I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 5 7Where does human civilisation itself come from? What are the
sources of our common life?
The answer for this novel is unambiguous. Civilisation has its
murky roots in crime, violence, labour, suffering, injustice, wretch-
edness and oppression. The fact that Magwitch is Pip’s benefactor
is symbolic of this deeper truth. It is from this coarse root that the
world of civility flowers. ‘I lived rough,’ the convict tells Pip, ‘that
you should live smooth.’ It is from hard labour and illegality that
Pip’s good fortune flows. His leisurely life in London thus has a
‘taint of prison and crime’ about it that he can never quite dispel.
The wealth of Miss Havisham, like that of the sophisticated London
world which Pip joins, also stems from wretchedness and exploita-
tion. And the fashionable world is as unconscious of this fact, or as
indifferent to it, as Pip is unaware that the underworld figure of
Magwitch is the real source of his identity. Even Estella turns out to
have criminal origins, as the long- lost daughter of Magwitch and a
suspected murderer. It is hard to see how the civilisation portrayed
in the book could survive if it were to become conscious of its true
foundation.
This is an astonishingly radical view for the novel to take. In fact,
it is far more radical than Dickens himself. It is a long way from his
real- life political views. He was a reformist, not a revolutionary. In
this sense, Great Expectations, like some of its author’s other late
novels, illustrates a point we noted earlier, that a writer’s real- life
opinions are not necessarily at one with the attitudes revealed in
his or her work. ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ as D.H.
Lawrence remarks. The novel’s sympathies clearly lie with the
criminal underworld, not with the fashionable world in which
Dickens himself was so idolised. Satis House reveals the dark
underside of that respectability, as Miss Havisham’s greedy,