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    Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Ebook704 pages12 hours

    Great Expectations

    By Charles Dickens

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    Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of Dickens' most memorable characters. 


    Among them are the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict Abel Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Haversham and her beautiful ward Estella, Pip's good-hearted room-mate Herbert Pocket and the pompous Pumblechook.

    As Pip unravels the truth behind his own 'great expectations' in his quest to become a gentleman, the mysteries of the past and the convolutions of fate through a series of thrilling adventures serve to steer him towards maturity and his most important discovery of all - the truth about himself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848703605
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the most popular and, many believe, the greatest English author. He wrote many classic novels, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are available from Brilliance Audio.

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    Reviews for Great Expectations

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    7,256 ratings204 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I have a problem with Great Expectations. The problem is, I believe I haven't read it. I have, three or four times, but the very first time, I didn't finish it (we were reading it aloud on a class trip, and the trip ended) and somehow, no matter how often I read it, I think I've never finished it. It's been my secret shame.So I'm writing this review to remind me. I have read Great Expectations. The parts of it I cherish are the sidelights: Magwitch, Wemmick and his Aged Parent. Even the Pockets tumbling up. In the introduction to this edition, John Irving mentions that the language shifts when the plot takes off. Perhaps that's why I stop remembering it: the sidelights fade. I've never had too much use for Mr. Pip (as opposed to young Pip, who is rather charming) -- none of his repentance and retrospective self-deprecation was enough for me.While I see the craft in this book, and the rich imagery that makes it so beloved of English teachers, it is not my favorite Boz. It's well worth reading though, if only for the images -- the ruined wedding feast, the clerk 'posting' bits of toast through his mail-slot mouth, the family of gravestones by the marshes -- that will stick with you, even if the denouement insists on fading.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyable as an audiobook. Well written.
    • 5/5
      Great Expectations is one of the Dickens books I never read because I was sure I had read it. I knew all about spooky Miss Havisham in her wedding dress with her moldy, spider-filled wedding cake, so I must have read it, right? No, I must have watched the dreary 1970s movie version somewhere along the line and missed out on the real thing.Too bad it took so long to get around to this one because Great Expectations is a whale of a good read. It is chock-o-block full of Dickens’s extraordinary characters, it is clever and funny, and there are exciting adventures, like prison breaks, murders, and a kidnapping. Orphan Pip goes from helping escaped convicts on the moors to keeping Miss Havisham company before being taken up by an unknown benefactor and taught to be a London gentleman. All goes awry before adult Pip can win the heart of his beloved Estella, but he learns important lessons and all comes right in the end.As it turns out, all came more right in the end of the version I read than originally planned by Dickens. He changed the original melancholy ending in subsequent editions and mine used the later, happier ending. Having gone back and compared the two, the original seems more integral to the story. Either way, what a wonderful book. I wish I had read it 25 years ago, like I thought I had.Also posted on Rose City Reader.
    • 5/5
      Great book. "You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose..." Perfect. I think I've read it four times, but I'm sure I'll read it again.
    • 1/5
      This could be listed with the subtitle of "The Misadventures of Pip." It's interesting, though not something that caught me to focus on it.If I'm understanding this correctly, Joe was abused by an alcoholic father and as such married an abusive woman to take the place of the abusive father. This is not openly displayed in the text, per se, but it is discussed by the narrator on a few occasions. This felt like a book written and published in stages, so the various parts feel a little stilted when pushed together. Though to bring the file up again did connect them some. Also the whole deal with the dying of Ms. Havernsham is kinda creepy.Something I did have to keep correcting myself in my mind was that the use of certain words has changed mightily since this was written. When someone asks is he an intimate, this isn't referring to a date, but to a close friend, for instance.I noted that unless he's given them no first name, Dickens has a habit of referring to characters by their title and first name. Mr. and Mrs. Joe. Mr. and Ms. Cecelia. It's a touch unnerving.I've gotten just about past the half way point. My loan expires tomorrow. I'm not looking to renew. The story isn't real compelling to me, and the "Great Expectations" are two fold: what Pip expects of himself and what others expect of Pip. This is definitely a long winded fictional biography. I'm not into biographies most times. Might be why this isn't my type of book.
    • 2/5
      I hated this book. I know it's a classic and I've met people who love it, but I just can't.

      The point of view gives a very skewed view of women and out motivations and it annoyed me too much to enjoy the other bits. I know there's lot of merit and so on, but it was just hard to for me stomach, especially at the age that I was when I first read it. It brought on emerging feelings about my place in the world and scared the crap out of me. I didn't mean to make it all about the image of women, but sometimes stories that really have nothing to do with us that way scare the hell out of me. This was one of those.

      And yeah, I get it that some find this irrational.
    • 5/5
      I find it hard to distinguish between the images furnished by my first reading of this and by the BBC serialisation in the 60s. I suspect that the TV version came first and influenced my rather rapid reading of the novel where I omitted all the characterisation, social commentary, landscape descriptions and comedy in favour of rooting out the plain narrative. So, Great Expectations for me then was a mix of two themes, the rags-to-riches story of Pip and the boy-meets-girl-but-it-doesn't-go-smoothly tale of Pip's infatuation with Estella, and hang the rich tapestry of life in early 19th-century rural Kent and teeming London which Dickens grew up with.I'm so glad I've given this a second chance, and that with maturity and experience am able to more fully appreciate the subtleties and nuances of Dickens' story. Yes, the overarching themes are there: Pip's abandonment of the forge to pursue a gentleman's life followed by the eventual Return of the Prodigal Son; and the hopeless obsession with the haughty Estella who almost until the last (and we never find out the whole story) rejects him while leading him on. And yet, of course, you can't spin out a serialised story in three lengthy parts just by dwelling on an individual's rise in the world and an unrequited love.Anybody else who skims through this novel and finds it wanting may need to put only a little more effort into it if they are to understand the fuss that is made of it. First, there is the cast of wonderful characters, eccentrics, villains, heroes and gentlefolk. The tragic Miss Havisham, Mr Wopsle the actor manqué and the lawyer's clerk Mr Wemmick all fall into the first group; Orlick, Drummle and Compeyson are first-rate villains; Jaggers and Provis are indubitably if unlikely heroes; and Pip's closest acquaintances, some of whom he woefully neglects, come as close as possible to gentlefolk, whatever their station in life.Dickens' own childhood familiarity with the prime locations in this book, London, Chatham and Rochester, add verisimilitude to Pip's experiences and vividly bring alive the events that happen in these bustling, or gloomy, or dank and foggy places. And in amongst the tragic happenings that percolate Great Expectations we mustn't forget the comic personalities and situations that leaven the disappointments; and even if one or two chapters appear a little indulgent and appear just to bulk out the narrative, that's hardly surprising when the public were devouring the previous installments and Dickens was trying to keep a step or two ahead.So, I'm pleased to have given a Dickens novel my undivided attention when I completed it a century and a half after his death in 1861, and doubly pleased that I was much more able to appreciate it than my younger self. The Collins Classic edition gave the full text with the revised, more upbeat, ending; granted that this was a budget edition I was still a little disappointed by the shortness of the introduction and by the glossary particularly, which, apparently directed at foreign students, included historic terms and phrases from a number of Victorian novels but very few, it seemed, from this novel itself.
    • 5/5
      5 reasons Great Expectations is a great novel1. Pip’s journey It’s a great bildungsroman. At its heart it’s about Pip’s inner journey toward greater self-understanding and molding of his character. He does not get what he expects, but in the journey finds so many other things of greater value. 2. Enduring friendships For me one of the most touching themes is that of friendship - Pip’s and Joe’s and later on with Herbert Pocket. When Pip need his friends the most they do turn up by his side. And Pip will also himself be a true friend to an unexpected person.3. Surprises, surprises You’re not aware of it, but slowly this “bildungsroman” turns into a tightly constructed mystery plot. The second half is full of surprising twists and turns.4. Lessons on wealth Wealth is the vehicle in the story. Everything hinges on what people are in terms of class and money and “expectations”. I like that Pip finds happinness in “working for his profits” rather than living on someone else’s money.5. A wealth of memorable characters You could mention this about any Dickens novel - but just think about Pip himself, Joe and Biddy, Miss Havisham, Estella, Jarvis, Wemming, Magwitch etc, etc.
    • 4/5
      This is classic Dickens. Young Pip, living with his shrewish sister and her dull, but kindly husband falls comes upon Miss Havisham who, upon being jilted years ago has entombed herself in her huge house with the beautiful Estella with whom Pip immediately falls in love,.Miss Havisham tells Pip that he has "Great Expectations" and throughout the book he rises and then falls in business until he finds contentment back where he started from - a sadder but wiser man. If you've never read this doorstop of a book, it's worth your while for a vivid picture on Victorian England and the vivid characters who inhabit it.
    • 4/5
      I am giving this audiobook edition 4* but downgrading my rating for the book itself to 3 ½ stars. I found Pip's devotion to Estella romantic but unconvincing and Pip himself I don't care for very much. This is my third or fourth time reading this novel and I keep hoping that I will discover why so many people think it is Dickens greatest. I like David Copperfield so much that I guess I just wish to feel the same fondness for this... Oh well.
    • 4/5
      I've discovered that listening to Dickens in the car is actually a reasonable way to get through a big old book. Maybe something about listening to it in chunks reflects the original publication in episodes. This has the usual cast of thousands (I may exaggerate, but not by much!) and they are a varied lot. Pip is the hub of the story and it starts with his meeting Magwich in the churchyard as a young boy. He helps the convict with food, but then gets involved in the chase to catch him again. It's an important meeting that has echoes through the rest of Pip's young life. In an unconnected event, Pip gets invited to Miss Haversham's and meets Estella. This is a very odd setup (understatement). In the short term it gives Pip some heartache and ideas above his station. This, again, has repercussions through the story and is a source of some considerable upheaval. Pip becomes Joe's apprentice, but his ideas of being a gentleman and winning Estella blind him to both Joe's goodness and the charms and affection of Biddy. He, in fact, turns into a snob and acts quite badly in this phase. Then comes the big turning point, Pip comes into his Great Expectations. The assumption is that the expectations are from Miss Haversham, certainly that's what everyone seems to think. And Pip becomes even worse. He goes to town and sets up an expensive establishment with Herbert, who is a Haversham relation of some description. They live a bit too high and end up in debt quite a lot. Pip neglects Joe in this period and gets a nice superiority complex going. Then the crisis comes, when Pip discovers who his benefactor is and it's not who you thought. That sets Pip & Herbert off on a bit of a madcap trip, in which they try and get a convict out of the country without being caught. Herbert turns up trumps in this phase, having seemed a bit weak and easily lead until this point. It doesn't turn out well, and Pip looses everything. It is at this point that Joe, once more, does the decent thing and turns up to sort Pip out once more. Not that he deserves it. And he then misses his chance to actually be nice to Joe for once and acknowledge what he owes to him. The ending comes upon you quite abruptly, and is slightly disatisfying. I know it was originally set that pip returned, found Estella, but that she had remarried. In this version, she is not yet married and there is a possibility that they will finally get together. Only I'm not entirely sure that is a good idea. Thy have both changed, with Estella having come down off her high horse and Pip having learnt stability and hard work since they were children. I'm just not convinced the possibly happy ending is justified. I felt, as I often do with Dickens, that he spends 2/3 of the book setting it up and then crams the final third with all the story. It works though, and the pace sits will with the episodic listening.
    • 4/5
      Dickens' descriptions of locations, people and their characters (or lack of it) create a mellow reading experience.They make the plot, at times revolving around Bonkers Chicken predictable twists with a few delightful surprises, more memorable and enduring.His description of Pip's early encounters with the alphabet and numbers is a treasure:"...I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush...""After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition."Though not as compelling as A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Great Expectations offers fewerannoying personages than his other books and Joe, Wemmick, Herbert, and the Aged givereaders people to care about. Pip and his convict are more of a challenge.
    • 5/5
      Magnificent, of course. Mr. Dickens is amazing.
    • 2/5
      Aanvankelijk zeer trage start; breedvoerig en zonder dat duidelijk is waar het verhaal heen wil. Het middelste derde is gevarieerder omdat het zich in Londen afspeelt en verschillende nieuwe personages introduceert. Het laatste derde heeft meer weg van een detectiveverhaal, maar dat gaat ten koste van de psychologische diepgang. Thema: ontrouw ten aanzien van afkomst en vrienden; de waan van geldGlobaal: interessant thema, toch mislukte roman vanwege trage opbouw en gebrek aan humor.
    • 5/5
      My favorite Dickens novel.
    • 2/5
      This is my least favorite Dickens. It's hard to enjoy it when you don't like any of the characters. I do love the last line, however:"I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; 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."I don't love it because I understand it (do they actually get together?!), I just love it because in the TV show Beauty and the Beast, Vincent reads it to Catherine and his voice melts my bones.
    • 3/5
      Great Expectations is a good book, but not awesome. Story is reasonably fast moving even though language is flowery and dialogues are noteworthy. There is undercurrent of humour and irony in whole narrative though never really explicit. Characters are engaging and some are even haunting too. That said, it always remains a mystery why this is considered popular classic and not others. There is not much substance to story but whole lot of emotional content without being melodramatic. Overall, I am glad that I read this, though I wouldn't have missed anything if I didn't.
    • 3/5
      With Great Expectations, I have now read or re-read every Dickens novel in the last year (minus two novels I had read in the last couple of years). Great Expectations was a book I studied in year 12, too many years ago, so I know the book well. I was pleased to to find some parts of the book were very familiar, like a favourite jacket, and a little surprised that other parts seemed to be completely new - like I was reading for the first time. The benefit of years, and a better knowledge of Victorian England and social conditions of the era made the book more meaningful now. I had enjoyed it years ago, and I enjoyed it a little more now with the benefit of that better context.At the end of the Dickens marathon, I find it interesting how some authors survive, or thrive, while others, popular in their time, fade away. I find that Dickens is a fine author, but wonder why Trollope, for example, hasn't become the icon of his era?I also notice that in all his many many pages, there is not one single depiction of a "normal" happy marriage. David Copperfield's marital relationship goes close, the couple are not unhappy, but the wife is painted as a child in an adult role and you could not imagine it as a satisfying relationship for either party. Recent biographies have made it clear that Dickens was, to be generous, a "difficult" husband and father. It is sad to think that he may never have experienced the joy of a fulfilling personal relationship.
    • 5/5
      A masterpiece in the study of corruption, guilt, revenge, obsession, ambition, class snobbery and redemption. Dickens, I dare say, at his best. The characters are brilliant both as individuals and as symbols -- Miss Haversham, Magwitch, Estella, Joe, and of course Pip. This is about as gritty as one can get. (I'm always surprised when someone says to me, "Your novels are so dark!" I can only assume they didn't read Dickens, or Hardy, or George Elliott. Snort.)In Miss Haversham's rotting mansion, Satis House, (word play on satisfy? Stasis?) Dickens created the perfect Gothic setting to explore the corrosive power of self-pity, revenge and narcissism. As though no one save her has ever been hurt by love and its misuse, Miss Havisham nurses her pain and uses everyone around her as props for her own revenge. Her body decays, the wedding dress she never removes decays, the wedding feast decays, the house decays around her like a rotting crust. A portrayal of decadence which has no parallel, and which symbolizes Dickens' feelings about the aristocracy. Much has been written about this book, and its many layers of meaning, and it all adds pleasure to the book, but really, it's one of those novels that is just such a pleasure to read. Enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Back in high school, I always found Dickens to be rather tedious, but in my adulthood, I gained a greater appreciation of his work. Audiobooks were the key--I discovered that his prose style worked far better for me read aloud that on the page. And so, despite owning the paperback, I listened to the audiobook instead.I wasn't wowed by Great Expectations, but I enjoyed it. Most interesting to me was the glimpse of (lower) middle class life during the time period, something that many novels avoid, preferring to focus on the affairs of the very wealthy or very poor.As is typical with Dickens, there are a number of unlikely coincidences and connections between characters. These are less satisfying to the modern audience than they no doubt were to the original readers. They are also typical of a serial format--modern television shows also tend to let loose those sorts of revelations, to sate an audience hungry for twists.Slow to get going and without a great deal of action, I continued to listen because of the interesting characters and a desire to find out what happened to Pip, even as he got less sympathetic throughout the course of the novel.I'm glad this was not my first introduction to Dickens, but I'm glad to have experienced it nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      The writing is stellar. The narration is first-rate. The story is, um, Dickensian, which I now understand to mean brilliant and peopled with billions of fascinating characters. However, I just don't like Pip, and that keeps me from giving this one five stars.
    • 4/5
      This was the first book by Dickens I have read and, based on this one, I'll definitely read another. At times the vernacular was a little clunky and hard to follow - but that is just because of the change in times and, more than likely, the British influence.

      As much as I enjoyed the book I think I'd rename it to "Great Coincidences" as it is chock full of them. In fact every relationship, except those between Pip and his Joe are pretty much purely coincidental and yet those ties interweave throughout the story and continue to build and pile upon one another throughout the tale. Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella, Jaggers, Magwitch, etc. They were all coincidentally connected. Yet, for all of that, I still enjoyed the story.

      Pip, as a kid was amiable enough and, as an adult, while he clearly had some failings, he grew on me and remained likable and decent to the core. Perhaps his failings made me like him all the more because he seemed to be altogether believable.

      I hope Dickens other works have survived as well as Great Expectations over the years because, if they have, I have a nice new collection of books in my to-read pile.
    • 3/5
      Great Expectations tells the story of Pip, an orphan brought up by his abusive sister, who rises from the depths of poverty to the status gentleman, through the machinations of an anonymous benefactor.

      Great Expectations, published in 1861, is classified as Bildungsroman, or Coming of Age. This genre focuses on the psychological and moral growth of a main character, in this case Pip. Dickens depicted Pip as whiny and selfish, ready to turn his back on the people who cared most for him, namely Joe Gargery.

      Charles Dickens is a master at social criticism and character development. Miss Havisham has to be one of the most recognized in English literature. She is obviously insane, while being coddled by those around her, malicious in her intentions, and delights in the selfish creature she created in Estella.

      I thought Great Expectations was a decent book, but the middle part (where Pip learns to be a gentleman) dragged on for longer than I liked. I expect this is due to the original serialization of the novel. Pip was too whiny for me to really care for. However, I did enjoy it overall.
    • 3/5
      Another read aloud we did this year as part of Home School. I'd read this book in high school but didn't appreciate it as much then. The story is intriguing and suspenseful. We had many great discussions, about Pip, Joe, the Convict, selflessness, sacrifice and true love. A good read.
    • 2/5
      I had little expectations going into this and it was just as I expected. Dickens's novels are just too wordy to keep my interest.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful story and John Lee is the perfect narrator for this book. I would have given it 5 stars, but when you are paid by the word, as Dickens was, the stories can sometimes be a bit loooooooong.
    • 1/5
      I loathe this book. Why does the man have to describe every. single. thing. The story itself was torture.
    • 3/5
      Great Expectations was much better than I expected. I wasn't particularly looking forward to it when it came up on a class syllabus, but I'm really glad I read it. There's so much going on in it I'm not sure where to jump in. The biggest complaint I've heard about this book is its slow pace. Yes, it is a very slow read. This is by no means an action adventure, or a crime drama, or anything of the sort. It's good old fashion literary fiction. That being said, if you sit down with it with a cup of tea on a rainy day, you're going to love it.It is most definitely on my re-read shelf.
    • 4/5
      My favourite Dickens. Masterful descriptions and eccentric characters. The story of a coming of age, of overcoming adversities and finding out that many ambitions were misplaced.
    • 4/5
      This was one of those books you have to be ready to read. I was required to read it in high school and I hated it. In later life, I picked it up again and was quite surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The ending dragged on a little long, but it was a very good story. I found myself to be quite intrigued by Miss Havisham. A classic.

    Book preview

    Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

    Great Expectations

    Charles Dickens

    with an Introduction and Notes

    by John Bowen

    WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

    Great Expectations first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1992

    New introduction and notes added in 2000

    Introduction and notes © John Bowen 2000

    Published as an ePublication 2011

    ISBN 978 1 84870 360 5

    Wordsworth Editions Limited

    8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

    Wordsworth® is a registered trademark of

    Wordsworth Editions Limited

    All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

    Readers interested in other titles from Wordsworth Editions are invited to visit our website at

    www.wordsworth-editions.com

    For our latest list of printed books, and a full mail-order service contact

    Bibliophile Books, Unit 5 Datapoint,

    South Crescent, London E16 4TL

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    orders@bibliophilebooks.com

    www.bibliophilebooks.com

    For my husband

    ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

    with love from your wife, the publisher

    Eternally grateful for your

    unconditional love

    Contents

    General Introduction

    Introduction

    Notes to the Introduction

    Further Reading

    Great Expectations

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 0

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Chapter 33

    Chapter 34

    Chapter 35

    Chapter 36

    Chapter 37

    Chapter 38

    Chapter 39

    Chapter 40

    Chapter 41

    Chapter 42

    Chapter 43

    Chapter 44

    Chapter 45

    Chapter 46

    Chapter 47

    Chapter 48

    Chapter 49

    Chapter 50

    Chapter 51

    Chapter 52

    Chapter 53

    Chapter 54

    Chapter 55

    Chapter 56

    Chapter 57

    Chapter 58

    Chapter 59

    Notes to the Text

    General Introduction

    Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

    General Adviser

    Keith Carabine

    Rutherford College

    University of Kent at Canterbury

    Introduction

    Great Expectations, Dickens’s thirteenth novel, was first published in the pages of his weekly magazine All the Year Round between December 1860 and August 1861. Although it was begun in some haste, with little time for the careful forward planning that had marked its predecessors, it is nevertheless one of the best organised and most well constructed of all novels, with scarcely a wasted gesture, character or event. As one gets to know the book, it seems as if there is no fat at all on it, no detail that does not resonate with the whole. Each episode, from the appearance of the mysterious convict in the first chapter to the ambiguities of the final scene, is important in its own right, adds to the richly symbolic structure of the book and plays its part in the shapely and decisive plot. When he wrote Great Expectations, Dickens had been at the top of the literary tree for the best part of a quarter of a century. He was the author of novels that had shaped the literature of the age and the creator of characters that had become proverbial. But his more recent works – in particular the ‘dark novels’ such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit which have been so highly praised by modern critics – had been less well received. Great Expectations, by contrast, was welcomed as a return to Dickens’s earlier comic form. The Saturday Review, for example, a journal which for many years had been hostile to his work, said that it ‘restores Mr Dickens and his readers to the old level. It is in his best vein . . . quite worthy to stand beside Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield’. [1] The plot, wrote Edwin P. Whipple in the Atlantic Monthly, was ‘universally admitted to be the best that Dickens has ever invented’, while E. S. Dallas in The Times described it as among the ‘happiest’ of Dickens’s works with a ‘flowing humour . . . which disarms criticism’. [2]

    These critics point to central virtues of the book – its brilliant comic writing and the sureness of its plotting – but Dickens in a letter to his great friend (later his biographer) John Forster emphasised another aspect. He described the ‘pivot on which the story will turn’ – the discovery of Pip’s dark secret – as a ‘grotesque tragi-comic conception’. [3] It is an important phrase, and one that points to an essential quality of the book – its ability to fuse together seemingly opposed qualities, in particular the serious and the comic, in grotesque and disturbing ways. The book is full of such scenes: when Pip (the central character if not necessarily the hero of the story) returns from his first visit to Miss Havisham’s, he spins an extraordinary tale to his sister and his brother-in-law Joe, piling invention upon absurd invention. It is a very funny scene, not least in Joe’s hope that at least some of Pip’s lies might be true, but counterpointing the comedy is both the violence of Pip’s sister, who boxes his ears and shakes her fist at him, and the psychological dislocation and distress that the visit has caused in him. The grotesquerie is there too in the little details of the book and the strangely disturbing creatures that inhabit the book, from ‘the young man who wanted my heart and liver’ in the opening chapter to the black beetles in Miss Havisham’s room who ‘groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another’.

    What contemporary critics, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not see were the ways in which Great Expectations refused to repeat the kinds of success that Dickens had already achieved. It is a brave and dangerous book, in which Dickens takes great risks with the material that had endeared him to the world and with some of the most cherished beliefs and ideals of modern society, in particular the belief in progress and the ability of an individual to shape his or her own destiny. We can see this clearly in the opening chapters, which are set at Christmas. Although they are scenes of eating and hospitality, they are not like a typical Dickens Christmas at all. On the contrary: Christmas Eve for Pip is a lonely and terrifying one, in which he visits the grave of his parents and his five dead brothers and is then forced to steal food from his sister and her husband to feed a starving, ragged convict on the marshes. During his Christmas dinner, Pip is consumed with guilt at his ‘crime’ and terrified of being found out. It is a world away from the celebratory, festive time for reconciliation and forgiveness that Dickens had made his own from his first book, Sketches by Boz, onwards. These scenes are the first of many that refuse to fulfil the reader’s expectations as remorselessly as Pip’s own expectations are unfulfilled, and in which Dickens treats in radically new ways some of the most important themes and ideas which had underpinned his earlier work.

    These vivid early scenes of eating – the convict Magwitch ‘handing mincemeat down his throat . . . more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent hurry, than a man who was eating it’ and Pip’s comically miserable Christmas meal – are two of many in the book which dramatise and embody important aspects of the social relationships and moral qualities of its characters. [4] It is rare, for example, that food is given or received in an easy or selfless way in this book. More often it is used for snobbish or selfish reasons as a means of humiliating or hurting someone in a weaker position: Estella (with whom Pip is in love) feeds him ‘as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace’; the dinners of the Finches of the Grove (a dining club to which Pip belongs) are the occasions for drunken quarrelling; Joe, when he visits Pip in his London lodgings, is unhappy and ill-at-ease among Pip’s new-found gentility. At times the novel’s use of food to enact moral differences or explore social relationships can carry a more symbolic purpose, of which the most spectacular is Miss Havisham’s long-decayed wedding breakfast, a symbol of her social isolation and of all that she has lost or forsaken. The use of food can also be very funny, as in Pip’s unfortunate Christmas dinner (‘A man needn’t go far to find a subject, if he’s ready with his salt-box.’ Mr Pumblechook added . . . ‘Look at Pork alone. There’s a subject! If you want a subject, look at Pork!’ p. 22) or the tender and comic scene where Herbert Pocket teaches the newly-enriched Pip some of the basics of etiquette: ‘ . . . excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one’s glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one’s nose’ p. 145.

    This is only one of the ways in which Dickens builds up the complex metaphoric and symbolic structures and texture of the book. Probably everyone notices the importance that the book gives to effects of light and dark. In the forge, on the marshes, in Miss Havisham’s and in London, we find rich and complex effects of light and shadow, from the time when Estella (whose name, of course, means ‘star’) takes the candle away from Pip and leaves him alone outside Miss Havisham’s door. As so often in the book, this moment is both a realistic detail and one capable of conjuring up the richer, metaphysical stage on which the action plays out. The cold and distant light that is represented by Estella is clearly contrasted to the warmth and glow of the fire at Joe’s forge, but fire, which seems to follow Pip throughout the book, also appears in more sinister forms. Just as Dickens creates narrative complexity through ‘grotesque, tragi-comic’ effects, so he exploits the ability of symbols to be multivalent and ambiguous, as the very different fires that Pip encounters in his climactic scenes with Orlick and Miss Havisham show all too clearly.

    But Great Expectations is much more than a symbolically rich novel. It is also a beautifully plotted one. [5] This might seem a strange thing to say, as, compared to many of Dickens’s other novels, it has a fairly simple story, with few of the ingenious plot-twists that he is so adept at creating. Although the work has a complicated ‘backstory’ of crime and illegitimacy, Great Expectations gains the force of its plot from a brilliant concentration of effect, building to powerful and surprising climaxes. Aristotle, thinking of Sophocles’ treatment of the Oedipus story, saw moments of reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis) as central to its power. Like Oedipus Rex, Great Expectations has some stunning moments of revelation and recognition, which recast and refigure Pip’s life in profound ways. After his first meeting with Miss Havisham, for example, where he first meets Estella, Pip says in one of his most important reflections in the book, ‘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.’ From now on, his life will never be the same again and the key words of his sentence – chain, iron, gold, bound – echo through the novel, on both literal and metaphorical levels, as the many different chains of Pip’s life are forged and linked together.

    Great Expectations is also a romance. Pip falls in love, or is made to fall in love, with Estella and this passion runs throughout his life. Their love-affair, if it can be called that, is part of the novel’s concern with the force of desire in human life. The desires the book is concerned with – to be rich, to be loved, to be admired, to be happy – seem at first commonplace and normal enough, yet they have devastating effects on the lives of the characters, entangling them in pleasures that seem inseparable from pain. When Pip finally realises the futility of his passion for Estella, he returns to marry the faithful and true Biddy who seems to have been waiting the whole novel for Pip to see the error of his ways and return to claim her. This is a device that Dickens uses in both Little Dorrit and David Copperfield, to which Great Expectations has a very close relation. In those novels, Amy and Agnes wait calmly and patiently over many years for Arthur and David to realise their respective mistakes. Dickens, in one of his more surprising, almost shocking, scenes refuses this consolation to Pip and the reader, and creates a very different and more ‘open’ ending to the book. Miss Havisham too suffers for her desires, with a passion that can never be fulfilled and that binds her to an endless and impossible mourning in the book, both for her lover (who jilted her at the altar) and for herself, immured in a house that is like a tomb. She is the victim of a terrible trauma, which she condemns herself to repeat day after day, night after night, alone and friendless. As with many characters in the book, desire takes her not forward but backwards, in a futile attempt to restore what has been lost for ever. Pip, Estella, Magwitch, Miss Havisham, all the central characters of the story, find their destinies governed by events and deeds long past, out of their knowledge, and pitiless in their consequences. The closing line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ – could be the conclusion of this book too. [6]

    The world of Satis House, where Miss Havisham lives, is one of many significant spaces of the book, which are often as grotesque and ambivalent as the characters who inhabit them. Even London, which Dickens so often relishes and celebrates in his fiction, is, according to Pip, ‘ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty’, a place where Newgate Prison and Jaggers’s law office (in the significantly-named Little Britain) lie next to Smithfield meat market ‘all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam’. Although Miss Havisham’s house is exactly where one might expect a semi-deranged woman to live – dark, miserable, decaying – it also seems like a place out of a fairy-tale or a Gothic novel, somewhere that comes from our deepest dreams and fancies. Pip believes for a long time that Miss Havisham is his fairy godmother, and that his own role in the story is to ‘restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin – in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess’. He is wrong, of course, and for much of the book is entrapped not in a fairy-tale, but within a much stranger and more uncanny story. Miss Havisham seems to him like ‘some ghastly waxwork at the Fair’, someone who looks human but who may not be, who seems to exist on the very margins of the human, like a vampire or a ghoul. Even the boundary between the living and the dead is not a reliable one. Pip sees ‘the hands of the dead people stretching up cautiously out of their graves’ to catch Magwitch as he flees in the first chapter, and wandering around the brewery at Miss Havisham’s, he glimpses ‘a figure hanging there by the neck . . . and . . . the face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me’. Like a Gothic novel, this is a haunting and haunted book, where the dead call out to the living and stretch out their hands to bring them down.

    Dickens is often thought to be a sentimental writer, but there is nothing sentimental about his treatment of human relationships or the relations of adults and children in this book. Much of the book is concerned with understanding how children manage to live on beyond the pain and psychological damage inflicted by those who should care for them. Pip is beaten by his sister, but more cruel is the psychological damage that Miss Havisham inflicts on him. When Estella says of Pip, ‘Why, he is a common labouring-boy!’ she replies, chillingly, ‘Well? You can break his heart.’ She makes Pip play for her with the cold command, ‘I sometimes have sick fancies . . . and I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play . . . play, play, play!’ The relations between adults are often nakedly aggressive battles of wills, with both sides determined to dominate: Miss Havisham is, like so many other people in this book, a victim who is also a bully. Magwitch, another victim and oppressor, tells Pip that if he disobeys him ‘your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate’ and even the mild Herbert Pocket, the ‘pale young gentleman’, challenges Pip to a fight the minute they meet. Much of this violence is directed at, or stems from, women: Pip’s sister, who is always hitting Pip and Joe, is brutally attacked herself; Jaggers speculates that Estella’s future husband may ‘turn to, and beat her’ after the marriage; when Pip, late in the novel, tries to put out the fire that is engulfing Miss Havisham, they find themselves ‘on the ground struggling like desperate enemies’.

    Violence, or the threat of it, is ever-present in the book, but particularly in the scenes that explore the law and crime. Throughout his life, Dickens had a peculiarly intimate relationship with the law and the legal apparatus. When he was a boy of twelve or so, his father was imprisoned for debt and he was taken away from school to work in a rat-infested blacking warehouse. It was a secret which he kept from everyone (with the exception of his friend John Forster and perhaps also his wife Kate), but it gave him a most vivid and personal sense of the power of the law to destroy or transform human lives for the worse. In the majority of his novels, the law is portrayed as foolish at best, malicious and deadly at worst. Lawyers in Dickens’s work, such as the obnoxious Dodson and Fogg in Pickwick Papers, or the blackmailing Tulkinghorn and deathly Vholes in Bleak House, are rarely treated with much sympathy, but it is, typically, more complex and surprising here. Jaggers and his clerk Wemmick may be Dickens’s most subtle exploration of lives lived under the shadow of the law. Whereas Jaggers gains much of his power from never letting his guard slip, never leaving his job behind, Wemmick divides his life in two, gradually losing his ‘work’ character as he gets nearer to his suburban castle at Walworth. Jaggers, by contrast, is incapable of having a conversation or discussion without making it also a cross-examination. The aggression that lies behind his technique of firing questions at people without giving away any of his own views drives Joe to an uncharacteristic outburst of anger (‘which I mean-tersay . . . that if you come into my place bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay if as sech if you’re a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay and stand or fall by!’), but the habit of cross-examination seems to be infectious in the book: Magwitch, Mrs Joe, Jaggers and the odious Pumblechook all cross-examine Pip at one time or another and he in turn cross-examines Miss Havisham, Magwitch, Estella and Orlick. It is as if the characters of the novel feel themselves to be constantly on trial, and this leads to a pervasive feeling of guilt in Pip from the first page of the novel onwards. Guilt of course has at least two meanings – it is both a psychological state, a matter of private thoughts and feelings (‘I feel guilty’), and a public judgment, enforced through the law (‘We find the prisoner guilty’). Dickens plays on the two senses of the idea throughout the book. When the soldiers arrive at the forge in search of the escaped convict, Pip believes (and Dickens makes us believe, if only for a moment) that they are, absurdly, in search of Pip. When his sister is found mysteriously assaulted, he believes himself again to be mysteriously guilty, and even when he is apprenticed, a perfectly everyday event, he is treated ‘exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick’.

    Biddy tells Pip at one point that ‘a gentleman should not be unjust neither’ and questions of judgment and the law are at the centre of Great Expectations, as is the recognition of the simultaneous necessity and difficulty of being just to others. What would a just judgment be on Estella, Magwitch, Miss Havisham or, indeed, Pip himself? Our judgments on Pip are made particularly complicated by the fact that he is not only the most important character in the novel, but also its narrator. In novels like Bleak House or A Tale of Two Cities (the immediate precursor of Great Expectations) much of the force of the novels comes from the power and individuality of the narrator who often seems the most important character in the book. Great Expectations is not really like this, nor does it resemble Dickens’s other major novel with a first-person narrator, David Copperfield. Whereas we gain a strong sense of the David Copperfield who is telling the story as well as the younger self who is experiencing it, Pip is a subdued, almost melancholy, presence in his own tale – a master-narrator to be sure but one whose force comes not from self-assertion but self-effacement. He does not seek to dominate the events of the book, or to make us think better of him than he deserves; on the contrary, he allows its readers to see his selfishness, vanity and mistakes in all clarity. Nineteenth-century novels typically work by playing on our mixed feelings about their characters – our urge to sympathise with them on the one hand, and to judge or condemn them on the other. It is part of the brilliance of this particular novel that Dickens can mobilise such strongly competing feelings about the central characters of the book. Pip in particular behaves so shabbily at times that he tests our sympathy to its limits, and yet our sense that he is trapped in a complex web of other people’s desires and needs prevents us from making any simple judgment or condemnation of him.

    The law saturates Great Expectations and dominates Pip’s life, but so too does the force of class difference. We can see this most clearly at Miss Haversham’s, where Estella’s contempt for him makes him determined to be a gentleman. Yet it is striking how little happiness Pip’s good fortune and gentility brings, how little pleasure comes with money and status. Pip’s new home in London, for example, is ‘the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats . . . a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground.’ His life, instead of moving onwards and upwards, seems in the centre of the book simply to stand still and his wealth simply results in more debt and more unhappiness. But it is not just in Pip’s life that class matters. As we move through the novel we encounter several other characters whose lives have been tainted by class difference and the injustices that it produces, particularly in the remarkable forty-second chapter, where Pip and Dickens hand over the narration of their stories to Magwitch, and we see Pip’s life and that of the respectable people of the book from the perspective of someone who has been ‘in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail’ all his life. This is one of the most important reversals of perspective in the novel, akin to the moment in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when the monster is at last allowed to tell his own story. Indeed Dickens explicitly draws attention to this parallel when Pip says, ‘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.’ Here, Pip is made to seem both like Frankenstein and his monster, both creator and created, both hunter and hunted, and so too is Magwitch.

    Through Magwitch, Great Expectations is also a novel about empire and colonialism. At the end of David Copperfield, Dickens shipped off many of the characters to Australia to begin a new life, simply as a convenient way of disposing of surplus or awkward individuals. In Great Expectations, the reverse movement occurs, not out from the imperial core to the colonised periphery but back from Australia to London and the life of the genteel middle-classes, where Magwitch erupts within Pip’s life like a volcano. Magwitch is in some ways the most bold and dangerous invention of the novel. He is a not just a convict, but also, as he tells Pip, his ‘second father’, who seems to appear out of a grave at the beginning of the book. He seems to Pip like a dead pirate ‘come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again’, but also strangely like an animal and a machine, with a noise in his throat ‘as if he had works in him like a clock’. It is this disturbing uncertainty that accounts for the fascination he exercises and the compassion he arouses, not just in Pip, but in many readers and writers too, of which perhaps the most interesting example is Peter Carey’s brilliant rewriting of the Great Expectations story in his novel Jack Maggs. [7]

    In many of his other novels Dickens wants to believe that romantic relationships, particularly marriage, can provide a haven from the conflicts and violence that exist outside the home. Here, he is courageous enough to explore the violence and cruelty within the family. The first marriage we see in the book – that of Joe and Pip’s sister – is saturated with aggression and violence, as later is that of Estella and Drummle. The most fearsome of the destructive characters in the book is the mysteriously named Dolge Orlick, whom we first meet at the forge and who at first seems quite marginal to Pip’s story, but who, as Pip and we learn too late, is in fact his dark double. He is consumed by the destructive emotions of envy, resentment and malice and for one terrifying moment, gains the power of life and death over Pip. Yet Pip survives Orlick’s assault, partly by chance, partly through the good sense and courage of his friends. For Great Expectations is, at least in part, a book about surviving, about Pip’s and Estella’s ability to live on beyond the traumas inflicted upon them. Although the novel has a deeply unillusioned understanding of human motives and behaviour, a bleak knowledge of the hurts that people can inflict on one another, it also has space to create plausible representations of generosity and goodness. Virtue exists in many places in the book: in Biddy and Herbert, in Wemmick (who keeps his ability to do good despite the taint of the Old Bailey and Newgate), even in Miss Havisham and Jaggers. Pip, too, for all his faults, does not betray or exploit the man who has made him what he is, but it is in Joe, above all, that we see virtue thrive. Like Pip and Magwitch, Joe was abused in his childhood (he and his mother were beaten by Joe’s drunken father) but he lives on, to adopt Pip as a child and later nurse him back to life, and throughout the book to assert the power of human solidarity and compassion: when he finds that the convict has stolen his food, he simply says, ‘God knows you’re welcome to it . . . we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.’

    One of the most discussed parts of the novel is its ending. The version that was printed in the first edition, and the majority of subsequent ones, was in fact the product of Dickens’s second thoughts. His friend Bulwer Lytton, the novelist, had advised him to revise it and, perhaps surprisingly, Dickens did so. Since the reprinting of the ‘original’ ending in Forster’s Life of Dickens, critics have debated the merits of the two versions. [8] The ‘first’ version is in some ways a more bleak one, in which Pip and Estella briefly meet by chance in a London street and part. Although Estella tells Pip that she is ‘greatly changed’, it is in sharp contrast to the majority of Dickens’s endings, which often have scenes of familial happiness and the creation of a new generation freed from the mistakes and errors of the past. Here, Dickens creates a deliberately low-key conclusion in which there is no hope that Pip and Estella can pick up the threads of their romance or return to the past. The ‘revised’ version is longer and more complex than the original although it too avoids simple consolation and wish-fulfilment. Pip and Estella meet in the grounds of Satis House and it seems as if they are reconciled: ‘I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place . . . ’. But the final phrase of the novel is both uncertain in itself, and made more so by the fact that Dickens revised it in a slight but important way. In the first published version, Pip says, ‘I saw the shadow of no parting from her.’ In later editions, this is subtly changed to, ‘I saw no shadow of another parting from her.’ There are several ways that we could interpret these lines. Should we emphasise the words ‘no parting’ and assume, as some adaptations of the book have done, that Pip and Estella will live happily ever after, freed from the burdens and constraints of the past? Or should we emphasise the words ‘I saw’? Pip has not been the best of prophets in this novel, and has been consistently wrong about his future prospects. Is the seeming reconciliation with Estella merely his last illusion, another great expectation that will turn to nothing? It is, perhaps, for the reader to decide. However we interpret the conclusion, or which of the several revisions we prefer, it seems appropriate that Pip’s story should end in ‘shadow’ – whether we believe that it is the shadow of parting, or no parting.

    Dr John Bowen

    Keele University

    Introduction Notes

    1. Saturday Review, 20 July 1861, xii, p. 69, quoted in Philip Collins, Dickens: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1971, p. 427

    2. Edwin P. Whipple, Atlantic Monthly, September 1861, viii, pp. 380–2, quoted in Philip Collins, op. cit., p. 428. E. S. Dallas, from an unsigned review, The Times, 17 October 1861, p. 6, quoted in Philip Collins, op. cit., p. 431

    3. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ix, iii, Chapman and Hall, London 1872–4, p. 567. On the grotesque in Dickens, see Michael Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque, Croom Helm, Beckenham 1984.

    4. See Barbara Hardy, ‘Food and Ceremony in Great Expectations’, in The Moral Art of Dickens, Athlone, London 1992, pp. 130–40, and Ian Watt, ‘Oral Dickens’, in Dickens Studies Annual, 3, 1974, pp. 165–81

    5. For a brilliant discussion of the plotting of Great Expectations, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 113–42.

    6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1950, p. 188

    7. Peter Carey, Jack Maggs, Faber and Faber, London 1998

    8. For an excellent (and exhaustive) treatment of the various endings, see the Norton edition of the novel, edited by Edgar Rosenberg, Norton, New York 1999, pp. 491–527.

    Further Reading

    Biography

    Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1990

    John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Chapman and Hall, London 1872–4, often reprinted

    Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Simon and Schuster, New York 1952, revised 1977

    Fred Kaplan, Charles Dickens, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1988

    Grahame Smith, Charles Dickens: A Literary Life, Macmillan, London 1996

    Editions

    Great Expectations, edited by Margaret Cardwell with an introduction by Kate Flint, World’s Classics, Oxford 1994

    Great Expectations, edited by Janice Carlisle, Bedford, Boston 1996

    Great Expectations, edited by Robin Gilmour, Everyman, London 1994

    Great Expectations, edited by Edgar Rosenberg, Norton, New York 1999

    Critical Books and Collections on Great Expectations

    Nicola Bradbury, Great Expectations, St Martin’s, New York 1990

    Anny Sadrin, Great Expectations, Unwin Hyman, London 1988

    Roger D. Sell (ed.), Great Expectations, Macmillan, London 1994

    Nicholas Tredell, Icon Critical Guides: Great Expectations, Icon, Cambridge 1998

    Selected Criticism

    Murray Baumgarten, ‘Calligraphy and Code: Writing in Great Expectations’, Dickens Studies Annual, 11, 1983, pp. 61–72

    Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 113–42

    John Carey, The Violent Effigy, Faber and Faber, London 1973

    William D. Cohen, ‘Manual Conduct in Great Expectations’, ELH, 60, 1993, pp. 217–59

    Eiichi Hara, ‘Stories Present and Absent in Great Expectations’, ELH, 53, 1986, pp. 593–614

    Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Dickens, Athlone, London 1970, pp. 130–40

    Michael Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque, Croom Helm, Beckenham 1984, pp. 216–30

    F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist, Chatto and Windus, London 1970, pp. 360–428

    John Lucas, The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens’s Novels, Methuen, London 1970, pp. 287– 314

    J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels, Harvard University Press, 1959, pp. 249–78

    Christopher D. Morris, ‘The Bad Faith of Pip’s Bad Faith: Deconstructing Great Expectations’, ELH, 54, 1987, pp. 941–55, and in Steven Connor (ed.), Charles Dickens, Longman, Harlow 1996, pp. 76–90

    Julian Moynahan, ‘The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations’, Essays in Criticism, 10, 1960, pp. 60–79

    Tom Paulin, Minotaur, Faber and Faber, London 1992

    Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, Dent, London 1983

    Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy-Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1979

    Jeremy Tambling, ‘Prison-Bound: Dickens and Foucault’, in Essays in Criticism, 36, 1986, pp. 11–31, and Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, Macmillan, London 1995, pp. 17–48, and in Steven Connor (ed.), Charles Dickens, Longman, Harlow 1996, pp. 117–34

    Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 150–74

    Great Expectations

    Chapter 1

    My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

    I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), [1] my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, [2] each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

    Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, [3] within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. 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, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!’

    A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A 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; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

    ‘Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,’ I pleaded in terror. ‘Pray don’t do it, sir.’

    ‘Tell us your name!’ said the man. ‘Quick!’

    ‘Pip, sir.’

    ‘Once more,’ said the man, staring at me. ‘Give it mouth!’

    ‘Pip. Pip, sir.’

    ‘Show us where you live,’ said the man. ‘Pint out the place!’

    I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat inshore among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

    The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside-down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. 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.

    ‘You young dog,’ said the man, licking his lips, ‘what fat cheeks you ha’ got.’

    I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong.

    ‘Darn me if I couldn’t eat ’em,’ said the man, with a threatening shake of his head, ‘and if I han’t half a mind to’t!’

    I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn’t, and held tighter to the tombstone on which he had put me; partly to keep myself upon it; partly, to keep myself from crying.

    ‘Now then, lookee here!’ said the man. ‘Where’s your mother?’

    ‘There, sir!’ said I.

    He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

    ‘There, sir!’ I timidly exclaimed. ‘ Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.’

    ‘Oh!’ said he, coming back. ‘And is that your father alonger your mother?’

    ‘Yes, sir,’ said I; ‘him too; late of this parish.’

    ‘Ha!’ he muttered then, considering. ‘Who d’ye live with – supposin’ you’re kindly let to live, which I han’t made up my mind about?’

    ‘My sister, sir – Mrs Joe Gargery – wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.’

    ‘Blacksmith, eh?’ said he. And he looked down at his leg.

    After darkly looking at his leg and at me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

    ‘Now lookee here,’ he said, ‘the question being whether you’re to be let to live. You know what a file is?’

    ‘Yes, sir.’

    ‘And you know what wittles [4] is?’

    ‘Yes, sir.’

    After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and danger.

    ‘You get me a file.’ He tilted me again. ‘And you get me wittles.’ He tilted me again. ‘You bring ’em both to me.’ He tilted me again. ‘Or I’ll have your heart and liver out.’ He tilted me again.

    I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both hands, and said, ‘If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.’

    He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its own weather-cock. Then, 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 your 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 a-keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off your inside. Now, what do you say?’

    I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in the morning.

    ‘Say, Lord strike you dead if you don’t!’ said the man.

    I said so, and he took me down.

    ‘Now,’ he pursued, ‘you remember what you’ve undertook, and you remember that young man, and you get home!’

    ‘Goo-good-night, sir,’ I faltered.

    ‘Much of that!’ said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. ‘I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!’

    At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms – clasping himself as if to hold himself together – and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.

    When he came to the low church wall, he got over it like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy, or the tide was in.

    The marshes were just a long, black, horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long, angry, red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered – like an unhooped cask upon a pole – an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it, which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But, now I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.

    The terrible stranger in the churchyard

    Chapter 2

    My sister, Mrs Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ‘by hand.’ [5] Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

    She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow – a sort of Hercules [6] in strength, and also in weakness.

    My sister, Mrs Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all: or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life.

    Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the dwellings in our country were – most of them, at that time. When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up and Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in the chimney-corner.

    ‘Mrs Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s out now, making it a baker’s dozen.’ [7]

    ‘Is she?’

    ‘Yes, Pip,’ said Joe, ‘and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.’

    At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame.

    ‘She sot down,’ said Joe, ‘and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did,’ said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it, ‘she Ram-paged out, Pip.’

    ‘Has she been gone long, Joe?’ I always treated him as a larger species of child, and as no more than my equal.

    ‘Well,’ said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, [8] ‘she’s been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She’s a-coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel [9] betwixt you.’

    I took the advice. My sister, Mrs Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me – I often served her as a connubial missile – at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney, and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg.

    ‘Where have you been, you young monkey?’ said Mrs Joe, stamping her foot. ‘Tell me directly what you’ve been doing to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.’

    ‘I have only been to the churchyard,’ said I, from my stool, crying and rubbing myself.

    ‘Churchyard!’ repeated my sister. ‘If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?’

    ‘You did,’ said I.

    ‘And why did I do it, I should like to know?’ exclaimed my sister.

    I whimpered, ‘I don’t know.’

    ‘I don’t!’ said my sister. ‘I’d never do it again! I know that. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off, since born you were. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother.’

    My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at the fire. For, the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the avenging coals.

    ‘Ha!’ said Mrs Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. ‘Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two.’ One of us, by the bye, had not said it at all. ‘You’ll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!’

    As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side flaxen curls and whiskers, and following Mrs Joe about with his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

    My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand, she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib – where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then, she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaister [10] – using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf; which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.

    On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of my trousers.

    The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow sufferers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each other’s admiration now and then – which stimulated us to new exertions. Tonight, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast-diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched bread-and-butter on the other. At last, I desperately considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread-and-butter down my leg.

    Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw that my bread-and-butter was gone.

    The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold of his bite and stared at me were too evident to escape my sister’s observation.

    ‘What’s the matter now?’ said she smartly, as she put down her cup.

    ‘I say, you know!’ muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious remonstrance. ‘Pip, old chap! You’ll do yourself a mischief. It’ll stick somewhere. You can’t have chawed it, Pip.’

    ‘What’s the matter now?’ repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

    ‘If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do it,’ said Joe, all aghast. ‘Manners is manners, but still your elth’s your elth.’

    By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him: while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on.

    ‘Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,’ said my sister, out of breath, ‘you staring great stuck pig.’

    Joe looked at her in a helpless way; then took a helpless bite, and looked at me again.

    ‘You know, Pip,’ said Joe solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek, and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone, ‘you and me is always friends, and I’d be the last to tell upon you, any time. But such a’ – he moved his chair and looked about the floor between us, and then again at me – ‘such a most oncommon bolt as that!’

    ‘Been bolting his food, has he?’ cried my sister.

    ‘You know, old chap,’ said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs Joe, with his bite still in his cheek, ‘I Bolted, myself, when I was your age – frequent – and as a boy I’ve been among a many Bolters; but I never seen your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you an’t Bolted dead.’

    My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair: saying nothing more than the awful words, ‘You come along and be dosed.’

    Some medical beast had revived Tar-water [11] in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence. On this particular evening, the urgency of my case demanded a pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater comfort, while Mrs Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and meditating before the fire), ‘because he had had a turn.’ Judging from myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had none before.

    Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy;

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