waits, he stares around the office, wondering about the odd
objects inside, such as a pistol, a sword, and two casts of faces.
He sits until he cannot bear the heat and the menacing looks of
the two casts; then, informing the clerk that he’d like to take a
walk, enters Smithfield, “asmear with filth and fat and blood
and foam.” (165) Beyond he enters Newgate Prison and sees
the Debtors’ door, where a drunk minister of justice informs
him four people are scheduled to be hung the following day.
Checking back in at Jaggers’s office and finding him still gone,
Pip heads toward a square in the opposite direction. There he
finds a group of people also awaiting Jaggers’s arrival. Jaggers
appears and addresses all of the people, including a group of
poor Jews, and eventually rebukes or casts them aside so that he
and Pip can return to the office. Jaggers’s purpose in life,
according to Steven Newman, is to “extort the worst in
everybody.” In this first glimpse of his typical day at work, it is
obvious that the man is incapable of discussing or considering.
Like the objects in his office, the man himself seems an
amalgam of mystery and violence.

Finally, Jaggers brings Pip into his office and, while

lunching, informs him that he is to stay at Barnard’s Inn with
young Mr. Pocket until Monday, at which point he should
accompany young Mr. Pocket to his father Matthew’s house.
After receiving details of his credit and allowance, Pip makes his
way toward Barnard’s Inn with Jaggers’s clerk, Wemmick.
Barnard’s Inn is a shabby group of buildings, and Wemmick
leads Pip up a flight of stairs “which appeared to be slowly
collapsing into sawdust.” (173) Bidding him farewell, Wemmick
is surprised when Pip commits the social error of inviting a
superior to shake his hand. After more than half an hour, young
Mr. Pocket emerges with an apology and a cone-shaped wicker

basket of strawberries. He pushes through the sticking door to
show Pip around the meager apartment—as he points out
furniture, Pip notices that the man before him is none other
than the pale young gentleman whom he fought at Miss
Havisham’s. “And you,” young Mr. Pocket says, “are the
prowling boy.” After they share a laugh, young Mr. Pocket
introduces himself as Herbert and discloses that at one time he
may have been intended for Estella. He expresses no remorse,
however, declaring the girl “hard and haughty and capricious to
the last degree, and has been brought up my Miss Havisham to
wreak revenge on all the male sex.” (177) Herbert explains that
Mr. Jaggers is Miss Havisham’s businessman and solicitor and
that his own father is Miss Havisham’s cousin. Charmed by
Herbert’s easy manner, the two settle in to an easy
conversation. Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel,” after the
composer’s piece called the Harmonious Blacksmith.

As they eat dinner, Herbert instructs Pip on proper London

table manners and shares what he knows about Miss Havisham.
He explains that Miss Havisham comes from a rich, proud
family; she had a half-brother from her father’s second
marriage to a cook. Once her father passed away, she was left
an heiress, and she was later pursued by a showy, passionate
man to whom she gave great sums of money for business
ventures. When Herbert’s father, Miss Havisham’s cousin,
warned that she was doing too much for the man, Miss
Havisham was so upset she ordered him out of her house
forever. The day she was to marry the man, at twenty minutes
to nine, she received a letter which canceled the entire thing.
At that point, she stopped all the clocks. All that is known,
Herbert says, is that her intended acted somehow in concert
with her scorned half-brother, and that the two men shared the
profits. Herbert confesses that he does not know Estella’s
origins, saying only that she is adopted and that “There has
always been an Estella, since I have heard of a Miss Havisham.”
(183) He explains that he works in a counting house and
dreams of making a great fortune through trading.

On Monday morning Herbert brings Pip to his father’s

house, in Hammersmith. They encounter Mrs. Pocket,

surrounded by a chaos of children and nursemaids. Mr. Pocket
emerges, stresses how happy he is to see Pip, and introduces
him to two young men named Drummle and Startop. After
dinner—which includes the Pocket’s seven children as well as
their widowed neighbor, Mrs. Colier—the boys practiced
rowing on the Thames. A few days later, once Pip has settled
in, he has a long conversation with Mr. Pocket. Pip asks if he
might continue living in Barnard’s Inn with Herbert, and Mr.
Pocket agrees. Pip goes to Jaggers to ask for money to buy a
few additional things, and after the two settle on an amount,
Wemmick pays him twenty pounds. Pip remarks to Wemmick
that he’s not sure how to understand Jaggers’ demeanor, and
Wemmick assures him that “it’s not personal; it’s professional:
only professional.” (198) He explains that the casts that haunt
Pip are the faces of famous clients who were executed. Wemmick
invites him to stay at his home in Walworth and inquires
whether or not Pip has yet dined with Jaggers. When Pip says
no, Wemmick suggests that when he does so soon, he shall be
sure to look at Jaggers’s housekeeper to see a “wild beast tamed.”
(202) After, they walk to a police court to watch Jaggers work.

One day Pip proposes to go home with Wemmick for the

evening. As they walk toward Walworth, Wemmick instructs
Pip to look at Jaggers’s expensive gold watch, explaining that
there are “seven hundred thieves in this town who know all
about that watch.” (206) They arrive at Wemmick’s house,
which looks like a miniature castle. Wemmick explains that
hidden in the back are farm animals and crops, so that if the
place was besieged, they would survive. Inside they meet a very
old man whom Wemmick addresses as “Aged Parent.” As they
sit down first to punch in the arbour and then to supper,
Wemmick explains that he got hold of his property little by
little, but that it’s all his now; he remarks upon being
questioned that Jaggers had never seen the place, as he believes
strongly in the separation of personal and professional matters.
In fact, the next morning, as the two returned to work,
Wemmick grew more pragmatic and distant with each step.
Indeed, he addresses the problem of reconciling the dark,
criminal world with a higher world by compartmentalizing. His

Walworth character, says Newman, is an attractive one, but
only by dehumanizing himself is Wemmick able to survive the
office. Whereas Jaggers might view life as evil, Wemmick sees
it in certain ways as checks and balances.

Soon after, Pip and his fellow students accompany Jaggers to

his set of rooms in a stately yet poorly kempt house. Jaggers
says that he owns the entire house, but rarely uses more than
what they see; as they eat, Pip’s guardian takes a peculiar
interest in Drummle. Pip notices the housekeeper, especially
the way she keeps her eyes attentively on Jaggers. As they talk
of the boys’ rowing and their strengths, Jaggers implores
Molly, the housekeeper, to show the boys her wrist. She
protests, but finally is forced to reveal a wrist scarred and
disfigured. Jaggers remarks that few men have the power of
wrist that Molly does. As the hours pass, Jaggers prepares to
dismiss them, first drinking to Drummle; he later warns Pip to
avoid him, proclaiming his classmate “one of the true sort” and
nicknaming him Spider. A month later, Drummle finishes his
studies with the Pockets and returns to his family.

Pip receives a letter from Biddy which says that Joe intends

to visit London in the company of Mr. Wopsle, that his sister is
much the same, and that Pip’s absence is felt, and discussed, in
the kitchen nightly. Realizing that Joe’s visit is scheduled for
the next day, Pip thinks that “if I could have kept him away by
paying money, I certainly would have paid money.” (218)
Herbert offers moral support by suggesting a breakfast that
might please Joe. The next morning, Pip listens with dread to
Joe’s heavy boots on the stairs. They greet one another, and
though Pip offers to take Joe’s hat, he holds it carefully, “like a
bird’s-nest with eggs in it.” With his fractured speech, Joe
comments on Pip’s maturity and describes Mr. Wopsle’s play.
Emphasizing his hope that he was somehow useful to Pip, Joe
says that it’s an honor to eat in the company of gentlemen.
Then he mentions that a few nights earlier, Miss Havisham
summoned him, asking Joe to relay a message that Estella has
come home and would be glad to see him. He then insists that
he must go, that he and Pip are not compatible to be seen
together in London.

The next day Pip sets off for his Satis house, thinking first

with remorse that he should stay with Joe, but eventually
deciding to stay at the Blue Boar. Leaving by the afternoon
coach, Pip realizes that he was traveling with his convict, who is
shackled to another. Though their eyes meet, the convict
doesn’t recognize Pip; as they continue toward London, a
feeling of coincidence tingles in the base of Pip’s spine. As he
sits in the Blue Boar’s empty coffee-room, he picks up a local
newspaper that includes an article about him, attributing his
earliest fortunes to Pumblechook.

Brooks argues that this return home from London is the first

in a series of repetitions—of attempted reparations for Joe, of
knowledge seeking at Satis house. It seems, in fact, to be a
harbinger of repressed thoughts and actions when the convict
is seated on Pip’s coach. Immediately before falling asleep on
the coach, Pip considers whether he should return the two-
pound notes to the convict. When he awakens, the first words
he hears are “Two-pound notes.” It’s as though hopes of Pip’s
progress are subverted by the reappearance of the convict. He
hopes that he will never be able to go home again. These
thoughts, Morgenthaler contends, suggest that Pip represents
“the evolution of the human species away from its primitive
origins.” Pip feels great guilt about his own developing
prejudices and the excuses he gives himself for being unable to
stay with Joe. “All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to
the self-swindlers.... that I should innocently take a bad half-
crown of somebody else’s manufacture is reasonable enough;
but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my
own make, as good money!” (225)

When Pip arrives at Miss Havisham’s the next morning, he

is shocked when Orlick opens the door. Commenting
insolently that he has left the forge, Orlick leads Pip into the
hall. Pip then meets Miss Sarah Pocket, who brings him to
Miss Havisham and an elegant lady. Pip realizes that the lady is
Estella, and each proclaims the other to be much changed.
When they are left alone in the garden, Estella discloses that
she saw the fight break out between Herbert and Pip long
before, and that she was gratified by it. Discussing their

prospects of being groomed for one another, Estella says evenly
that she has “not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I have
never had any such thing.” (238) They return, and Pip is
surprised to learn that Jaggers will join them for dinner. Pip is
captivated by the act of pushing Miss Havisham’s chair once
again, feeling as though the action is transporting him back in
time. Estella leaves the room to dress, and Miss Havisham
eagerly asks if Pip finds her beautiful and then implores that he
love her, describing love as “blind devotion, unquestioning self-
humiliation, utter submission ... giving up your whole heart
and soul to the smiter—as I did.” (240) Jaggers arrives for
dinner and asks Pip how many times he has encountered Miss
Estella. As they eat dinner, Jaggers scarcely looks at Estella,
even when she addresses him. Afterwards it is arranged that
when Estella comes to London, Pip should meet her at the
coach. After Pip and Jaggers return to the Blue Boar, Pip says
into his pillow “I love her, I love her, I love her!”

The next morning Jaggers answers Pip’s concern about

Orlick’s new position with the dismissing comment that the
right sort of man never fills a post of trust. Nervous about
running into Pumblechook at the Blue Boar, Pip walks into the
marshes and runs into Trabb’s boy, who circles and taunts him.
When Pip returns to London, he sends oysters and codfish to
Joe as an act of repentance; he then returns to Barnard’s Inn.
Seeing Herbert, Pip confesses that he is in love with Estella;
Herbert replies that he knew all along and that Pip should have
patience in the absence of knowing Estella’s feelings for him.
He also insists that Estella cannot be a condition of Pip’s
inheritance and suggests, especially upon hearing of Jaggers’s
reaction to Estella at dinner, that Pip detach himself from her.
When Pip deems such an action impossible, Herbert ventures
to make himself agreeable again. He confesses that he is
secretly engaged to a woman named Clara who is below his
mother’s notions of acceptability and whose father is an invalid.
Pip insists that he would like to meet Clara, and the two friends
set off to watch Mr. Wopsle’s performance of Macbeth.

Wopsle has adopted the stage name of Waldengarver, and

his performance of Macbeth is so poor that throughout he is

greeted by peals of laughter. Pip suggests to Herbert that they
sneak out, but they are greeted at the door by a Jewish man
who addresses Pip by name and suggests that Waldengarver
would be delighted to see Pip. When they meet in the dressing
room Pip consults with Herbert and then invites Wopsle back
to Barnard’s Inn for supper. When Wopsle finally leaves at two
in the morning, Pip dreams that his expectations are canceled,
that he is promised to Herbert’s Clara, that he plays Hamlet to
Miss Havisham’s ghost.

One day Pip receives a note from Estella which explains that

she is London-bound. Pip waits for her at the coach-office,
where he runs into Wemmick, on his way to Newgate to
consult with a client. As they walk through the prison, Pip is
struck by Wemmick’s stiff manner, so unlike when he is at
home among the Aged. Pip tries to rid himself of prison dust as
he waits for Estella. This prison dust is yet another
manifestation of the guilt and distain Pip feels for being so
closely linked to a world of crime. From his acceptance of the
two-pound notes at the Three Jolly Bargemen to his
association with Jaggers and his proximity to Smithfield and
Newgate, Pip is tied to violence and crime. Julian Moynahan
argues that Dickens has entrapped his protagonist. He writes:
“Regardless of the fact that Pip’s association with crimes and
criminals is purely adventitious and that he evidently bears no
responsibility for any act or intention of criminal violence, he
must be condemned on the principle of guilt by association.”
These coincidences are ties that bind characters to one another,
regardless of reason.

When Pip sees Estella’s face, he notices a “nameless shadow”

(264) hovering between them. Estella informs Pip that he is to
take her to Richmond, in Surrey, where she is to live. As they
talk, Pip observes aloud that Estella speaks of herself as though
she were someone else. She talks resignedly about Miss
Havisham’s wiles and about their own status as mere pawns of
her plan. They travel by coach to Estella’s new lodgings,
passing through Newgate-street and then Hammersmith,
where Pip points out the Pocket residence. When Pip expresses
surprise that Miss Havisham might part with Estella so soon

after her return from the Continent, Estella insists that it’s
simply part of the plan. After dropping her off in Richmond,
Pip returns to Hammersmith with a heavy heart, considering
airing his woes to Mr. Pocket, and soon deciding against it.

As he has grown accustomed to London, Pip has become

used to an extravagant lifestyle which includes the employment
of a servant (called “the Avenger”) and inclusion in a club called
The Finches of the Grove, whose members dine expensively
once every two weeks and quarrel among themselves. When
Pip and Herbert realize they have plummeted deeply into debt,
they sit down at the table and calculate their affairs. These
efforts, for Pip, include the act of “leaving a Margin,” (276) to
round the amount of their debt up to the nearest whole
number. Pip is enjoying his busywork one evening when a
letter, signed “Trabb & Co.,” arrives bearing the news of his
sister’s death. Pip returns home, realizing with great shock that
Mrs. Joe’s is the first death through which he has lived. When
he arrives, he finds the funeral an ostentatious affair and Joe
crippled with grief. Biddy is very helpful, and Trabb conducts
the entire ceremony with a pomp that pains Joe, who says he
would have preferred to carry his wife to the church himself.
Pumblechook and the Hubbles seem to relish the parade to the
churchyard. When everyone finally leaves, Pip and Biddy
discuss her prospects now that she is no longer saddled with
the responsibility of Mrs. Joe. Biddy suggests that she might
enjoy taking a teaching job. When Pip asks about the specifics
of his sister’s final hours, Biddy tells him that her last words
were “Joe,” then “Pardon,” and then “Pip.” Biddy admits that
she is still being pursued by Orlick, and Pip is disturbed by this
notion as well as the realization that Biddy has acquired a habit
of repeating everything he says. Pip asks to spend the night in
his childhood room, and the next morning he sets off early,
promising that he’ll visit soon.

When Pip’s twenty-first birthday arrives, Jaggers summons

him to his office, calls him Mr. Pip, and inquires after his lack
of financial stability. When Pip asks whether his benefactor will
be revealed to him on this day, Jaggers says no. He does,
however, present Pip with a 500-pound note, with the news

that he will be presented with the same amount every year, on
his birthday. Pip again inquires after his benefactor, and Jaggers
is curt about his inability to answer such questions; he says that
when the person comes forward, Jaggers’s responsibilities will
be finished. Pip seeks Wemmick’s advice on how to help
Herbert financially. Wemmick, being at the office and in his
pragmatic mind frame, lists the names of the bridges in
London and advises that Pip would be better off throwing his
money from one of them. Realizing that he might get a
different answer at Walworth, Pip resolves to visit Wemmick
there. Jaggers joins Herbert and Pip for dinner, and when he
leaves, Herbert remarks that Jaggers’s presence made him feel
as though he had committed a felony.

That Sunday Pip sets out for Walworth in order to obtain

advice about Herbert. He makes pleasant conversation with the
Aged until he is surprised by tumbling wooden flaps marked
“John,” and “Miss Skiffins,” which Wemmick has rigged to
amuse his father. Miss Skiffins is a wooden, middle-aged
woman upon whom Wemmick seems to dote. Pip once again
beseeches Wemmick about Herbert—giving more details this
time—and the clerk is much more responsive. The four share
tea and toast and listen to the Aged read; Pip observes
Wemmick’s attempts to sneak an arm around Miss Skiffins. By
the end of the week, Pip receives a note from Wemmick which
details the plan for Herbert—Pip will donate 100 pounds
yearly to a merchant named Clarriker, who will hire Herbert
and make him a partner without mentioning that he’s being
paid to do so.

Estella stays with a widow named Mrs. Brandley who knew

Miss Havisham before her seclusion. Pip is summoned to visit,
and Estella mentions her worries that Pip will not heed the
warnings she gives against his attraction to her. She then says
that Miss Havisham wishes for Pip to accompany Estella to
Satis house the day after next. When they arrive, again Miss
Havisham prods Pip about the way Estella uses him. Pip sees
more clearly the way Estella has been groomed to wreak Miss
Havisham’s revenge on men. As the three sit by the fire, Miss
Havisham’s arm linked through Estella’s, Estella slowly begins

to detach herself. When Estella is reproached, she accuses her
guardian of making her proud and hard. When Miss Havisham
laments Estella’s inability to return her love, Estella insists
again that all of her failings are the result of her being taught to
turn against the daylight. Pip escapes into the courtyard for an
hour, and when he returns, Estella is seated at Miss Havisham’s
knee. Disturbed, Pip cannot sleep through the night, and at
two o’clock in the morning he awakes to find Miss Havisham
walking around the house, clutching a candle, and moaning
quietly. The next day and upon subsequent visits, Pip can see
no evidence of the harsh words exchanged between Estella and
Miss Havisham. Soon after, at a meeting of the Finches of the
Grove, Drummle mentions that he has been keeping company
with a woman named Estella. Upset, Pip demands evidence,
and the next day Drummle produces a note in Estella’s hand,
which says that she danced with him several times. Pip
confronts Estella at a ball in Richmond, insisting that she
should not associate with characters such as Drummle. She
defends herself by explaining that she “deceives and entraps
many others—all of them but you.” (312)

By the time Pip turns 23, he has moved with Herbert the

Temple, one of the Inns of the court. Though Pip had
terminated his official lessons with Mr. Pocket, they remain on
good terms, and Pip remains interested in reading. When, a
week after Pip’s birthday, Herbert travels to Marseilles on
business, Pip, overcome by a feeling of loneliness, hears a
footstep on the stairs. Pip lets in the man, who looks about
sixty, and asks his business. After the man makes some strange
comments about Pip’s appearance, Pip realizes that he is staring
at his convict. Feeling threatened and confused by the convict’s
outpouring of affection and appreciation, Pip insists that he
hopes the convict’s gratitude for his actions as a young child
will be repaid in the convict’s resolution to rebuild his life. The
convict explains that he has traveled the world and worked at
many trades; he asks Pip how he has come to his fortune and
then begins to make correct guesses as to the logistics, one by
one, finishing with Wemmick’s name.

As Pip braces himself with shock, the convict gleefully

relishes the fact that he has created a gentleman, suggesting
that even love can be Pip’s, as long as money can buy it.
Thinking sadly of Estella, Pip asks whether anyone else is
responsible for his fortune; the convict’s proud dissent upsets
Pip. When the convict asks for a place to stay, Pip gives him
Herbert’s room. The storms and the shock install in Pip a
profound sense of despair; worried about footsteps on the stairs
and the convict nearby, he locks the convict in his room and
falls asleep in a chair. Van Ghent suggests that the convict is
inside Pip as the negative potential for his “great
expectations”—Dickens explores extensively that power that
brings people together, as binding as the convict’s shackles. It is
the effect of the original encounter that propels Magwitch back
from across the world to Pip.

Volume Three

Pip is troubled by the thought of an unexpected visitor lurking
outside on the stairs, and the task of keeping his benefactor
away from the prying eyes of his old neighbor woman and her
niece seems arduous. He informs the watchman that the man
who asked for him was his uncle and inquires after other
unknown visitors. The watchman says that he thought another
person was with his uncle—a working person, wearing dust-
colored clothes. As the clock strikes six in the morning Pip
lights the fire; shortly thereafter, he tells the old woman and
her niece to modify breakfast, as his uncle had arrived during
the night. When the convict awakens, he tells Pip that his real
name is Abel Magwitch, but that he came to call himself Provis
during his travels. He said that he hopes he is not known in
London, though he was tried there most recently, and that he
would not advertise the fact that he had returned from
Australia. Pip concludes that he must offer the man lodging
and that he’ll have to confide in Herbert, although Provis
insists upon studying Herbert’s physiognomy before disclosure.

Pip secures a lodging house for his so-called uncle, and then

goes to see Jaggers, who, after confirming that his benefactor
was indeed Abel Magwitch of New South Wales, says that he

doesn’t want to hear any more about the situation. Jaggers says
that when Magwitch gave a distant hint of wanting to return to
England, he was discouraged and told that he would unlikely
be granted a pardon. Then he allows that Wemmick received a
letter from a colonist named Provis interested in Pip’s address.
After that disclosure, the conversation is terminated. This
admission, says Morgenthaler, is the revelation of the fairy tale
turns inside out—the happy ending is provided by a member of
low society, proving, perhaps, Darwin’s idea of interdependence
of all things. With Pip’s revelation and Jaggers’s confirmation,
moral distinctions between categories are forever blurred.

Since Wemmick is out, Pip returns home to find Magwitch

drinking rum. Even after his clothes are replaced, the convict
still seems untamed and mysterious, and Pip is haunted by the
fact that the man can be hanged on his account. Herbert
returns and is halted by the sight of Magwitch; the three men
sit by the fire as Pip explains the entire situation. Magwitch
assures the two young men that he’ll always have a “gen-teel
muzzle on.” (341) Herbert and Pip discuss the situation, and
Herbert says that although he understands Pip’s impulse to
separate himself from Magwitch’s funding and friendship, he
sees danger in Pip’s renunciation of this stubborn and
passionate man who for so long has had such a fixed idea to
help him. They decide that the only thing to do is to convince
Magwitch to leave England.

Magwitch sits down to tell the boys the story of his life,

including mention of the other convict Pip encountered in the
marshes, a man named Compeyson. This man, whom
Magwitch met twenty years earlier, was good-looking and
educated, and he soon took in Magwitch to be his partner in
swindling. Compeyson’s other partner was a dying man named
Arthur who lived upstairs; one evening Arthur, who was
perpetually haunted by the image of a mad woman dressed all
in white, saw the woman coming toward him with a shroud,
and promptly died. During his employment with Compeyson
Magwitch was tried and convicted of misdemeanor; soon after
the two men were together tried for felony. At the trial,
Compeyson’s character was celebrated, while Magwitch was

implicated. For this, after a series of trials and escapes, the two
men became mortal enemies. As Magwitch stands smoking by
the fire, Herbert pencils in the cover of a book, “ ‘ Young
Havisham’s name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who
professed to be Miss Havisham’s lover.’ ” Fearful and vowing
not to mention Estella to Provis, Pip sets off to find Estella the
next day. He is told he can find her at Satis house, and as he
passes the Blue Boar for breakfast and to clean up, he sees
Bentley Drummle. They meet and exchange tense pleasantries
until a waiter informs Drummle that the lady will not ride.
Before Pip leaves he thinks he spots Orlick.

Miss Havisham and Estella are surprised to greet Pip, and he

tells them that he’s discovered the secret of his patronage. In
response to Pip’s query, Miss Havisham says that she brought
him to Satis house as she might have any other chance boy, and
that her association with Jaggers has nothing to do with Pip’s
expectations. Pip expresses disdain that she has misled Herbert
and Matthew Pocket as well as himself, and begs Miss
Havisham do the lasting service for Herbert that he himself
began. He then professes his love for Estella, who replies in
kind that she doesn’t understand such a thing. She admits that
she is to be married to Bentley Drummle. Pip begs her to
bestow herself at the very least on someone more worthy, and
explains that she will never leave his heart. He moves through
the gate and toward London and finds a note from Wemmick
awaiting him at the Temple, urging him not to go home.

After spending the night at a rooming house in Covent

Garden, Pip sets off for Walworth. Wemmick tells Pip that
Compeyson is living in London. Herbert, instructed by
Wemmick to hide Magwitch until a plan can be constructed for
his safe escape, has brought the convict to live with the father
of his intended, Clara. Pip leaves Wemmick—noting from the
tea service the imminent arrival of Miss Skiffins—and finds
Herbert at the house Wemmick indicated. Herbert says that
the housekeeper is happy to have the company of Magwitch
upstairs from Clara’s father, the surly, noisy, drunk Mr. Barley.
Herbert, Pip, and Magwitch construct a plan—they will take
Magwitch down the river by boat, when the time is right.

Weeks pass without change and Pip begins to realize that

Estella is married. He begins rowing regularly, so as to
establish himself and his boat as a presence on the river. He
keeps a nervous and distanced watch over Magwitch. One
evening Pip dines alone and then takes in a Christmas
pantomime in which Wopsle is featured. When he greets his
former neighbor afterwards, he is shocked when Wopsle
indicates that he recognized a man to have been sitting behind
Pip, describing him as one of the two convicts they found in
the ditch many years earlier. Pip is shocked that Compeyson
was behind him, “like a ghost.” (386) Pip returns home and
holds council with Herbert by the fire. One day soon after, Pip
runs into Jaggers, who invites him to lunch with Wemmick.
Jaggers says over lunch that Miss Havisham wishes to settle a
matter of business with Pip; he then gleefully mentions that
“our friend the Spider” has won the contest of Estella’s heart.
When Jaggers summons his housekeeper, Molly, Pip is
surprised to notice that the hands and eyes of the housekeeper
were so familiar; that, in fact, she is doubtlessly Estella’s
mother. After the meal Pip asks Wemmick if he has ever seen
Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. When Wemmick says no,
Pip reminds him of the time he was instructed to take notice of
Jaggers’s housekeeper. Wemmick says that many years earlier,
the housekeeper was tried and acquitted for murder. It was a
case of jealously, Wemmick says, as both Molly and the murder
victim were tramps. He says that the woman was also under
strong suspicion of having destroyed her three-year-old child as
revenge upon the man, but Jaggers argued against that,
insisting that the marks on her hands were not those of
fingernails but brambles. The sex of the child, Wemmick says,
was female.

Pip returns to Satis house, and Miss Havisham begs Pip to

explain the history behind his secret partnership with Herbert.
She says that if she gives him the money—900 pounds—Pip
must agree to keep her secret as she has kept his own. He
agrees, and she asks if there is nothing she might do to serve
Pip as she has his friend. They sign papers on their agreement
and Miss Havisham begs him to write under her name, “I

forgive her.” (398) Pip insists that he has forgiven her, and Miss
Havisham cries despairingly and repeatedly, “What have I
done!” Pip asks after Estella, and Miss Havisham says that she
doesn’t know whose child she was but that Jaggers brought her
when she was two or three. They part, and Pip walks through
the brewery, taking stock of the places where he felt such
childish hope and pain. As he looks into the window, he seems
Miss Havisham throw herself onto the fire. He rushes in and
attempting to smother the flames with his coat and his hands,
he burns himself. A surgeon arrives and pronounces her
wounds serious and her shock potentially more fatal. The
surgeon promises to write to Estella, who is in Paris. Pip sets
off to notify the family personally.

Back at Barley’s house, Herbert dresses Pip’s wounds and

speaks of a discussion he had with Magwitch in which
Magwitch mentions a woman with whom he had a child and
many struggles. Magwitch told Herbert that the woman was
vengeful to the point of murder, and that though she was
acquitted, the woman swore that she would destroy the child.
Fearful that he would be the cause of the child’s death,
Magwitch hid himself. Herbert says that when Pip was seven
and ran into Magwitch in the churchyard, Magwitch was
reminded of the little girl. Pip asks Herbert to confirm that he
has no fever—that he is in the right frame of mind—and then
explains patiently that the man they have in hiding is Estella’s
father.

Pip goes to Little Britain and makes the arrangements with

Jaggers and Wemmick for Herbert’s future. Pip mentions that
he engaged Miss Havisham in a discussion of Estella’s origins,
saying later that he, unlike Miss Havisham, knew Estella’s
mother. Jaggers is startled, and Pip says he has seen Estella’s
mother in the past three days, and that he knows her father:
Provis, from New South Wales. Then Pip discloses all that he
knows, leaving Jaggers to infer that some information was
imparted by Miss Havisham rather than by Wemmick. Jaggers
abruptly changes the subject, and Pip implores Wemmick—
invoking his pleasant home and aging father—to urge his
superior to be more forthright. Jaggers maps out the story for

Pip and asks for whose benefit the secret should be revealed.
When Pip fails to provide an answer, Jaggers returns once
again to his work. When a client appears, sniveling, shortly
thereafter, Jaggers dismisses him, insisting “I’ll have no feelings
here.” (415)

Pip settles Herbert’s affairs, and Herbert tells Pip that his

career is progressing such that he might establish a branch-
house in Cairo, where he and Clara hope to live. A few days
later, they receive a post from Walworth which tells them the
escape should be plotted for Wednesday. Herbert suggests they
engage Startop in the plan, and they begin to construct a
detailed scheme which provides for Pip’s injured hands. Pip
receives an anonymous note which summons him to the old
marshes in order to receive information about his uncle Provis.
Pip leaves immediately, stopping at Satis house to inquire after
Miss Havisham, and then taking dinner in an inn. He engages
the landlord in a unwitting conversation about his own history,
with Pumblechook cited as his earliest benefactor. As Pip
listens, he realizes how much of an impostor Pumblechook was,
and how good, honest, and uncomplaining Joe was.

Pip walks through the marshes and seeing a light in the old

sluice house, walks in. He calls out to see if anyone is nearby,
and is captured, he realizes, by Orlick. Orlick says that he is
going to kill Pip—as he did his sister—and that he knows about
Provis and Pip’s plans to smuggle him away. Stopping first to
drink, he picks up a hammer. Pip shouts and struggles with all
his might, hears voices, and sees Orlick emerge from the
struggle and run into the night. It is Herbert and Startop come
to his rescue, and they assure Pip that he has the next day to
rest before the journey. They say that in Pip’s haste he dropped
the letter, and so they tried to find him at Miss Havisham’s.
Finding Pip nowhere they retired to the Blue Boar, which Pip
had often mentioned, and heard from Trabb’s boy that Pip had
been seen going in the direction of the sluice house. It is
Orlick, Moynahan argues, not Magwitch, who represents the
true criminal in Great Expectations, for his origins are
mysterious and he has no regret for any of his actions. They
work side by side, and in some ways, Orlick represents the

shadow of Pip—they are both ambitious, and in many ways,
they want the same things. When he confronts him in the
sluice-house, he wants to take his life both literally and
figuratively. But with this parallel drawn, Moynahan says, the
reader may be compelled to see Pip more harshly than Pip
might ever see himself.

The next morning a bright sunrise inspires the men to begin

their journey. They set off and stop at Clara’s house for
Magwitch, who seems grateful and relaxed. As they begin to
row, he mentions the delights of freedom and compares life’s
fleetingness and fluidity to the river’s. They stop that night at a
rundown inn, dragging the boat up, and the landlord mentions
a seeing a four-oared galley. That night Pip notices two men
looking into their boat, and the next morning it is decided that
Pip and Magwitch will set off early. They see a Rotterdam
steamer that will take them away, but then, in the early
afternoon, Pip notices the galley. Soon they hear a policeman
call for the arrest of Abel Magwitch. Noticing the face of
Compeyson onboard, Magwitch dives into the river to attack
him. After a struggle, only Magwitch surfaces, injured badly,
and he is immediately placed in shackles. He claims that there
had been a struggle underwater, but that he didn’t drown
Compeyson—he simply disengaged and swam away. Pip
promises to stand by his benefactor. Brooks argues that the
fact that Magwitch’s return is played out on a Thames estuary
draws a line back to Pip’s childhood and his first encounter
with Magwitch on the marshes. “It was like my own marsh
country,” Pip thinks, “flat and monotonous, and with a dim
horizon.” (438) Ghent argues that the river is one of the most
prominent demonic symbols in Dickens—it unites classes,
reveals evidence, unites victim and criminal, and swallows
people whole.

At Police Court the next day, Jaggers is convinced Magwitch

will be found guilty. Pip is not bothered by news that his
inheritance shall be appropriated by the state. At this time
Herbert explains that he and Clara must leave for Cairo.
Herbert offers Pip a clerkship, and Pip says that he must leave
the question open for a little while. On Saturday Pip returns to

his lonely home and finds Wemmick on the stairs, looking for
him. He asks if Pip will meet him at the Castle on Monday
morning, and when he does, the two take a little walk and find,
inside a church, Miss Skiffins and a wedding party. The two are
married, and Pip promises not to mention a word of the
festivities in Little Britain.

Pip goes to visits the ailing Magwitch in prison. Though

Jaggers put in an application for a trial postponement given
the state of his client, Magwitch is found guilty and sentenced
to death. In response, Magwitch says, “I have received my
sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours.”
(458) As the days wear on, Pip knows the end is near. When
words fail his benefactor, Pip tells him, immediately before
death, that he knows of Magwitch’s child, that she was still
alive, and that he loves her. Brooks argues that Magwitch’s
statement before the court is Dickens way of contrasting
human plots, such as the law, with the laws of the universe,
which render futile both actions and attempts at
interpretation. The shaft of light that falls onto all the court’s
attendants eliminates the distinction between the judge and
the judged and the guilty and the innocent. Pip’s evolution is
apparent in his observation of “the broad shaft of light ...
linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among
the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute
equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and
cannot err.” (458)

Pip falls ill himself after Magwitch’s death, and his debt is so

great that he is arrested and carried off to prison. In his abject
state he begins hallucinating, seeing Miss Havisham and Orlick
and finally Joe. Pip finally snaps out of his feverish haze and
realizes that Joe actually is sitting at his bedside, having come
to nurse him back to health. When Joe composes a note to
Biddy, telling of Pip’s recovery, Pip realizes that Biddy has
taught Joe to write. Joe says that Miss Havisham died about a
week after Pip took ill, and that she distributed her wealth
among the Pockets, including four thousand pounds to
Matthew. He also tells Pip Orlick was arrested and thrown into
the county jail for robbing Pumblechook. One Sunday, the

still-weak Pip and Joe go for an outing, and Pip tries to tell Joe
the story of Magwitch—Joe, however, is not interested in
revisiting painful memories. Upon rising the next morning, Pip
realizes that Joe is gone. He has left only a note and a receipt
indicating that he had paid all of Pip’s debt.

In some ways, Pip’s emergence from brainfever finds him a

child again—in the care of Joe, absolved of all his mistakes.
Still, innocence is lost, and Pip must address his lost innocence
head on. He returns to find Satis House in a state of disarray,
readying for an auction. Stopping at the Blue Boar, Pip
encounters Pumblechook, who is very rude to him. Finally, he
goes back to his old home, discovering, upon meeting Joe and
Biddy, that he arrived on their wedding day. Pip is surprised—
as his own slight hopes of a happy marriage with Biddy are
dashed—yet he expresses nothing but happiness for the couple.
Returning to London, Pip sells his few possessions and takes a
partnership with Herbert. Eleven years later he returns to Joe
and Biddy, and finds a young child—that they’ve named Pip—
sitting before the hearth. Biddy insists that Pip must marry, but
Pip tells her that he’s already an old bachelor.

After admitting to Biddy that he has not forgotten Estella,

Pip goes to revisit the site of Satis house one last time. He
walks through the overgrown garden in the mist and thinks of
Estella, about her unhappy life and the news that her cruel
husband, Bentley Drummle, died two years earlier. As he
continues to stroll pensively, Estella’s figure appears in the
distance. She declares herself greatly changed and admits that
excluding the grounds, she has lost everything, little by little.
She says she has often thought of Pip and that she never
imagined that in taking leave of Satis house that she’d also take
leave of him. She says that she has been bent and broken, but
that she is, she hopes, in better shape. They take hands and
walk out of the ruins together.

Work Cited

Mitchell, Charlotte, ed. Great Expectations. Penguin Classics, 1996.

Critical Views

EORGE

ERNARD

HAW ON THE

NAMIABLE

STELLA AND

IP AS

UNCTION OF

LASS

NOBBERY

Estella is a curious addition to the gallery of unamiable women
painted by Dickens. In my youth it was commonly said that
Dickens could not draw women. The people who said this
were thinking of Agnes Wickfield and Esther Summerson, of
Little Dorrit and Florence Dombey, and thinking of them as
ridiculous idealizations of their sex.

Gissing put a stop to that

by asking whether shrews like Mrs. Raddle, Mrs. Macstinger,
Mrs. Gargery, fools like Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Finching,
warped spinsters like Rosa Dartle and Miss Wade, were not
masterpieces of woman drawing.

And they are all unamiable.

* * * Of course Dickens with his imagination could invent
amiable women by the dozen; but somehow he could not or
would not bring them to life as he brought the others. We
doubt whether he ever knew a little Dorrit; but Fanny Dorrit

is from the life unmistakably. So is Estella. She is a much more
elaborate study than Fanny, and, I should guess, a recent one.

Dickens, when he let himself go in Great Expectations, was

separated from his wife and free to make more intimate
acquaintances with women than a domesticated man can. * * *
It is not necessary to suggest a love affair; for Dickens could get
from a passing glance a hint which he could expand into a full-
grown character. The point concerns us here only because it is
the point on which the ending of Great Expectations turns:
namely, that Estella is a born tormentor. She deliberately
torments Pip all through for the fun of it; and in the little we
hear of her intercourse with others there is no suggestion of a
moment of kindness: in fact her tormenting of Pip is almost
affectionate in contrast to the cold disdain of her attitude
towards the people who were not worth tormenting. It is not
surprising that the unfortunate Bentley Drummle, whom she
marries in the stupidity of sheer perversity, is obliged to defend
himself from her clever malice with his fists: a consolation to us

for Pip’s broken heart, but not altogether a credible one; for
the real Estellas can usually intimidate the real Bentley
Drummles. At all events the final sugary suggestion of Estella
redeemed by Bentley’s thrashings and waste of her money, and
living happily with Pip for ever after, provoked even Dickens’s
eldest son to rebel against it, most justly.

Apart from this the story is the most perfect of Dickens’s

works. In it he does not muddle himself with the ridiculous
plots that appear like vestiges of the stone age in many of his
books, from Oliver Twist to the end. The story is built round a
single and simple catastrophe: the revelation to Pip of the
source of his great expectations. There is, it is true, a trace of
the old plot superstition in Estella turning out to be
Magwitch’s daughter; but it provides a touchingly happy
ending for that heroic Warmint. Who could have the heart to
grudge it to him?

As our social conscience expands and makes the intense class

snobbery of the nineteenth century seem less natural to us, the
tragedy of Great Expectations will lose some of its appeal. I have
already wondered whether Dickens himself ever came to see
that his agonizing sensitiveness about the blacking bottles and
his resentment of his mother’s opposition to his escape from
them was not too snobbish to deserve all the sympathy he
claimed for it. Compare the case of H.G. Wells, our nearest to
a twentieth-century Dickens. Wells hated being a draper’s
assistant as much as Dickens hated being a warehouse boy; but
he was not in the least ashamed of it, and did not blame his
mother for regarding it as the summit of her ambition for
him.

Fate having imposed on that engaging cricketer Mr.

Wells’s father an incongruous means of livelihood in the shape
of a small shop, shopkeeping did not present itself to the young
Wells as beneath him, whereas to the genteel Dickens being a
warehouse boy was an unbearable comedown. Still, I cannot
help speculating on whether if Dickens had not killed himself
prematurely to pile up money for that excessive family of his,
he might not have reached a stage at which he could have got
as much fun out of the blacking bottles as Mr. Wells got out of
his abhorred draper’s counter.

Dickens never reached that stage; and there is no prevision

of it in Great Expectations; for in it he never raises the question
why Pip should refuse Magwitch’s endowment and shrink from
him with such inhuman loathing. Magwitch no doubt was a
Warmint from the point of view of the genteel Dickens family
and even from his own; but Victor Hugo would have made
him a magnificent hero, another Valjean.

Inspired by an

altogether noble fixed idea, he had lifted himself out of his rut
of crime and honestly made a fortune for the child who had
fed him when he was starving. If Pip had no objection to be a
parasite instead of an honest blacksmith, at least he had a
better claim to be a parasite on Magwitch’s earnings than, as
he imagined, on Miss Havisham’s property. It is curious that
this should not have occurred to Dickens; for nothing could
exceed the bitterness of his exposure of the futility of Pip’s
parasitism. If all that came of sponging on Miss Havisham (as
he thought) was the privilege of being one of the Finches of
the Grove, he need not have felt his dependence on Magwitch
to be incompatible with his entirely baseless self-respect. But
Pip—and I am afraid Pip must be to this extent identified with
Dickens—could not see Magwitch as an animal of the same
species as himself or Miss Havisham. His feeling is true to the
nature of snobbery; but his creator says no word in criticism of
that ephemeral limitation.

The basic truth of the situation is that Pip, like his creator,

has no culture and no religion. Joe Gargery, when Pip tells a
monstrous string of lies about Miss Havisham, advises him to
say a repentant word about it in his prayers; but Pip never
prays; and church means nothing to him but Mr. Wopsle’s
orotundity. In this he resembles David Copperfield, who has
gentility but neither culture nor religion. Pip’s world is
therefore a very melancholy place, and his conduct, good or
bad, always helpless. This is why Dickens worked against so
black a background after he was roused from his ignorant
middle-class cheery optimism by Carlyle. When he lost his
belief in bourgeois society and with it his lightness of heart he
had neither an economic Utopia nor a credible religion to
hitch on to. * * * [B]ut at least he preserved his intellectual

innocence sufficiently to escape the dismal pseudo-scientific
fatalism that was descending on the world in his latter days,
founded on the preposterous error as to causation in which the
future is determined by the present, which has been
determined by the past. The true causation, of course, is always
the incessant irresistible activity of the evolutionary appetite.

Notes

1. Dickens’s sentimental heroines: Agnes Wickfield: daughter of the

Canterbury solicitor with whom David Copperfield boards while at
school, David’s tutelary angel and second wife—Orwell calls her “the real
legless angel of Victorian romance.” Little Dorrit: the self-sacrificing
heroine of the novel named for her, who is born and raised in debtors’
prison and continues to hover as ministering angel over her family after
their release. Florence Dombey: the humiliated daughter of the purse-
proud Dombey clan, whose father, in prosperity, spurns her for not being
a male and, in adversity, comes to depend on her samaritan surveillance.

2. Assorted shrews, termagants, and hysterics. Mrs. Raddle: vitriolic

landlady in Pickwick Papers. Mrs. Macstinger: imperious widow in Dombey
and Son, hell-bent on a second marriage. Mrs. Nickleby: the hero’s
mother, given to nonstop twaddle. Rosa Dartle: the repressed and
masochistic house-companion in David Copperfield, in love with the
voluptuary son of the house. Miss Wade: a head-strong young woman in
Little Dorrit, whose “History of a Self-Tormentor” (book 2, chapter 21) is
often cited as evidence of Dickens’s grasp of abnormal types.

3. Little Dorrit’s go-getting older sister, who marries into the Merdle

plutocracy.

4. In his introduction to the novel in the Macmillan Edition (1904).

For his judgment on the conclusion of Great Expectations, see also p. 500
in the original text.

5. H.G. Wells (1866–1946), the prolific author of science fiction,

popular histories, and novels about lower-middle-class life (Kipps, Tono
Bungay, Mr. Polly), began life as a draper’s apprentice at thirteen, after his
father, a shopkeeper and part-time professional cricketer, was crippled in
an accident and his mother had to abandon the Wells’s failing china shop
to work as a housekeeper. As Shaw suggests, Mrs. Wells free-associated
drapery with the tuxedos and tailcoats of the very rich who passed in front
of the shop; per Wells himself, “Almost as unquestioning as her belief in
Our Father and Our Saviour was her belief in drapers.” As Shaw also
suggests, Wells—no Trabb’s boy—loathed his job and ran away at sixteen
to become an usher—a teaching assistant.

6. Jean Valjean, the central figure in Victor Hugo’s novel of social

repression Les Misérables (1862).

EORGE

RWELL ON

AGWITCH AND

THE

ANTOMIME OF THE

ICKED

NCLE

* * * Dickens * * * shows less understanding of criminals than
one would expect of him. * * * As soon as he comes up against
crime or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the
“I’ve always kept myself respectable” habit of mind. The
attitude of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickens himself)
towards Magwitch in Great Expectations is extremely
interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards
Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When
he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits
for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies
of disgust. “The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread
I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him,
could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible
beast”, etc. etc. So far as one can discover from the text, this is
not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorised by
Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a
criminal and a convict. There is an even more “kept-myself-
respectable” touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of
course that he cannot take Magwitch’s money. The money is
not the product of a crime, it has been honestly acquired; but it
is an ex-convict’s money and therefore “tainted”. There is
nothing psychologically false in this, either. Psychologically the
latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens
ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels “Yes, that is
just how Pip would have behaved.” But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his
attitude is at bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch
belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and,
probably, Don Quixote—characters who are more pathetic
than the author intended.

( ... )

Significantly, Dickens’s most successful books (not his best

books) are The Pickwick Papers, which is not a novel, and Hard
Times and A Tale of Two Cities, which are not funny. As a
novelist his natural fertility greatly hampers him, because the
burlesque which he is never able to resist is constantly breaking
into what ought to be serious situations. There is a good
example of this in the opening chapter of Great Expectations.
The escaped convict, Magwitch, has just captured the six-year-
old Pip in the churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly
enough, from Pip’s point of view. The convict, smothered in
mud and with his chain trailing from his leg, suddenly starts up
among the tombs, grabs the child, turns him upside down and
robs his pockets. Then he begins terrorising him into bringing
food and a file:

He held me by the arms in an upright position on the

top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:

“You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and

them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery
over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word
or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such
a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be
let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any
partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and
liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain’t alone,
as you may think I am. There’s a young man hid with me,
in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That
young man hears the words I speak. That young man has
a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and
at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to
attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may
lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up,
may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself
comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly
creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am
keeping that young man from harming you at the present

moment, but with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to
hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do
you say?”

Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin

with, no starving and hunted man would speak in the least like
that. Moreover, although the speech shows a remarkable
knowledge of the way in which a child’s mind works, its actual
words are quite out of tune with what is to follow. It turns
Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one
sees him through the child’s eyes, into an appalling monster.
Later in the book he is to be represented as neither, and his
exaggerated gratitude, on which the plot turns, is to be
incredible because of just this speech. As usual, Dickens’s
imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details
were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are
more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by
some seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the
habit of ending David Copperfield’s lessons every morning
with a dreadful sum in arithmetic. “If I go into a
cheesemonger’s shop, and buy five thousand double-
Gloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each, present
payment,” it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens
detail, the double-Gloucester cheeses.

But it is far too human

a touch for Murdstone; he would have made it five thousand
cashboxes. Every time this note is struck, the unity of the
novel suffers. Not that it matters very much, because Dickens
is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes.
He is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture, but
wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when he is
building up some character who will later on be forced to act
inconsistently.

Note

3. Chapter 4: the “appalling sums” Murdstone forces him to learn.

[Editor.]

ETER

ROOKS ON THE

EGINNING AND

NDING

EFORE

LOT AND

EYOND

LOT

Great Expectations is exemplary for a discourse on plot in many
respects, not least of all for its beginning. For what the novel
chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search for a
beginning. As in so many nineteenth-century novels, the hero
is an orphan, thus undetermined by any visible inheritance,
apparently unauthored. * * * There may be sociological and
sentimental reasons to account for the high incidence of
orphans in the nineteenth-century novel, but clearly the
parentless protagonist frees an author from struggle with
preexisting authorities, allowing him to create afresh all the
determinants of plot within his text. He thus profits from what
Gide called the “lawlessness” of the novel

by starting with an

undefined, rule-free character and then bringing the law to
bear upon him—creating the rules—as the text proceeds. With
Pip, Dickens begins as it were with a life that is for the
moment precedent to plot, and indeed necessarily in search of
plot. Pip when we first see him is himself in search of the
“authority”—the word stands in the second paragraph of the
novel—that would define and justify—authorize—the plot of
his ensuing life.

The “authority” to which Pip refers here is that of the

tombstone which bears the names of his dead parents, the
names that have already been displaced, condensed, and
superseded in the first paragraph, where Pip describes how his
“infant tongue” (literally, a speechless tongue: a catachresis that
points to a moment of emergence, of entry into language)
could only make of the name, Philip Pirrip, left to him by the
dead parents, the monosyllabic Pip. “So, I called myself Pip,
and came to be called Pip” (chapter 1). This originating
moment of Pip’s narration and his narrative is a self-naming
that already subverts whatever authority could be found in the
text of the tombstones. The process of reading that text is
described by Pip the narrator as “unreasonable,” in that it
interprets the appearance of the lost father and mother from
the shape of the letters of their names. The tracing of the

name—which he has already distorted in its application to self—
involves a misguided attempt to remotivate the graphic symbol,
to make it directly mimetic, mimetic specifically of origin. Loss
of origin, misreading, and the problematic of identity are bound
up here in ways we will further explore later on. The question
of reading and writing—of learning to compose and to decipher
texts—is persistently thematized in the novel.

The decipherment of the tombstone text as confirmation of

loss of origin—as unauthorization—is here at the start of the
novel the prelude to Pip’s cogito,

the moment in which his

consciousness seizes his existence as other, alien, forlorn:

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity
of things seems to me to have been gained on a
memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a
time I found out for certain, that this bleak place
overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that
Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana, wife
of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander,
Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant
children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and
that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,
intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with
scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that
the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the
distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was
the sea—, and that the small bundle of shivers growing
afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice.... (chapter 1)

The repeated verbs of existence—“was” and “were”—perform
an elementary phenomenology of Pip’s world, locating its
irreducible objects and leading finally to the individual subject
as other, as aware of his existence through the emotion of fear,
fear that then appears as the origin of voice, or articulated
sound, as Pip begins to cry: a cry that is immediately censored
by the command of the convict Magwitch, the father-to-be, the
fearful intrusive figure of future authorship who will demand of

Pip: “Give us your name.” * * * For purposes of my study of
plot, it is important to note how this beginning establishes Pip
as an existence without a plot, at the very moment of
occurrence of that event which will prove to be decisive for the
plotting of his existence, as he will discover only two-thirds of
the way through the novel. Alien, unauthorized, self-named, at
the point of entry into the language code and the social systems
it implies, Pip will in the first part of the novel be in search of a
plot, and the novel will recount the gradual precipitation of a
sense of plot around him, the creation of portents of direction
and intention.

( ... )

The ultimate situation of plot in the novel may suggest an
approach to the vexed question of Dickens’s two endings to the
novel: the one he originally wrote and the revision (substituted
at Bulwer Lytton’s suggestion) that was in fact printed. I think
it is entirely legitimate to prefer the original ending, with its
flat tone and refusal of romantic expectation, and find that the
revision, with its tentative promise of reunion between Pip and
Estella, “unbinds” energies that we thought had been
thoroughly bound and indeed discharged from the text. We
may also feel that choice between the two endings is somewhat
arbitrary and unimportant in that the decisive moment has
already occurred before either of these finales begins. The real
ending may take place with Pip’s recognition and acceptance of
Magwitch after his recapture—this is certainly the ethical
dénouement—and his acceptance of a continuing existence
without plot, as celibate clerk for Clarrikers. The pages that
follow may simply be obiter dicta.

If we acknowledge Pip’s experience of and with Magwitch to

be the central energy of the text, it is significant that the climax
of this experience, the moment of crisis and reversal in the
attempted escape from England, bears traces of a hallucinatory
repetition of the childhood spell—indeed, of that first
recapture of Magwitch already repeated in Mr. Wopsle’s
theatrical vision:

In the same moment, I saw the steersman of the galley lay
his hand on the prisoner’s shoulder, and saw that both
boats were swinging round with the force of the tide, and
saw that all hands on board the steamer were running
forward quite frantically. Still in the same moment, I saw
the prisoner start up, lean across his captor, and pull the
cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the galley.
Still in the same moment, I saw that the face disclosed
was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still in the
same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white
terror on it that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry
on board the steamer and a loud splash in the water, and
felt the boat sink from under me. (chapter 54)

If this scene marks the beginning of a resolution—which it
does in that it brings the death of the arch-villain Compeyson
and the death sentence for Magwitch, hence the disappearance
from the novel of its most energetic plotters—it is resolution in
the register of repetition and working through, the final effort
to master painful material from the insistent past. Pip emerges
from this scene with an acceptance of the determinative past as
both determinative and as past, which prepares us for the final
escape from plot. It is interesting to note that where the
“dream” plot of Estella is concerned, Pip’s stated resolution has
none of the compulsive energetic force of the passage just
quoted, but is rather a conventional romantic fairy-tale ending,
a conscious fiction designed, of course, to console the dying
Magwitch, but possibly also a last effort at self-delusion: “You
had a child once, whom you loved and lost.... She lived and
found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a lady and very
beautiful. And I love her!” (chapter 56). If taken as anything
other than a conscious fiction—if taken as part of the “truth”
discovered by Pip’s detections—this version of Pip’s experience
leads straight to what is most troubling in Dickens’s revised
version of the ending: the suggestion of an unbinding of what
has already been bound up and disposed of, an unbinding that
is indeed perceptible in the rather embarrassed prose with
which the revision begins: “Nevertheless, I knew while I said

these words, that I secretly intended to revisit the site of the old
house that evening alone, for her sake. Yes, even so. For
Estella’s sake” (chapter 59). Are we to understand that the
experience of Satis House has never really been mastered? Is its
nightmare energy still present in the text as well? The original
end may have an advantage in denying to Pip’s text the
possibility of any reflux of energy, any new aspirations, the
undoing of anything already done, the unbinding of energy
that has been bound and led to discharge.

As at the start of the novel we had the impression of a life

not yet subject to plot—a life in search of the sense of plot that
would only gradually begin to precipitate around it—so at the
end we have the impression of a life that has outlived plot,
renounced plot, been cured of it: life that is left over. What
follows the recognition of Magwitch is left over, and any
renewal of expectation and plotting—such as a revived romance
with Estella—would have to belong to another story. It is with
the image of a life bereft of plot, of movement and desire, that
the novel most appropriately leaves us.

Notes

1. André Gide (1869–1951) preached and practiced the subversion of

conventional plot constructions and character definitions in nearly all of
his later works, most famously in The Counterfeiters (1925). For Gide the
behaviour and function of the characters reveal themselves by trial and
error, often by chance or in answer to questions Gide himself puts to
them—pretty much in the way scientists come by their information in
conducting their research. In the central chapter of The Counterfeiters to
which Brooks refers, “Edouard Explains His Theory of the Novel” (part
2, chapter 3), Gide’s alter ego expresses his opinion—by now, thanks
largely to Gide, a commonplace—that “of all literary genres, the novel
remains the freest, the most lawless” (Gide uses the English word).
[Editor.]

2. On the theme of reading in the novel, see Max Byrd, “‘Reading’ in

Great Expectations,” PMLA 91, no. 2 (1976), 259–65.

3. “I think” (Latin). By hitching an English (or any other modern)

noun, pronoun, or article to the verb, the writer arrives at some such
meaning as “awareness” or the cognate “cogitation.” [Editor.]

8. Literally, “things said in passing.” [Editor.]

OROTHY

HENT ON THE

ENTURY

ROGRESS

, D

ICKENS

’

SE OF THE

ATHETIC

ALLACY

AND

’

“I

DENTITY OF

HINGS

”

Dickens lived in a time and an environment in which a full-
scale demolition of traditional values was going on,
correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men,
women, and children by the millions—a process brought about
by industrialization, colonial imperialism, and the exploitation
of the human being as a “thing” or an engine or a part of an
engine capable of being used for profit. This was the “century
of progress” which ornamented its steam engines with iron
arabesques of foliage as elaborate as the anti-macassars

and

aspidistras and crystal or cut-glass chandeliers and bead-and-
feather portieres of its drawing rooms, while the human
engines of its welfare groveled and bred in the foxholes
described by Marx in his Capital.

(Hauntingly we see this

discordance in the scene in Great Expectations where Miss
Havisham, sitting in her satin and floral decay in the house
called Satis, points her finger at the child and outrageously tells
him to “play.” For though the scene is a potent symbol of
childish experience of adult obtuseness and sadism, it has also
another dimension as a social symbol of those economically
determined situations in which the human soul is used as a
means for satisfactions not its own, under the gross and
transparent lie that its activity is its happiness, its welfare and
fun and “play”—a publicity instrument that is the favorite of
manufacturers and insurance agencies, as well as of totalitarian
strategists, with their common formula, “We’re just a happy
family.”) The heir of the “century of progress” is the twentieth-
century concentration camp, which makes no bones about
people being “things.”

Dickens’ intuition alarmingly saw this process in motion, a

process which abrogated the primary demands of human
feeling and rationality, and he sought an extraordinary
explanation for it. People were becoming things, and things
(the things that money can buy or that are the means for

making money or for exalting prestige in the abstract) were
becoming more important than people. People were being de-
animated, robbed of their souls, and things were usurping the
prerogatives of animate creatures—governing the lives of their
owners in the most literal sense. This picture, in which the
qualities of things and people were reversed, was a picture of a
daemonically motivated world, a world in which “dark” or
occult forces or energies operate not only in people (as modern
psychoanalytic psychology observes) but also in things: for if
people turn themselves or are turned into things, metaphysical
order can be established only if we think of things as turning
themselves into people, acting under a “dark” drive similar to
that which motivates the human aberration.

There is an old belief that it takes a demon to recognize a

demon, and the saying illustrates the malicious sensibility with
which things, in Dickens, have felt out and imitated, in their
relationship with each other and with people, the secret of the
human arrangement. A four-poster bed in an inn, where Pip
goes to spend the night, is a despotic monster that straddles
over the whole room,

putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace, and
another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched
little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.

Houses, looking down through the skylight of Jaggers’ office in
London, twist themselves in order to spy on Pip like police
agents who presuppose guilt. Even a meek little muffin has to
be “confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron
cover,” and a hat, set on a mantelpiece, demands constant
attention and the greatest quickness of eye and hand to catch it
neatly as it tumbles off, but its ingenuity is such that it finally
manages to fall into the slop basin. The animation of inanimate
objects suggests both the quaint gaiety of a forbidden life and
an aggressiveness that has got out of control—an
aggressiveness that they have borrowed from the human
economy and an irresponsibility native to but glossed and
disguised by that economy.

Dickens’ fairly constant use of the pathetic fallacy

(the

projection of human impulses and feelings upon the
nonhuman, as upon beds and houses and muffins and hats)
might be considered as incidental stylistic embellishment if his
description of people did not show a reciprocal metaphor:
people are described by nonhuman attributes, or by such an
exaggeration of or emphasis on one part of their appearance
that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part, with an effect
of having become “thinged” into one of their own bodily
members or into an article of their clothing or into some
inanimate object of which they have made a fetish. Dickens’
devices for producing this transposition of attributes are
various. * * * Many of what we shall call the “signatures” of
Dickens’ people—that special exaggerated feature or gesture or
mannerism which comes to stand for the whole person—are
such dissociated parts of the body, like Jaggers’ huge forefinger
which he bites and then plunges menacingly at the accused, or
Wemmick’s post-office mouth, or the clockwork apparatus in
Magwitch’s throat that clicks as if it were going to strike. The
device is not used arbitrarily or capriciously. In this book,
whose subject is the etiology of guilt and of atonement, Jaggers
is the representative not only of civil law but of universal Law,
which is profoundly mysterious in a world of dissociated and
apparently lawless fragments; and his huge forefinger, into
which he is virtually transformed and which seems to act like
an “it” in its own right rather than like a member of a man, is
the Law’s mystery in all its fearful impersonality. Wemmick’s
mouth is not a post-office when he is at home in his castle but
only when he is at work in Jaggers’ London office, where a
mechanical appearance of smiling is required of him. And as
Wemmick’s job has mechanized him into a grinning slot, so
oppression and fear have given the convict Magwitch a
clockwork apparatus for vocal chords.

* * *

Through the changes that have come about in the human, as

humanity has leaked out of it, the atoms of the physical

universe have become subtly impregnated with daemonic
aptitude. Pip, standing waiting for Estella in the neighborhood
of Newgate, and beginning dimly to be aware of his
implication in the guilt for which that establishment stands—
for his “great expectations” have already begun to make him a
collaborator in the generic crime of using people as means to
personal ends—has the sensation of a deadly dust clinging to
him, rubbed off on him from the environs, and he tries to beat
it out of his clothes. Smithfield, that “shameful place,” “all
asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam,” seems to “stick
to him” when he enters it on his way to the prison. The nettles
and brambles of the graveyard where Magwitch first appears
“stretch up cautiously” out of the graves in an effort to get a
twist on the branded man’s ankles and pull him in. The river
has a malignant potentiality that impregnates everything upon
it—discolored copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green
dank deposit. The river is perhaps the most constant and
effective symbol in Dickens, because it establishes itself so
readily to the imagination as a daemonic element, drowning
people as if by intent, disgorging unforeseen evidence,
chemically or physically changing all it touches, and because
not only does it act as an occult “force” in itself but it is the
common passage and actual flowing element that unites
individuals and classes, public persons and private persons,
deeds and the results of deeds, however fragmentized and
separated. Upon the river, one cannot escape its action; it may
throw the murderer and his victim in an embrace. At the end of
Great Expectations, it swallows Compeyson, while, with its own
obscure daemonic motivation, though it fatally injures
Magwitch, it leaves him to fulfill the more subtle spiritual
destiny upon which he has begun to enter. The river scene in
this section, closely and apprehensively observed, is one of the
most memorable in Dickens.

* * *

What brings the Convict Magwitch to the child Pip, in the
graveyard, is more than the convict’s hunger; Pip (or let us say

simply “the child,” for Pip is an Everyman) carries the convict
inside him, as the negative potential of his “great
expectations”—Magwitch is the concretion of his potential
guilt. What brings Magwitch across the “great gulfs” of the
Atlantic to Pip again, at the moment of revelation in the story,
is their profoundly implicit compact of guilt, as binding as the
convict’s leg iron which is its recurrent symbol. The
multiplying likenesses in the street as Magwitch draws nearer,
coming over the sea, the mysterious warnings of his approach
on the night of his reappearance, are moral projections as
“real” as the storm outside the windows and as the crouched
form of the vicious Orlick on the dark stairs. The conception
of what brings people together “coincidentally” in their
seemingly uncaused encounters and collisions—the total
change in the texture of experience that follows upon any act,
public or private, external or in thought, the concreteness of
the effect of the act not only upon the conceiving heart but
upon the atoms of physical matter, so that blind nature
collaborates daemonically in the drama of reprisal—is deep
and valid in this book.

* * *

Pip first becomes aware of the “identity of things” as he is

held suspended heels over head by the convict; that is, in a
world literally turned upside down. Thenceforth Pip’s interior
landscape is inverted by his guilty knowledge of this man “who
had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by
stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
briars.” The apparition is that of all suffering that the earth can
inflict, and that the apparition presents itself to a child is as
much as to say that every child, whatever his innocence,
inherits guilt (as the potential of his acts) for the condition of
man. The inversion of natural order begins here with first self-
consciousness: the child is heir to the sins of the “fathers.”
Thus the crime that is always pervasive in the Dickens universe
is identified in a new way—not primarily as that of the “father,”
nor as that of some public institution, but as that of the child—

the original individual who must necessarily take upon himself
responsibility for not only what is to be done in the present and
the future, but what has been done in the past, inasmuch as the
past is part and parcel of the present and the future. The child
is the criminal, and it is for this reason that he is able to redeem
his world; for the world’s guilt is his guilt, and he can expiate it
in his own acts.

The guilt of the child is realized on several levels. Pip

experiences the psychological form (or feeling) of guilt before
he is capable of voluntary evil; he is treated by adults—Mrs. Joe
and Pumblechook and Wopsle—as if he were a felon, a young
George Barnwell (a character in the play which Wopsle reads
on the night when Mrs. Joe is attacked) wanting only to
murder his nearest relative, as George Barnwell murdered his
uncle. This is the usual nightmare of the child in Dickens, a
vision of imminent incarceration, fetters like sausages, lurid
accusatory texts. He is treated, that is, as if he were a thing,
manipulable by adults for the extraction of certain sensations:
by making him feel guilty and diminished, they are able to feel
virtuous and great. But the psychological form of guilt acquires
spiritual content when Pip himself conceives the tainted wish—
the wish to be like the most powerful adult and to treat others
as things. At the literal level, Pip’s guilt is that of snobbery
toward Joe Gargery, and snobbery is a denial of the human
value of others. Symbolically, however, Pip’s guilt is that of
murder; for he steals the file with which the convict rids
himself of his leg iron, and it is this leg iron, picked up on the
marshes, with which Orlick attacks Mrs. Joe; so that the child
does inevitably overtake his destiny, which was, like George
Barnwell, to murder his nearest relative. But the “relative”
whom Pip, adopting the venerable criminality of society, is, in
the widest symbolic scope of intention, destined to murder is
not Mrs. Joe but his “father,” Magwitch—to murder in the
socially chronic fashion of the Dickens world, which consists in
the dehumanization of the weak, or in moral acquiescence to
such murder. Pip is, after all, the ordinary mixed human being,
one more Everyman in the long succession of them that
literature has represented, but we see this Everyman as he

develops from a child; and his destiny is directed by the ideals
of his world—toward “great expectations” which involve the
making of Magwitches—which involve, that is, murder. These
are the possibilities that are projected in the opening scene of
the book, when the young child, left with a burden on his soul,
watches the convict limping off under an angry red sky, toward
the black marshes, the gibbet, and the savage lair of the sea, in
a still rotating landscape.

Notes

4. Coverlets draped over the backs of chairs and sofas to keep them

from soilure, specifically a protection against hair oil (imported from the
Indonesian seaport Makassar).

5. See esp. book 1, chapter 25, section 5, in which Marx, citing the

Public Health Reports for 1865–66, attacks the appalling living conditions
of English workingmen.

6. As a formal term in literary criticism, the phrase first appears in

John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, volume 3, part 4, chapter 12 (1856), in
which he imputes the fallacy to writers who are “over-dazzled by
emotion” without sufficient mental powers to control their feelings: “the
state of mind which attributes the characters of a living creature to [non-
human phenomena] is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief” or
by any other sensation that ends by falsifying the object.

ULIAN

OYNAHAN ON

’

GGRESSIVE

MBITION AND THE

ARK

OUBLES

RLICK AND

RUMMLE

In Great Expectations, as in its legendary prototypes, the theme
of ambition is treated under the two aspects of desire and will,
the search for a superabundance of love and the drive for
power. And it is in his presentation of the theme in the latter
aspect that Dickens makes the more profound analysis of the
immoral and criminal elements in his hero’s (and the century’s)
favourite dream.

But Pip’s ambition is passive. He only becomes active and

aggressive after he has ceased to be ambitious. How then does

Great Expectations treat the theme of ambition in terms that are
relevant to the total action of which Pip is the centre? I have
already begun to suggest an answer to the question. Ambition
as the instinct of aggression, as the pitiless drive for power
directed against what we have called authority-figures is both
coalesced and disguised in the figure of Orlick. And Orlick is
bound to the hero by ties of analogy as double, alter ego and
dark mirror-image. We are dealing here with an art which
simultaneously disguises and reveals its deepest implications of
meaning, with a method which apparently dissociates its
thematic materials and its subject matter into moral fable-cum-
melodramatic accompaniment, yet simultaneously presents
through patterns of analogy a dramatic perspective in which
the apparent opposites are unified. In Great Expectations
criminality is displaced from the hero on to a melodramatic
villain. But on closer inspection that villain becomes part of a
complex unity—we might call it Pip-Orlick—in which all
aspects of the problem of guilt become interpenetrant and co-
operative. The only clue to this unity which is given at the
surface level of the narrative is Pip’s obsession of criminal guilt.
Pip tells us over and over again that he feels contaminated by
crime. But we do not find the objective correlative of that
conviction until we recognise in the insensate and
compunctionless Orlick a shadow image of the tender-minded
and yet monstrously ambitious young hero.

( ... )

Recognition that Pip’s ambition is definable under the aspect

of aggression as well as in terms of the regressive desire for
passive enjoyment of life’s bounty depends upon the reader’s
willingness to work his way into the narrative from a different
angle than the narrator’s. The evidence for the hero’s power-
drive against the authority-figures, the evidence of his
‘viciousness’ if you will, is embodied in the story in a number of
ways, but a clear pattern of meaning only emerges after the
reader has correlated materials which are dispersed and
nominally unrelated in the story as told. Orlick, thus far, has

been the figure whose implicit relations to the hero have
constituted the chief clue to the darker meaning of Pip’s career.
He continues to be important in any attempt to set forth the
complete case, but there are also some significant correlations
to be made in which he does not figure. * * *

We might begin with the apparently cynical remark that Pip,

judged on the basis of what happens to many of the characters
closely associated with him, is a very dangerous young man. He
is not accident-prone, but a great number of people who move
into his orbit decidedly are. Mrs. Joe is bludgeoned, Miss
Havisham goes up in flames, Estella is exposed through her
rash marriage to vaguely specified tortures at the hands of her
brutal husband, Drummle. Pumblechook has his house looted
and his mouth stuffed with flowering annuals by a gang of
thieves led by Orlick. All of these characters, with the exception
of Estella, stand at one time or another in the relation of
patron, patroness, or authority-figure to Pip the boy or Pip the
man.

* * * Furthermore, all of these characters, including Estella,

have hurt, humiliated, or thwarted Pip in some important way.
All in some way have stood between him and the attainment of
the full measure of his desires. All are punished.

Let us group these individual instances. Mrs. Joe, the cruel

foster-mother, and Pumblechook, her approving and
hypocritical relation by marriage, receive their punishment
from the hands of Orlick. Mrs. Joe hurts Pip and is hurt in turn
by Orlick. Pip has the motive of revenge—a lifetime of brutal
beatings and scrubbings inflicted by his sister—but Orlick, a
journeyman who does not even lodge with the Gargerys,
bludgeons Mrs. Joe after she has provoked a quarrel between
him and his master. If we put together his relative lack of
motive with his previously quoted remarks at the limekiln and
add to these Pip’s report of his own extraordinary reaction
upon first hearing of the attack—

With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first
disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in
the attack upon my sister, or at all events that as her near

relation, popularly known to be under obligations to her,
I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than anyone
else—

we arrive at an anomalous situation which can best be resolved
on the assumption that Orlick acts merely as Pip’s punitive
instrument or weapon.

With regard to Pumblechook’s chastisement, the most

striking feature is not that Orlick should break into a house, but
that he should break into Pumblechook’s house. Why not
Trabb’s? One answer might be that Trabb has never stood in
Pip’s light. Pumblechook’s punishment is nicely proportioned to
his nuisance value for Pip. Since he has never succeeded in
doing him any great harm with his petty slanders, he escapes
with a relatively light wound. Although we are told near the end
of the novel that Orlick was caught and jailed after the burglary,
we are never told that Pip reported Orlick’s murderous assault
on him or his confessions of his assault on Mrs. Joe to the
police. Despite the fact that there is enough accumulated
evidence to hang him, Orlick’s end is missing from the book.
Actually, it seems that Orlick simply evaporates into thin air
after his punitive role has been performed. His case needs no
final disposition because he has only existed, essentially, as an
aspect of the hero’s own far more problematic case.

Estella receives her chastisement at the hands of Bentley

Drummle. How does this fit into the pattern we have been
exploring? In the first place, it can be shown that Drummle
stands in precisely the same analogical relationship to Pip as
Orlick does. Drummle is a reduplication of Orlick at a point
higher on the social-economic scale up which Pip moves with
such rapidity through the first three-quarters of the novel.
Drummle, like Orlick, is a criminal psychopath. At Jaggers’s
dinner party the host, a connoisseur of criminal types, treats
Drummle as ‘one of the true sort’, and Drummle demonstrates
how deserving he is of this distinction when he tries to brain
the harmless Startop with a heavy tumbler.

But the most impressive evidence that Orlick and Drummle

are functional equivalents is supplied by the concrete

particulars of their description. To an extraordinary degree,
these two physically powerful, inarticulate, and dark-
complexioned villains are presented to the reader in terms
more often identical than similar. Orlick, again and again, is
one who lurks and lounges, Drummle is one who lolls and
lurks. When Pip, Startop, and Drummle go out rowing, the
last ‘would always creep in-shore like some uncomfortable
amphibious creature, even when the tide would have sent him
fast on his way; and I always think of him as coming after us in
the dark or by the back-water, when our own two boats were
breaking the sunset or the moonlight in mid-stream’. When
Startop walks home after Jaggers’s party, he is followed by
Drummle but on the opposite side of the street, ‘in the shadow
of the houses, much as he was wont to follow in his boat’. The
other creeper, follower and amphibian of Great Expectations is
Orlick, whose natural habitat is the salt marsh, who creeps his
way to the dark landing below Pip’s apartment to witness the
return of Magwitch from abroad, who creeps behind Biddy and
Pip as they walk conversing on the marshes and overhears Pip
say he will do anything to drive Orlick from the
neighbourhood, who appears out of the darkness near the
turnpike house on the night Pip returns from Pumblechook’s
to discover that his sister has been assaulted, and who, finally,
creeps his way so far into Pip’s private business that he ends by
acting as agent for Compeyson, Magwitch’s—and Pip’s—
shadowy antagonist.

Like Orlick, Drummle is removed from the action suddenly;

Pip is given no opportunity to settle old and bitter scores with
him. In the last chapter we hear that he is dead ‘from an
accident consequent on ill-treating a horse’. This is the
appropriate end for a sadist whose crimes obviously included
wife-beating. But more important to the present argument is
our recognition that Drummle has been employed to break a
woman who had, in the trite phrase, broken Pip’s heart. Once
he has performed his function as Pip’s vengeful surrogate he
can be assigned to the fate he so richly deserves.

Mrs. Joe beats and scrubs Pip until she is struck down by

heavy blows on the head and spine. Pumblechook speaks his

lies about him until his mouth is stuffed with flowers. Estella
treats his affections with cold contempt until her icy pride is
broken by a brutal husband. In this series Orlick and Drummle
behave far more like instruments of vengeance than like three-
dimensional characters with understandable grudges of their
own. In terms of my complete argument, they enact an
aggressive potential that the novel defines, through patterns of
analogy and linked resemblances, as belonging in the end to
Pip and to his unconscionably ambitious hopes.

When Miss Havisham bursts into flames, there is no Orlick

or Drummle in the vicinity to be accused of having set a match
to her. In the long series of violence which runs through Great
Expectations from the beginning to end, this is one climax of
violence that can be construed as nothing more than accidental.
And yet it is an accident which Pip, on two occasions, has
foreseen. Before Miss Havisham burns under the eye of the
horror-struck hero, she has already come to a violent end twice
in his hallucinated fantasies—in Pip’s visionary experiences in
the abandoned brewery, where he sees Miss Havisham hanging
by the neck from a beam. He has this vision once as a child, on
the occasion of his first visit to Satis House, and once as an
adult, on the occasion of his last visit, just a few minutes before
Miss Havisham’s accident occurs. What are we to make, if
anything, of these peculiar hallucinatory presentiments and of
the coincidence by which they come true? * * *

How do these hallucinations, the second followed

immediately by Miss Havisham’s fatal accident, add to the
burden of the hero’s guilt? The answer is obvious. Because Pip’s
destructive fantasy comes true in reality, he experiences the
equivalent of a murderer’s guilt. As though he had the evil eye,
or as though there were more than a psychological truth in the
old cliché, ‘if looks could kill’, Pip moves from the brewery,
where he has seen Miss Havisham hanging, to the door of her
room, where he gives her one long, last look—until she is
consumed by fire. But here the psychological truth suffices to
establish imaginative proof that Pip can no more escape
untainted from his relationship to the former patroness than he
can escape untainted from any of his relationships to characters

who have held and used the power to destroy or hamper his
ambitious struggles. In all these relationships the hero becomes
implicated in violence. With Estella, Pumblechook, and Mrs.
Joe, the aggressive drive is enacted by surrogates linked to the
hero himself by ties of analogy. With Miss Havisham the
surrogate is missing. Miss Havisham falls victim to the purely
accidental. But the ‘impurity’ of Pip’s motivation, as it is
revealed through the device of the recurrent hallucination,
suggests an analogy between that part of Pip which wants Miss
Havisham at least punished, at most removed from this earth for
which she is so profoundly unfit, and the destroying fire itself.

* * *

[Moynahan briefly discusses Pip’s brainfever as a reflection

of his destructive impulses and his helplessness.]

When Pip wakes up from his delirium he finds himself a

child again, safe in the arms of the angelic Joe Gargery. But the
guilt of great expectations remains inexpiable, and the cruelly
beautiful original ending of the novel remains the only possible
‘true’ ending. Estella and Pip face each other across the
insurmountable barrier of lost innocence. The novel dramatises
the loss of innocence, and does not glibly present the hope of a
redemptory second birth for either its guilty hero or the guilty
society which shaped him. I have already said that Pip’s fantasy
of superabundant love brings him at last to a point of alienation
from the real world. And similarly Pip’s fantasy of power brings
him finally to a point where withdrawal is the only positive
moral response left to him.

The brick is taken down from its giddy place, a part of the

engine is hammered off. Pip cannot redeem his world. In no
conceivable sense a leader, he can only lead himself into a sort
of exile from his society’s power centres. Living abroad as the
partner of a small, unambitious firm, he is to devote his
remaining life to doing the least possible harm to the smallest
number of people, so earning a visitor’s privileges in the lost
paradise where Biddy and Joe, the genuine innocents of the
novel, flourish in thoughtless content.

OLDIE

ORGENTALER ON

ARWIN AND

ONEY AS

ETERMINANT

Great Expectations lends itself to a Darwinian reading because it
contains three concepts with broad evolutionary implications—
the idea of the primitive or low and its relationship to
“civilized” society; the idea of adaptation, of what is fit and not
fit; and, finally, the conception of time as moving in one
direction only—into the future—rather than being a
reanimation of the past.

The novel is essentially a Cinderella story in which the fairy

godmother turns out to be a convict. The infusion of
Magwitch’s money into Pip’s young life creates a relationship
analogous to paternity. Jaggers refers to Magwitch as the
fountainhead, the source of Pip’s money, and therefore the
generating force behind his birth as a gentleman. Magwitch
himself makes the point: “Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second
father. You’re my son ... I’ve put away money only for you to
spend” (GE p. 337).

In this father–son relationship, money

substitutes for semen as the stuff out of which life is created. In
the same way, money stands for both the biological and the
material aspects of Pip’s love for Estella. Pip writes that he
cannot dissociate Estella from all his hankerings after money
and gentility, nor yet separate her from “the innermost life of
my life” (GE, p. 257). Heredity has been discarded; money—
that most equivocal of external factors, and the one most
commonly associated with metaphors of breeding—has taken
its place as a determinant of human identity.

Great Expectations may appear to be a fairy tale, but it is a

fairy tale turned inside-out. In fact, one of the novel’s most
obvious intentions is to overturn the fairy-tale plot of hidden
identity. Traditionally, this plot depicts the lower-class hero as
belonging biologically to a higher station than the one to which
circumstances have assigned him. This is, in fact, the plot of
Dickens’s early novel Oliver Twist. As Gillian Beer points out,
the plot of hidden identity is fundamentally opposed to
Darwinism, which insists on the opposite—that all human

beings, no matter how advanced they may think themselves to
be, share the same lowly animal origins.

Thus, by overturning the plot of hidden identity, Great

Expectations constitutes a reassessment of Oliver Twist. But this
reassessment goes beyond Pip’s discovery that his sudden
wealth allies him to the underworld rather than to the
aristocracy. There is a concomitant reassessment of the very
nature of that underworld and its relationship to the rest of
society. Where Oliver Twist defines the genteel and the criminal
spheres as distinct, contrary, and antithetical, Great Expectations
maintains that the upper-class world of the gentleman is
implicated in the criminal domain of the underclass, and that
the relationship between the two, far from being mutually
exclusive, is redolent of complicity and interdependence.

This makes Great Expectations, among other things, a

meditation on the low, because it bases its demonstration of the
inherent kinship between human beings on the
interrelationship between the criminal world and its
noncriminal counterparts. This interrelationship results in a
redefinition of the manner in which Dickens depicts the
criminal class in this novel. That class is here presented as more
important for the base position it occupies in society than for
its anti-social behavior. Magwitch belongs to the underclass of
the underworld, but the fortune he makes Down Under will
support Pip at the topmost reaches of the social scale.

Because its emphasis is on the social position of the convict

rather than on his criminality, Great Expectations neutralizes the
moral dimension of crime. To be a convict in this novel is to
occupy a position of shame, a shame which is primarily
associated with being outcast and reviled rather than with
being a villain. Evil, which had previously been a major
preoccupation in all of Dickens’s fiction, is no longer simply
black in this novel, nor is it exclusively associated with crime.
In fact, the concept of criminality has here been generalized to
include such flawed beings as Pip himself, who sin in their
hearts rather than in their deeds. While the world of Great
Expectations is not totally amoral, as is the natural world in The
Origin of Species, neither is it Manichaean to quite the same

extent as in the earlier novels. Instead, the moral distinctions
between categories of behavior have become blurred and
overlapping.

( ... )

In another echo of Darwinism, Dickens introduces the notion
of adaptation or fitness. Miss Havisham’s crime, we are told,
lies in her being against Nature, in her trying to shut out the
sun and secluding herself “from a thousand natural and healing
influences” (GE, p. 411). Her brooding solitary mind has
grown diseased, Pip tells us, and this leads him to the
conclusion that she has been punished by “her profound
unfitness for this earth on which she was placed” (GE, p. 411).
The idea of not fitting, of not having adapted to one’s
environment, and therefore cheating and distorting the next
generation—as Miss Havisham does to Estella—owes
something to Darwinism.

Nor is Miss Havisham the only character who is not well

adapted to her surroundings. The same is also true of Joe, Pip’s
brother-in-law, although in his case, it depends on the
surroundings. Joe is a natural in the sense that any form of
behavior which forces him away from his essential nature is
uncomfortable to him, and this includes all the conventions
associated with “polite” society. Clothes provide the most
obvious example of Joe’s inability to cope with civilization. He
is uncomfortable in anything but his work clothes. And he is
uncomfortable anywhere out of his natural element—the
country and the forge. His boots are too big; he is clumsy on
stairs; he learns to read only with difficulty. The city—that
ultimate symbol of human civilization—is his nemesis. He says,
“I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the
kitchen, or off th’ meshes” (GE, p. 246).

Yet Joe is not merely the novel’s symbol of the natural man;

he is also its embodiment of the affective ideal in human
nature. It is he who recognizes Magwitch as a “poor miserable
fellow-creatur” (GE, p. 71). In fact, Joe and Magwitch may
legitimately be viewed as substitutes for one another, the more

so since both are surrogate fathers to Pip. And Pip is ashamed
to be connected to both of them. Both Joe and Magwitch are
men who act with their hearts; and while this is generally
defined as a good, there is also something to be said against
such behavior. With Magwitch the ambivalence is built into the
ambiguities of the plot—the man is a thief and a convict. Even
the altruism of Magwitch’s love for Pip is complicated by his
wish to “own” a gentleman. Joe’s love for Pip is more truly
selfless, but it is also inept. It cannot save Pip from the
harshness of his sister’s upbringing, and it cannot serve Pip as a
model for getting along in a world which is more complicated
than mere goodness will allow for.

( ... )

To illustrate this new attitude toward time, Dickens evokes
the metaphor of a chain: “That was a memorable day to me,
for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any
life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how
different its course would have been. Pause you who read this,
and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of
thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for
the formation of the first link on one memorable day” (GE, p.
101). This is a statement of both randomness and inevitability.
Here the past is equated with fate. A single chance day may
unavoidably alter the course of a lifetime, and what occurs
after that day will never resemble what went before. This is a
decidedly different conception of time from that which
pertained, for instance, in A Tale of Two Cities, where so
momentous a historical event as the French Revolution was
described as essentially a roll-over, a substitution of one class
by another, a reiteration and reenactment in other terms of
previous injustices, without consequences for change in the
future. What we have in Great Expectations is Darwinian time—
the ceaseless and inevitable moving into the future without a
glance back to the reassuring reanimation of the past.

Notes

11. All references to Dickens’s novels are to the Penguin editions and

will be cited parenthetically in the text.

12. Aristotle’s condemnation of usury in his Politics as unnatural

breeding “because the offspring resembles the parent,” quoted in Bernard
Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962), p.
79, is probably the most famous and influential conflation of biological
notions with financial ones. Another example of this kind of conflation
can be found in the Victorian euphemism for orgasm, “spending.”

13. Beer, p. 63.

HRISTOPHER

D. M

ORRIS ON

ARRATION

AND

’

ORAL

AITH

The problem of Pip’s moral bad faith, both in his actions and in
his narrative assessment of his past conduct, has long troubled
critics, so much so that in recent years very probing questions
have been asked about the depiction of his moral character,
even about his self.

In this essay I want to extend the direction

of this recent questioning by considering Pip’s bad faith as an
instance of what J. Hillis Miller calls “varnishing,” that is, the
authorial establishment of some putative center for a work
which simultaneously conceals evidence that would invalidate
such a center.

Pip’s bad faith works this way in Great

Expectations: because we so often attend to the serpentine
maneuvers of his conscience, we accept without question that
this conscience is functioning within an autonomous,
continuous, achieved, created self. And yet analysis of the
varnished side of Great Expectations shows that it is precisely
these assumptions that have been called into question, even in
the very attempt to establish Pip’s conscience as a center. After
a discussion of the general relation between narration and bad
faith, I examine, in turn, the novel’s famous opening, the
allusions Pip makes as narrator, and the letters sent in the
novel. The polemical connotations of “deconstruction” are
nothing to the purpose here, but I do hope to show the
existence of fundamental contradictions in the novel, aporia
whose logical reconciliation seems impossible to articulate.

Pip’s relation with all characters is self-serving, even when he
claims to be acting altruistically, and in his narration he
occasionally covers this seemingly irreducible egotism with a
veneer of disingenuous contrition. One example is his relation
with Joe. As narrator, Pip claims to have developed a solicitude
for Joe, but that claim is everywhere contradicted by his
actions. After learning the selfless rationale for Joe’s
acquiesence in Mrs. Joe’s “government,” Pip writes:

Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of
Joe from that night. We were equals afterwards, as we had
been before; but afterwards, at quiet times when I sat
looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new
sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe
in my heart.

(7, 52)

But nowhere afterwards are they “equals.” On the contrary, at
the end of the novel, Pip still condescends to Joe even as he
benefits from his ransoming, even as he egocentrically worries
what “little Pip,” his only posterity, will think of him. Similarly
distorted appraisals of his past conduct surface in his
comments on Biddy, Estella, Pumblechook, and Magwitch.
The pervasive pattern of Pip’s distortions raises the question of
whether there might be some inherent discontinuity between
the narrating and the narrated self. Peter Brooks hints at such
a contradiction when he cites Sartre’s remark that all
autobiographies are obituaries, excluding the margins of
experience.

But Pip’s bad faith runs deeper than that

phenomenological mauvaise foi described by Sartre: it is not
that Pip distorts by reifying the For-Itself in language. Instead,
as we will see, there never was an original self apart from
language to suffer such distortion. Selfhood has always already
been the narrator’s fictive construct, and Pip’s moral bad faith
serves to varnish that fact.

This deeper contradiction within the process of narration is

discernible in other retrospective judgments. After concluding

the account of his first visit to Satis House and his new
perception of Joe’s thick boots and coarse hands, Pip writes:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great
changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine
one selected day struck out of it, and think how different
its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and
think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of
thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but
for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

(9, 76)

The admonitory tone of the passage makes it resemble an
epitaph on a tombstone: narration itself may be only the
substitution of a new set of dead letters for old. But in this
paragraph, too, Pip struggles to articulate the determinative
value of this first exposure to class, to wealth, to humiliation.
In retrospect Pip speaks as a developmental psychologist, a
Piaget, who believes in formative events and irrevocable stages
of development. (We may note in passing that the metaphor of
the chain also serves to exculpate Pip: after this point, he is no
longer responsible for his actions.) Yet even more important
than the passage’s self-serving function are its contradictory
metaphors for life. The chain is the privileged metaphor here,
implying absolute continuity, formative events, historical
determinism and a narration that could transparently trace
these. And yet a life is also a “course,” a movement through
time, that lacks the capacity to “bind.” The problem is not
simply one of mixed metaphors. Instead, language seems
incapable of articulating both diachrony and synchrony
simultaneously. Words mark the conversion of the synchronic
into the diachronic; to articulate is to be caught in a signifying
chain; what Pip struggles to express cannot be expressed: the
act of narration already excludes it. It is against this
background that we should understand the novel’s famous
opening, in which Pip reads his name from the dead letters of
the tombstones.

Notes

An early version of this paper was read at the Eleventh Annual
Colloquium on Literature and Film, sponsored by the Department of
Foreign Languages, West Virginia University, September 25–27, 1986.

1. Julian Moynahan, in “The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great

Expectations,” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 60–79, analyzed the
ambivalence of Pip’s troubled relations with all characters. Moynahan’s
study was one of the first thoroughgoing accounts of Pip’s persistent bad
faith: he sees Pip as “implicated in violence” and brought, finally, to a
point of “alienation from the real world” (77, 78). More recently, Colin
Manlove, in “Neither Here Nor There: Uneasiness in Great Expectations,”
Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 61–70, cautioned that “any simple view of
Pip’s career in terms only of spiritual amelioration and the finding of his
selfhood may require considerable qualification” (69). Judith Weissman
and Steven Cohan, in “Dickens’s Great Expectations: Pip’s Arrested
Development,” American Imago 38 (1981): 105–26, hold that Pip’s
delusions persist through the last chapter because he “does not confront
the sorrow and emptiness that make him need to lie” (124). In 1984, two
studies of the novel saw Pip’s bad faith as rooted in the conditions of
narrative itself: Michael Ginsburg’s “Dickens and the Uncanny:
Repression and Displacement in Great Expectations,” Dickens Studies
Annual 13 (1984): 115–24, a Freudian reading, argued that the very
possibility of Pip’s storytelling is dependent on a repression which
“manifests itself as something other than itself” (123). Fiction-making is
therefore inherent in the guilt and desire of existence. Peter Brooks’s
study in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in the Narrative (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), also fundamentally psychoanalytic, argues
that repression causes Pip to “misread the plot of his life” (130) and that
the return of Magwitch, the repressed, dramatizes Freud’s dynamic
tension between eros and thanatos (139). Taken together with the recent
deconstructive readings of Dickens by Dianne F. Sadoff (“Storytelling and
the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit,” PMLA 95 [1980]: 234–45) and
Alistair M. Duckworth, (“Little Dorrit and the Question of Closure,”
Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 [1978]: 110–30), this critical tradition which
calls into question the status of Pip’s “self ” seems well established;
however, an alternative tradition, which sees the novel as finally valorizing
the self, continues. See note 7.

2. J. Hillis Miller, “The Ethics of Reading: Vast Gaps and Parting

Hours,” in American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age, ed. Ira
Konigsberg (Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, 1981), 34.

3. All references to Great Expectations are from the Oxford Edition

(London: Oxford University Press, 1953). Chapter and page numbers are
given in parentheses.

4. Brooks, 114.

OSEPH

A. H

YNES ON

TAR

, G

ARDEN

AND

IRELIGHT

MAGERY

Dickens’ fondness for light imagery crops up once more in the
way he uses stars. Estella’s name is immediately relevant, of
course, but we ought to note also that stars connote even more
generally—until the very last scene—what candles and
extinguished fires connote: the illusion which Pip basks in. On
the night when Mrs. Joe will announce Miss Havisham’s
invitation to Pip, there is a fine contrast evident between fire
and starlight—a contrast made while Joe and Pip wait for Mrs.
Joe’s arrival: “Joe made the fire and swept. the hearth, and then
we went to the door to listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry
cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white
and hard. A man would die to-night lying out on the marshes, I
thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how
awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he
froze to death, and see no help or pity in the glittering
multitude” (p. 49). This section suggests all sorts of contrasts:
e.g., the difference between the book’s many “prisoners” with
and without one another’s help; the difference between a
deluded Pip with his eyes on a star (Estella), and an awakened
Pip aware of his and Estella’s tie with Magwitch; the pitiless
gaze of Estella before her chastening marriage, as distinct from
the gaze of an Estella restored to the human race even as Pip is
restored. All of these contrasts are implicit—retrospectively—
in the symbolic opposition between warm hearth and dry, cold,
frosty, white, hard, starlit night; and, by extension, between
Joe’s warmth and the others’ cold manipulation of one another.
When Estella says that it is not in her nature to love (p. 366),
she speaks of a fact which in one or another degree is true for
Magwitch, Pip, and Miss Havisham as well, before their various
interwound conversions. The same theme is suggested again as
Pip leaves for his first meeting with Estella and Miss Havisham:
“they [the stars] twinkled out one by one, without throwing any
light on the questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss
Havisham’s, and what on earth I was expected to play at” (p.

52). Only with Magwitch’s return does Pip become aware of
the game he has been “playing,” and of how inhumanly cold he
has become.

Such are some of the associations, offered by stars, which

continually remind us of the real coldness and inhumanity of
the particular illusion shown in this book. Thus, Estella’s “light
[a candle] came along the dark passage [in Satis House] like a
star” (p. 59); later “I saw her pass among the extinguished fires
[of the brewery], and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out
by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the
sky” (p. 63); despite the “ashes” of Miss Havisham’s “bridal
feast,” and that lady’s looking like a “figure of the grave,”
“Estella looked more bright and beautiful than before, and I
was under stronger enchantment” (p. 242); the juxtaposing of
Estella and Miss Havisham’s jewels reminds us that Estella, like
the gems, is cold, brilliant, beautiful, and valuable as property
owned and used by Miss Havisham (pp. 89, 245, 273); like
these jewels, Estella is “ ‘ out of reach; prettier than ever;
admired by all who see her’ ” (p. 117; see also pp. 237, 241,
251); after meeting Estella, Pip regards the stars as “poor and
humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I
had passed my life” (pp. 145–146); speaking unknowingly of his
own daughter, Magwitch regards her as jewel-like property, just
as Miss Havisham does, and says to Pip that the “‘bright eyes
somewheres, wot you love the thoughts on ... shall be yourn,
dear boy, if money can buy ‘em’ ” (p. 325), and thus crassly
echoes the sentiments of the “city” Wemmick, whose “‘guiding
star always is, Get hold of portable property’ ” (p. 202). This
contrast between illusion and reality is shown again in Pip’s
statement that “Biddy ... look[ed] at me under the stars with a
clear honest eye” (p. 288). In the context, Pip is deceiving
himself in telling both himself and Biddy that he will come
frequently to visit Joe, whereas Biddy knows that he will not be
able to reconcile his promise with his gentlemanly pretensions.

Interestingly, stars eventually help to signal Pip’s and

Estella’s coming to their senses, humbly seeking forgiveness of
each other, and presumably seeing all things, including love, in
clear—if subdued—light. Thus, “the stars were shining beyond

the mist, and the moon was coming, and the evening was not
dark”; Estella’s “once proud eyes” manifested a “saddened
softened light”; and “as the morning mists had risen long ago
when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising
now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed
to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her” (pp. 491,
493). This last use of stars, though different from the
consistent use of stars throughout the book, is not in violation
of the characters’ experiences or of the star symbol elsewhere.
Further, the stars here support, rather than oppose, Dickens’
decision to accept Bulwer-Lytton’s suggestion for the ending:
i.e., throughout the book, stars have symbolized illusion; quite
appropriately, then, stars here symbolize the very illusions
which Pip and Estella have healthfully dropped, as well as the
cooler, more “tranquil,” but very real promise left to them after
they have shed all misleading glamour. In my opinion, then,
Dickens’ choice of endings is both psychologically and
symbolically valid.

This paradoxical but perfectly accurate use of symbol

appears also in the way gardens are treated. Like stars, gardens
here are almost always associated with the illusory, the
inhuman, the destructive, the unnatural. Miss Havisham’s is “a
rank garden” (p. 63) wherein one looks “upon a rank ruin of
cabbage-stalks, and one box tree that had been clipped round
long ago, like a pudding, and had a new growth at the top of it,
out of shape and of a different colour, as if that part of the
pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt” (p. 80; see
also p. 90). Pip the man sees ugliness and unnaturalness for
what they are, even as he was earlier appalled by the “city”
Wemmick’s walking calmly through a “garden” full of “plants,”
“shoots,” and other growths in his Newgate “greenhouse” (pp.
264–266) as distinct from his strolling about the little garden of
natural growths in Walworth (pp. 208–211). But Pip the dupe
misses the symbolic similarity between himself as unnatural
plant raised by others’ manipulations, and these ugly growths
in Newgate and in Miss Havisham’s yard. This same confusion
turns up again as Estella tries to tell Pip that his devotion to
her is based upon illusion. Significantly, since they are walking

through Miss Havisham’s decayed garden, the ruin all about
them is as nothing to Pip, for whom “it [the garden] was all in
bloom” by virtue of Estella’s accidentally brushing against his
shoulder (pp. 238–241). In his right mind, of course, Pip sees
the garden for the anti-Paradise which it has been in his life (p.
406); and this is why, again, Dickens was right to conclude the
novel as he did. Just as Pip and Estella see the stars for what
they seemed and for what promise they still hold, so finally and
just as credibly they see the garden both as it seemed and as it
suggests belated growth and renewal. Stars and garden work
together symbolically to suggest neither a burgeoning of young
love nor the permanent improbability of all love, but rather the
mutual emotional rejuvenation made accessible by mutually
suffering for illusions. The suffering which such unnatural
careers imply makes Pip’s and Estella’s eventual love for each
other as natural as the mist’s lifting from the stars or the
garden’s displaying at this late date a second growth of ivy
“growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin” (p. 490; see pp.
490–493).

By way of partial recapitulation, let me remind the reader

that this starlit garden is part of our general discussion of the
values of light in the book—whether starlight, candle-light, or
firelight. The last of these remains; and I think it accurate to
say that firelight is easily the most prevalent and important
symbol in Great Expectations.

Firelight is always the atmosphere which signals truth or

reality, as distinct from the candle-lit atmosphere typical of the
poorly seen and illusory. This is why I have said that the
symbolic task of Pip and Magwitch (as well as of Miss
Havisham and Estella) is to re-kindle human truth in their
lives, and it is also why humanly constant Joe is said to be more
at home in his working clothes around the kitchen fire or the
blacksmith’s forge than imprisoned in his Sunday clothes and
visiting either village or city. When Joe tells little Pip how he
married Mrs. Joe and gladly assumed responsibility for her
infant brother, and how he prefers to suffer the inconveniences
imposed upon him by Mrs. Joe, rather than to fight back and
take the risk of causing her as much pain as his father inflicted

upon his mother, he is notably poking and stirring the fire all
the while, and thereby—as I hope to establish—letting us know
that such selflessness is the moral burden of the novel (pp.
45–49). Again, after Pip has delivered himself of some splendid
lies in describing his first visit to Satis House, he refers to the
fire in a way that appears quite gratuitous except as symbol:
“ ‘ Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to tell you
something’” (p. 69). And when he has told Joe that he lied, Pip
penitently sits “down in the ashes at [Joe’s] feet” (p. 70). Joe is
hereby made into a sort of smithy-confessor, the center and
symbol of truth.

B. D

OBIE ON

URREALISM AND

TREAM

-C

ONSCIOUSNESS

Much of the recent criticism of Great Expectations has dealt with
the surrealistic elements to be found in it.

( ... )

Since the term “surrealism” can be applied to different art
forms and can thus have several different meanings, it is
curious that stream-of-consciousness, a strictly literary
technique related in a general way to the surrealistic
movement, has from time to time been mentioned in
connection with Dickens’s writing but never traced in any
detail throughout the novels. Great Expectations in particular
would seem to have many of the characteristics of the
technique, dose examination of which not only provides greater
insight into the workings of the novel, but into Dickens’s
general style as well. It may not be the complex novel that
twentieth-century readers of Joyce and Woolf have grown to
expect, but Dickens’s experiments with stream-of-
consciousness in Great Expectations may be responsible to some
degree for the book’s effect on modern readers.

That Dickens should arrive at simple forms of stream-of-

consciousness is not surprising, for he was throughout his life a

conscious manipulator of readers’ emotions both as a writer of
novels and as a public reader of them. His pleasure in exciting
and controlling his audience frequently led him to indulge in
descriptions of violence, arch-villainy, mystery, flights and
pursuits, and other melodramatic stock-in-trade. Well aware of
the attraction of repulsion, Dickens often let his imagination
play upon macabre or sadistic situations, leading some critics to
suggest that his appeals for sympathy for the sufferings of the
underdog at the hands of a brutal and callous society may have
been more related to his interest in commercial success than to
any artistic purpose. However, as Stone asserts, the lasting
success Dickens has enjoyed could have come only to a
conscious artist capable of capturing “the evanescent and yet
infinite quality of experience.”

In spite of the restrictions

imposed by Victorian society, the phenomenal career of
Charles Dickens reveals an equally phenomenal growth of
artistic sophistication in the representation of such immediacy
of experience in his novels.

( ... )

The direct interior monologue aims at representing the
contents and processes of the mind as they exist at prespeech
levels. Harry Stone defines the interior monologue as a
literary attempt to “render in written words that
semistructured and evanescent aspect of private consciousness
which is composed of disorganized and yet meaningfully
associated speech-thought.”

1 8

In the direct interior

monologue the narrator is invisible and “paring his nails.”
Stone recognizes that in his later novels Dickens was capable
of representing consciousness by the interior monologue
technique, and asserts that in some of his lesser-known short
pieces he came close to the interior monologues of the
twentieth century.

However, in Great Expectations, certainly

not a “lesser-known short piece,” Dickens skillfully renders an
individual consciousness. A major portion of the novel is
concerned with the presentation not of external action but of
the drama taking place in Pip’s mind as he assesses the world

and tries to find his place in it. Dickens does strive to maintain
a degree of narrative coherence while depicting the images and
associations of Pip’s mind, but the qualities of rambling
thought, discontinuity, and private associations are strongly
evident. For example, the book begins not with the depiction
of some grand action, but with a young boy staring at five
graves and indulging in two aspects of mental activity: memory
and imagination.

My most vivid and broad impression of the identity of

things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable
raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found
out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with
nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of
this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were
dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew,
Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, the infant children of the
aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark
flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with
dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding
on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line
beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from
which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the
small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and
beginning to cry, was Pip.

A short time later the convict forces the reader upside down
along with Pip:

When the church came to itself—for he was so sudden
and strong that he made it go head over heels before me,
and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church
came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone,
trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously. (2)

In both excerpts there is a freedom and fluidity of syntax which
correspond to the darting impressions within the frightened
child’s mind.

The indirect monologue differs from the direct only because

it less intensely reflects the inner workings of the mind of the
protagonist. The reader is more aware of the author’s presence,
for though unspoken material is still presented as if it were
directly from the consciousness of a character, there is a wider
use of descriptive and expository techniques. Scenes can be
more dramatized, or the point of view can shift to third person.
In other words, the reader goes in and out of the character’s
mind; he is not strictly imprisoned within it. Thus, the indirect
monologue fulfills its function as Humphrey defines it by
creating in the reader “a sense of the author’s continuous
presence.”

The arrival of Magwitch at Pip’s London abode

late at night is such a scene. The reader is led into it by
following the impressions and reflections of Pip as he sits
alone. When a footstep is heard on the stair, the reader is
drawn out of Pip’s consciousness and into a scene which is
partly dramatized and partly mental.

Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown
out, I took up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-
head. Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my
lamp, for all was quiet.

“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called

out, looking down.

“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath. “What

floor do you want?”

“The top. Mr. Pip.”
“That is my name. There is nothing the matter?”
“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man

came on.

I stood with my lamp held out over the stair rail, and

he came slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to
shine upon a book, and its circle of light was very
contracted; so that he was in it for a mere instant, and
then out of it. In the instant I had seen a face that was
strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of
being touched and pleased by the sight of me. (319)

The scene continues to alternate between dialogue and the
private thoughts of Pip. The dialogue carries the action
forward, but Pip’s thoughts set the atmosphere of mystery,
dismay, and confusion. The reader is still looking through Pip’s
eyes, though with less intensity than in the direct interior
monologue quoted earlier.

( ... )

The importance of the native tradition in the development of
the English novel is worth noting. Before Freud, Jung, and the
surrealists made their contributions to the tide of knowledge
concerning the human psyche, Charles Dickens had developed
techniques for conveying some of the drama which takes place
in an individual’s consciousness. Preeminent Victorian though
he was, his narrative innovations point clearly toward the
stream-of-consciousness novels soon to follow.

Notes

1. “Dickens and the Interior Monologue,” PQ 38 (1959): 64.

18. Thomas E. Connolly, “Technique in Great Expectations,” Philological

Quarterly 34 (1955): 52–53.

19. P. 56.

20. Great Expectations (New York, 1966), pp. 1–2. All subsequent

quotations from the novel will be taken from this paperback edition
(Holt, Rinehart, Winston).

21. P. 29.

INA

UERBACH ON

ICKENS AND THE

VOLUTION

OF THE

IGHTEENTH

-C

ENTURY

RPHAN

All Dickens’ novels constitute variations on the theme of
orphanhood, but only in Great Expectations is he able to
confront it without false pathos, in all the dread it held for him
and his age. Pip’s confessions both recapitulate and comment
on those of previous orphan novels we have looked at, and

show, too, why the myth of the orphan—which at its high point
practically constituted orphan-worship—was losing its efficacy
as the century drew to a close.

( ... )

Pip’s story repeats rather mechanically the paradigm of the
orphan-myth established in the 1840’s.

Like Jane Eyre, Pip

brings down by fire the great house he enters as “a kind of
servant,” destroying and purging it of the banked embers of its
past. The power Pip acquires over Miss Havisham is not Jane’s
quasi-supernatural spell over Rochester, but the power of his
sincere emotion, which to Dickens is always magical. In a key
scene, Miss Havisham kneels to him: “‘Until you spoke to her
the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that
showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had
done. What have I done! What have I done!’ And so again,
twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!” (GE, p. 411).
Miss Havisham’s yielding to the power of Pip’s emotion seems
somehow to ignite the fire that destroys her and Satis House, a
destruction that Pip, like Jane again, has foreseen in odd
premonitory visions. So the vision of the orphan passing
through a great house which his influence destroys and
restores retains its potency. But we do not think of this as we
read the novel.

For one thing, its point of view makes us aware not of Pip’s

power over his world, but of the power of his world over him.
His early perspective—that of “the small bundle of shivers
growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry”—is never really
lost. His adult life is still pervaded by his childhood terrors, so
that he does not convey to us his powers even when he
commands them. Of course, Dickens’ specialty is the worm’s-
eye perspective of a monstrous world looming large over a
helpless child, but in Great Expectations the terror is not simply
a trick of “camera angle,” as it sometimes is in Dickens. It is
inherent in Pip’s situation: he really is alone. For the first time
in the novels we have looked at, the orphan’s parents are
implacably dead, equated only with their tombstones. Father

figures though generations of critics have rightly called them,
neither Magwitch nor Joe is really Pip’s father, making Pip’s
alienation all the more terrifying when Magwitch looms out of
his parents’ graves. Moreover, there is no God in Great
Expectations to give sanction to Pip’s identity. God withdrew
from Dickens’ world in Bleak House, when the “distant ray of
light” that fell on the orphan Jo was finally extinguished in Jo’s
death. Pip’s selfhood is contained not in his social definition, as
Moll’s was, nor in his soul, as Jane’s was, but in a more fragile
thing: his name.

For Pip’s identity is self-bestowed; he names himself before

the novel begins. His childish naming of himself recalls the
eighteenth-century orphan as self-made man, but it is the last
act of autonomy Pip is permitted. When Magwitch stipulates
that Pip keep his name upon accepting his tainted inheritance,
his fear is prophetic, for this is the one thing Pip can’t do: from
that moment, a bewildering variety of names is bestowed on
him by everyone he meets, even his friend Herbert christening
him “Handel.” The crowning erosion of his identity is Joe’s
schizophrenic slipping back and forth between “Pip” and “sir.”
This is a cannibalistic inversion of the plenitude of names Moll
assumed in her escapades. In her picaresque mutability, Moll
was simultaneously all these selves and no-self. Pip has only
one identity, which is Pip, and when others gnaw away at it,
they gnaw away at him.

Just as the many names Pip is given employ a picaresque

device to invert it, so does the motif of costume. Instead of
being a master of disguise, Pip is tormented by his clothes,
which become embodied in the humiliating Nemesis of Trabb’s
boy. His social rise itself inverts the picaro’s. Instead of being a
brilliant improviser, succeeding by the spontaneous
manipulation of chance events, Pip mechanically obeys
commands to succeed. He does not inveigle his way into Miss
Havisham’s house; he is ordered there. He plays grimly when
she says “Play!”—no picaro, with his love of games, would
require such a command!—loves Estella when she commands
him to “love her,” and yearns for gentility as she programs him
to. Moll’s desire for gentility was spontaneous; Pip’s is

conditioned. Once Pip is “made” a gentleman, all his moves are
charted for him according to stipulations delivered by Jaggers.
Never once does he act independently; even his adherence to
Magwitch is as much a reaction to the influence of another as
his love for Estella is. The legacy he bestows on Herbert and
forces Miss Havisham to maintain is his one autonomous act,
and here, he is “making” another as he has been “made.”
Estella, whose automaton-like qualities are only an
exaggeration of Pip’s, acts as his chorus: “We have no choice,
you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to
follow our own devices, you and I” (GE, p. 285). The repetition
of “you and I” is mechanical, sepulchral, emphasizing the
identities they lack by insisting on them. Even more chilling
are the words she intones to Miss Havisham: “I am what you
have made me” (GE, p. 322). This zombie-like creature is the
opposite of the early Victorian orphan, whose mysterious
origins were suggestive of infinite Being. Having no soul, the
orphan in Great Expectations has become a thing.

The eighteenth-century orphan has been turned around,

having become manipulated by rather than manipulator of
events. He has gone from self-made man to made man. In an
odd inversion of the Frankenstein image, Pip returns to the
eighteenth-century idea of the orphan as artifact, but
emphasizes his loss of power: “The imaginary student pursued
by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not
more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made
me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more
he admired me and the fonder he was of me” (GE, p. 354). The
idea of Pip as artifact is further emphasized by the fact that
none of the people who manipulate him are his parents. His
being is not organically shaped by inheritance, however hidden.
His parents are tombstones; he is infinitely conditioned. The
convict image that always follows him seems more suggestive
of this incessant coercion than it is of guilt, despite the
emphasis of Dorothy Van Ghent’s brilliant essay.

After all,

Pip sins only in thought or by omission. He wishes to run away
from the forge, and later from Magwitch, but never actually
does so. He avoids seeing Joe and Biddy, but when he does, he

never actively cuts them, responding to their love with love as
he responds to everybody’s emotions. The most terrifying part
of Great Expectations is Pip’s lack of the initiative to sin. Like
Alex, Anthony Burgess’ clockwork orange, he is a made man
even when he hugs his own evil to himself. In a state of infinite
conditioning, there is no room for the fruit of the soul growing
on the tree of God. The protective coloring of the orphan was
always a sham.

Notes

17. An analysis of Dickens’ many uses and variations of this paradigm

would constitute a long article in itself.

18. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New

York, 1933), pp. 125–38.

TEPHEN

EWMAN ON

AGGERS AND

EMMICK

INDOWS ON

ITTLE

RITAIN

Jaggers is one of Dickens’s most triumphant achievements in
the delineation of character by means of exterior details. By
observing these details we can build up an astonishingly vivid
and complete impression of the man. Jaggers himself of course
tells its much, with his ‘disagreeably sharp and suspicious’ eyes,
burly figure, ‘great, bright, creaking boots’ (which laugh for
him ‘in a dry and suspicions way’), his ability to conduct only a
cross-examination, never a conversation, and his general
manner which, as Wemmick tells us meaningfully, is ‘only
professional’. He is a man whose private nature is totally
subdued to his public personality, and a man who delights in
‘seeing through’ people as though their individual colourings,
hopes, thoughts, feelings and beliefs are merely so much tinsel
draped river their contemptible vices. This aspect of Jaggers is
seen most vividly in Chapter 29 where he broods over the whist
table, coming out ‘with mean little cards at the ends of hands,
before which the glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly
abased’. Yet he is by no means drily matter-of-fact. On the

contrary, we can detect from the furniture of his office and
house strange and concealed currents of the man’s passion, not
easily evident in his public manner. Pip describes the office as ‘a
dismal place’ and it contains disquieting things: ‘an old rusty
pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several strange-looking boxes and
packages, and two dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces peculiarly
swollen, and twitchy about the nose’. These are images of
mystery and violence. And the house is dark and dingy, its
ornamental ‘carved garlands on the panelled walls’ reminding
Pip of nooses. The books in the dining room reflect crime,
crime and yet more crime. And, above all, there is the
housekeeper: a living witness (as the casts of hanged men were
(lead witnesses), of Jaggers’s professional skill; but, more than
this, an unconscious witness to some obscure, controlled
sadism in the man. ‘A wild beast tamed’, Wemmick calls her;
and as such she acts both as the outward sign of an inward
impulse to animal violence in Jiggers and as the image of that
brutality conquered.

This repressed sadism throws a revealing light on Jaggers’s

attitude to Molly’s daughter, Estella, in Chapter 29. Pip
observes him ‘look at her from under his thick eyebrows, and
raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him, with
those rich flushes of glitter and colour in it’. And it illuminates
the nature of his interest in ‘the spider’ Bentley Drummle.
Jaggers’s public self conceals and controls a temperament both
sensual and sadistic. He surrounds himself with images that
either flatter or reflect his darkest self; his absorption in crime
is partly an expression of his interest in that self. As such we can
understand the obsessive need to wash himself in scented soap
at the end of each day—Dickens knew as well as Freud what
was the classic ritual symbol of guilt.

Yet there is reason as well as neurosis behind this grim view

of humanity as Dickens makes clear in Chapter 52. Jaggers’s
account of how he saved Estella from the usual fate of
criminals’ children glows with a pitying indignation that has
nothing unhealthy about it. Any thought in the reader that
such emotion is uncharacteristic of the mail is immediately
curbed partly by the intensely dramatic circumstances (Jaggers,

for perhaps the first time in his life, is compelled to submit to
examination), partly by the typically intransigent language that
admits nothing even while it tells all:

‘Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and
that all he saw of children, was, their being generated in
great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that
he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar,
where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he
habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped,
transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for
the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case
that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily
business life, he had reason to look upon as so much
spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his
net—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made
orphans, bedevilled somehow.’

And Jaggers’s profession is consistent with this complex

character. He is an attorney, an advocate for the underworld.
He defends the deprived and the depraved. He is unscrupulous
in his methods, as we see in Chapter 20 where his client Mike,
busy collecting false witnesses, offends him not by lies but by
careless phraseology. Jaggers has no interest in legal justice. He
is interested only in saving as many outcasts as possible from
the judgment of a society which both reason and instinct tell
him is as corrupt as the criminals it condemns. As Pip says
when he sees him ‘at it’ in court: ‘Which side he was on, I
couldn’t make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding the
whole place in a mill; I only knew that when I stole out on
tiptoe, he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was making
the legs of the old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive
under the table, by his denunciations of his conduct as the
representative of British law and justice in that chair that day’.
(Chapter 24.)

‘After such knowledge. What forgiveness?’ It would be

shallow to call Jaggers’s view of life cynical.

Nevertheless, for all its realism, this view is not the whole

truth. There are areas of compassion, responsibility,
magnanimity, love, that it cannot comprehend. Joe, for instance,
is beyond Jaggers’s understanding. He regards him as an idiot for
not taking advantage of a profitable payment for Pip’s services.
Likewise he is ‘querulous and angry’ with Pip for letting
Magwitch’s wealth escape him. Living continually with the
worst in humanity he has ceased to believe in the best. It is this
awareness of the best that dignifies hip’s experience. Jaggers’s
vision lends perspective to the central theme; it never rivals or
obscures it.

Pip’s other contact in Little Britain is Jaggers’s clerk

Wemmick. And Wemmick also presents an answer to the
problem of reconciling sub-world with upper world. His
method is simply to shelve the problem and lead a double life.
In Little Britain he endorses Jaggers’s values and scorns
anything that ‘smells of mortality’. In Walworth he pulls up the
drawbridge of his miniature castle, ‘brushes the Newgate
cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged’. From Wemmick’s point
of view this course works perfectly. He feels no tension
between his two lives and he never allows the one to affect the
other. And he is certainly a most attractive character—at least
his Walworth self is. He shows genuine devotion to his father,
proves a staunch friend to Pip, and finally becomes a married
man with prospects of quiet contentment. Dickens never
allows Wemmick’s domesticity to appear sentimental. He salts
it with Wemmick’s oddity (‘“Now, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick,
triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came out, “let
me ask you whether any body would suppose this to be a
wedding-party!” ’ (Chapter 55) and his incurable interest in
‘portable property’—both nicely adjusted indications of the
ghostly other self who allows no emotions and devotes
himself to material things. No wonder the contemporary
reviews almost unanimously voted Wemmick the comic
triumph of the novel.

But we mustn’t be hoodwinked by the charm of the

Walworth Wemmick into forgetting his twin. The Little
Britain Wemmick is very different. We can perhaps gauge his
nature best if, instead of regarding the Walworth twin as

humanizing the Little Britain twin, we regard the Little Britain
twin is de-humanizing the Walworth one. For it is by de-
humanizing himself that Wemmick survives at the office. And
because he lacks Jaggers’s savage vision of corruption his
desiccated attitude to humanity is perhaps more frightening.
His conversation with Pip in Chapter 21 is as revealing as his
reptilian features: ‘He had glittering eyes,’ Pip tells us, ‘—small,
keen, and black—and thin wide mottled lips’.

‘You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered, in

London. But there are plenty of people anywhere, who’ll
do that for you.’

‘If there is had blood between you and them,’ said I, to

soften it off a little.

‘Oh! I don’t know about bad blood’, returned Mr.

Wemmick; ‘there’s not much bad blood about. They’ll do
it, if there’s anything to be got by it.’

‘That makes it worse.’
‘You think so?’ returned Mr. Wemmick. ‘Much about

the same, I should say.’

Jaggers sees life as essentially evil. Wemmick reduces it to a
matter of profit and loss, self-interest and ‘portable property’.
He is wholly materialistic. By simplifying humanity in this way
he can confront the worst unmoved. He studies men as
clinically as a surgeon. Indeed, in Chapter 32, Pip notices that.
He regards his clients as specimens rather than individuals.
This chapter contains one of the most shocking scenes in the
novel. Wemmick introduces Pip to a condemned man: ‘a portly
upright man (whom I can see now, as I write) in a well-worn
olive-coloured frock-coat. With a peculiar pallor over-
spreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that went
wandering about when he tried to fix there, came up to a
corner of the bars, and put his hand to his hat—which had a
greasy and fatty surface like cold broth—with a half-serious and
half-jocose military salute.’

Pip’s horrified description captures the man’s mixture of

terror and bravado exactly. The sickening detail about the hat

suggests more potently than any analysis a bold temperament
congealing at the prospect of death. But Wemmick regards him
merely as a dead plant to be stripped of its remaining useful
attributes. The way he builds up his ‘portable property’ from
condemned clients is only one step removed from the ‘Jack’ (or
odd job man) of the causeway in Chapter 54, who dresses in the
clothes of drowned men.

In the face of this callousness we can perhaps see Wemmick’s

ability to lead a double life without trace of psychological
disturbance as an implicit criticism of his system rather than a
solution to the problem of the two worlds. The fact that he can
isolate his humane qualities so completely suggests their
limitation, not their strength. As Joe says in Chapter 57, ‘ “ a
Englishman’s ouse is his Castle,”’ but it is a sign of weakness
when a castle is forever in a state of siege. Like Jaggers,
Wemmick serves chiefly as a foil to Pip’s more profound
experience.

LAYTON ON

REAT

XPECTATIONS

AS A

ORESHADOWING OF

OSTMODERNISM

Great Expectations—and at last I refer to the novel by Charles
Dickens—mixes cultural signs from different periods as
pervasively and as incongruously as any postmodern text. Joe,
the simple blacksmith, for example, represents a nostalgic
portrait of a figure from an earlier era, a phase of capitalism fast
disappearing in 1861, when the novel was published, although
not as uncommon in rural areas in the 1820s, when the novel
was set. The values associated with Joe—integrity, unswerving
loyalty, pride in one’s craft—accrue to this residual economic
order, thus serving as an implicit critique of the more highly
developed dominant economy of London. Staging the contrast
as one between country and city helps to reduce the sense of
incongruity for readers. Still, the incompatibility of this ideal
with modern existence is dramatized at the end of the novel.
The only way Pip can find to be true to the lessons he has
learned from Joe is to spend eleven years away from the forge

in his company’s colonial branch in Cairo. Pip’s summary of
those eleven years represents the most “Victorian” moment in
the book. His only consolation, the thing that enables him to
hold up his head when he thinks of how badly he has behaved,
is that now he “lived frugally, and paid my debts.” If the
reader had any doubts about the middle-class positioning of
this Victorian ethic, Pip clears them up without delay: “I must
not leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House,
or that we made mints of money. We were not in a grand way
of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our
profits” (436).

If Joe is a holdover from a rural, pre-Victorian mode of early

capitalism and Pip matures into a thoroughly up-to-date
middle-class Victorian, then is there anyone in the novel who
might be said to fore shadow postmodernism? I am happy to
say that there is. That person is not Pip, so the answer to the
question in my title must be: No, Pip is not postmodern. The
character who has the best claim to that role is a minor figure,
although a favorite with readers down through the years:
Wemmick.

Mr. Jaggers’s clerk conflates enough incongruous cultural

signs in his humble person to become a veritable icon of the
Dickens icon. A model of businesslike decorum at the office,
with his post-office mouth and his invariable advice to look
after “portable property,” he is an entirely different man at
home, where he indulges his Aged P, shyly courts Miss Skiffins,
and lovingly tends to his house and garden. The split between
these two incarnations is so profound that Pip speculates that
there must be “twin Wemmicks” (356). A division of this kind,
between the self in its “private and personal capacity,” to use
Wemmick’s words (273), and the public, professional self is
seen often enough today but is hardly restricted to
postmodernism. This kind of alienation was, in fact, one of the
hallmarks of the “modern” self, a condition that Marx famously
identified as a consequence of urban capitalism.

If a divided self were Wemmick’s only distinctive

characteristic, then he would be an unusually pure
representative of a single historical type, “modern man.” But

Wemmick’s interest hardly stops there. His home at Walworth
is his other claim to fame. It is a little wooden cottage, which
Wemmick has transformed into a miniature Gothic castle,
perfect in every detail, including mock fortifications, a moat
with its own drawbridge, a flag, and a cannon, which is
discharged punctually at nine o’clock every evening. He lives in
a simulacrum of another era, a theme park version of feudal
England. And like today’s theme parks, he takes pride in
bringing to life a cliché. Wemmick has turned his house into a
literal incarnation of the saying “A man’s home is his castle.”
His mode of existence—inside this simulacrum—reproduces
the economic conditions of a “freehold” (200), as far as is
possible in a suburb of nineteenth-century London. As
Wemmick proudly explains, “I am my own engineer, and my
own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener,
and my own Jack of all Trades” (200).

Inside the castle is Wemmick’s prized “collection of

curiosities.” His treasures “were mostly of a felonious
character,” including a forger’s pen and “a distinguished razor
or two” (201). The collection is a treasury of Victorian murder,
as odd as Rick Geary’s postmodern comic book of that name.
The Aged P is so proud of his son’s accomplishment that he
thinks “it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my
son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment” (200). After visiting
some of the houses preserved by the British National Trust,
with their mismatched architectural styles and their (far more
expensive) collections of curiosities, I sometimes wonder if they
did. In short, Wemmick’s home is a postmodern pastiche, a
simulacrum, as misshapen—and comical—as “Great Hair-
Spectations” at the local mall.

With Wemmick as a guide, one begins to notice that Great

Expectations itself is a palimpsest of different cultural periods.
Raymond Williams has pointed out that no era is ever
characterized by a single ideology, and he has proposed
dividing cultural beliefs along temporal lines into the “residual,
dominant, and emergent.” In Dickens’s novel, one can identify
traces of at least five different epochs, each competing with the
others for cultural space: (1) the “feudal” freehold of

100

Wemmick’s castle; (2) the preindustrial capitalism of Joe’s
forge; (3) the “Victorian” middle-class values of Pip’s mature
years, with their clear connections to the fortunes of empire;
(4) the “modern” alienation that splits Wemmick into twin
selves; and (5) the “postmodern” world of simulacra and
pastiche. The discontinuity among these layers contributes to
many of the novel’s most enduring effects: the comedy of
Wemmick, the tenderness toward Joe, the ethical growth of
Pip, and the social commentary on modern urban alienation.
Yet few readers before today have ever read them as signs that
there is “no consensus about reality.” The more usual
procedure has been to single out one strand and elevate it as
the master discourse of the text. Where Dickens’s
contemporaries saw the novel as a return to the comic types
and affectionate portraits of his youthful fiction, modernist
critics perceived a new, “dark” phase of social criticism, and
David Lean and the Classics Illustrated of the 1940s discerned
images of masculinity and national identity that could
symbolically replace the loss of empire. Only at the end of the
twentieth century have people begun to focus on discontinuity
itself, seeing in Dickens a foreshadowing of the “incompatible
realities” of postmodernism. When Elvis comes calling for
Estella, can any marriage be too far-fetched?

DWARD

W. S

AID ON

USTRALIA

RITISH

MPERIALISM

AND

ICKENS

’

ICTORIAN

USINESSMEN

Let me say a little here about what I have in mind, using [a]
well-known and very great novel.... Dickens’s Great Expectations
(1861) is primarily a novel about self-delusion, about Pip’s vain
attempts to become a gentleman with neither the hard work
nor the aristocratic source of income required for such a role.
Early in life he helps a condemned convict, Abel Magwitch,
who, after being transported to Australia, pays back his young
benefactor with large sums of money; because the lawyer

101

involved says nothing as he disburses the money, Pip persuades
himself that an elderly gentlewoman, Miss Havisham, has been
his patron. Magwitch then reappears illegally in London,
unwelcomed by Pip because everything about the man reeks of
delinquency and unpleasantness. In the end, though, Pip is
reconciled to Magwitch and to his reality: he finally
acknowledges Magwitch—hunted, apprehended, and fatally
ill—as his surrogate father, not as someone to be denied or
rejected, though Magwitch is in fact unacceptable, being from
Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not
the repatriation of transported English criminals.

Most, if not all, readings of this remarkable work situate it

squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction,
whereas I believe that it belongs in a history both more
inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow. It
has been left to two more recent books than Dickens’s—Robert
Hughes’s magisterial The Fatal Shore and Paul Carter’s
brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay—to reveal a vast
history of speculation about the experience of Australia, a
“white” colony like Ireland, in which we can locate Magwitch
and Dickens not as mere coincidental references in that history,
but as participants in it, through the novel and through a much
older and wider experience between England and its overseas
territories.

Australia was established as a penal colony in the late

eighteenth century mainly so that England could transport an
irredeemable, unwanted excess population of felons to a place,
originally charted by Captain Cook, that would also function as
a colony replacing those lost in America. The pursuit of profit,
the building of empire, and what Hughes calls social apartheid
together produced modern Australia, which by the time
Dickens first took an interest in it during the 1840s (in David
Copperfield Wilkins Micawber happily immigrates there) had
progressed somewhat into profitability and a sort of “free
system” where laborers could do well on their own if allowed
to do so. Yet in Magwitch “Dickens knotted several strands in
the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of
transportation. They could succeed, but they could hardly, in

102

the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a
technical, legal sense, but what they suffered there warped
them into permanent outsiders. And yet they were capable of
redemption—as long as they stayed in Australia” (Hughes 586).

Carter’s exploration of what he calls Australia’s spatial

history offers us another version of that same experience. Here
explorers, convicts, ethnographers, profiteers, soldiers chart the
vast and relatively empty continent each in a discourse that
jostles, displaces, or incorporates the others. Botany Bay is
therefore first of all an Enlightenment discourse of travel and
discovery, then a set of travelling narrators (including Cook)
whose words, charts, and intentions accumulate the strange
territories and gradually turn them into “home.” The adjacence
between the Benthamite organization of space (which produced
the city of Melbourne) and the apparent disorder of the
Australian bush is shown by Carter to have become an
optimistic transformation of social space, which produced an
Elysium for gentlemen, an Eden for laborers in the 1840s
(Carter 202–60). What Dickens envisions for Pip, being
Magwitch’s “London gentleman,” is roughly equivalent to what
was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia, one social
space authorizing another.

But Great Expectations was not written with anything like the

concern for native Australian accounts that Hughes or Carter
has, nor did it presume or forecast a tradition of Australian
writing, which in fact came later to include the literary works
of David Malouf, Peter Carey, and Patrick White. The
prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but
imperial: subjects can be taken to places like Australia, but they
cannot be allowed a “return” to metropolitan space, which, as
all Dickens’s fiction testifies, is meticulously charted, spoken
for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages. So on
the one hand, interpreters like Hughes and Carter expand on
the relatively attenuated presence of Australia in nineteenth-
century British writing, expressing the fullness and earned
integrity of an Australian history that became independent
from Britain’s in the twentieth century; yet, on the other, an
accurate reading of Great Expectations must note that after

103

Magwitch’s delinquency is expiated, so to speak, after Pip
redemptively acknowledges his debt to the old, bitterly
energized, and vengeful convict, Pip himself collapses and is
revived in two explicitly positive ways. A new Pip appears, less
laden than the old Pip with the chains of the past—he is
glimpsed in the form of a child, also called Pip; and the old Pip
takes on a new career with his boyhood friend Herbert Pocket,
this time not as an idle gentleman but as a hardworking trader
in the East, where Britain’s other colonies offer a sort of
normality that Australia never could.

Thus even as Dickens settles the difficulty with Australia,

another structure of attitude and reference emerges to suggest
Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the
Orient. In his new career as colonial businessman, Pip is hardly
an exceptional figure, since nearly all of Dickens’s businessmen,
wayward relatives, and frightening outsiders have a fairly
normal and secure connection with the empire. But it is only in
recent years that these connections have taken on interpretative
importance. A new generation of scholars and critics—the
children of decolonization in some instances, the beneficiaries
(like sexual, religious, and racial minorities) of advances in
human freedom at home—have seen in such great texts of
Western literature a standing interest in what was considered a
lesser world, populated with lesser people of color, portrayed as
open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoes....

To lose sight of or ignore the national and international

context of, say, Dickens’s representations of Victorian
businessmen, and to focus only on the internal coherence of
their roles in his novels is to miss an essential connection
between his fiction and its historical world. And understanding
that connection does not reduce or diminish the novels’ value
as works of art: on the contrary, because of their worldliness,
because of their complex affiliations with their real setting, they
are more interesting and more valuable as works of art.

104

Works by Charles Dickens

“A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” 1833.

Sketches by Boz, 1836.

Pickwick Papers, 1836–7.

Oliver Twist, 1837–9.

Nicholas Nickelby, 1838–9.

The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840–1.

Barnaby Rudge, 1841.

American Notes, 1842.

A Christmas Carol, 1843.

Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843–4.

The Chimes, 1844.

The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845.

The Battle of Life, 1846.

Pictures from Italy, 1846.

Dombey and Son, 1846–8.

The Haunted Man, 1848.

David Copperfield, 1849–50.

A Child’s History of England, 1851–3.

Bleak House, 1852–3.

Hard Times, 1854.

Little Dorrit, 1855–7.

A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.

Great Expectations, 1861.

Our Mutual Friend, 1864–5.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870.

105

Annotated Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

This thousand-plus page study delves into both Dickens’s
public and private lives. Ackroyd contends that Dickens was
the first to introduce the language of the Romantic poets
into the novel. He also says that his dramatic readings
revolutionized the art form.

Brook, G.L. The Language of Dickens. London: Andre Deutsch,

1970.
This book concerns the speech of Dickens’s characters,
including Joe Gargery’s, in sections such as “Substandard
Grammar” and “Substandard Vocabulary.”

Cary, John, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination.

London, Faber & Faber, 1973.
Using concrete examples from Dickens’s work in each of the
seven chapters—broken down into topics such as “Dickens
and Violence” and “Dickens and Sex”—this work illustrates
how the writer’s imagination created interesting and
sometimes unexpected juxtapositions. It also discusses
Dickens’ tendency to “break his characters into fragments,”
and describes how a character’s approach to inanimate
objects reveals their conflicts or mindsets

Carlisle, Janice, ed., Charles Dickens: Great Expectations. Case

Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford Books of
St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
This work contains an authoritative text of Great
Expectations, biographical as well as historical contexts, and
essays that cover a broad spectrum of current theoretical
approaches, including feminist, psychoanalytic, gender, and
deconstructionist critiques.

Ford, George, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism

Since 1836. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.

106

A study of Dickens’s affects on his audiences, this book
addresses along the way both the evolution of the author and
the reading public. Ford argues that Dickens doesn’t stick to
a time-honored fictional formula; in fact, according to some
critics, Great Expectations was a welcome return to some of
Dickens’s earlier stylings.

Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. London:

Chapman & Hall, 1872–4.

Drawing on letters and anecdotes, this three-volume work is
part biography and part critical appraisal. Forester’s
memories help chart the evolution of Great Expectations from
Dickens’s initial idea, to the steamer chartered so as he
might accurately render Magwitch’s attempted escape, to
Dickens’s exhaustion following the book’s completion.

Gross, John, and Gabriel Pearson, eds. Dickens and the

Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

Christopher Ricks’s “Great Expectations,” argues that
Dickens maintains the reader’s sympathy by giving Pip
enough honest self-reflection to admit his shortcomings and
enough impetus to do good work in the name of his friends
and family. Other essays herein also mention Great
Expectations, including Angus Wilson’s “The Heroes and
Heroines of Dickens,” which connects Estella with Bella
Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend.

House, Humphrey, The Dickens World. London: Oxford

University Press, 1941.

This work discusses in part the way the attitude of money in
Great Expectations is more typical of the time of the book’s
publication than it is of the earlier decade in which it is set.
House contends that Dickens shared Magwitch’s belief that
money can make a gentleman; he argues against the
assumption that the base of Great Expectations is class
consciousness.

107

Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph,

revised edition London: Allen Lane, 1977.

This modern biography deals extensively with the
relationship between Dickens and Charles Lever, whose
novel A Day’s Ride hurt the circulation of All the Year Round
to the extent that Dickens felt compelled to publish Great
Expectations in the magazine.

Leavis, F.R., and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist. London,

Chatto & Windus, 1970.

This work contains a close reading of Great Expectations that
is particularly sympathetic to Pip—a character certainly
plagued by fears and inadequacies, but never completely
blind to his own fallibility. It draws parallels between Great
Expectations and other books, including The Scarlet Letter and
Pilgrim’s Progress.

Martin, Graham, Great Expectations. Milton Keynes: Open

University Publications, 1985.

This work is part of a course on “the Nineteenth Century
Novel and Its Legacy.”

Miller, J. Hillis, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Often called one of the most influential studies of Dickens’s
novels, this book contains a quite detailed and documented
chapter on Great Expectations, which contends that Pip is the
archetypal Dickens hero. Pip must confront the conflicts
created by money and rank, Miller argues, and eventually
must disregard societal pressures and surrender to “selfhood.”

Rosenberg, Edgar, Great Expectations: Charles Dickens. A

Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1999.
This is a thorough and comparative study of all versions of
Dickens novel, including its serial runs in both Harper’s

108

Weekly and in All the Year Round. It also contains background
information, context-setting facts, and a variety of criticsm.

Stone, Harry, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy

and Novel-Making Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1979.
Arguing for a strong focus on the fairy-tale approach
Dickens took to his writing, this book suggests Orlick’s role
as devil and Magwitch’s role as Pip’s double. The work also
suggests two possible works which directly influenced the
writing of Great Expectations: E.C. Grenville Murray’s
preface to The Roving Englishman, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Dickens-edited short story “The Ghost in the Garden
Room,” which appeared in All the Year Round and which
concerns a protagonist strikingly similar to Pip.

Wall, Stephen, ed. Charles Dickens. Penguin Critical

Anthologies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
A critical anthology that contains the original ending of
Great Expectations, Thomas Hardy’s essay on “Food and
Ceremony,” and several other essays and exhibits. The
appendix gives a dated list of when each installment of the
serial appeared in All the Year Round.

Worth, George J. Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography.

New York: Garland, 1986.
A comprehensive listing of scholarship, criticism, and
appreciation of Great Expectations, from the time the book
was published in 1861, to Dickens biographies and
bibliographies, to film adaptations.

Wright, Thomas. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Butler &

Tanner, 1935.
Praising both the pathos and humor in Great Expectations,
Wright suggests that this is Dickens’s only work in which the
hero and the heroine are the most interesting characters. He
draws the conclusion that Estella is actually a model for

109

Dickens’s lover Ellen Ternan, pointing out that Ellen
Lawless Ternan’s initials are present in the heroine’s first
name.

110

Contributors

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University. He is the author of over 20 books, including
Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961),
Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading
(1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of
Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western
Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels,
Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973)
sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary
relationships between the great writers and their predecessors.
His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to
Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred
Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited
(2003). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for
Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International
Prize.

Sarah Robbins has an MFA in fiction writing from New School
University. She is a New York City-based writer and editor.
Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the
American Book Review, ArtNews, Glamour, and Newsday, and she
is currently at work on a novel.

George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and critic, first
revolutionized the Victorian stage and later became concerned
with dramas of ideas. He is the author of many plays, among
them Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913), and Saint
Joan (1923). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

George Orwell is best known for his satirical and political
writings. This British essayist and novelist is the author of
Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1946), and Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949).

111

Peter Brooks is University Professor at the University of
Virginia. In addition to his work on Dickens, he has published
books on narrative and narrative theory, including Reading for
the Plot (1984) and Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law
and Literature (2000).

Dorothy Van Ghent is an American writer and critic who is the
author of The English Novel: Form and Function (1953) and the
editor of The Essential Prose (1965).

Julian Moynahan is Professor of English Emeritus at Rutgers
University. He is the author of Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales
of D.H. Lawrence (1966), Selected Poems (May 1991), and Anglo-
Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (2000).

Goldie Morgentaler is an Associate Professor at the University
of Lethbridge. She is the author of Dickens and Heredity: When
Like Begets Like (1999)

Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor
of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont,
since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation:
On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in
journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism.

Joseph A. Hynes has written “Image and Symbol in Great
Expectations” which was published in ELH journal.

Ann B. Dobie is the director of the Louisiana Writing Project
State Network and former director of the National Writing
Project of Acadiana. She is professor emeritus in the
Department of English at the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette.

Nina Auerbach is the John Welsh Centennial Professor of
English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her special area of
concentration is nineteenth-century England, she is the author
of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian

112

Women Writers (1993), Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997), and
Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress (2002). She has received
a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lindback Award for
Distinguished Teaching, and the Distinguished Scholarship
Award from the International Association of the Fantastic in
the Arts.

Stephen Newman has written Great Expectations (1975), which
is considered to be one of the finest works of scholarship on the
novel.

Jay Clayton is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
He is the author of The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary
American Literature and Theory (1993), Time and the Literary
(2002), and Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the
Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (2003).

Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University, was also president of the Modern
Language Association in 1999. He is the author of many books,
including The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of
Dispossession (1994), and Reflections on Exile (2000). He twice
received Columbia’s Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the
American Comparative Literature Association.

113

Acknowledgments

"Introduction to Great Expectations" by Bernard Shaw. From

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations by Edgar Rosenberg (ed).
Pp. 632-641. © 1999 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors, on
behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate.

"Charles Dickens" by George Orwell. From Charles Dickens:

Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 641-644. © 1940
by George Orwell. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton
as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia
Brownell Orwell, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

"Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great

Expectations" by Peter Brooks. From Charles Dickens: Great
Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 679-689. © 1999
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

"On Great Expectations" by Dorothy Van Ghent. From

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Edgar Rosenberg. Pp.
648-654. © 1999 Thomson Learning. Reprinted by
permission.

"The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations" by Julian

Moynahan. From Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed.
Edgar Rosenberg. Pp. 654-663. © 1999 W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

"Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great

Expectations" by Goldie Morgentaler. Pp. 707-721.
Reprinted with permission from Studies in English Literature
1500-1900 38, 4 (Autumn 1998). © by Rice University.

"The Bad Faith of Pip's Bad Faith: Deconstructing Great

Expectations" by Christopher D. Morris. From ELH 54: 4
(1987). Pp. 941-955. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University
Press.

"Early Stream-of-Consciousness Writing: Great Expectations"

by Ann B. Dobie. From Nineteenth-Century Fiction (25), No.

114

"Image and Symbol in Great Expectations" by Joseph A.

Hynes. From ELH (30), No. 3 (September, 1963): Pp. 258-
292. © by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted
by permission.

"Incarnations of the Orphan" by Nina Auerbach. From ELH

42: 3 (1975). Pp. 395-419. © The Johns Hopkins University
Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins
University Press.

"Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)" by Stephen Newman.

From Notes on English Literature, John D. Jump & W.H.
Mason (eds). Pp. 79-85. © 1975 Stephen Newman. Reprinted
by permission.

"Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens at the End of the Twentieth

Century" by Jay Clayton. From Charles Dickens: Great
Expectations ed. Janice Carlisle. Pp. 621-623. © 1996 Bedford
Books of St. Martin's Press. Reprinted by permission.

"Two Commentaries on Great Expectations: From

Deconstruction to Postcolonialism" by Edward Said. From
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations ed. Janice Carlisle. Pp.
524-526. © 1996 Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.
Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Chatto &
Windus, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

115

characters are alphabetized by their first
names

Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations,

69, 77, 80, 83

capture, 15, 17, 44, 56, 101
clockwork throat, 61
convict, 15, 19–22, 25, 32, 37–39,

43, 51–52, 61, 62–65, 72–73,
75, 86–87, 91, 100–1,103

daughter, 7, 15, 18, 42, 45, 48, 81
death, 45, 57, 62, 101
escape, 40–41, 44
Pip’s father-substitute, 7–8, 55,

64, 72, 74–75, 90, 101

as secret benefactor, 15–17,

38–39, 46, 49, 56, 58, 90–91,
95, 101–2

speech, 24, 52–53

Acceptance of loss theme, 8

innocence, 12, 50, 71
and Joe, 26–27
and Pip, 25, 37, 46

Adaptation theme in Great

Expectations, 72, 74

All the Year Round (periodical), 10,

Ambition theme in Great

Expectations, 65–71

American Notes, 10, 104
Auerbach, Nina

on the orphan theme in Great

Expectations, 88–92

Barnaby Rudge, 10, 104
Barzilai, Shuli, 8
Battle of Life, The, 10, 104
Beer, Gillian
on Great Expectations, 72

Bentley Drummle in Great

Expectations

crimes of, 67–70
dark shadow of Pip, 65–71, 93
death, 69
mannerisms, 17, 30–31
marriage to Estella, 8, 15, 17, 37,

40–41, 46–48, 67

Biddy in Great Expectations, 17, 31,

45, 77, 81

and Joe, 46, 71, 91
and Orlick, 16, 26, 35, 69
and Pip’s education, 22, 24–27

Bildungsroman, 13
Bleak House, 10, 90, 104
Brontë, Emily

Wuthering Heights, 8

Brooks, Peter

on Great Expectations, 19, 32,

44–45, 77

on the plot of Great Expectations,

54–58

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 14, 56, 82

Carey, Peter, 102
Carlyle, Thomas, 49
Carter, Paul

The Road to Botany Bay, 101–2

Chimes, The, 10, 104
Christmas Carol, A, 10, 104
Clara Bailey in Great Expectations, 16
Clayton, Jay

on postmodernism in Great

Expectations, 97–100

Compeyson in Great Expectations, 18

betrayal of Magwitch, 15, 39–41,

44, 69

death of, 57, 62
and Miss Havisham, 15
and Orlick, 16

Index

116

Cricket on the Hearth, The, 10, 104

Darwin, Charles

Origin of Species, The, 12, 19, 39,

72–76

David Copperfield, 10, 104

autobiographical content, 7–9
Dora in, 9
Mr. Micawber in, 10, 101
narrative of, 7

David Copperfield in David

Copperfield, 49, 53

consciousness of, 7

Day’s Ride, A (Lever), 13
Decipherment theme in Great

Expectations, 55

Demonic symbolism in Great

Expectations

exaggerated character features, 61
graveyard, 62
Jaggers’ office, 60, 93
Newgate prison, 62
the river, 62
Smithfield, 62

Dickens, Catherine Hogarth, 9
Dickens, Charles

affairs of, 7, 14, 47
biography, 9–11
birth, 9
critics, 7–8, 11–12
death, 11
imagination, 47–49, 53, 85
inconsistent characters, 51–53
public readings, 11
theatrical productions, 10–11
use of pathetic fallacy, 59–65
works by, 104

Dobie, Ann B.

on the stream of consciousness in

Great Expectations, 84–88

Dombey and Son, 10, 104

Eliot, George, 13

Estella in Great Expectations, 77, 100

Miss Havisham’s influence on, 16,

18, 21, 29, 33, 34–37, 74, 91

marriages, 8, 15, 17, 40–41,

46–48, 67–68, 70, 80

parents, 7, 15, 18, 29, 40–42, 45,

48, 93

and Pip, 7–8, 14, 22–23, 25–26,

31–34, 36–38, 45–48, 56–58,
62, 67, 70–72, 81, 83–84, 90–91

and star imagery, 80–83
tormentor, 47–48
unhappiness of, 15, 33–36, 46

Fatal Shore, The (Hughes), 101–2
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 88, 93

Great Expectations, 10, 104

autobiographical content, 7–8, 13
character list, 15–18
coincidences in, 34, 38, 63, 70
critical views, 14, 19–20, 22,

24–25, 28, 31–32, 34, 38–39,
43–45, 47–103

historical aspects of, 100–3
human discordance in, 59–65
language, 24
The Origin of Species influence on,

12, 19, 39, 72–76

plot of, 13, 19, 45, 48, 53–58,

72–73, 75

postmodernism in, 97–100
self-delusion of, 100
story behind, 12–14
stream of consciousness in, 84–88
structure of, 13
summary analysis, 19–46
two endings of, 8, 14, 56–58, 71,

violence in, 70–71
writing of, 7, 12, 14

Guilt and atonement theme in Great

Expectations, 61

117

of great expectations, 71, 93
murderer’s, 70
Pip’s, 7–8, 20, 25, 27, 32–34, 51,

60, 62–64, 66, 70, 71, 91–92

Hard Times, 10, 52, 104
Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,

The, 10, 104

Havisham, Miss in Great

Expectations, 17, 80

death, 45, 67, 70–71, 89
and Estella, 18, 21, 24–26, 31, 37,

revenge on men, 15, 24–25, 29,

34, 36

and Satis house, 15, 21–22,

32–33, 36, 40–43, 46, 49,
58–59, 70, 78, 81, 84, 89–90

sufferings of, 15–16, 23, 27, 40,

49, 74, 81–83

Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations

desires of, 16, 33–34, 44
help to Magwitch, 17, 38–44, 91,

103

and Pip, 28–38, 42–43, 46, 90

Historical novels, 13
Hogarth, Mary

model for heroines, 9

Household Words (periodical), 10
Hughes, Robert

The Fatal Shore, 101–2

Hugo, Victor, 49
Humor, 11, 52
Hynes, Joseph A.

on imagery in Great Expectations,

80–84

Illustrative of Every-day Life and

Every-day People, 9

Imagery in Great Expectations

firelight, 80–81, 83–84
garden, 82–83
star, 80–83

Jaggers in Great Expectations, 17, 60,

98, 100

dirty business of, 16, 26, 28–31,

68–69, 91–96

forefinger, 61
housekeeper, 18
mannerisms, 92–97
as Pip’s counsel, 27–30, 33–36,

38–45, 72

Joe Gargery, Mr. in Great

Expectations, 15, 35, 67, 78, 81

and Biddy, 46, 71, 91
honesty and warmth, 16, 21, 43,

71, 73, 80, 83–84, 95, 97–98

Pip’s father-substitute, 7–8, 16,

19–20, 22, 24, 26–27, 32–33,
45, 51, 64, 74–75, 77, 90

pride of, 27, 31
speech of, 24–25

Joe Gargery, Mrs. in Great

Expectations, 15, 49, 83

attack on, 16–17, 25–27, 31, 43,

64, 67–69

death, 35
disinterest in education, 21
jealousy of, 16, 19–20, 22, 24, 67,

75, 77, 80

Johnson, Edgar, 7
Joyce, James, 84
Jung, Carl, 88

Lever, Charles

A Day’s Ride, 13

Little Dorrit, 10, 104

Malouf, David, 102
Martin Chuzzlewit, 10, 104
Marx, Karl, 59, 98
Master Humphrey’s Clock (weekly), 10
Matthew Pocket in Great

Expectations

118

and Miss Havisham, 17, 23, 29,

40, 45

tutor, 16, 27–28, 30–31, 37

Miller, J. Hillis, 76
Molly in Great Expectations

crimes of, 18, 41
and Estella, 18, 41, 93
and Jaggers, 18, 31

Morgenthaler, Goldie

on Great Expectations, 19, 32, 39,

43–44

on The Orgins of Species influence

on Great Expectations, 72–76

Morris, Christopher D.

on Great Expectations, 19
on Pip’s moral bad faith, 76–79

Moynahan, Julian

on Great Expectations, 34
on the theme of ambition in Great

Expectations, 65–71

Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 11, 104

Narrative, Great Expectations

direct monologue, 87–88
first person, 7, 12, 66
indirect monologue, 85, 87
Pip’s, 54, 76–79, 85–88
stream of consciousness, 84–85,

87–88

third person, 87

Newgate prison in Great

Expectations, 13, 28, 34

Newman, Steven

on Great Expectations, 28, 31
on Jaggers and Wemmick in

Great Expectations, 92–97

Nicholas Nickleby, 10, 104

Old Curiosity Shop, The, 10, 104

Little Nell in, 9

Oliver Twist, 9, 48, 72–73, 104
The Origin of Species (Darwin)

influence on Great Expectations,

12, 19, 39, 72–76

Orlick in Great Expectations, 32, 40

arrest of, 45
attack on Mrs. Joe, 16, 25–26, 35,

43, 64

attack on Pip, 16, 43
and Biddy, 16
and Compeyson, 16
crimes of, 66–70
dark shadow of Pip, 16, 33, 43,

65–71

Orphanhood theme

in Bleak House, 90
in Great Expectations, 88–92

Orwell, George

on Dickens’s inconsistent

characters, 51–53

Our Mutual Friend, 10, 104

Paroissien, David, 12
Pickwick Papers, 9–10, 52, 104
“Pictures of Italy,” 10, 104
Pip in Great Expectations

ambition of, 65–71
authentic maturity, 8
and “commonness,” 15, 22, 24, 51
consciousness, 85–89
dark doubles of, 65–71
education, 21, 24, 26–27, 30–31,

father-substitutes of, 7–8, 19,

31–33, 46, 55–56, 64, 72,
74–75, 77, 89–90, 101

identity of things, 59–65, 73,

82–84, 90, 93–97

imagination and hallucinations, 7,

56, 70–71, 86

injuries, 43–45
looking back of, 12–13, 19, 44, 57
loss, 12, 25, 37, 50
and Magwitch, 17, 19–22, 25, 32,

34, 37–46, 51–52, 56, 62, 81,
86–87, 90–91, 101–3

119

moral bad faith, 76–79
naming of self, 19, 27, 54, 56, 90
passion for Estella, 7–8, 21–26,

31–38, 40–42, 45–48, 56, 58,
62, 69, 80–83, 90–91

rise in social status, 13, 15, 16–17,

22, 26–31, 38, 45, 48, 57, 73,
78, 91, 97–98, 100

secret benefactor, 15–17, 27,

35–40, 44, 49, 56, 90–91, 100–2

sense of guilt, 7–8, 20, 25, 27,

32–34, 51, 60, 62–64, 66,
70–71, 91–92

Postmodernism

foreshadowing in Great

Expectations, 97–100

Pumblechook in Great Expectations,

20, 25, 33, 35, 45–46, 77

plans for Pip, 21–22, 24, 27, 32,

43, 64

obsessions of, 17
robbery of, 67–71

Realism

domestic, 13

Road to Botany Bay, The (Carter),

101–2

Said, Edward W.

on the historical aspects of Great

Expectations, 100–3

Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations

at Satis House, 23, 26, 32

Shaw, George Bernard, 12

on the class snobbery in Great

Expectations, 47–50

Sketches of Boz, 9, 104
Smithfield market in Great

Expectations, 13

Society in Great Expectations

civilized, 72–74
and class snobbery, 47–51, 64, 75

criminality of, 64, 66, 73–74
and commodification of people,

high, 13
“Newgate,” 13, 82, 95
unification, 44
Victorian, 85, 88, 91, 98, 103

Startop Great Expectations, 43

mannerisms, 17, 30
violence against, 68–69

Stone, Harry, 85
Surrealism, 84, 88

Tale of Two Cities, A, 10, 52, 75, 104
Ternan, Ellen, 7, 14
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 13
Time theme in Great Expectations, 72

and metaphor of chain, 75, 78,

103

Trollope, Anthony, 13

Van Ghent, Dorothy

on Dickens’ use of pathetic

fallacy, 59–65

on Great Expectations, 20, 22,

24–25, 38, 44, 91

on Pip’s identity of things, 59–65

Wells, H.G., 48
Wemmick in Great Expectations, 28,

34, 37, 39, 41–42

“aged parent,” 30, 36, 95, 98
divided life of, 17, 31, 36, 81–82,

95–100

mannerisms, 92–97
post-office mouth, 61
and Miss Skiffins, 17, 36, 40, 45,

95, 98

White, Patrick, 102
Williams, Raymond, 99
Woolf, Virginia, 84

120

Wopsle, Mr. in Great Expectations,

20–22, 24–25, 27, 49, 64

playacting, 18, 31, 33, 41, 56

as Wadengarver, 18, 33–34

Wright, Thomas, 13–14
Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 8

Document Outline

Cover
Charles Dickens’sGreatExpectations
Contents
Introduction
Biographical Sketch
The Story Behind the Story
List of Characters
Summary and Analysis
Works by Charles Dickens
Annotated Bibliography
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index

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