Approaching literature: Reading Great Expectations

Introduction

In this coursewefocus upon a specific novel, and consider some of the different ways in which it can be read. We do this by identifying its genre, or the kind of writing it belongs to.

The novel as a kind of writing continuously involved in offering representations of the everyday, of the past and present world, is inevitably bound up with the different ways in which we have come to think about ourselves in relation to that world. Insofar as novels typically have a specific location in time and place, they are characteristically involved in the major upheavals of their societies, directly or indirectly: we are viewing the novel as a genre capable of registering in satisfyingly complex ways what we think we know about how the world we live in has come about. This goes beyond what used to be the dominant way of thinking about novels in this country —that they were basically moral, English and liberal, although of course many of the greatest novels can usefully be thought of in that way.

If a novel like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–1) may be thought of as a ‘classic’ example of the genre, then we would expect to find that the nature of its realism is more than simply a matter of the presentation of the moral growth of a single character. Depending upon how we choose to read it, it may also be about many other things, more or less apparent. In what follows, I want to suggest a range of approaches to this novel, each of which builds on its predecessor. To begin with, I consider how contemporary readers and critics viewed the novel — what sort of expectations they had — as a way of thinking about our expectations, and to question assumptions based upon the familiar, almost mythical, Dickens that we all think we know. Next, approaching the text as an ‘autobiographical’ type of novel, I look at how it takes us beyond the actuality of first person narrative — with which we so easily identify as readers — towards the realm of the gothic or ‘grotesque’. This enables me to proceed to a ‘hallucinatory reading’, derived from critics who explain the novel in terms of the fantasies of desire and revenge expressed through hidden psychic patterns linking the different characters. Finally, further questioning the idea that we should read Dickens's novel as realist in any simple sense, I take up the possibility that we should think of it as playing a part in the broader history of Britain, including its colonial history. It has been held that the mainstream realist novel did much to ‘normalise’ imperialist attitudes. I do not think things are quite so straightforward: apart from anything else, this presumes a very limited idea of the genre. Nevertheless, it takes us beyond the familiar, towards a reading that raises yet more possibilities for what we may find in the novel. My aim is to increase your sense of the genre's potential, not just to advocate any one reading, or place Great Expectations within a particular category.

Great Expectations has been published in many editions over time. In order to reference sections of the novel, we have chosen to use the 1994 edition (Oxford University Press, ed. M. Cardwell with an introduction by K. Flint). You may be reading a different version of the book, so the references will not be the same. However, they will give you an idea as to where to find the sections mentioned.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Arts and Humanities.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• read and understand the classic novel Great Expectations, based on the genre of the book

• study literature at a higher level.

1 Openings and ogres

1.1 The novel's opening

One important way of approaching the novel as a genre is to think about what expectations this kind of text would have aroused in its first readers. This is a way of reminding us of the gap between then and now, of the fact that readers of the original novel had certain assumptions, which would have been different from our own. It is a way of remembering the changing cultural-historical context, which will help us to make sense of a text, but also of reading with more awareness of what the process of reading involves. In order to help us to think about how our reading may be influenced by our conventions and assumptions, I would like briefly to consider a modern novel, which raises these issues quite sharply.

1.2 Perspective

Perhaps the most striking thing about the opening of Great Expectations is the way it combines the rhetorical immediacy of the speaking voice, and the closeness to the reader that invites, with this flexibility between different perspectives in time. Dickens thereby combines the ancient storyteller's art with more recent developments in narrative technique.

By ‘recent’, I have in mind the development of first person written narrative in the nineteenth century. There was a growing interest in the idea of a narrative retrospectively discovering a pattern of development in the young mind from within. (This was usually male, although Jane Eyre (1847) is the notable exception.) This type of autobiographical fiction is sometimes given the label Bildungsroman or apprenticeship novel (from Johann von Goethe's influential narrative of this type, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–6)). However, a ‘confessional’ element, derived from religious (especially puritan) tradition, was equally important in the formation of the sub-genre.

In this kind of narrative, the moral focus on the individual, which, as we have seen, was central to the formation of realist fiction, became mapped onto stories of the thoughts and adventures of childhood. Most of the earlier authors working within the autobiographical sub-genre chose to tell their story from the perspective of the adult, rather than as if it were spoken by the child or adolescent. The latter could not be expected to express feelings or analyse situations except within a limited range and remain credible, and so could only offer the most indirect or attenuated sense of moral or spiritual values. The characteristic modern version of this type of narration was established by James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The Catcher in the Rye shows the continuity of the modern way of representing the inner workings of the mind, in terms of an inner monologue or ‘stream of consciousness’, which aims at authenticity rather than morality.

As novelists themselves have long recognised, the choice of what ‘point of view’ to adopt is one of the most important decisions they have to make. Theorists have gone on to isolate many different aspects of this decision, perhaps the most important being the distinction between ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’. In the opening of Great Expectations, the speaker is the adult Pip, but the child Pip is the one who sees. This gap is vital for the exploration of memory as well as morality in the novel, and as it proceeds the adult narrator's voice and comments play an increasingly important part in the way the narrative is mediated.

The dual role or perspective is established from the first words, if only by implication:

This is the voice, not of the boy himself, but of the man, who can refer with light-hearted irony to the inadequacies of the ‘infant tongue’. In an act of self-identification explained by the next paragraph, the child gives himself a name associating him with his dead father, even as it registers his isolation from his unknown family. (Father-figures are especially important in what follows, as we shall see.) The second paragraph of the novel reinforces the suggestion of the creative power of the boy ‘fancies’ or imagination, at the same time as it offers a critical perspective upon that power: reading the grave inscriptions leads to unreasonable or childish images, which nonetheless sway us with their sympathetic or comic force.

The defining moment of Pip's life which follows is rendered with a touching melancholy, ‘a memorable raw afternoon towards evening’ (p.3), when childish fantasy is dissolved by the reality of the overgrown churchyard, his dead family and its gloomy environment. His sense of isolation and fear is suddenly dramatised by the appearance of the gruff stranger who threatens to murder and even eat him. The eruption of direct speech (‘Hold your noise!’), as a man ‘started up from among the graves’, takes us directly into the frightening present again: ‘A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg’ (p.4). Did you notice how this paragraph presents the man as the boy first sees him, with the minimum of narrative interference, by omitting the verbs from the first two sentences?

Activity 2

The first shocking appearance of the convict (well caught in David Lean's memorable film version of the novel, see Figure 1) brings into play another set of associations, which are critically important for our sense of the kind of novel we are dealing with here. How are we to respond to the convict's first appearance? By what means does the narrator mediate the ‘reality’ of this character to us?

Figure 1 Still from the Cineguild film production of Great Expectations 1946, directed by David Lean, with Anthony Wager as Pip, Finlay Currie as Abel Magwitch. Photograph by courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive.

Discussion

The convict's opening words (‘Hold your noise! … Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!’, p.4) have just the exaggerated unreality we would expect of a stage or fairy-tale monster. Yet I think we accept his ‘reality’ because of the way Dickens presents the character: by making him not only something threatening as seen by the shivering child, but also something comic, as he becomes when mediated to us by the narrating adult. The humorous, ironic effect emerges, for instance, when the convict himself momentarily takes fright as Pip indicates that his mother is ‘There, sir!’ in the graveyard (p.5). The effect is confirmed when the convict tells Pip that if he does not do as he is told, there is a young man who will ‘get’ him even when he thinks he is safe in bed (‘in comparison with which young man I am a Angel’, p.6). Pip is terrified, but we are not – nor, clearly, are we meant to be. The distance between who sees and who speaks in this situation is explicitly indicated by the narrator's words when he describes the impression made upon young Pip as the convict leaves: ‘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’ (p.7).

With superbly grotesque precision – ‘cautiously’ seems particularly apt – Dickens suggests the fearful closeness of living and dead to the young Pip. At the same time, the boy's fancy anticipates something of importance for the novel as a whole, which may well work upon us unconsciously in a first reading. This is the power of the dead, the forgotten or unseen, unexpectedly to influence our lives. The manner of narration invites sympathy and understanding for the child Pip, but by reminding us of the adult narrator it offers a more detached perspective as well, making possible the ironic humour that plays about the entire narrative. The initial conception of the convict suggests gothic melodrama, but it is melodrama incorporated within a subtle artistic medium to produce complex effects within the reader.

Why does the term ‘gothic’ seem appropriate? Well, surely, the figure that ‘started up’ into Pip's view with such suddenness ‘from among the graves’, with his frightful glaring and growling, reminds us of that other creature from the dead who, as you may recall, caused a frightened young boy to cry out as he struggled: ‘Let me go … monster! ugly wretch! you wish to eat me, and tear me to pieces – You are an ogre’? Of course, Frankenstein's creature goes on to kill his victim (Shelley, Frankenstein, 1994 edn, p.117), whereas, for all his ogreish aspect, the convict in Great Expectations does not and, as we soon realise, would not. Shelley's creature tells his own story, distanced by being told to another narrator, whereas Dickens's ‘monster’ is seen from his potential victim's point of view. This makes his presentation in terms of what we might read as ‘gothic’ excess in fact rather plausible, since it can also be understood as the product of a young imagination replete with the monsters and ogres of folk and fairy-tale tradition. Moreover, this is a young imagination already sensitised by long infant meditation upon the family gravestones, amid the dreary winter marshes.

1.3 The serialised novel

That Dickens knew of Shelley's creature and may well have had him in mind is indicated by an explicit association very much later, after Pip finally learns the identity of his mysterious benefactor. He thinks of himself in the role of the ‘imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, [who] was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me’ (p.335). Curiously, Pip sees himself as in different ways comparable to both Frankenstein and the creature, a typically gothic doubling which yet arises plausibly enough in his consciousness.

In other words, the first person narrative provides a realist perspective upon happenings inherently gothic, melodramatic or non-realist in implication. Insofar as we are brought to share the boy Pip's viewpoint, we share his sense of the world as arbitrary and frightening; insofar as we are brought back from it by the adult narrator's viewpoint, we are invited to adopt a more ‘mature’ position, noting the plausibility of the child's and then the young man's experience.

I have used the word ‘grotesque’ to indicate the effect upon Pip's childish imaginings of the convict's appearance as it is conveyed to us, but also because this is the word Dickens himself thought of when the first inklings of this narrative came to him. The idea for the story began as an idea for a short essay by a semi-fictional adult narrator he had created for his magazine All The Year Round in January 1860, to recount recent experiences in town and country, and to delve into memories of his own childhood in Kent and London. As Dickens began to compose the essay, there came to him ‘a very fine, new, and grotesque idea’, he told his friend and biographer John Forster. ‘I begin to doubt’, he continued, ‘whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book … I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner’ (Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 1928 edn, p.733). By early October Dickens's hand was forced by the need to boost the circulation of All The Year Round, then falling as the result of a tedious serial by another writer. The new serial was to concern the adventures of ‘a boy-child, like David [Copperfield]’ and, to avoid any unconscious repetition, Dickens reread David Copperfield and was ‘affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe’. His approach to the new serial was to be more detached:

The ‘very funny’ relationship between the child and the ‘good-natured foolish man’ is that between Pip and his sister's husband, Joe Gargery the blacksmith. The ‘grotesque tragi-comic conception’ upon which the whole mystery plot turns is, of course, the connection between Pip and the convict. The terms Dickens uses suggest popular theatrical or romance conventions, according to which distant or long-lost relations turn up when they can cause most surprise. Dickens had already published Hard Times as a serial to revive the fortunes of All The Year Round's predecessor, Household Words, a twopenny weekly begun in 1850 with the aim of casting ‘something of romantic fancy’ over ‘familiar things’ (ibid., p.512). When he hastily decided to put his new idea into All The Year Round, which had already seen the heartening effect upon sales of his historical romance, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), he planned a weekly serial of about the same length. It was to be much shorter than his other novels, normally published in twenty monthly parts, but would still be read over a lengthy period of time (Figure 2).

Figure 2 All The Year Round, vol. IV, no. 84, 1 December 1860, p.1. The first page of Great Expectations as it first appeared. British Library PP.600.4.gh, reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.

1.4 Summary

The abrupt and striking beginning of the novel, rich with anticipatory hints (not to mention the ‘pivot’ upon which the plot will turn), is obviously a good way to start a new serial as well as a new book. The evidence is that contemporary readers were very pleased. They were absorbed, they thought it a return to Dickens's comic vein, and sales soared. As modern readers, with a willingness to read more actively and seek meanings at a deeper level if so prompted, we nevertheless accept the illusion of reality that is, after all, vital to our involvement in the whole narrative. This is created at the very start by a range of familiar realist strategies, from the rendering of the boy's thoughts and impressions when he encounters the escaped convict, to the precise number of gravestones in the churchyard setting on the windswept marshes. The dating of the start of the story to one Christmas Eve in the early 1800s is suggested parenthetically on the first page, where we learn that Pip's parents ‘lived long before the days of photographs’ (p.3) (so he has to imagine what they looked like). It is made more explicit as we read on, by the preparations for Christmas dinner (p.13), by the appearance of the King's soldiers, and by many other clues (see p.77 and the editor's note on p.493).

At a time when the novel as a predominantly realist genre appeared to have stabilised, Great Expectations occupied a fairly recently established sub-genre, autobiographical fiction, but it also incorporated other generic possibilities, in particular those of Gothic fiction and popular melodrama. For example, when the convict first comes into Pip's view, he is like an emanation from the graves in the churchyard. He is marked all over his body by the landscape and he tells the boy he wishes he were a frog or an eel. He finally limps off towards the black and deathly gibbet on the river's edge, which had once held a pirate, looking as if he were that pirate ‘come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again’ (p.7). The word ‘grotesque’ can be used to describe the surprising mixture of forms, characteristic of Dickens's writing, in which human, animal and vegetable seem to intermingle, but which is nonetheless designed to win our belief. Without winning that belief, Dickens cannot hope to engage us with the moral patterning of his text.

2 Grotesque expectations

2.1 Writing style

If, as I have been suggesting, the opening chapter of Great Expectations demonstrates a novel that employs melodramatic and Gothic techniques while maintaining its actuality as a first person narrative, how does this relate to our expectations as modern readers of Dickens? The trouble is, Dickens is too familiar. Most readers will have heard of the author, if not the novel, and many will have come across some other version of it, as a film, a television serial, a tape recording, a school text, a children's book – or, as Virginia Woolf said, as one of those stories like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or Grimms' Fairy Tales, communicated by word of mouth ‘in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience’ (‘David Copperfield’, 1925, quoted in Wall, Charles Dickens, 1970, p.273). This may seem to reflect something many of us feel about Dickens, but it also reveals a certain condescending assumption that Dickens's novels are less than art because they belong to the realm of childhood experience, the realm of ‘memories and myths’. Yet, as Woolf went on to acknowledge, Dickens's extraordinary powers have

Woolf was reviewing Dickens when his reputation was suffering from a general reaction against Victorianism, as evidenced, for example, in her friend Lytton Strachey's wittily irreverent Eminent Victorians (1918). She was, moreover, expressing the views of someone engaged in redefining the novel by means of her own more internalised, subjective kind of writing. However, her point is crucial. To read Dickens with full understanding, we have to become ‘creators’. This means that if, as modern readers, we do not expect to find subtlety and complexity in Dickens, this is not because it is not there, but because it is not where we expect to find it. We must search it out – we who have other ‘conventions in these matters’. What are our conventions in these matters? It is difficult to say, partly because these are to a large extent made up of habits of acceptance that are unconscious. For instance, we accept the artificial dialogue of a novel as ‘real’ although it is a construct, quite different from a recording of actual speech. In addition, what we accept in practice is so varied. Among the texts of our own time, for example, this might range from an experimental novel by John Fowles to a social realist novel by Margaret Drabble, from an historical romance by Georgette Heyer to a thriller by Patricia D. Cornwell, each written according to a different set of rules.

All these publications fall within broadly realist parameters, parameters that stubbornly persist long after realist strategies have lost their status as a ‘high’ art form, although they continue to be important in popular culture. As we have seen, historically the conventions of realism were accompanied, if not on occasion overturned, by alternative forms of representation. These included romance and Gothic fiction, which appealed to sufficient readers (if not always critics) to sustain them, and which continue in popular forms of writing. What is especially interesting about Dickens's writings is the degree to which they anticipate the continuing hybridity of genre expectations, although to his early readers his work simply confirmed the growing importance of realist assumptions. When Dickens published his first book – a collection of periodical essays and stories called Sketches by Boz (1836) – it was welcomed for its

2.2 Dickens and his critics

With rare exceptions (generally from critics in other countries, such as Edgar Allan Poe or Ludwig Tieck), the published response to Dickens during his lifetime stressed the realist and ignored or disparaged the non-realist element in his work. However, as his use of caricature and fantasy became more apparent (for example, in A Christmas Carol, 1843), and as his popularity increased, some reviewers felt an obligation at least to try to come to terms with his kind of writing. Thus, G.H. Lewes hailed the early Dickens for his descriptive observation and truthful perception of character. Lewes subscribed to a simple but comprehensive definition of realism, according to which all art was a representation of reality, and the best art, like that of his partner George Eliot, was an accurate representation of reality. However, he could not define ‘by what peculiar talent Boz is characterised’, because the novelist mixed in so many other qualities, including such ‘absurdities’ against ‘nature’ as exaggerated characters, and incredible coincidences of plot (‘Sketches, Pickwick and Oliver Twist’, 1837, in Collins, Dickens, 1971, pp.64–8).

When Dickens responded to such criticism, which was rarely, he pointed out that ‘what is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another’ (preface to Martin Chuzzlewit (1867): 1951 edn, p.xv). Furthermore, as he argued in a letter to Forster:

Despite having been praised for it, Dickens opposed the ‘literal and catalogue-like’ tendency of the literature of his time, preferring a ‘fanciful treatment’ of his subject, by which he meant incorporating popular or subliterary genres like melodrama, fairy stories, Gothic tales and romances. Since this was at a time when writers such as Eliot and critics such as Lewes were trying to establish the novel as a serious, ‘high’ art form, increasingly realist in orientation, his approach was easily misunderstood.

The critic David Masson, in comparing Thackeray as a novelist ‘of the Real school’ with Dickens as a novelist ‘of the Ideal, or Romantic’, sensibly argued that ‘each writer is to be tried within his own kind [of writing] by the success he has attained within it’ (‘British novelists since Scott’, 1859, in Eigner and Worth, Victorian Criticism of the Novel, 1985, p.150). However, the distinction is too absolute, although Dickens would have agreed with Masson that his writing was ‘romantic’ in the sense that, as he said in the preface to Bleak House (1853), he ‘dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things’ (1951 edn, p.xiv). This did not mean that he excluded everyday reality, or a certain level of representational accuracy. When he was criticised for the fact that a character in Bleak House was portrayed as dying by ‘spontaneous combustion’ (a widespread idea that the human body could burn up through internally generated chemical reactions), he referred to the ‘scientific’ evidence to support its plausibility. It was Lewes who attacked him for going beyond the bounds of the plausible, just as it was Lewes who, after the novelist's death, summed up Dickens's achievement by repeating all the standard charges against him, in particular his ‘susceptibility to the grotesque’, suggesting unreality to the point of madness (‘Dickens in relation to criticism’, 1872, in Collins, Dickens, 1971, p.573).

Views such as these typified the ‘cultivated’ or upper-middle-class response to Dickens for many years, with the result that, although his works have always been read in vast numbers, it has only been comparatively recently that they have been thought to deserve serious attention. The views of the critic F.R. Leavis were mentioned in Chapter Four, but Dickens's reputation as worthy of study at the highest level rests upon three pieces of criticism that preceded Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) by several years. These are George Orwell's ‘Charles Dickens’ (Inside the Whale, 1940), Humphry House's The Dickens World (1941) and Edmund Wilson's ‘Dickens: the Two Scrooges’ (The Wound and the Bow, 1941). When Leavis argued that ‘Dickens is a great genius and is permanently among the classics’, he added to the growing weight of critical attention Dickens was receiving, only to undermine it at the same time by excluding all except one of Dickens's novels from the ‘great tradition’ of the English novel.

Leavis's argument, like Lewes's before him, turned on the legitimacy of Dickens's mixed kind of writing, in particular his use of melodrama. This, for Leavis, was a ‘low’ art form, making Dickens's art by association equally low, or at least just that of ‘a great entertainer’. For Leavis, the ‘adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness’ (The Great Tradition, 1960, p.19). Hard Times, escaped this damning judgement, despite the melodrama that most of us might find in it, because of its status as a ‘fable’, capturing the ‘key characteristics of Victorian civilization’ (ibid., p.20). Leavis's viewpoint, for all its narrow cultural élitism, was sympathetic to Dickens, but it was over twenty years before he and his wife Q.D. Leavis published Dickens the Novelist (1970), extending the ‘great tradition’ to all Dickens's ‘mature’ novels, of which Great Expectations was the last. According to Q.D. Leavis (whose broader knowledge of nineteenth-century fiction may have contributed to this revision): ‘The sense in which Great Expectations is a novel at all is certainly not to be arrived at by applying to it the ordinary conventions and assumptions derived from Victorian novels in general’ (Dickens the Novelist, 1970, p.288). In a chapter rather alarmingly called ‘How We Must Read Great Expectations’, she argued that Dickens found in this novel a ‘freer form of dealing with experience’ than the realist inheritance provided or than his readers expected, enabling readers to move ‘without protest, or uneasiness even, from the “real” world of everyday experience into the non-rational life of the guilty conscience or spiritual experience, outside time and place and with its own logic’ (ibid., p.289).

2.3 Surface realism – and beyond

Whether we are ever taken quite so far beyond the everyday is a moot point, but it is easy to see what she means in relation to Pip's guilty conscience, for example. Pip had always been treated ‘as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends’ (p.23). This is a comical expression of the unpleasant contemporary emphasis upon children as little sinners who need to be bullied into virtue. The Christmas dinner at which all the adults except Joe attack Pip, morally speaking, seems to confirm this judgement. It represents the ‘real’ world of everyday experience, easily confirmed by historical evidence as well as our own awareness of how children can be terrorised by the righteous. However, there is also the child's way of seeing things – powerfully present to us as well – producing a sense of guilt so pervasive that it feels as if it is in the nature of things. Even the cattle look ‘clerical’ and accusing (p.17) and ‘when I and my conscience showed ourselves’ (p.21) we feel the boy's alienation as a non-rational state quite beyond what we might expect from someone brought up as he has been. Where does this come from?

The answer is revealed by Dickens's wonderfully sympathetic exploration of the inner dilemma of a boy caught between the demands of the terrifying, starving convict on the one hand and his inadequate surrogate parents on the other – the bullying sister with the ‘impregnable bib’ (p.8) and her submissive, child-like husband. We are told that his upbringing has made the child sensitive, and the adult narrator is quite severe about the inability of his young self to confess his ‘pilfering’ on the convict's behalf to Joe (pp.40–1). However, it is precisely this sensitivity that has led Pip to align himself with the outcast, against even Joe, leading to an irrational excess of guilt. He suffers a continual fear that his ‘criminal’ association will be discovered by the respectable citizens around him. For instance, when the man with the file arrives at the Jolly Bargemen with ‘two fat sweltering one-pound notes’ for him, he thinks of himself as on ‘secret terms of conspiracy with convicts’ (p.77).

By this stage in the novel the ‘freer form’ Dickens has adopted enables him to expand his narrative beyond surface realism, as shown in the first encounter with Miss Havisham and Satis House. This is where the second major thread of the plot begins, which is made explicit for us by the adult narrator's comment: ‘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’ (p.71).

2.4 Summary

We do not have to share Q.D. Leavis's perception of the spiritual dimension of the novel to admit the mixed nature of Dickens's writing, its grounding in different fictional modes, which opens it up to many equally relevant and convincing readings.

However, to begin to develop a deeper insight into Great Expectations, we need to think more about how we approach this kind of writing. Like Pip, we may discover that our expectations have been based on some false or at least misleading premises. This is particularly so if we forget that the novel was published not only after familiar realist fictions of moral purpose such as Pride and Prejudice, but also after Gothic works such as Frankenstein, whose tales shadow Austen's orderly, coherent and humane world. This shadowing accompanies conventional views of the novel genre as one of realist formation, suggesting ways of writing that connect with the inner history of the psyche and the wider history of Britain in the world. The fact that today we are more aware both of the unexpected ways of the mind and of Britain's colonial history should encourage us to read Great Expectations, in a more challenging light than we expect of the familiar, mythical Dickens of childhood.

3 Hallucinatory reading

3.1 Details

Dickens employs popular sub-genres in a way that tries to persuade his readers to accept that there is another manner of stating the truth or, indeed, as we may see it now, that there are other kinds of truth, at a time when the trend was to be ‘frightfully literal and catalogue-like’. In practice, he does provide the kind of ‘superfluous’, ‘useless’ or ‘concrete’ detail crucial for what the critic Roland Barthes has usefully identified as ‘the reality effect’, an effect at the basis of narrative from the nineteenth century onwards. Without this element of depicting detail, the illusion of the real cannot be sustained. It is easy to find examples in Great Expectations. Almost at random (the randomness confirms the point), I might mention the sack of peas the narrator informs us is present in Pumblechook's front office, and on which his shopman takes his ‘mug of tea and hunch of bread-and-butter’ at eight o'clock on the morning that Pip and the pompous corn-chandler have breakfast, before Pumblechook delivers him to Satis House (p.53). Despite the gothic overtones of her first appearance, the illusion of everyday reality is sustained even in Miss Havisham's odd environment by, for example, added details of her jewels and trinkets, her ‘handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped about’ before her looking-glass (p.56).

Of course, such details are functional in other ways, adding something to the significance of each scene and character. Pumblechook is always associated with food and Miss Havisham is at least as confused as her ornaments, which here also signify the halted preparations for a wedding. Other novelists of the time similarly attempt to create the effect of reality with, at its best, a realism of detailed description that seduces the reader precisely through its detail. For example, we are told that a ‘necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold-work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it’ (1994 edn, p.12) attracts the eye of Dorothea Brooke, who is introduced to the reader in the opening chapter of Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–2). In this case the detail also serves to confirm and develop the idea of a character whose psychology and background has just been given to the reader at some considerable length, over four pages.

Pumblechook's shopman has no further role in the novel by Dickens, and although Pumblechook's association with seedcorn continues – towards the end of the book his mouth is stuffed full of flowering annuals by the journeyman Dolge Orlick (p.461) – his inner life is never analysed. What about Miss Havisham, whose role is more central? Is her inner life offered to us? I think it should be clear that, despite the shared ground of realist detail, what Dickens intends to convey with details such as the trinkets and other paraphernalia with which he surrounds Miss Havisham is rather different from the use of detail by a novelist like Eliot. Dickens prefers not to analyse Miss Havisham's mind or feelings or personal history; instead, he presents us with a complex, highly suggestive image of what she is, and may become.

3.2 Moral development

I want to stress this aspect of Dickens's kind of fiction, because he is so often thought of as the novelist of the stereotypically obvious, with his tyrannical men, dried up women and pathetic children. Although there may be nothing wrong with being obvious, the point about Great Expectations is that it is most persuasive when it is not obvious. Various critics have tried to point out what is obvious about the novel (see, for example, Q.D. Leavis's ‘How We Must Read Great Expectations’) but the struggle to do so makes it seem less and less obvious. From the title, with its ambivalent overtones, to the two endings, neither of which is unambiguous, this is surely a novel that resists tying down to any simple message or summary?

It could be argued that one of the things it is about is precisely the inadequacy of the obvious. This is a function of its multi-genre status. If, for example, the novel seems obviously a classic story of self-education, of the rise of a young man from his rural roots towards metropolitan sophistication, then it also appears to undermine this very familiar Victorian tale. As Kate Flint says in the introduction (p.xvii), Pip's Bildungsroman is the ‘antithesis’ of those well-known and widely read contemporary chronicles of humble perseverance, such as Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859), which it calls to mind. Flint also relates Great Expectations to the contemporary vogue for sensation novels exemplified by Dickens's friend Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860), with its ‘combination of crime, violence, a self-sequestrated woman, and the revelation of her ward's parentage’ (p.viii), although Dickens's book is also more than a novel of mystery and suspense. Flint proposes that Great Expectations is best seen in terms of the broad form of fictional autobiography. This is in line with her overall emphasis upon the novel's dramatization of ‘the issue of identity’, by means of which it participates in mid-Victorian attempts to show that work, loyalty and compassion are their own reward, while leaving ‘uncertain how Pip may prosper in the busy society of modern, urban Britain’ (p.xxi).

3.3 Dickens' characterisation

I have suggested that Miss Havisham's psyche is indirectly revealed through the associations implied when Pip first sees her and her surroundings, but how do we learn about Pip himself? We need to consider this in the light of what I have been saying about Dickens's largely external way of reporting his story, from the distanced perspective of Pip as an adult. The answer to the question takes us back to Lewes's insinuation that Dickens's vision as a writer was grotesque and unreal almost to the point of insanity. What Lewes said was that Dickens's imaginative power was comparable to the hallucinations of the insane, except that in his case the hallucinations had the ‘coercive force of realities’. Unreal and impossible as creations like Miss Havisham are, ‘speaking a language never heard in life, moving like pieces of simple mechanism always in one way’ (‘Dickens in relation to criticism’, 1872, in Collins, Dickens, 1971, p.572), they nonetheless persuade us uncritical readers to believe in them, and not simply by means of descriptive detail. Lewes thereby implied something very important about the novelist's work that I would like to explore. The suggestion is that Dickens touches on submerged or repressed areas of the personality, which can only find expression indirectly or through unexpected, even disturbing, yet persuasively vivid associations.

It was not until Wilson's 1941 essay, ‘Dickens: the Two Scrooges’, that this suggestion was developed (under the twin influences of Jung and Freud) as a serious critical viewpoint. According to Wilson, Dickens's brilliant public persona as a successful comic novelist and energetic social reformer was a cover for the deep pain he always felt as a result of his own sense of shame and rejection as a child – when he had to work in a boot-blacking factory at the age of ten, and his family were imprisoned for debt. This pain, said Wilson, emerged in his fascination for outcasts, criminals and murderers, often coupled with a sympathetic portrayal of neglected children such as Oliver Twist – or Pip. Pip can thus be understood as like his creator in being both inside and outside the society of mid-Victorian Britain. This is revealed in his relationships with Joe and the convict Abel Magwitch, Estella and Miss Havisham, and the curious parallels and similarities they imply.

This sort of approach tends to underplay the art of the writer, even as it supports rich readings of the unsettling insights claimed for the writings. However, it offers a new kind of challenge: to read Dickens as if, consciously or not, he laid bare the tensions within himself in such a way as to reach the deep and typical anxieties of his own age – and ours, shaped as it is by its predecessors. This challenge was taken up by an influential American critic, Dorothy van Ghent, who found in the complex, non-realist development of character and plot in Dickens a vision linking inner and outer worlds which explains the strange, hallucinatory surface of his narrative. Her account of Great Expectations as the type of this approach towards Dickens has hardly been improved upon.

3.4 Fantasies and desires

Whether or not you agree with this complex account, these ideas are worth thinking about. Following van Ghent, we could go on to read the novel in terms of Pip's fantasies of desire and revenge. For example, when his sister has been smashed down with a convict's leg-iron, he is ‘at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack’. Although we know he has not (p.117), this can easily be read as a reflection of Pip's real, but unconscious because aggressive, feelings towards the one who brought him up ‘by hand’, and regularly applied ‘the Tickler’ to his frame. There is so much suppressed (and indeed actual) violence in the novel, hovering on the edge of everything that happens, that this kind of reading is surely persuasive? If at first it seems improbable, consider the point at which, many pages later, when Orlick tries to murder Pip in revenge for what he (rightly) gathers have been all Pip's attempts to have him sent away, the gloating brute tells him ‘It was you as did for your shrew sister … You done it; now you pays for it’ (p.421). The rational explanation offered is that it was Orlick's resentment and jealousy at Pip's preferment, and his beating by Joe, itself provoked at least in part by Mrs Joe (chapter XV), that led Orlick into trying to murder her. However, the non-rational, deep association of Pip with Orlick (and Orlick with the primeval ooze, see p.129) remains. This is confirmed by many little details, such as the suggestion that Orlick also desires Biddy, expressed by his ‘dancing’ (ibid.) at her which so annoys Pip, surely because it is also an expression of his feelings on a level he can only convey indirectly, if at all.

When it came to describing feelings of desire, Dickens was, of course, inhibited by contemporary prudery. This was especially strong in the case of cheap and accessible serial fiction, which could enter every home. He was obliged to be indirect, but this has its advantages. Estella is far from being one of Dickens's notoriously ‘legless’ angels, like Agnes in David Copperfield, although to begin with Estella's body is absent, or substituted by a star, confirming the cold distance implied by her name. When Pip first sees her at the ironically named Satis House, ‘her light came along the long dark passage like a star’ (p.58). Her disdain is reflected in remarks about Pip's commonness, and his ‘coarse’ hands – remarks that linger in his mind, since he keeps repeating them, and which to us evidently provoke in him both class and sexual yearning at once. That his deeper desires are not confined to himself is clarified by another of his visits to Satis House, when, after he has beaten the ‘pale young gentleman’ in the hidden garden, he finds Estella

This is skilfully done, and it is developed as an undercurrent of implication by another fight, that between Joe and Orlick. This was provoked, as I have suggested, by Mrs Joe's interfering. ‘You'd be everybody's master, if you durst’ (p.112), says the journeyman, which leads to a ‘Ram-page’ on her part, and Mrs Joe dropping ‘insensible at the window’, but not without having ‘seen the fight first, I think’ (p.113). On one level, Mrs Joe is depicted as a virago whose bullying of her young brother and husband in some sense is supposed to make her ‘deserve’ being flattened by Orlick. On another level her behaviour is presented as the implied product of frustrated desire: her ‘square impregnable bib’ (p.8) may well have something to do with Joe's inability to come ‘to a stand’ (p.48). In other words, both of them are subject to barely understood inhibitions and maltreatment in the past (which in Joe's case is given in detail, see pp.45–6).

Perhaps too we eventually understand the frigidly self-consuming Miss Havisham as the product of her past, and Pip as deeply connected with both Joe and Miss Havisham in his secret sado-masochistic urges – secret in the sense that they are never openly acknowledged, while being present through implication. Miss Havisham and Orlick are both linked with Estella, the main object of Pip's desire, and also with his class guilt. It is fitting that he should be nearly killed by both of them towards the end, duly expressing the satisfaction of his need for self-punishment through the twin ordeals. All this may produce a feeling of inevitability, rather than surprise, when we learn that Estella marries the brutal Bentley Drummle, and that this leads to violence against her, too, before she can – in an analogous progression to Pip's – return to the main narrative, humbled and contrite.

Such hidden patternings begin to show what can be teased out of the richly ambiguous surface so well described by van Ghent, taking us beyond what appears at first sight to be merely another reflection of conventional mid-Victorian attitudes towards its restlessly aspiring heroes and its wayward women. Freudian readings like Wilson's and van Ghent's have multiplied, although today they are less common than they used to be. Their main message is that desire is interwoven with guilt along classic psychoanalytic lines, which propose that since desire is repressed it can only appear indirectly.

Let us take an example to illustrate this theory and its implications more fully. Until reading critics of this persuasion, I had been puzzled to know how to explain the fantasy Pip experiences at Satis House of Miss Havisham hanging by the neck from a great wooden beam, which he thought ‘a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards’ (p.63), and which recurs very much later (p.397). No explanation is offered. The only obvious connecting link seems to be the presence of Estella, whose appearance also comes to call up ‘strange’, hallucinatory feelings in Pip (p.235). It all feels too specific to be merely part of the deathly atmosphere surrounding Miss Havisham. An explanation is finally offered for the uncanny associations surrounding Estella when it is revealed that she has been reminding Pip of her mother, Molly, Jaggers's strong-wristed (and murderously violent) servant woman. This provides one last link of association, ‘wanting before’, and ‘riveted for me now, when I had passed by a chance, swift from Estella's name to the fingers with their knitting action, and the attentive eyes’ (p.386).

Does this help to explain the image of Miss Havisham hanging? Might there be a connection with Pip's early memory of Magwitch resembling a hanged man come to life and then going to hook himself up again? After all, it turns out that all these people are related, in one way or another, in the complicated unravelling of the plot. There are various possibilities here and I do not want to tie things down too much, since we are talking about hints and suggestions rather than anything very clear. However, if we think in terms of van Ghent's view that everything in Dickens's ‘nervous’ universe has in some way to do with child-parent relations, it seems possible to read things as follows. Pip's fancy of Miss Havisham hanging from the beam recalls his similar fancy of the escaped convict, because it thereby suggests the boy's unconscious wish to kill both his imagined parent–benefactors. This is a repressed desire that produces excessive feelings of guilt, fear and anger towards them, feelings that retrospectively become justified to the degree that both Magwitch and Miss Havisham are revealed as manipulators of their ‘adopted children’. These children inadvertently, that is unconsciously, contrive to punish them, and could even be said to bring about their deaths. When Pip imagines Miss Havisham hanging the second time – ‘A childish association revived with wonderful force’ (p.397) – he has just learned that Estella has married, and that Miss Havisham regrets what she has done. She asks for his forgiveness and, although according to the Christian moral scheme he must comply, there is a repressed desire to punish her, which is realised the next moment when she bursts into flames in his presence. Whether this is accidental or not is left unclear. Similarly, when the returned convict reveals his identity and his relationship as ‘second father’ (p.315) to Pip, the first impulse of revulsion becomes a much more extended attempt to rescue and forgive, but in vain, leaving Pip in the end safely alone.

I say ‘safely’ because Pip now refuses any kind of patronage, financial or familial, despite the advice of both Wemmick and Jaggers. Although at first this leaves him ill and alone, Joe comes to look after him ‘in the old unassertive protecting way’. ‘I fancied I was little Pip again’, he says, becoming ‘like a child in his hands’ (p.461). The new, patrilineal bonding enables Joe, the father who never was, to become father to another little Pip: ‘– I again!’ as Pip expresses it (p.475). All Pip's guilty fears and visions of murder can disappear at last in this recreation of himself, through his final acceptance of Joe and Biddy.

3.5 Summary

Like so many earlier scenes, this return to the forge replays numerous details of Pip's preceding encounters, giving it an almost ritualised feel, as the reader is made to go through the process of repetition and return that makes up the basic rhythm of the story. These details appear at first to be purely surface realism, but an active reader can sense that more lies behind or within them, in the heightened awareness encouraged by recognition of Dickens's hallucinatory writing. When Biddy touches the new Pip's hand to her lips, ‘and then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it, into mine’ (p.476), we can understand that she thereby replaces Mrs Joe's bringing up ‘by hand’ and the sado-masochistic feelings long associated with it, with her own form of domesticated desire. Pip's hands were burnt by the false mother, Miss Havisham, and are now recovered. Before that, Magwitch had, in the climactic recognition scene, come towards him, ‘holding out both his hands for mine’ (p.327). Pip resisted this action at first, then accepted it, as he accepted his ties to the outcast convict. On the latter's deathbed he held Magwitch's hand, who finally ‘raised my hand to his lips. Then, he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on it’ (p.455). That moment is recalled by ‘the friendly touch of the once insensible hand’ (p.477) of Estella when, at the last, Pip meets the convict's daughter and thinks of Magwitch pressing his hand, a memory empowering him to take ‘her hand in mine’ (p.479), as they go out of the ruined place in the last paragraph of the novel.

Thus, the constant association of Miss Havisham's world with that of Magwitch, represented as coincidence, contains a revelatory truth about Pip and the source of his aspirations. It is also an indication of their common status as outsiders.

4 Little Britain and the Empire

4.1 A changing society

Reading Great Expectations for its insights into the ways of the psyche does not mean that we should ignore its connections with its time or ours, or with the wider history of Britain in the world. As van Ghent pointed out, the intuition expressed in terms of Dickens's creation of a universe of reciprocal change, in which human and non-human become each other, took place at a time that witnessed

According to this view, the class system depicted in the novel, and the great expectations it feeds on, are ultimately rooted in the reality of the prison hulks (Figure 3), the decay and murder that occupy the more or less hidden underground of the narrative. The most pointed irony of Pip's story is that the woman he falls in love with, and perhaps in the end joins, turns out to be the child of that dark and hidden reality.

Figure 3 Prison hulk at Deptford, engraving by George Cooke after Samuel Prout 1826. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library.

Reading the novel in terms of its power as social statement or critique goes back at least as far as the work of two key figures mentioned earlier, George Orwell and Humphry House. House in particular established an influential interpretation of Great Expectations based upon a profound understanding of the nature of mid-Victorian British society. ‘Many people’, he said, ‘still read Dickens for his records and criticism of social abuses, as if he were a great historian or a great reformer’ (The Dickens World, 1965 edn, p.9). He went on to question this view, since the precise connection between Dickens's writings and the times in which they appeared, between his urge for reform and some of the things he wanted reformed, was far from clear-cut. Moreover, the Dickens that emerged from House's account of the novels, the journalism, and from much contemporary comment on the social and political issues that interested the novelist – from debtors’ prisons to child labour, from prostitutes to sanitation, from schools to religion – was a relatively conservative figure. This Dickens drew attention to conditions after others had noticed them, and proposed reform rather than revolution, insofar as he proposed anything at all. In Orwell's words, Dickens's criticism of society ‘is almost exclusively moral … There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown’ (Inside the Whale, 1940, in Wall, Charles Dickens, 1970, pp.297–8).

Such perceptions of Dickens continue to occupy the middle ground of Dickens criticism. Whether or not we accept them, the account of Great Expectations offered by House still deserves attention for its informed judgement of the novel as an expression of the phase of society in which it was written (not the imaginary dates of its plot). House says:

4.2 Great Expectations and realism

House's reading relies upon assuming that the novel is a realist text, with a satirical edge. Yet it is a reading that can be taken further, and some critics have developed a much more complex and persuasive view of the theme of gentility.

Robin Gilmour, for example, argues that Great Expectations is unique among Dickens's fiction ‘in that its real subject is not a specific social abuse, or a series of related abuses, but nothing less than civilisation itself’. Gilmour probes the implications of Pip's acceptance of the mutual dependencies of a class-divided society by showing how far Pip seems aware that his struggle towards ‘the civilised life’ is ‘sharpened by a knowledge of its very precariousness’ (Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentlemen in the Victorian Novel, 1981, p.125). Different notions of gentility were in circulation at the time, indicating various perceptions of high social status, involving wealth, property, education or ‘polish’, and moral qualities. Dickens was conscious to the point of obsession of the distance he had come as a hugely successful, self-made public figure whose early background and experience was a matter of shame to him. Yet, by the time Great Expectations was published, his marriage had broken down, and a liaison with an actress (the likely model for Estella) was kept secret to avoid tainting his public image, so he was well aware of what might lie behind the middle-class dream. The novel demonstrates, in the repression of desire and activity associated with Satis House, one cost of becoming a gentleman. At the same time it promotes a kind of moral and spiritual gentility. This is shown in Pip's acknowledgement of the Christian ideals of love and forgiveness, as when he watches Joe from his sickbed, ‘penitently whispering’: ‘O God bless this gentle Christian man’ (p.458). Dickens asserts Joe's moral gentility at the same time as he acknowledges the social distance between him and Pip. Pip cannot join Joe and Biddy in the end, he has to go abroad to make his (modest) fortune.

Is all this any more than an elaboration of House's view? It assumes that Dickens underwrites Pip's mid-Victorian, middle-class values: as a moderately prosperous, well-tutored (by the Pockets, father and son) and hard-working bourgeois, distinct from the parasitical, leisured aristocracy (Bentley Drummle) on the one hand and the brutal rural workers (Orlick) on the other. Joe represents the honest toiler, whose values Pip admires, but cannot emulate. A motif in this theme is money: notice how often and in what contexts ‘money’ is referred to, from the payment for Pip's indentures to Magwitch's fat notebook. Its centrality for Pip's expectations is made quite clear. As he recalls, ‘it was impossible to dissociate’ even the sought-after Estella from ‘all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood’ (p.233). In the end, after losing all his money, he starts again (as a clerk), builds himself up to a partnership, and earns enough to return after eleven years in the East as a potential partner for Estella after all.

If the novel is taken to be exclusively realist in orientation, as this approach tends towards, it becomes difficult to avoid what George Levine has identified as the ideology of realist writing, the ideology of liberal individualism. Dickens aimed to appeal to his predominantly middle-class audience, who believed that a man could aspire to be a gentleman by cultivating such values as decency, loyalty, generosity, sensitivity and hard work, ‘cemented together’ with the Christian ideals of charity and forgiveness.Such an approach does not preclude searching and intelligent readings, which bring out Dickens's conscious mastery of his theme and form. The strong moral sense that pervades the narrative as presented by the adult narrator can be explained as a reflection of the author's own beliefs, undeniably complex and critical as these may have been. The language of the novel may thus be seen as no more than an instrument – if a finely tuned one – designed to establish and express the truth as Dickens and (some at least of) his readers saw it.

A further twist has recently been given to this broadly realist reading of the novel in its times by the cultural critic Edward Said, in Culture & Imperialism (1993). Said's book proposes (among other things) a general revision of the history of the novel as a realistic genre by asking that we see it as crucially connected with ‘the imperial process’ in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He takes Great Expectations to be one of the ‘well-known and very great novels’ in the history of the genre which can be read in terms of this ‘hitherto ignored aspect’ of novel criticism (Part Two, p.253). Said situates himself in line with Raymond Williams as a reader of novels in terms of their broadly incorporative cultural reach, their role as mediators of contemporary ‘structures of feeling’ (see p.99 above). He claims to be offering a much more inclusive and dynamic account of how the European novel operated than has hitherto been provided even by Williams, whose criticism is in any case limited by his mainly English focus.

4.3 Death

I am not trying to suggest that we ignore Said's criticism. On the contrary, he provides a salutary reminder of that ‘other’ history of Dickens's times, that is, the colonial history, which any attempt to relate his work to its times needs now to negotiate. Rather, I am trying to suggest that the criticism should prompt us to look again at the key characters, events and relationships in the novel, with an awareness of the uniquely mixed genre that it puts forward.

In the limited space I have left here, I would like to consider once again how Dickens deals with the relation between Pip and Magwitch. This relation, it seems to me, offers the truly subversive potential of the novel. Considering this potential may enlarge our understanding of imperial Britain of the 1850s and 1860s, a time of high achievement whose legacy is with us yet. Of course, there is a convincing realism in Dickens's characterization of both boy and convict, even when they meet on that stereotypically Victorian setting, a deathbed. Here Dickens troublingly allows Pip to express his profound pity for the outcast by revising the well-known biblical prayer from Luke 18:13, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’, in a way that suggests a pharisaical perversion: ‘O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner!’ (p.455). The remarkable, detailed account of Magwitch's trial and sentencing, which precedes the deathbed scene, is witnessed by Pip as a young man, but it is depicted by the older narrator as a memorable tableau, which takes us into another, symbolic dimension.

4.4 Summary

The way in which this important scene at the defining moment of the Pip and Magwitch story has been imagined implies the deep connection between the highest and the lowest. Once we accept this connection, we can read the narrative afresh as the source of currents of implication which at least question its own tendency towards accepting the status quo. We can go further, turning Said's view upside-down, and argue that it is one of this novel's greatest strengths to assert, with whatever qualification, in an imperial age the deep connection between the achievement of wealth, status and happiness in Britain and the misery, humiliation and deprivation of those condemned to be its underclass, and sent abroad to colonise a land nobody wanted to think about. Pip's resistance to Magwitch in the hallucinatory, dream-like recognition scene that opens the third volume of the book can be seen to express the resistance of all those in his society who would rather not know about the source of their position or their country's pre-eminence. The realist features of that sequence – it has a filmic quality – ensure that we as readers are drawn in as we, through Pip's eyes, meet ‘A.M. come back from Botany Bay’ (p.329), with his ‘blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the dust’ (p.328) (Magwitch at least knows that even out there we find a class system), with his pocket-book, his ‘greasy little clasped black Testament’ (p.330), his clasp-knife and his appallingly ungenteel manner of eating – ‘in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable … Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog’ (p.327).

As with any great novel, there are always further possibilities. Reading Great Expectations with an active awareness of Dickens's kind of writing, we could pursue, for example, the fact that, according to Robert Hughes's book on the convict settlement of Australia, one of the most notorious escapees was an Irishman transported in 1819 for seven years for stealing six pairs of shoes, who resorted to cannibalism to survive (The Fatal Shore, 1987, pp.220–6). The way people eat in this novel, and in particular the way Magwitch feeds (a ‘Bolter’, unlike the young Pip who is only accused of this by Joe), carries some strange and unexpected overtones, which would bear investigating, but not now. Now is the moment to leave Great Expectations to you, and your further reading of it.

Conclusion

This free course provided an introduction to studying the Arts and Humanities. It took you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner. 

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References

Acknowledgements

This course was written by Professor Dennis Walder.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:

Course image: stuartpilbrowBy: stuartpilbrow in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.

Van Ghent, D. ‘On Great Expectations, contained in novel: Form and Function, Harper & Row, pp128-38 (first published 1953)

This chapter – Reading Great Expectations by Dennis Walder must be kept in context at all times in order to benefit from the critique provided by the author.

This chapter is contained in Approaching Literature The Realist Novel (ed Dennis Walder) pp 135-165, published by Routledge in association with The Open University. Copyright © 1995 The Open University.

Said, E. W., ‘Culture and imperialism’ contained in Culture & Imperialism, Vintage, ppxiv-xvii, 73-5, 77-8 (first published 1993)

Figure 1 Still from the Cineguild film production of Great Expectations 1946, directed by David Lean, with Anthony Wager as Pip, Finlay Currie as Abel Magwitch. Photograph by courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive

Figure 2 All The Year Round, vol. IV, no.84, 1 December 1860, p.l. The first page of Great Expectations as it first appeared. British Library PP.600.4.g, reproduced with permission of the British Library Board.

Figure 3 Prison hulk at Deptford, engraving by George cook after Samuel Prout 1826. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library

All other material contained within this course originated at the Open University

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