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Expectations
Bloom’s
GUIDES
Charles Dickens’s
Great
Expectations
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1984
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
All the Pretty Horses
Beloved
Brave New World
The Chosen
The Crucible
Cry, the Beloved Country
Death of a Salesman
The Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
Hamlet
The Handmaid’s Tale
The House on Mango Street
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Iliad
Lord of the Flies
Macbeth
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The Member of the Wedding
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Romeo and Juliet
The Scarlet Letter
Snow Falling on Cedars
A Streetcar Named
Desire The Things They
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Bloom’s
GUIDES
Charles Dickens’s
Great
Expectations
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Contents
Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 9
The Story Behind the Story 12
List of Characters 15
Summary and Analysis 19
Critical Views 47
George Bernard Shaw on the Unamiable Estella
and Pip as Function of Class Snobbery 47
George Orwell on Magwitch and the Pantomime
of the Wicked Uncle 51
Peter Brooks on the Beginning and Ending:
Pip Before Plot and Beyond Plot 54
Dorothy Van Ghent on the Century of Progress,
Dickens’s Use of the Pathetic Fallacy, and
Pip’s “Identity of Things” 59
Julian Moynahan on Pip’s Aggressive Ambition
and the Dark Doubles Orlick and Drummle 65
Goldie Morgentaler on Darwin and Money
as Determinant 72
Christopher D. Morris on Narration and
Pip’s Moral Bad Faith 76
Joseph A. Hynes on Star, Garden, and Firelight Imagery 80
Ann B. Dobie on Surrealism and Stream-of-Consciousness 84
Nina Auerbach on Dickens and the Evolution
of the Eighteenth-Century Orphan 88
Stephen Newman on Jaggers and Wemmick:
Two Windows on Little Britain 92
Jay Clayton on Great Expectations as a Foreshadowing
of Postmodernism 97
Edward W. Said on Australia, British Imperialism,
and Dickens’s Victorian Businessmen 100
Works by Charles Dickens 104
Annotated Bibliography 105
Contributors 110
Acknowledgments 113
Index 115
Introduction
HAROLD BLOOM
8
occult a connection between Pip and Estella as there is
between Heathcliff and the first Catherine in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights. One critic, Shuli Barzilai, relates Pip’s self-
lacerating temperament to Freud’s “moral masochism,” the
guilty need to fail, and she traces the same self-punishing
pattern in Estella’s marriage to the sadistic Bentley Drummle.
Both Estella and Pip seem doomed to go on expiating a guilt
not truly their own, whether or not it was truly Charles
Dickens’s.
Dickens originally ended the novel with a powerful
unhappiness: Pip and Estella meet by chance in London; she
has remarried, and each sees in the other a suffering that
cannot be redressed. Unfortunately, Dickens revised this into
the present conclusion, in which Pip prophesies that he and
Estella will not be parted again. Though this is a litt le
ambiguous and just evades senti mentality, it is highly
inappropriate to what is most wonderful about the novel: The
purgation, through acceptance of loss, that has carried Pip into
an authentic maturity. What matters in that maturation is not
that guilt has been evaded or transcended, but that the reader
has come to understand it, however implicitly, as the cost of
Pip’s confirmation as an achieved self. What Dickens could not
bring himself to do in David Copperfield, he disciplined himself
into doing in Great Expectations. Self-made, even self-fathered,
Dickens disowns part of that psychic achievement when he
creates Pip, who is fatherless but keeps faith at last both with
Joe and with the memory of Magwitch.
Biographical Sketch
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Landport, Portsea,
near Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of
eight children of John and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens. The
family moved to London in 1814, to Chatham in 1817, and
then back to London in 1822. By 1824 increasing financial
difficulties caused Dickens’s father to be briefly imprisoned for
debt; Dickens himself was put to work for a few months at a
shoe-blacking warehouse. Memories of this painful period in
his life were to influence much of his later writing, in particular
the early chapters of David Copperfield.
After studying at the Wellington House Academy in London
(1824–27), Dickens worked as a solicitor’s clerk (1827–28), then
worked for various newspapers, first the True Sun (1832–34)
and later as a political reporter for the Morning Chronicle
(1834–36). In 1833 Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell,
but her family opposed any contemplated marriage. Dickens
never forgot Maria, and she served as the model for Dora in
David Copperfield.
In 1836 a collection of articles contributed to various
periodicals appeared in two volumes as Sketches by “Boz,”
Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. This
was followed by the enormously popular Posthumous Papers
of the Pickwick Club (1836–37). Like many of Dickens’s later
novels, the Pickwick Papers first appeared in a series of
monthly chapbooks or “parts.” Other novels were
serialized in magazines before appearing in book form. In
1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had
ten children before their separation in 1858. At the
beginning of his marriage, Catherine’s sixteen-year-old sister
Mary lived with them, but she died after a few months. The
shock of this loss affected Dickens permanently, and Mary
would be the model for many of the pure, saintly heroines in
his novels—such as Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop—who
die at an early age.
Between 1837 and 1839 Dickens published a second novel,
Oliver Twist, in monthly installments in Bentley’s Miscellany, a
new periodical of which he was the first editor. This was
followed in 1838–39 by Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens then
founded his own weekly, Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–41), in
which appeared his novels The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby
Rudge. In 1842 he and his wife visited the United States and
Canada, and after returning Dickens published American Notes
(1842), two volumes of impressions that caused much offense
in the United States. He then wrote Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–44), a novel set partly in America.
In 1843 Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the first in a
series of Christmas books that included The Chimes (1845), The
Cricket on the Hearth (1846), The Battle of Life (1846), and The
Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). Early in 1846 he
was for a brief time the editor of the Daily News, a paper of the
Radical party to which he contributed “Pictures of Italy” after
visiting Italy in 1844 and again in 1845. During a visit to
Switzerland in 1846 Dickens wrote his novel Dombey and Son,
which appeared monthly between 1846 and 1848. In 1850 he
started the periodical Household Words; in 1859 it was
incorporated into All the Year Round, which Dickens continued
to edit until his death. Much of his later work was published in
these two periodicals, including David Copperfield (1849–50),
Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit
(1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations
(1860–61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65).
Throughout his life, Dickens threw himself vigorously into a
variety of social and political crusades, such as prison reform,
improvement of education, the status of workhouses, and
reform of the copyright law (American publishers were
notorious for pirati ng his works and off ering him no
compensation). These interests find their way also into his
work, which is characterized by sympathy for the oppressed
and a keen examination of class distinctions. His novels and
stories have been both praised and censured for their
sentimentality and their depiction of “larger-than-life”
characters, such as Pickwick or Mr. Micawber (in David
Copperfield).
During the last twenty years of his life Dickens still found
time to direct amateur theatrical productions, sometimes of
his
own plays. He also became involved in a variety of
philanthropical activities, gave public readings, and in 1867–68
visited America for a second time. Dickens died suddenly on
June 9, 1870, leaving unfinished his last novel, The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, which was first published later that same year.
Several editions of his collected letters have been published.
Despite his tremendous popularity during and after his own
life, it was not until the twentieth century that serious critical
study of his work began to appear. Modern critical opinion has
tended to favor the later, more somber and complex works
over the earlier ones characterized by boisterous humor and
broad caricature.
The Story Behind the Story
Charles Dickens set out to compose what Bernard Shaw called
his “most compactly perfect book” during a tumultuous time
of upheaval and change in his native England. During the
second half of the nineteenth century, when Dickens’s
career had flowered, the world’s center of influence shifted
from France to London, whose population tripled during the
time of Queen Victoria’s reign—and society shifted from one
of ownership and property to one of manufacture and
trade. While the beginning of the nineteenth century and
the effects of the Industrial Revolution brought poverty and
persecution for the laboring class, a series of reforms in the
1830s and 1840s helped to stabilize both the economy and
the population. Factory acts restricted child labor and
limited hours of employment, and the erection of the Crystal
Palace in 1851 celebrated the beauty—rather than the
strife—of the Revolution’s technological innovation.
Charles Darwin’s treatise The Origin of Species, published
in 1859, put this progress in the context of evolution and
natural selection. And so, in 1860, the story of a boy’s
confusion-riddled rise from impoverished orphan to city
gentleman grew slowly from a the seed of Dickens’s letter to
his friend John Forster, describing “a little piece I am writing ...
Such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon
me ... I can see the whole of a serial revolving around it, in a
most singular and comic matter.”
Great Expectations is at once an elegy for the lost
innocence of lower-class rural population—who, like the
Gargerys of Rochester, toiled in the countryside of his
childhood—and a critical analysis of the broadening gap
between illusion and reality that came with the
hopefulness of reform, social mobility, and ever
increasing commerce. In order to successfully render this
transformation, Dickens’s scholar David Paroissien says the
author needed to use first-person narration and maintain a
dual focus: “Pip looks back to those events of his life set in
Regency England but tells them from a present he belongs to,
the now of the relating time.” Through
his protagonist, Pip, Dickens sought to define and question the
motivations and forces behind a rise in social status and the
prejudices surrounding the divide between high society and
the base criminal world. An advocate of free trade, Dickens
was sickened by the cruelty overcrowded London inflicted
upon its inhabitants. His depictions of Smithfield market and
Newgate prison serve as reminders of the filthy, teeming,
bloody world of questionable justice during this era. But since
Pip’s story begins not in the present time but rather in the
early part of the century, Dickens appealed to readers by
depicting Pip as looking back from a current perspective,
with some of the knowledge and maturity that wouldn’t be
available to a young, “common labouring boy” in the beginning
of the century.
Reader faith and investment was necessary for a writer who
constructed his plot as a series of bite-sized chunks. As the
editor of the weekly journal All the Year Round, Dickens had to
contend with the journal’s plummeting sales following the
failure of novelist Charles Lever’s serialized publication of his A
Day’s Ride. Great Expectations appeared in weekly installments in
both All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly from December
1860 to August 1861. This format, though challenging for the
writer, brought him a broad readership that only improved his
career. Dickens used the serial constraints as structural features
in the novel, shaping plot around his need to have a continual
series of beginnings and endings and maintaining suspense
throughout the work. Great Expectations does not fall neatly
into any particular genre. It does have aspects of domestic
realism—which by 1860 was characteristi c of Dickens’s
contemporaries such as Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope—but in
different moments also resembles a variety of Victorian
subgenres, including the historical novel; a “silver-fork” fiction
dealing with high society; a “Newgate” sensationalist or crime
novel; and, perhaps most obviously, the Bildungsroman.
Seeing the autobiographical nature of Great Expectations is
easy with the knowledge that Dickens, like Pip, once lived in
the marsh country, was employed in a job he despised, and
experienced success in London at an early age. These
similarities may be the reason why biographer Thomas Wright
says that Great Expectations differs from Dickens’s other
novels, arguing that the hero and heroine are “really live
and interesting characters with human faults and failings.”
Some critics, including Wright, argue that Estella, in name and
spirit, is an amalgam of Ellen Lawless Ternan, a 20-year-old
actress with whom Dickens had an affair following his
divorce. Although like Pip and Estella, Dickens and Ternan
were united in the end, Great Expectations’s original ending
was considerably more melancholy. After finishing the last
installment of the book in June 1861, the exhausted Dickens
brought the proofs to his friend, novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-
Lytton. Lytton argued that the Dickens’s first and
considerably shorter ending—in which Pip encounters
Estella remarried and unambiguously leaves her forever—
would be too disappointing for readers. In a letter to Forster,
Dickens wrote, “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing
as I could, and I have no doubt that the story will be more
acceptable through the alteration.”
When the novel was published as a whole that July, critics
had differing opinions on the revised ending, but the novel was
a tremendous commercial success. A century and a half later,
few remember that the novel once closed with a remarried
Estella’s encounter with Pip on a Picadilly street and their final,
unambiguous parting soon after. Today the novel is popular—
well-read and widely taught. And Dickens’s controversial
decisions in writing the serial have faded into the annals of
history. “This was the author’s last great work,” wrote
Swinburne. “The defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as
spots on the sun or shadow on a sunlit sea.”
List of Characters
Pip, the protagonist of the novel, is an orphan living with Mr.
and Mrs. Joe Gargery, his sister and brother-in-law. Realizing
with disgust his “commonness” once he encounters Miss
Havisham and Estella, he is delighted when he learns he has a
secret benefactor who wishes to make him a gentleman.
Mrs. Joe is Pip’s sister, more than twenty years his elder, who
never loses a chance to remind her charge that she “brought
him up by hand.” This effort is often conducted with the help
of a cane she calls “Tickler.” Dissatisfied with her station in life,
and often shrill, jealous, and confrontational, she is silenced
when Orlick strikes her in the back of the head.
Volume Three
Pip is troubled by the thought of an unexpected visitor lurking
outside on the stairs, and the task of keeping his benefactor
away from the prying eyes of his old neighbor woman and her
niece seems arduous. He informs the watchman that the man
who asked for him was his uncle and inquires after other
unknown visitors. The watchman says that he thought another
person was with his uncle—a working person, wearing dust-
colored clothes. As the clock strikes six in the morning Pip lights
the fire; shortly thereafter, he tells the old woman and her
niece to modify breakfast, as his uncle had arrived during the
night. When the convict awakens, he tells Pip that his real
name is Abel Magwitch, but that he came to call himself Provis
during his travels. He said that he hopes he is not known in
London, though he was tried there most recently, and that he
would not advertise the fact that he had returned from
Australia. Pip concludes that he must offer the man lodging and
that he’ll have to confide in Herbert, although Provis insists
upon studying Herbert’s physiognomy before disclosure. Pip
secures a lodging house for his so-called uncle, and then goes
to see Jaggers, who, after confirming that his benefactor was
indeed Abel Magwitch of New South Wales, says that he
doesn’t want to hear any more about the situation. Jaggers says
that when Magwitch gave a distant hint of wanting to return to
England, he was discouraged and told that he would unlikely
be granted a pardon. Then he allows that Wemmick received a
letter from a colonist named Provis interested in Pip’s address.
After that disclosure, the conversation is terminated. This
admission, says Morgenthaler, is the revelation of the fairy tale
turns inside out—the happy ending is provided by a member of
low society, proving, perhaps, Darwin’s idea of interdependence
of all things. With Pip’s revelation and Jaggers’s confirmation,
moral distinctions between categories are forever blurred.
Since Wemmick is out, Pip returns home to find Magwitch
drinking rum. Even after his clothes are replaced, the convict
still seems untamed and mysterious, and Pip is haunted by the
fact that the man can be hanged on his account. Herbert
returns and is halted by the sight of Magwitch; the three men
sit by the fire as Pip explains the entire situation. Magwitch
assures the two young men that he’ll always have a “gen-teel
muzzle on.” (341) Herbert and Pip discuss the situation, and
Herbert says that although he understands Pip’s impulse to
separate himself from Magwitch’s funding and friendship, he
sees danger in Pip’s renunciation of this stubborn and
passionate man who for so long has had such a fixed idea to
help him. They decide that the only thing to do is to convince
Magwitch to leave England.
Magwitch sits down to tell the boys the story of his life,
including mention of the other convict Pip encountered in the
marshes, a man named Compeyson. This man, whom
Magwitch met twenty years earlier, was good-looking and
educated, and he soon took in Magwitch to be his partner in
swindling. Compeyson’s other partner was a dying man named
Arthur who lived upstairs; one evening Arthur, who was
perpetually haunted by the image of a mad woman dressed all
in white, saw the woman coming toward him with a shroud,
and promptly died. During his employment with Compeyson
Magwitch was tried and convicted of misdemeanor; soon after
the two men were together tried for felony. At the trial,
Compeyson’s character was celebrated, while Magwitch was
implicated. For this, after a series of trials and escapes, the two
men became mortal enemies. As Magwitch stands smoking by
the fire, Herbert pencils in the cover of a book, “ ‘ Young
Havisham’s name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who
professed to be Miss Havisham’s lover.’” Fearful and vowing
not to mention Estella to Provis, Pip sets off to find Estella the
next day. He is told he can find her at Satis house, and as he
passes the Blue Boar for breakfast and to clean up, he sees
Bentley Drummle. They meet and exchange tense pleasantries
until a waiter informs Drummle that the lady will not ride.
Before Pip leaves he thinks he spots Orlick.
Miss Havisham and Estella are surprised to greet Pip, and he
tells them that he’s discovered the secret of his patronage. In
response to Pip’s query, Miss Havisham says that she brought
him to Satis house as she might have any other chance boy, and
that her association with Jaggers has nothing to do with Pip’s
expectations. Pip expresses disdain that she has misled Herbert
and Matt hew Pocket as well as himself, and begs Miss
Havisham do the lasting service for Herbert that he himself
began. He then professes his love for Estella, who replies in
kind that she doesn’t understand such a thing. She admits that
she is to be married to Bentley Drummle. Pip begs her to
bestow herself at the very least on someone more worthy, and
explains that she will never leave his heart. He moves through
the gate and toward London and finds a note from Wemmick
awaiting him at the Temple, urging him not to go home.
After spending the night at a rooming house in Covent
Garden, Pip sets off for Walworth. Wemmick tells Pip that
Compeyson is living in London. Herbert, instructed by
Wemmick to hide Magwitch until a plan can be constructed for
his safe escape, has brought the convict to live with the father
of his intended, Clara. Pip leaves Wemmick—noting from the
tea service the imminent arrival of Miss Skiffins—and finds
Herbert at the house Wemmick indicated. Herbert says that
the housekeeper is happy to have the company of Magwitch
upstairs from Clara’s father, the surly, noisy, drunk Mr. Barley.
Herbert, Pip, and Magwitch construct a plan—they will take
Magwitch down the river by boat, when the time is right.
Weeks pass without change and Pip begins to realize that
Estella is married. He begins rowing regularly, so as to
establish himself and his boat as a presence on the river. He
keeps a nervous and distanced watch over Magwitch. One
evening Pip dines alone and then takes in a Christmas
pantomime in which Wopsle is featured. When he greets his
former neighbor afterwards, he is shocked when Wopsle
indicates that he recognized a man to have been sitting behind
Pip, describing him as one of the two convicts they found in
the ditch many years earlier. Pip is shocked that Compeyson
was behind him, “like a ghost.” (386) Pip returns home and
holds council with Herbert by the fire. One day soon after, Pip
runs into Jaggers, who invites him to lunch with Wemmick.
Jaggers says over lunch that Miss Havisham wishes to settle a
matter of business with Pip; he then gleefully mentions that
“our friend the Spider” has won the contest of Estella’s heart.
When Jaggers summons his housekeeper, Molly, Pip is
surprised to notice that the hands and eyes of the
housekeeper were so familiar; that, in fact, she is
doubtlessly Estella’s mother. After the meal Pip asks
Wemmick if he has ever seen Miss Havisham’s adopted
daughter. When Wemmick says no, Pip reminds him of the time
he was instructed to take notice of Jaggers’s housekeeper.
Wemmick says that many years earlier, the housekeeper was
tried and acquitted for murder. It was a case of jealously,
Wemmick says, as both Molly and the murder victim were
tramps. He says that the woman was also under strong
suspicion of having destroyed her three-year-old child as
revenge upon the man, but Jaggers argued against that,
insisting that the marks on her hands were not those of
fingernails but brambles. The sex of the child, Wemmick says,
was female.
Pip returns to Satis house, and Miss Havisham begs Pip to
explain the history behind his secret partnership with Herbert.
She says that if she gives him the money—900 pounds—Pip
must agree to keep her secret as she has kept his own. He
agrees, and she asks if there is nothing she might do to serve
Pip as she has his friend. They sign papers on their agreement
and Miss Havisham begs him to write under her name, “I
forgive her.” (398) Pip insists that he has forgiven her, and Miss
Havisham cries despairingly and repeatedly, “What have I
done!” Pip asks after Estella, and Miss Havisham says that she
doesn’t know whose child she was but that Jaggers brought
her when she was two or three. They part, and Pip walks
through the brewery, taking stock of the places where he
felt such childish hope and pain. As he looks into the window,
he seems Miss Havisham throw herself onto the fire. He rushes
in and attempting to smother the flames with his coat and his
hands, he burns himself. A surgeon arrives and
pronounces her wounds serious and her shock potentially
more fatal. The surgeon promises to write to Estella, who is in
Paris. Pip sets off to notify the family personally.
Back at Barley’s house, Herbert dresses Pip’s wounds and
speaks of a discussion he had with Magwitch in which
Magwitch mentions a woman with whom he had a child and
many struggles. Magwitch told Herbert that the woman was
vengeful to the point of murder, and that though she was
acquitted, the woman swore that she would destroy the child.
Fearful that he would be the cause of the child’s death,
Magwitch hid himself. Herbert says that when Pip was seven
and ran into Magwitch in the churchyard, Magwitch was
reminded of the little girl. Pip asks Herbert to confirm that he
has no fever—that he is in the right frame of mind—and then
explains patiently that the man they have in hiding is Estella’s
father.
Pip goes to Little Britain and makes the arrangements with
Jaggers and Wemmick for Herbert’s future. Pip mentions that
he engaged Miss Havisham in a discussion of Estella’s origins,
saying later that he, unlike Miss Havisham, knew Estella’s
mother. Jaggers is startled, and Pip says he has seen Estella’s
mother in the past three days, and that he knows her father:
Provis, from New South Wales. Then Pip discloses all that he
knows, leaving Jaggers to infer that some information was
imparted by Miss Havisham rather than by Wemmick. Jaggers
abruptly changes the subject, and Pip implores Wemmick—
invoking his pleasant home and aging father—to urge his
superior to be more forthright. Jaggers maps out the story for
Pip and asks for whose benefit the secret should be revealed.
When Pip fails to provide an answer, Jaggers returns once
again to his work. When a client appears, sniveling, shortly
thereafter, Jaggers dismisses him, insisting “I’ll have no feelings
here.” (415)
Pip settles Herbert’s affairs, and Herbert tells Pip that his
career is progressing such that he might establish a branch-
house in Cairo, where he and Clara hope to live. A few days
later, they receive a post from Walworth which tells them the
escape should be plotted for Wednesday. Herbert suggests
they engage Startop in the plan, and they begin to construct
a detailed scheme which provides for Pip’s injured hands. Pip
receives an anonymous note which summons him to the old
marshes in order to receive information about his uncle Provis.
Pip leaves immediately, stopping at Satis house to inquire after
Miss Havisham, and then taking dinner in an inn. He engages
the landlord in a unwitting conversation about his own history,
with Pumblechook cited as his earliest benefactor. As Pip
listens, he realizes how much of an impostor Pumblechook
was, and how good, honest, and uncomplaining Joe was.
Pip walks through the marshes and seeing a light in the old
sluice house, walks in. He calls out to see if anyone is nearby,
and is captured, he realizes, by Orlick. Orlick says that he is
going to kill Pip—as he did his sister—and that he knows about
Provis and Pip’s plans to smuggle him away. Stopping first to
drink, he picks up a hammer. Pip shouts and struggles with all
his might, hears voices, and sees Orlick emerge from the
struggle and run into the night. It is Herbert and Startop come
to his rescue, and they assure Pip that he has the next day to
rest before the journey. They say that in Pip’s haste he dropped
the letter, and so they tried to find him at Miss Havisham’s.
Finding Pip nowhere they retired to the Blue Boar, which Pip
had often mentioned, and heard from Trabb’s boy that Pip had
been seen going in the direction of the sluice house. It is
Orlick, Moynahan argues, not Magwitch, who represents the
true criminal in Great Expectati ons, for his origins are
mysterious and he has no regret for any of his actions. They
work side by side, and in some ways, Orlick represents the
shadow of Pip—they are both ambitious, and in many ways,
they want the same things. When he confronts him in the
sluice-house, he wants to take his life both literally and
figuratively. But with this parallel drawn, Moynahan says, the
reader may be compelled to see Pip more harshly than Pip
might ever see himself.
The next morning a bright sunrise inspires the men to begin
their journey. They set off and stop at Clara’s house for
Magwitch, who seems grateful and relaxed. As they begin to
row, he mentions the delights of freedom and compares life’s
fleetingness and fluidity to the river’s. They stop that night at a
rundown inn, dragging the boat up, and the landlord mentions
a seeing a four-oared galley. That night Pip notices two men
looking into their boat, and the next morning it is decided that
Pip and Magwitch will set off early. They see a Rotterdam
steamer that will take them away, but then, in the early
afternoon, Pip notices the galley. Soon they hear a policeman
call for the arrest of Abel Magwitch. Noticing the face of
Compeyson onboard, Magwitch dives into the river to attack
him. After a struggle, only Magwitch surfaces, injured badly,
and he is immediately placed in shackles. He claims that there
had been a struggle underwater, but that he didn’t drown
Compeyson—he simply disengaged and swam away. Pip
promises to stand by his benefactor. Brooks argues that the
fact that Magwitch’s return is played out on a Thames estuary
draws a line back to Pip’s childhood and his first encounter
with Magwitch on the marshes. “It was like my own marsh
country,” Pip thinks, “flat and monotonous, and with a dim
horizon.” (438) Ghent argues that the river is one of the most
prominent demonic symbols in Dickens—it unites classes,
reveals evidence, unites victim and criminal, and swallows
people whole.
At Police Court the next day, Jaggers is convinced Magwitch
will be found guilty. Pip is not bothered by news that his
inheritance shall be appropriated by the state. At this time
Herbert explains that he and Clara must leave for Cairo.
Herbert offers Pip a clerkship, and Pip says that he must leave
the question open for a little while. On Saturday Pip returns to
his lonely home and finds Wemmick on the stairs, looking for
him. He asks if Pip will meet him at the Castle on Monday
morning, and when he does, the two take a little walk and find,
inside a church, Miss Skiffins and a wedding party. The two are
married, and Pip promises not to mention a word of the
festivities in Little Britain.
Pip goes to visits the ailing Magwitch in prison. Though
Jaggers put in an application for a trial postponement given
the state of his client, Magwitch is found guilty and sentenced
to death. In response, Magwitch says, “I have received my
sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours.”
(458) As the days wear on, Pip knows the end is near. When
words fail his benefactor, Pip tells him, immediately before
death, that he knows of Magwitch’s child, that she was still
alive, and that he loves her. Brooks argues that Magwitch’s
statement before the court is Dickens way of contrasting
human plots, such as the law, with the laws of the universe,
which render futi le both acti ons and att empts at
interpretation. The shaft of light that falls onto all the court’s
attendants eliminates the distinction between the judge and
the judged and the guilty and the innocent. Pip’s evolution is
apparent in his observation of “the broad shaft of light ...
linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among
the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute
equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things and
cannot err.” (458)
Pip falls ill himself after Magwitch’s death, and his debt is so
great that he is arrested and carried off to prison. In his abject
state he begins hallucinating, seeing Miss Havisham and Orlick
and finally Joe. Pip finally snaps out of his feverish haze and
realizes that Joe actually is sitting at his bedside, having come
to nurse him back to health. When Joe composes a note to
Biddy, telling of Pip’s recovery, Pip realizes that Biddy has
taught Joe to write. Joe says that Miss Havisham died about a
week after Pip took ill, and that she distributed her wealth
among the Pockets, including four thousand pounds to
Matthew. He also tells Pip Orlick was arrested and thrown into
the county jail for robbing Pumblechook. One Sunday, the
still-weak Pip and Joe go for an outing, and Pip tries to tell Joe
the story of Magwitch—Joe, however, is not interested in
revisiting painful memories. Upon rising the next morning, Pip
realizes that Joe is gone. He has left only a note and a receipt
indicating that he had paid all of Pip’s debt.
In some ways, Pip’s emergence from brainfever finds him a
child again—in the care of Joe, absolved of all his mistakes.
Still, innocence is lost, and Pip must address his lost innocence
head on. He returns to find Satis House in a state of disarray,
readying for an auction. Stopping at the Blue Boar, Pip
encounters Pumblechook, who is very rude to him. Finally, he
goes back to his old home, discovering, upon meeting Joe and
Biddy, that he arrived on their wedding day. Pip is surprised—
as his own slight hopes of a happy marriage with Biddy are
dashed—yet he expresses nothing but happiness for the
couple. Returning to London, Pip sells his few possessions and
takes a partnership with Herbert. Eleven years later he returns
to Joe and Biddy, and finds a young child—that they’ve named
Pip— sitting before the hearth. Biddy insists that Pip must
marry, but Pip tells her that he’s already an old bachelor.
After admitting to Biddy that he has not forgotten Estella,
Pip goes to revisit the site of Satis house one last time. He
walks through the overgrown garden in the mist and thinks of
Estella, about her unhappy life and the news that her cruel
husband, Bentley Drummle, died two years earlier. As he
continues to stroll pensively, Estella’s figure appears in the
distance. She declares herself greatly changed and admits that
excluding the grounds, she has lost everything, little by little.
She says she has often thought of Pip and that she never
imagined that in taking leave of Satis house that she’d also
take leave of him. She says that she has been bent and broken,
but that she is, she hopes, in better shape. They take hands
and walk out of the ruins together.
Work Cited
Mitchell, Charlotte, ed. Great Expectations. Penguin Classics, 1996.
Critical Views
Notes
1. Dickens’s sentimental heroines: Agnes Wickfield: daughter of the
Canterbury solicitor with whom David Copperfield boards while at
school, David’s tutelary angel and second wife—Orwell calls her “the real
legless angel of Victorian romance.” Little Dorrit: the self-sacrificing
heroine of the novel named for her, who is born and raised in debtors’
prison and continues to hover as ministering angel over her family after
their release. Florence Dombey: the humiliated daughter of the purse-
proud Dombey clan, whose father, in prosperity, spurns her for not being
a male and, in adversity, comes to depend on her samaritan surveillance.
2. Assorted shrews, termagants, and hysterics. Mrs. Raddle: vitriolic
landlady in Pickwick Papers. Mrs. Macstinger: imperious widow in
Dombey and Son, hell-bent on a second marriage. Mrs. Nickleby: the
hero’s mother, given to nonstop twaddle. Rosa Dartle: the repressed
and masochistic house-companion in David Copperfield, in love with
the voluptuary son of the house. Miss Wade: a head-strong young
woman in Little Dorrit, whose “History of a Self-Tormentor” (book 2,
chapter 21) is often cited as evidence of Dickens’s grasp of abnormal
types.
3. Little Dorrit’s go-getting older sister, who marries into the Merdle
plutocracy.
4. In his introduction to the novel in the Macmillan Edition (1904).
For his judgment on the conclusion of Great Expectations, see also p.
500 in the original text.
5. H.G. Wells (1866–1946), the prolific author of science fiction,
popular histories, and novels about lower-middle-class life (Kipps, Tono
Bungay, Mr. Polly), began life as a draper’s apprentice at thirteen, after
his father, a shopkeeper and part-time professional cricketer, was
crippled in an accident and his mother had to abandon the Wells’s failing
china shop to work as a housekeeper. As Shaw suggests, Mrs. Wells free-
associated drapery with the tuxedos and tailcoats of the very rich who
passed in front of the shop; per Wells himself, “Almost as unquestioning
as her belief in Our Father and Our Saviour was her belief in drapers.” As
Shaw also suggests, Wells—no Trabb’s boy—loathed his job and ran away
at sixteen to become an usher—a teaching assistant.
6. Jean Valjean, the central figure in Victor Hugo’s novel of social
repression Les Misérables (1862).
Note
3. Chapter 4: the “appalling sums” Murdstone forces him to learn.
[Editor.]
PETER BROOKS ON THE BEGINNING AND ENDING:
PIP BEFORE PLOT AND BEYOND PLOT
Great Expectations is exemplary for a discourse on plot in
many respects, not least of all for its beginning. For what the
novel chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search
for a beginning. As in so many nineteenth-century novels, the
hero is an orphan, thus undetermined by any visible
inheritance, apparently unauthored. * * * There may be
sociological and sentimental reasons to account for the
high incidence of orphans in the nineteenth-century
novel, but clearly the parentless protagonist frees an
author from struggle with preexisting authorities, allowing
him to create afresh all the determinants of plot within his
text. He thus profits from what Gide called the “lawlessness”
of the novel1 by starting with an undefined, rule-free
character and then bringing the law to bear upon him—
creating the rules—as the text proceeds. With Pip, Dickens
begins as it were with a life that is for the moment
precedent to plot, and indeed necessarily in search of plot. Pip
when we first see him is himself in search of the
“authority”—the word stands in the second paragraph of the
novel—that would define and justify—authorize—the plot of
his ensuing life.
The “authority” to which Pip refers here is that of the
tombstone which bears the names of his dead parents, the
names that have already been displaced, condensed, and
superseded in the first paragraph, where Pip describes how his
“infant tongue” (literally, a speechless tongue: a catachresis that
points to a moment of emergence, of entry into language)
could only make of the name, Philip Pirrip, left to him by the
dead parents, the monosyllabic Pip. “So, I called myself Pip,
and came to be called Pip” (chapter 1). This originating
moment of Pip’s narration and his narrative is a self-naming
that already subverts whatever authority could be found in the
text of the tombstones. The process of reading that text is
described by Pip the narrator as “unreasonable,” in that it
interprets the appearance of the lost father and mother from
the shape of the letters of their names. The tracing of the
name—which he has already distorted in its application to self
— involves a misguided attempt to remotivate the graphic
symbol, to make it directly mimetic, mimetic specifically of
origin. Loss of origin, misreading, and the problematic of
identity are bound up here in ways we will further explore
later on. The question of reading and writing—of learning to
compose and to decipher texts—is persistently thematized in
the novel.2
The decipherment of the tombstone text as confirmation of
loss of origin—as unauthorization—is here at the start of the
novel the prelude to Pip’s cogito,3 the moment in which his
consciousness seizes his existence as other, alien, forlorn:
( ... )
Notes
1. André Gide (1869–1951) preached and practiced the subversion of
conventional plot constructions and character definitions in nearly all of
his later works, most famously in The Counterfeiters (1925). For Gide the
behaviour and function of the characters reveal themselves by trial and
error, often by chance or in answer to questions Gide himself puts to
them—pretty much in the way scientists come by their information in
conducting their research. In the central chapter of The Counterfeiters to
which Brooks refers, “Edouard Explains His Theory of the Novel” (part
2, chapter 3), Gide’s alter ego expresses his opinion—by now, thanks
largely to Gide, a commonplace—that “of all literary genres, the novel
remains the freest, the most lawless” (Gide uses the English word).
[Editor.]
2. On the theme of reading in the novel, see Max Byrd, “‘ Reading’ in
Great Expectations,” PMLA 91, no. 2 (1976), 259–65.
3. “I think” (Latin). By hitching an English (or any other modern)
noun, pronoun, or article to the verb, the writer arrives at some such
meaning as “awareness” or the cognate “cogitation.” [Editor.]
8. Literally, “things said in passing.” [Editor.]
DOROTHY VAN GHENT ON THE CENTURY
OF PROGRESS, DICKENS’S USE OF THE PATHETIC
FALLACY, AND PIP’S “IDENTITY OF THINGS”
Dickens lived in a time and an environment in which a full-
scale demoliti on of traditi onal values was going on,
correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men,
women, and children by the millions—a process brought about
by industrialization, colonial imperialism, and the exploitation
of the human being as a “thing” or an engine or a part of an
engine capable of being used for profit. This was the “century
of progress” which ornamented its steam engines with iron
arabesques of foliage as elaborate as the anti-macassars 4 and
aspidistras and crystal or cut-glass chandeliers and bead-and-
feather portieres of its drawing rooms, while the human
engines of its welfare groveled and bred in the foxholes
described by Marx in his Capital.5 (Hauntingly we see this
discordance in the scene in Great Expectations where Miss
Havisham, sitting in her satin and floral decay in the house
called Satis, points her finger at the child and outrageously tells
him to “play.” For though the scene is a potent symbol of
childish experience of adult obtuseness and sadism, it has also
another dimension as a social symbol of those economically
determined situations in which the human soul is used as a
means for satisfactions not its own, under the gross and
transparent lie that its activity is its happiness, its welfare and
fun and “play”—a publicity instrument that is the favorite of
manufacturers and insurance agencies, as well as of
totalitarian strategists, with their common formula, “We’re
just a happy family.”) The heir of the “century of progress” is
the twentieth- century concentration camp, which makes no
bones about people being “things.”
Dickens’ intuition alarmingly saw this process in motion, a
process which abrogated the primary demands of human
feeling and rationality, and he sought an extraordinary
explanation for it. People were becoming things, and things
(the things that money can buy or that are the means for
making money or for exalting prestige in the abstract) were
becoming more important than people. People were being de-
animated, robbed of their souls, and things were usurping the
prerogatives of animate creatures—governing the lives of their
owners in the most literal sense. This picture, in which the
qualities of things and people were reversed, was a picture of
a daemonically motivated world, a world in which “dark” or
occult forces or energies operate not only in people (as
modern psychoanalytic psychology observes) but also in
things: for if people turn themselves or are turned into things,
metaphysical order can be established only if we think of
things as turning themselves into people, acting under a “dark”
drive similar to that which motivates the human aberration.
There is an old belief that it takes a demon to recognize a
demon, and the saying illustrates the malicious sensibility with
which things, in Dickens, have felt out and imitated, in their
relationship with each other and with people, the secret of the
human arrangement. A four-poster bed in an inn, where Pip
goes to spend the night, is a despotic monster that straddles
over the whole room,
* **
* **
* **
Notes
4. Coverlets draped over the backs of chairs and sofas to keep them
from soilure, specifically a protection against hair oil (imported from the
Indonesian seaport Makassar).
5. See esp. book 1, chapter 25, section 5, in which Marx, citing the
Public Health Reports for 1865–66, attacks the appalling living
conditions of English workingmen.
6. As a formal term in literary criticism, the phrase first appears in
John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, volume 3, part 4, chapter 12 (1856), in
which he imputes the fallacy to writers who are “over-dazzled by
emotion” without sufficient mental powers to control their feelings: “the
state of mind which attributes the characters of a living creature to [non-
human phenomena] is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief” or
by any other sensation that ends by falsifying the object.
( ... )
* **
( ... )
( ... )
The problem of Pip’s moral bad faith, both in his actions and in
his narrative assessment of his past conduct, has long troubled
critics, so much so that in recent years very probing questions
have been asked about the depiction of his moral character,
even about his self.1 In this essay I want to extend the
direction of this recent questioning by considering Pip’s bad
faith as an instance of what J. Hillis Miller calls “varnishing,”
that is, the authorial establishment of some putative center
for a work which simultaneously conceals evidence that would
invalidate such a center. 2 Pip’s bad faith works this way in
Great Expectations: because we so often attend to the
serpentine maneuvers of his conscience, we accept without
question that this conscience is functi oning within an
autonomous, continuous, achieved, created self. And yet
analysis of the varnished side of Great Expectations shows
that it is precisely these assumptions that have been called
into question, even in the very attempt to establish Pip’s
conscience as a center. After a discussion of the general
relation between narration and bad faith, I examine, in turn,
the novel’s famous opening, the allusions Pip makes as
narrator, and the letters sent in the novel. The polemical
connotations of “deconstruction” are nothing to the
purpose here, but I do hope to show the existence of
fundamental contradictions in the novel, aporia whose logical
reconciliation seems impossible to articulate.
I
Pip’s relation with all characters is self-serving, even when he
claims to be acting altruistically, and in his narration he
occasionally covers this seemingly irreducible egotism with a
veneer of disingenuous contrition. One example is his relation
with Joe. As narrator, Pip claims to have developed a solicitude
for Joe, but that claim is everywhere contradicted by his
actions. After learning the selfless rationale for Joe’s
acquiesence in Mrs. Joe’s “government,” Pip writes:
( ... )
( ... )
A short time later the convict forces the reader upside down
along with Pip:
( ... )
Notes
1. “Dickens and the Interior Monologue,” PQ 38 (1959): 64.
18. Thomas E. Connolly, “Technique in Great Expectations,”
Philological Quarterly 34 (1955): 52–53.
19. P. 56.
20. Great Expectations (New York, 1966), pp. 1–2. All subsequent
quotations from the novel will be taken from this paperback edition
(Holt, Rinehart, Winston).
21. P. 29.
( ... )
Notes
17. An analysis of Dickens’ many uses and variations of this paradigm
would constitute a long article in itself.
18. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New
York, 1933), pp. 125–38.
A
Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations,
69, 77, 80, 83
capture, 15, 17, 44, 56, 101
clockwork throat, 61
convict, 15, 19–22, 25, 32, 37–
39,
43, 51–52, 61, 62–65, 72–73,
75, 86–87, 91, 100–1,103
daughter, 7, 15, 18, 42, 45, 48,
81
death, 45, 57, 62, 101
escape, 40–41, 44
Pip’s father-substitute, 7–8, 55,
64, 72, 74–75, 90, 101
as secret benefactor, 15–17, 38–
39, 46, 49, 56, 58, 90–91,
95, 101–2
speech, 24, 52–53
Acceptance of loss theme, 8
innocence, 12, 50, 71
and Joe, 26–27
and Pip, 25, 37, 46
Adaptation theme in Great
Expectations, 72, 74
All the Year Round (periodical), 10,
13
Ambition theme in Great
Expectations, 65–71
American Notes, 10, 104
Auerbach, Nina
on the orphan theme in Great
Expectations, 88–92
B
Barnaby Rudge, 10, 104
Barzilai, Shuli, 8
Battle of Life, The, 10, 104
Beer, Gillian
Bentley Drummle in Great on the plot of Great Expectations,
Expectations 54–58
crimes of, 67–70 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 14, 56, 82
dark shadow of Pip, 65–71, 93
death, 69 C
mannerisms, 17, 30–31 Carey, Peter, 102
marriage to Estella, 8, 15, 17, 37, Carlyle, Thomas, 49
40–41, 46–48, 67 Carter, Paul
Biddy in Great Expectations, 17, 31, The Road to Botany Bay, 101–2
45, 77, 81 Chimes, The, 10, 104
and Joe, 46, 71, 91 Christmas Carol, A, 10, 104
and Orlick, 16, 26, 35, 69 Clara Bailey in Great Expectations,
and Pip’s education, 22, 24–27 16 Clayton, Jay
Bildungsroman, 13 on postmodernism in Great
Bleak House, 10, Expectations, 97–100
90, 104 Brontë, Compeyson in Great Expectations, 18
Emily betrayal of Magwitch, 15, 39–41,
Wuthering 44, 69
Heights, 8 Brooks, death of, 57, 62
Peter and Miss Havisham, 15
on Great Expectations, 19, 32, and Orlick, 16
44–45, 77
Cricket on the Hearth, The, 10, 104 the river, 62
Smithfield, 62
D Dickens, Catherine Hogarth, 9 Dickens, Charles
Darwin, Charles affairs of, 7, 14, 47
Origin of Species, The, 12, 19, 39, biography, 9–11
72–76 birth, 9
David Copperfield, 10, 104 critics, 7–8, 11–12
autobiographical content, 7–9 death, 11
Dora in, 9 imagination, 47–49, 53, 85
Mr. Micawber in, 10, 101 inconsistent characters, 51–53
narrative of, 7 public readings, 11
David Copperfield in David theatrical productions, 10–11 use of pathetic
Copperfield, 49, 53 fallacy, 59–65 works by, 104
consciousness of, 7 Dobie, Ann B.
Day’s Ride, A (Lever), 13 on the stream of consciousness in
Decipherment theme in Great Great Expectations, 84–88
Expectations, 55 Dombey and Son, 10, 104
Demonic symbolism in Great
Expectations E
exaggerated character features, 61 Eliot, George, 13
graveyard, 62
Jaggers’ office, 60, 93
Newgate prison, 62
Estella in Great 88, 93
Expectations,
77, 100 Miss G
Havisham’s Great Expectations, 10, 104
influence on, autobiographical content, 7–8, 13
16, character list, 15–18
18, 21, 29, 33, 34–37, 74, 91 coincidences in, 34, 38, 63, 70
marriages, 8, 15, 17, 40–41, critical views, 14, 19–20, 22,
46–48, 67–68, 70, 80 24–25, 28, 31–32, 34, 38–39,
parents, 7, 15, 18, 29, 40–42, 45, 43–45, 47–103
48, 93 historical aspects of, 100–3
and Pip, 7–8, human discordance in, 59–65
14, 22–23, 25– language, 24
26, The Origin of Species influence on,
31–34, 36–38, 12, 19, 39, 72–76
45–48, 56–58, plot of, 13, 19, 45, 48, 53–58,
62, 67, 70–72, 81, 83–84, 90–91 72–73, 75
and star postmodernism in, 97–100
imagery, 80– self-delusion of, 100
83 tormentor, story behind, 12–14
47–48 stream of consciousness in, 84–88
unhappiness of, 15, 33–36, 46 structure of, 13
summary analysis, 19–46
F two endings of, 8, 14, 56–58, 71,
Fatal Shore, 82
The violence in, 70–71
(Hughes), writing of, 7, 12, 14
101–2 Freud, Guilt and atonement theme in Great
Sigmund, 8, Expectations, 61
of great expectations, 71, 93 34, 36
murderer’s, 70 and Satis house, 15, 21–22,
Pip’s, 7–8, 20, 25, 27, 32–34, 51, 32–33, 36, 40–43, 46, 49,
60, 62–64, 66, 70, 71, 91–92 58–59, 70, 78, 81, 84, 89–90
sufferings of, 15–16, 23, 27, 40,
H 49, 74, 81–83
Hard Times, 10, 52, 104 Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations
Haunted Man and the Ghost’s desires of, 16, 33–34, 44
Bargain, The, 10, 104 help to Magwitch, 17, 38–44, 91,
Havisham, Miss in Great 103
Expectations, 17, 80 and Pip, 28–38, 42–43, 46, 90
death, 45, 67, 70–71, 89 Historical novels, 13
and Estella, 18, 21, 24–26, 31, Hogarth, Mary
37, model for heroines, 9 Household
91 Words (periodical), 10 Hughes, Robert
revenge on men, 15, 24–25, 29, The Fatal Shore, 101–2
Hugo, Victor, 49
J
Humor, 11, 52
Jaggers in Great Expectations, 17, 60,
Hynes, Joseph A.
98, 100
on imagery in Great Expectations,
dirty business of, 16, 26, 28–31,
80–84
68–69, 91–96
forefinger, 61
I
housekeeper, 18
Illustrative of Every-day Life
and Every-day People, 9 mannerisms, 92–97
Imagery in Great Expectations as Pip’s counsel, 27–30, 33–36,
firelight, 80–81, 83–84 38–45, 72
garden, 82–83 Joe Gargery, Mr. in Great
star, 80–83 Expectations, 15, 35, 67, 78, 81
and Biddy, 46, 71, 91
honesty and warmth, 16, 21, 43,
71, 73, 80, 83–84, 95, 97–98
Pip’s father-substitute, 7–8, 16,
19–20, 22, 24, 26–27, 32–33,
45, 51, 64, 74–75, 77, 90
pride of, 27, 31
speech of, 24–25
Joe Gargery, Mrs. in Great
Expectations, 15, 49, 83
attack on, 16–17, 25–27, 31, 43,
64, 67–69
death, 35
disinterest in education, 21
jealousy of, 16, 19–20, 22, 24, 67,
75, 77, 80
Johnson, Edgar, 7
Joyce, James, 84
Jung, Carl, 88
L
Lever, Charles
A Day’s Ride, 13
Little Dorrit, 10, 104
M
Malouf, David, 102
Martin Chuzzlewit, 10, 104
Marx, Karl, 59, 98
Master Humphrey’s Clock (weekly), 10
Matthew Pocket in Great
Expectations
and Miss Havisham, 17, 23, 29, influence on Great Expectations,
40, 45 12, 19, 39, 72–76
tutor, 16, 27–28, 30–31, 37 Orlick in Great Expectations, 32, 40
Miller, J. Hillis, 76 arrest of, 45
Molly in Great Expectations attack on Mrs. Joe, 16, 25–26, 35,
crimes of, 18, 41 43, 64
and Estella, 18, 41, 93 attack on Pip, 16, 43
and Jaggers, 18, 31 and Biddy, 16
Morgenthaler, Goldie and Compeyson, 16
on Great Expectations, 19, 32, 39, crimes of, 66–70
43–44 dark shadow of Pip, 16, 33, 43,
on The Orgins of Species influence 65–71
on Great Expectations, 72–76 Orphanhood theme
Morris, Christopher D. in Bleak House, 90
on Great Expectations, in Great Expectations, 88–92
19 Orwell, George
on Pip’s moral bad faith, 76–79 on Dickens’s inconsistent
Moynahan, Julian characters, 51–53
on Great Expectations, 34 Our Mutual Friend, 10, 104
on the theme of ambition in Great
Expectations, 65–71 P
Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 11, 104 Paroissien, David, 12
Pickwick Papers, 9–10, 52, 104
N “Pictures of Italy,” 10, 104
Narrative, Great Expectations Pip in Great Expectations
direct monologue, 87–88 ambition of, 65–71
first person, 7, 12, 66 authentic maturity, 8
indirect monologue, 85, 87 and “commonness,” 15, 22, 24, 51
Pip’s, 54, 76–79, 85–88 consciousness, 85–89
stream of consciousness, 84–85, dark doubles of, 65–71
87–88 education, 21, 24, 26–27, 30–31,
third person, 87 37
Newgate prison in Great father-substitutes of, 7–8, 19,
Expectations, 13, 28, 34 31–33, 46, 55–56, 64, 72,
Newman, Steven 74–75, 77, 89–90, 101
on Great Expectations, 28, identity of things, 59–65, 73,
31 on Jaggers and Wemmick 82–84, 90, 93–97
in Great Expectations, 92–97 imagination and hallucinations, 7,
Nicholas Nickleby, 10, 104 56, 70–71, 86
injuries, 43–45
O looking back of, 12–13, 19, 44, 57
Old Curiosity Shop, The, 10, loss, 12, 25, 37, 50
104 Little Nell in, 9 and Magwitch, 17, 19–22, 25, 32,
Oliver Twist, 9, 48, 72–73, 104 34, 37–46, 51–52, 56, 62, 81,
The Origin of Species (Darwin) 86–87, 90–91, 101–3
moral bad faith, 76–79 criminality of, 64, 66, 73–74
naming of self, 19, 27, 54, 56, 90 and commodification of
passion for Estella, 7–8, 21–26, people,
31–38, 40–42, 45–48, 56, 58, 22
62, 69, 80–83, 90–91 high, 13
rise in social status, 13, 15, 16– “Newgate,” 13, 82, 95
17, unification, 44
22, 26–31, 38, 45, 48, 57, 73, Victorian, 85, 88, 91, 98, 103
78, 91, 97–98, 100 Startop Great Expectations, 43
secret benefactor, 15–17, 27, mannerisms, 17, 30
35–40, 44, 49, 56, 90–91, 100–2 violence against, 68–69
sense of guilt, 7–8, 20, 25, 27, Stone, Harry, 85
32–34, 51, 60, 62–64, 66, Surrealism, 84, 88
70–71, 91–92
Postmodernism T
foreshadowing in Great Tale of Two Cities, A, 10, 52, 75, 104
Expectations, 97–100 Ternan, Ellen, 7, 14
Pumblechook in Great Expectations, Thackeray, William Makepeace, 13
20, 25, 33, 35, 45–46, 77 Time theme in Great Expectations, 72
plans for Pip, 21–22, 24, 27, 32, and metaphor of chain, 75, 78,
43, 64 103
obsessions of, 17 Trollope, Anthony, 13
robbery of, 67–71
V
R Van Ghent, Dorothy
Realism on Dickens’ use of pathetic
domestic, 13 fallacy, 59–65
Road to Botany Bay, The (Carter), on Great Expectations, 20, 22,
101–2 24–25, 38, 44, 91
on Pip’s identity of things, 59–65
S
Said, Edward W. W
on the historical aspects of Great Wells, H.G., 48
Expectations, 100–3 Wemmick in Great Expectations, 28,
Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations 34, 37, 39, 41–42
at Satis House, 23, 26, 32 “aged parent,” 30, 36, 95, 98
Shaw, George Bernard, 12 divided life of, 17, 31, 36, 81–82,
on the class snobbery in Great 95–100
Expectations, 47–50 mannerisms, 92–97
Sketches of Boz, 9, 104 post-office mouth, 61
Smithfield market in Great and Miss Skiffins, 17, 36, 40, 45,
Expectations, 13 95, 98
Society in Great Expectations White, Patrick, 102
civilized, 72–74
Williams, Raymond, 99
and class snobbery, 47–51, 64, 75
Woolf, Virginia, 84
Wopsle, Mr. in Great as Wadengarver, 18, 33–34
Expectations, 20–22, 24–25, 27, Wright, Thomas, 13–14
49, 64 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 8
playacting, 18, 31, 33, 41, 56