"Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens

One of the most popular of the novels of Charles Dickens, Great Expectations is a bildungsroman narrated in the first person, in the past tense, warning of the dangers of trying to turn a working-class boy into a gentleman. (In Oliver Twist, the hero can be successfully transformed because, despite his upbringing in a workhouse, he is of good birth and nature trumps nurture. For all his early support of social reform, Dickens, himself a middle-class boy who had been plunged into the lower classes by the improvidence of his parents before escaping through his writing, was a great believer that the social hierarchy of Victorian Britain was god-ordained.)

A with most novels by Dickens, it's plot is heavily convoluted. It was originally published in serial form so a cliff-hanger is needed every few chapters. The hook at the start of the book occurs at the bottom of the first page.

Again, as is typical with Dickens, it contains extravagantly grotesque but utterly memorable characters. Dickens develops his characters through their appearances, often succinctly but vividly described (eg "an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture"; Ch 23), their behavioural characteristics (eg the way Mrs G cuts bread in chapter 2) and the peculiarities of their speech (Joe Gargery being the prime example in this novel). Some of the cast are little more than comic decorations (eg Trabb's boy, Pumblechook and Mr Wopsle, and the Aged P). But even his major characters rarely develop. Joe is salt-of-the-earth throughout. It takes brain damage to make Mrs Gargery nice. Jaggers is Jaggers, Wemmick is Wemmick, Estelle is Estelle. They are little more than scenery with which the hero can interact, against whom he can fulfil his potentialities. Only the half-mad Miss Havisham, to a very limited extent, and Pip, who is growing up, change. This is what limits Great Expectations. It is hugely entertaining but it is entertainment rather than art.

It is like a painting that impresses one by the skill shown in creating a two-dimensional scene with three-dimensional verisimilitude. Dickens achieves this with his detailed descriptions of settings. He clearly knew these places intimately and he can recreate them in the mind of the readers. Many of these settings are classic Gothic melodrama settings: the deserted churchyard on the misty marshes, the tumbledown crowded buildings in London, the desolate dereliction of Miss Havisham's house. But, as with his characters, they are utterly memorable.

The start of the plot:

Pip, an orphan living with his sister and her blacksmith husband on the marshes of the Thames estuary in Kent, encounters an escaped convict, Magwitch, and is terrified into helping him. Later, he is sent as a playmate for the girl being brought up by Miss Havisham, a rich recluse who retired from the world when she was jilted on her wedding day. Years later, when Pip is an apprentice blacksmith, he is told by a London lawyer that he has great expectations of inheriting a substantial fortune but the identity of the donor is to be kept hidden. Pip, believing the donor to be Miss Havisham, goes to London to be educated as a gentleman, and starts to look down on his former family and friends.

Of course, being Dickens, there are multiple sub-plots, all of which, however fancifully, are resolved in the end. Had I written the book I would have excised at least the Orlick plot; it isn't necessary, it over-complicates the plot, it blurs the focus. 

Fundamentally, though, the novel, though long, is easy to read, is packed full of incident, has a wonderful cast, and, as entertainment, is superb. 

Selected quotes:

• "Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion." (Ch 4)
• "In his working-clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and everything that he wore then grazed him." (Ch 4)
• "A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air,—like our own marsh mist." (Ch 11)
• "I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still." (Ch 17)
• "Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make off somewhere" (Ch 18)
• "I went to the hatter’s, and the bootmaker’s, and the hosier’s, and felt rather like Mother Hubbard’s dog whose outfit required the services of so many trades" (Ch 19) The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog was written by Sarah Catherine Martin and published in 1805; it is an extended poem which relates the adventures of a lady whose original is said to have lived in a thatched cottage in Yealmpton, Devon which can still be seen. It was a great success and the first verse (which is supposed to be of ancient origin) is still known as a nursery rhyme today: Old Mother Hubbard/ Went to the cupboard/To give the poor Dog a bone;/When she came there,/The Cupboard was bare,/And so the poor Dog had none." The rest of the book describes the various different tradespeople to whom Mother Hubbard goes to ensure that the dog is properly cared for.
• "I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off." (Ch 21)
• "no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; ... the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself." (Ch 22)
• "'me and Wopsle went off straight to look at the Blacking Ware’us. But we didn’t find that it come up to its likeness in the red bills at the shop doors; which I meantersay, added Joe, in an explanatory manner, as it is there drawd too architectooralooral'.” (Ch 27) When his family fell on hard times, the young Charles Dickens worked at Warren's Blacking (at 30, Hungerford Stairs, just off the Strand; the factory was demolished and the site is now Incorporated within Charing Cross Station) which made boot polish. Dickens was always ashamed of his time here.
• "All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. 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!" (Ch 28)
• “it seems to me that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our gift-horse’s mouth with a magnifying-glass." (Ch 30)
• “'—Invest portable property in a friend?' said Wemmick. 'Certainly he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend,—and then it becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid of him'.” (Ch 36)
• "looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think it might perplex the thread of his narrative." (Ch 41)
• "The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death." (Ch 53)

April 2023; 460 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I have been watching the BBC TV 2023 six-part adaptation. Here are some of my thoughts.

• How old is Pip?
• He seems to be a young boy at the start of the novel; most commentators suggest he is seven or eight. But the BBC adaptation shows a rather older boy, eleven or older, with the attitude of a surly teenager. So I tried to enquire more deeply into Pip's chronology. According to the text, he goes to Miss Havisham's a year after the convict incident. He still seems a little boy: the only card game he can play is Beggar My Neighbour. But ten months after this, he is apprenticed to Joe. But in those days, apprenticeships normally started at about age fourteen, and one would have thought that a lad younger than that wouldn't have the physical strength needed for blacksmithery. He stays apprentice for four years before his Expectations take him to London where he is for an undetermined period (three years or so?) before her comes of age at 21. This suggests that there are some missing years, and that they should be within the Miss Havisham experience. 
• If we take the BBC line, that he is say twelve at the start of the book (and not nearly so naive as the text implies) then his Expectations come six years later. But this won't work. Magwitch in Australia has to do seven years forced labour before being able to start out on his own. and making a fortune (and that presumably takes a few years). Even if he comes into his Expectations at the age of 20 (it must be before 21) we don't have enough time. The only way we can reconcile the Magwitch back story with the Pip story is if he encounters the convict on the marshes when he is at most ten years old.