H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 5 8hypocritical relations wait like vultures to swoop on her money
when she dies.
Joe, the novel’s moral touchstone, hopes that Magwitch will give
the slip to the soldiers pursuing him on the marshes. When Pip
arrives in London, one of the first sights he sees is Newgate prison,
where the wretched inmates are whipped and hanged. Later on,
when Magwitch is brought to court for sentence of execution, the
novel contrasts the prisoners in the dock, ‘some defiant, some
stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some covering
their faces’, with ‘the sheriffs with their great chains and nosegays,
other civic gewgaws and monsters, criers, ushers.. .’. There is a
clear implication throughout the book that conventional society is
as cruel and corrupt in its own more decorous way as the world of
thieves and assassins.
The novel hints at a parallel between the child and the criminal.
Both figures are half in and half out of orthodox society, stripped
of privileges and sorely oppressed. Neither has the benefit of
much education, and both are accustomed to being ordered
about. The Victorian child may enjoy almost as little freedom as
an inmate of death row. The young Pip is forever being cuffed,
smacked, reproved and casually roughed up by Evangelical- minded
adults for whom children are not far from the spawn of Satan. At
one point, children are explicitly described as criminals fit to
be hanged, which points to the secret solidarity between Pip
and Magwitch. There is also a literal connection between
children and crime in the novel. Jaggers, who is not exactly a
bleeding- heart liberal, tells Pip indignantly how he has seen
children ‘being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast
out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be
hanged’.