H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 6 4high society. It suggests what is real about the forge and the
criminal underworld, as well as what is harsh and comfortless
about them.
There is also a pattern of food imagery which weaves its way
through the story, and which is similarly ambiguous. Food, like
iron, is associated with power and violence. Magwitch threatens to
gobble the child Pip up; the pie which the boy steals for the convict
becomes a source of guilt and terror for him; Mr Pumblechook
recounts a bizarre tale in which Pip becomes a pig whose throat is
slit; while Miss Havisham speaks of being feasted on by her preda-
tory relatives. Yet food and drink also signify friendship and
solidarity, as with Pip’s generous- hearted gifts to the famished
Magwitch. Dickens’s heart never beats faster than when he can
smell the bacon sizzling.
Nobody would guess from the account of the book I have just
given that it can be ecstatically funny. Joe Gargery is among his
author’s finest comic creations. The novel pokes a fair amount of
good- humoured fun at him, while at the same time treating him as
the moral yardstick of the whole fable. The fact that Joe’s forge is
marooned in the countryside, however, might suggest that virtue
can flourish only when isolated from corrupting social influences.
The same is true of Wemmick’s domestic castle. There is an abun-
dance of humour elsewhere in the book as well. Dickens can be
funny even when he is painting some deeply unpalatable realities,
which suggests that one of the alternatives he is proposing to such
unpleasantness is comedy itself. Goodness is in notably short
supply in his later fiction; but even if there is a dearth of it in
the flint- hearted world the novels portray, a good deal of moral
virtue is involved in the way they portray it. The loving sympathy,
imaginative flair, benevolent humour and geniality of spirit which