Great Expectations
Dickens best combines narrative and analysis in Great Expectations, a story with a
single focus of consciousness. Expectations are thrust on ‘Pip’, a boy brought up by
his harsh sister, the wife of a simple village blacksmith. Pip is suddenly given money
from a mysterious source, supplied via a lawyer, Jaggers. Pip imagines his benefactor
to be Miss Havisham, an heiress jilted on her wedding day, who has trained up the
beautiful Estella to take revenge on men. Pip’s rise in the world turns his head. In
London he is embarrassed by his blacksmith brother-in-law, the good-hearted Joe.
Estella chooses to marry a rival suitor who is Pip’s social superior. The story takes
few holidays, one being Pip’s visits to the eccentric home of Jaggers’s kindly clerk,
Wemmick. But this holiday is, like Homer’s similes in the Iliad, a reminder of the
normal human simplicities left behind. Everything in the novel hangs together, even
the melodrama which usually weakens the effects it is supposed to intensify.
A disciplined beginning helps:
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles
ofthe 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!’
This is a convict escaped from the prison hulks moored in the Thames. The terrified
boy brings him food he purloins from home. In recompense the convict Magwitch,
having made good in Australia, magically becomes Pip’s secret benefactor. When he
returns to inspect the Young Gentleman his wealth has created, Magwitch is proud
but Pip is ashamed.
Dickens wrote an ending in which Estella had found that ‘suffering had been
stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching’ and Pip is single. But the published ending,
changed at Lytton’s suggestion, reads:
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.This chastened marital ending, recalling that ofParadise Lost, does not take away the
pain ofGreat Expectations, a Romantic ‘autobiography’ in which the reader is more
aware than the hero-narrator. Here Dickens best combines his myth-making with a
world of experience. Its critique of worldly success succeeds because it is not too
explicit.
‘The Inimitable’
Dickens was ‘the Inimitable’ – a word from his own circus style. His extraordinary
talent is uniquely a communicative one. In his best scenes, his words seem to be
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 295