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Installment 33 of Great Expectations: the masterpiece chapter

#
JEROME MECKIER
University of Kentucky

eaders of Great Expectations would probably choose one of the following as the novels most memorable scene: Pips graveyard encounter with Magwitch, his rst attendance at Satis House, Jaggerss announcement of Pips great expectations or the ex-convicts return in chapter 39, the most likely preference. Honorable mention might go to Miss Havishams self-incineration, Pips visit to Denmark for Wopsles debacle as Hamlet, or either of the novels two endings. Not so John Forster. For Dickenss friend, advisor, and ocial biographer, the crme de la crme was the fteenth chapter of the third volume (Forster, 2: 359). We know it as chapter 54, installment 33 of 36, which appeared on 13 July 1861. In it, Pip and Magwitch attempt to escape from England by rowing down the Thames. They hope to board the steamer to Hamburg or Rotterdam. Forster divulged some of his reasons for singling out chapter 54; one can augment them to defend his choice. At the opening of the story, he wrote:
there had been an exciting scene of the wretched mans chase and recapture among the marshes, and this has its parallel at the close in his chase and recapture on the river while poor Pip is helping to get him o. To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or nine friends and three or four members of his family were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22nd of May 1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his own in the shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river. The fteenth chapter of the third volume is a masterpiece (Forster, 2: 359).

One wonders how much it cost to rent a steamer for the day and provide refreshments for as many as thirteen people. Unfortunately, Forster does not provide the guest list; one presumes he was among those invited. Nor is
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it clear if, at the time, he knew the purpose of the excursion. In retrospect, Forster marveled at Dickenss capacity to observe both sides of the river while partying with family and friends. If the Inimitable took notes, Forster did not catch him at it. It would be almost two months before chapter 54 was published. On 25 May, three days after the outing, installment 26 appeared. Herbert returns from Marseilles to learn of Magwitchs reappearance (ch. 41) and the ex-convict tells his life story in chapter 42. Three things about chapter 54 impressed Forster. First, he found the attempted escape exciting, that is, suspenseful. Would the attempt succeed? If not, would Compeyson help to foil it? Forster also savored the parallel between the rst recapture in chapter 5 and this one. It showed Dickenss structural expertise. The dierence, of course, is the degree of Pips involvement. Only a much improved Pip, who has discovered merit in the uncouth Magwitch, would take the risk of aiding and abetting an illegally returned transport. Not until the recapture, however, is Pip poor. When Magwitch, in custody, assures Pip that he can be a gentleman without [him] (332; ch. 54), the latter realizes that, being convicted, [Magwitchs] possessions would be forfeited to the Crown. Pips fairygodfather goes broke, leaving Pip worse o than Cinderella at the start of her story. Thirdly and paramount, Forster admired a twofold verisimilitude: the escape attempt in chapter 54 was accurate topographically and chronologically. Dickens recreated the actual course of a boat in such circumstances, calculated how long the adventure would take, and included no incident that was not possible. One of several memoranda bound into the Wisbech Manuscript of Great Expectations is a sheet titled Tide; it contains information about the Thamess tides; Dickens relied on it to get the timing right in chapter 54. It was surely written after the steamer trip. Sometime prior to writing chapter 48, Dickens used two half-sheets headed Dates to doublecheck the ages he had assigned his major characters and another memorandum page titled General Mems to remind himself what he had still to do in the remaining installments.  Chapter 48 appeared on 15 June, approximately three weeks after the steamer party of 22 May and nearly three weeks again before chapter 54. In his quest for accuracy, Dickens worked out the times for the Thames tides sometime between 22 May and 15 June for an installment that came out in mid-July. When Pip, Herbert, and Startop pick up Magwitch from Mill Pond stairs on a Wednesday in March 1829, it is half-past eight or high water: they are just in time to catch the tide as it begins to turn (or ebb) out to sea at 9:00 a. m. About 3:00 p. m., the party reaches Gravesend. The ebb tide
 See endnote 1, Meckier, Dating the Action, 191.  This paragraph follows almost verbatim the last two paragraphs on p. 167 of Dating the Action.

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has carried them the entire way, but once past this customs checkpoint, it slackens and turns. By 5:00 p. m., shortly before sunset, Pip and his companions, having pushed o from the spit of slippery stones near Mucking Flats (326; ch. 54), must row in the dark against the incoming tide for another two hours until they reach the Ship Inn at Hole Haven, where they spend the night. After breakfast on Thursday, Pip and Magwitch conceal themselves at a distant point east of the inn. Herbert and Startop pick them up about noon (329). They see the Hamburg steamers smoke an hour and a half later, at 1:30 p. m., and row out, only to be intercepted by the police galley. Besides describing the river journey with a guidebooks precision, Dickens wanted to be chronologically exact: he assigned each phase of the trip the amount of time it would actually have taken, a feat made possible by rst-hand knowledge of the incoming and outgoing tides. Dickens required fourteen chapters (ten weeks) to set the escape in motion, but he quickened the pace steadily. The action reaches a chapterlong peak between 9 a. m. on a Wednesday in March 1829 and 1:30 p. m. on a Thursday, about thirty hours later. Fourteen chapters and ten weeks of preparation for the escape chapter that is, starting from Magwitchs return in chapter 39, which came out on 11 May (or the strong hint at the close of chapter 38 on 4 May) until the escape collapses in chapter 54, which appeared on 13 July. In chapter 43 (out on 1 June), rst Pip and then Herbert conclude that Magwitch might be best got away across the water (265; ch. 43). In chapter 46 (June 8), one learns that Pip keeps a boat and has been training for the escape by rowing up and down the Thames. The steamer day-trip occurred nine days before Dickens published the chapter in which Pip contemplates escape by water. The novelist conducted a feasibility study shortly before, or even as, he worked the idea of a Channel crossing into his plot. When Pip rst mentions this possibility, Dickens had either just written the Tide memorandum or would do so shortly. Verisimilitude was the result of advance planning and arduous research. Forster doubtless recognized this when he exalted chapter 54. There probably exists no comparable stretch of a Dickens novel that conforms more precisely to an actual locale than chapter 54 of Great Expectations . Accordingly, the eminent Dickensian topographer, W. Lawrence Gadd, devoted two chapters of The Great Expectations Country (VI, VII) to The River Journey, his name for the escape attempt. Geography in the escape chapter seems utterly realistic because Dickens lled it with
 The name Mucking Flats was supplied by W. Laurence Gadd (140), who also identied the real-life inn at Hole Haven as the Lobster Smack (142), a run-down establishment catering mostly to seamen. Pip refers to the sign of the house (the Ship), so Dickens renamed it the Ship Inn (Great Expectations, 329); one stays there before shipping out.

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verbal photographs of everything he saw on 22 May 1861 and ascribed the result to Pip, who sees the same sights in March 1829. Whether things looked the same as in 1861 is impossible to say. Early in the twentieth century, when Gadd retraced the river journey by boat, he found that not much had changed since 1861. As yet, for example, he spied no factories or clusters of oil tankers along the riverside (Gadd, 147). At the conclusion of Chapter VII, Gadd and his companions watch for the Hamburg and the Rotterdam steamer coming down from London (148) just as it did for Pip and Magwitch. The dierence is that this time the Rotterdam steamer arrives rst. Gadd did not attempt to board. When the pilots whistle gives a hoarse warning bleat, Gadd and crew quickly get out of the steamers way (149). Gadd testied to Pips veracity by declaring that he himself saw nearly everything that Dickens said Pip sees. The topographer pinpointed the site of Mrs. Whimples house at Mill Pond, in which Magwitch lay concealed (Gadd 121); he identied the White Hart as the inn where Pip and his party come ashore to purchase beer (129); and he even located the low point of land, from behind which the four-oared police galley shoots out (148) to cite just three examples of Gadds remarkable diligence. Unlike Pip, Dickens and his party did not spend the night on the river or sleep in the Lobster Smack. Gadd speculated that Dickens derived his information about the inn from the skipper of the rented steamboat (Gadd, 144). In Gadds opinion, Forster overrates Dickenss observational powers: Dickens had a much closer acquaintance with the river than can be acquired from a single days run from Blackwall to Southend, Gadd asserted (130). In that case, the nighttime portion of Pips adventure and perhaps much else besides must be attributed to prior investigation or to subsequent prowling unbeknownst to Forster between 22 May and early July. It has been argued that Dickens used two-chapter weekly installments, which seem to read quickly, to create a sense of acceleration, as happens when three two-chapter installments (8 through 10) precede chapter 18 (installment 11), the climactic chapter in the First Stage in which Pip learns of his great expectations (109; ch. 18). One reads swiftly through chapters 12 to 17 until Mr. Pirrip brakes sharply with an account of Jaggerss announcement. Similarly, at the climax of the Second Stage, three onechapter installments occur in a row for the only time in Great Expectations with Magwitchs return, the novels pivot and core, as the middle chapter of the three (38, 39, 40). Prior to this trio of one-chapter installments, four
 By 1922, the refurbished Lobster Smack had become a favourite week-end resort of Thames yachtsmen, one of the very few improvements reported by Gadd (144).  Throughout this paragraph and the next one, I have borrowed extensively from Meckier, Great Expectations: Symmetry in (Com)motion, 3334.

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two-chapter installments (1922) seem to hasten towards it. Not surprisingly, chapter 54 is a single-chapter installment. Six twochapter installments, 26 through 31, propel readers towards the ill-fated escape it depicts. Just as a single-chapter installment, chapter 19, prolonged the surprise of the great expectations chapter, a single-chapter installment, chapter 53, precedes the escape attempt to increase suspense. In chapter 53, Orlick almost strangles Pip. Dickens delays and imperils the climax he has been preparing since the last one-chapter installment (ch. 40). The set of six two-chapter installments preceding chapter 54 is unique in Great Expectations, making this part of the Third Stage the novels fastest narrative stretch. To gain ever-greater momentum, Dickens grouped six of the Third Stages eight two-chapter installments (2631), a twelve chapter run, prior to Orlicks attack on Pip (ch. 53) and Magwitchs escape attempt (ch. 54). Each one of three keystone chapters 18 (Jaggerss announcement), 39 (the ex-convicts return), and 54 (the river journey) provides a suspenseending climax for a Stage of Great Expectations. When Dickens relied on three one-chapter installments to underscore the Second Stages climax, he identied Magwitchs reappearance in chapter 39 as his novels main event. Of the novels three keystone chapters, however, Forster evidently preferred the third, chapter 54, perhaps for the rapid storytelling that builds up to it or because he felt that the third in a series had to be the ultimate. Chapter 54 brings the Magwitch-Compeyson plot to a violent, vengeful conclusion: Pips convict drowns his nemesis. In chapter 5, the pair were recaptured struggling at the bottom of a ditch (33).When steamer, galley, and Pips boat collide in chapter 54, Magwitch and Compeyson go overboard together; in a whisper Magwitch later tells Pip that they had gone down, ercely locked in each others arms, and that there had been a struggle under water (331). Here is the parallel that Forster praised. He might have gone on to point out an equally strong contrast: as Magwitch frees himself forever from Compeysons evil grasp, Pip bonds permanently with his erstwhile benefactor in what has been called the most important relationship Dickens ever concocted. He takes a seat beside Magwitch in the galley: I felt that was my place henceforth while he lived, Pip states (332; ch. 54). The relationship between Pip and Magwitch, waxing steadily over the last fteen chapters, assumes nal form in chapter 54. Dickens used it symbolically to bridge the gap between young and old, Haves and Have Psychologically, sociologically, economically, the Pip-Magwitch connection is arguably the most important relationship Dickens ever concocted and the most important bonding in the novel. See Meckier, Dickenss Great Expectations, 1, 107. Pips relationship with Magwitch, Bert Hornback decided, is more important than his relations with Herbert, Joe, and Estella, even though all of these continue beyond the novel (62).

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Nots, gentlemen and the lower classes. Henceforth, Pip and Magwitch are inseparable, virtually father and son. Ironically, the last traces of Pips repugnance towards Magwitch melt away just minutes after the ex-convict kills Compeyson. Pips sympathy and gratitude include admiration for his would-be benefactors constancy through a series of years (332). With Pips epiphany in the closing paragraphs, chapter 54 fullls its dual role as both Stage Threes climax and the conclusion to the Pip-Magwitch relationship. Perceiving in Magwitch a much better man than he had been to Joe, Pip has a priceless moment of self-realization (332). It liberates him nally and completely from the snobs skewed perspective that overexpectancy brings. Although Forster never discusses it, Dickens changed his mind about having Pip save Magwitch after their boat collides with the Hamburg steamer. In the General Mems, Dickens instructed himself thusly: Compeyson drowned /Magwitch rescued by Pip. And/taken. In chapter 54, Pip is taken on board the galley where he joins Herbert and Startop (331). Then Magwitch is spotted, a dark object swimming, but not swimming freely due to a very severe injury in the chest and a deep cut in the head. He is pulled aboard by the galleys crew and instantly manacled at the wrists and ankles. Dickens presumably realized that heroics for Pip at this point would mitigate the catastrophe by giving readers something to feel good about. Instead of coming to his benefactors aid, Pip must watch helplessly while Magwitch, badly hurt, is recaptured and restrained. Awestruck by the chapters topographical and chronological realism, Forster never let on that the crucial last step in Pips plan, escape to the continent by steamer, and the immediate consequence of its failure, Pips return to London with Magwitch, may be totally unrealistic. Both incidents are possible (Forsters criterion, 2: 359), but the latter has been said to transpire contrary to law, and the former seems implausible, if not also illegal. Perhaps Dickens was scrupulously realistic, attentive all along to the smallest details, so that he could take astonishing liberties at the end without being detected or without much censure if caught. He made the photographic and the fabricated look to be of a piece. Dickens was determined not only to be thoroughly realistic when possible, but also to appear so when he was not. He wanted the hailing and its aftermath to appear as true-to-life as the chapters delity to time, tide, and place. The nal step in the escape plan, which Pip hatches in the chapters
 Dickens may have departed from the General Mems a second time at this point. Just above the note about Pip rescuing Magwitch, Dickens wrote Both on board/together. This never happens if Both refers to Magwitch and Compeyson. Rosenberg suggested reading on board as overboard, but Anny Sadrin rejected this solution, insisting that Dickens clearly wrote on board. See Sadrin, 24, n. 8 and Rosenberg, Preface, 327.

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opening paragraph, is to hail the rst steamer from London, be it for Hamburg or Rotterdam, and get taken aboard (323). Pip bolsters his credibility by creating practical-sounding options: he and Magwitch will try to take whichever boat comes rst so as to have another chance with the second if by any accident they are bypassed initially. (The reference to a possible accident becomes ironic in retrospect). We knew the distinguishing marks of each vessel, Pip states, thereby calling attention to his attention to details and garnering additional respect for Dickens as a realist. Yet it is extremely unlikely, logistically or legally, that a large vessel bound for a Continental port would come to a halt in order to pick up unscheduled passengers from a small boat. Were such a rendezvous doable, it surely would be forbidden. Who but a fugitive from justice would leave England so surreptitiously? The captain and the line employing him would be guilty of assisting criminals. I have been unable to document the practice of hailing steamboats in order to stop them, David Paroissien tactfully observes (384). Such hailings could never have been a practice. As Gadd and his companions watch the Rotterdam steamers approach, the topographer was even more circumspect: Whatever may have been done a hundred or more years ago, wrote Gadd, the chances of the Batavier stopping her way to pick up a passenger in Sea Reach are, in this age, very remote (Gadd, 149), no more so in all probability than in Pips. It has been maintained that no ocer from the galley would grant Pip leave to accompany the prisoner to London (332) or permit Herbert and Startop to return by land. Technically, the argument goes, all three are complicit in Magwitchs escape attempt, therefore subject to arrest. If Magwitchs only crime is returning from Australia, Pip and his associates become accessories after the fact, (Rosenberg, Great Expectations, 461). They are liable to a sentence of two years in jail. Complicity in an escape becomes the least of their worries if they are tried as accessories to Magwitchs murder of Compeyson, his denouncer, the ultimate in the string of oences for which the judge sentences the ex-convict to death (341; ch. 56). The penalty for accessories to murder was imprisonment for life, although such a sti sentence would probably have been commuted (Rosenberg, Great Expectations, 46162). Commentators like to point out that the Accessories and Abettors Act of 1861 was being debated while Dickens wrote Great Expectations; it was passed into law as the serial appeared. They attribute the novels
 According to Rosenberg, imprisonment for life could be commuted to transportation or imprisonment for no more than four years (Great Expectations, 6162), a severe enough penalty.  See Paroissiens note on accomplices or accessories (395).

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avoidance of a third, truly unhappy ending Pip in jail to Dickenss absentmindedness (Rosenberg, Great Expectations, 462). Supposedly, the novelist who wrote himself several memoranda in order to complete Great Expectations without error, forgot about the new legislation. The PipMagwitch relationship would certainly have been cheapened if they were no longer father and son but partners in crime. Still, although Dickens neglected to say what became of Startop, it seems unlikely that he ignored the complicity issue even if he invented the hailing of steamboats. We need to be reminded that Magwitchs escape attempt is foiled in 1829, more than thirty years prior to the 1861 Accessories and Abettors Act. Only a gross anachronism could hold Pip accountable under a statute still three decades from enactment. Indicting Pip would have been harder in 1829. Under the 1826 law then in eect, an alleged accessory after the fact could not be indicted or tried until the principal oender had been convicted, the logic being that one cannot be accessory to a crime not yet proven (see Holdsworth, 308). Indeed, since Queen Annes reign (170214), no accessory could be indicted and tried till the guilt of the principal had been legally ascertained (Holdsworth, 310). Under the 1826 law, accessories before the fact could be indicted of a substantive felony independently of the principal; not until 1847 was a similar provision made in the case of accessories after the fact (Holdsworth, 310; italics added). Section 3 of the Act that became law on 6 August 1861 specied that an Accessory after the Fact could be indicted and convicted whether the principal Felon shall or shall not have been previously convicted (24 & 25 Victoria, Cap. 94, 686). Special provision was made for the punishment of all accessories after the fact (Holdsworth, 310). Section 8 stipulated that anyone who aids, abets, counsels, or procures the commission of a crime shall be liable to be tried, indicted, and punished as a principal Oender (Cap. 94, 687).10 In 1861, everyone in Pips boat could have been arrested prior to Magwitchs conviction and charged with the same oense; the extent of each persons culpability would be sorted out afterwards.11 Accessories and major oenders were considered interchangeable and were liable to identical punishments. The most meticulous of men, Dickens almost certainly did not forget the 1861 Act; it simply did not apply. Nor did the demands of the plot compel [him] to overlook Pips, Herberts, and Startops role as accomplices or accessories to Magwitchs attempted escape (Paroissien, 39495). Dickens bent the law earlier in the novel when Magwitch exclaims that he should of a certainty be hanged for returning from transportation
10 See Williams, 287 and Seago, 87. 11 According to Williams, it became easier in 1861 to charge accessories as perpetrators and vice versa (287).

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(Great Expectations, 243). The novelist conceals or ignores the fact that this oence had notoriously ceased to be de facto capital at the time the action of the novel takes place (Collins, 281). But the Inimitable was correct to let Pip go, at least for the time being. Allowing him to accompany Magwitch eectively keeps him under surveillance. If detained in 1829, one must reiterate, Pip could not be tried as an accessory after the fact until Magwitch is found guilty. In fact, Pip is arrested after Magwitchs conviction, but for debt. By that time, Startops whereabouts are unknown, perhaps even to Dickens, and Herbert has relocated to Egypt. Having recovered from a nervous breakdown only to nd Biddy married to Joe, Pip hastens to join Herbert. I sold all I had, Pip writes and Within a month, I had quitted England (355; ch. 59). He wraps up his aairs with an alacrity more akin to an absconding felons than a disappointed lovers. But that Pip and his companions have been directly implicated in and responsible for Compeysons murder (Rosenberg, Great Expectations, 46162) seems unlikely. They are not accessories before the fact, the only oence with which they could be charged in March1829 before Magwitch is convicted. Nor are they accessories after the murder. Pip designed the escape plan to get Magwitch as far from Compeyson as possible. Ironically, the police bring the victim to his murderer, and the steamboat knocks them into each others arms. In sum, Dickens masterpiece chapter contains sensational melodrama, the fast-paced action of an attempted escape; it ends tragically with a disaster that combines an accident with murder. Compact despite rapid movement, it obeys the classical unities: one action (escape), one place (the Thames estuary), over a little more than twenty-four hours. Through the cheeky Jack-of-all-trades at the Ship Inn, Dickens supplies comic relief, until the handyman alarms Pip with news of a four-oared galley (328; ch. 54). Admirably self-contained, the novels longest chapter nevertheless makes an excellent connector, seamlessly linking chapter 53 with 55. Dickens not only substantially deepened, indeed, completed the novels central relationship between Pip and Magwitch, he also brought the main plot, Pips undeserved Cinderella-like rise, to a calamitous resolution. Perished (333; ch. 54) is the chapters nal word. Compeyson has already, and Magwitch appears doomed to follow suit; his hopes of enriching Pip are dead as a door-nail. However, the pervasive sense of loss and death does not preclude rebirth through an admittedly terrifying immersion. Jerome Hamilton Buckley specied Pips watery baptism in chapter 54 as the climax of the novel(Buckley, 100). It ts in with the facts of the story and yet connotes spiritual renewal.12 Miss Havisham is dead, too, and
12 Pips pride having been drowned, he melts with compassion towards Magwitch (Buckley, 100).

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Estella conspicuously absent; only two of the novels four major personages appear. Still, one may concur with Forster and nominate chapter 54 of Great Expectations as the nest one-chapter installment that Dickens (or any other Victorian serialist) ever wrote.
Works Cited
Accessories and Abettors Act. 24 & 25 Victoriae Reginae. Cap. 94, 68488. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1861. Buckley, Jerome H. The Victorian Temper: New York: Vintage, 1964. Collins, Phillip. Dickens and Crime. London: Macmillan, 1965. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Edgar Rosenberg, ed. New York: Norton, 1999. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol. II, 18471870. London: Chapman & Hall, n. d. Hornback, Bert. Great Expectations: A Novel of Friendship. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Gadd, W. Laurence. The Great Expectations Country. London: Cecil Palmer, 1929. Holdsworth, W. S. A History of English Law. Vol. 3. Boston: Little Brown, and Co., 1923. Meckier, Jerome. Dating the Action in Great Expectations: A New Chronology. Dickens Studies Annual, 21 (1992), 15794. Dickenss Great Expectations: Misnars Pavilion versus Cinderella . Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002. Great Expectations: Symmetry in (Com)motion. Dickens Quarterly, 15 (March, 1998), 2849. Paroissien, David. The Companion to Great Expectations. Helm Information: Robertsbridge, 2000. Rosenberg, Edgar. A Preface to Great Expectations: the pale usher dusts his lexicons. Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972), 294335, 37478. Sadrin, Anny. Great Expectations. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Seago, Peter. Criminal Law. Sweet & Maxwell, 1881. Williams, Glanville. Textbook of Criminal Law. London: Stevens & Sons, 1978.

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