Review of Great Expectations

Great Expectations, 1861

This could be the title or hashtag addressed to all of our lives right now.  We have great expectations of when this self imposed quarantine will end, when our freedom will be restored, of the plans we will make.

For Pip, the protagonist of the novel, great expectations turn out not to be what he expects.  For that matter, most of the characters have great expectations that just don’t happen.

Dickens as a little of Hugo or Hugo has a taste of Dickens because a convict, Magwitch, decides to be kind to the sevenish or so Pip, after he’s terrorized him in the cemetery early in the novel.  After Pip brings him a file for his leg irons and some food, he uses his ill gotten gains, becomes wealthy as a sheep farmer, and becomes a secret benefactor to Pip.

Dickens’ favorite theme of secret pedigrees, of lost fortunes returned, and of characters being connected in ways no one could imagine, continues here.  As with the characters of Bleak House, many characters here wait for the wealth and better things they think are coming, and are not happy with what they have.   Their financial and social restlessness lead to unhappiness for them.

The theme of young men trying to gain an inheritance to make their way in the world is a favorite of 19^th century novels.  Men, and women, are driven by the need to better themselves by money and class are prevalent in Austen’s work.  Think Mr. Collins the greedy, oafish cleric, think Mr. Darcy’s disdain of such men.   Think the machinations of Mrs. Bennett and her attempts to marry off her daughters to gentry.

Mr. Rochester tells his own story of his marriage to Bertha Mason and of his early woes as a second son, doomed to make his own way.  Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to earn wealth and social status to impress Cathy and become worthy of her love.  Cathy could be Estella’s long lost twin; both are hard hearted to a certain extent, marry for class and money, and learn the full extent of unhappiness through the wrong marriage.  At least Estella lives to repent.

Joe Gargery, Pip’s faithful brother in law, is simple, lacks education, but is self supporting.  He is a successful blacksmith who has provided for his family, and is happy with his lot, though he knows society holds no place for him.

In these picaresque stories of young men and women coming of age, fortunes are made and lost, and the adventures either make the main character gain incite or maturity or the adventures kill him or her.  Their ancestors are the bodice buster romances like the Angelique books (Sergeanne Golon) and the women of Rosemary Rogers’, Jennifer Wilde’s, and Kathleen Woodiwiss’s romances.

The women of Great Expectations have their own adventures.  Some, like Pip’s sister Mrs. Joe have let money and social climbing obsess them.  Mrs. Joe was an emotional cripple, insecure and abusive, before Orlick’s attack on her rendered her a helpless invalid. She is like Fagin; she sends out Pip and Joe to work, and if they come across a bit of money, she takes it and hoards it, perhaps planning a great expectation of her own.

Poor Miss Havisham is worthy of a book of her own.  She is trapped in time and lives in the past, forever the jilted bride.  Like Bertha Mason, her brother/half brother has betrayed her, except he has cost her a marriage and part of her fortune.  Where Bertha remains married but mad and imprisoned in Rochester’s attic, Miss Havisham remains rich in money but poor in spirit.  Her ghostly figure haunts the novel, and like a puppet master, she manipulates Pip, Estella her adopted daughter, and those around her.

She has taught Estella to hate men, and to be cold hearted.  Estella marries Drummle for his wealth and class, though she doesn’t love him.  She also hurts Pip a great deal, and allows Miss Havisham and others in the household to taunt Pip with tales of her courtship to Drummle, whom Pip loathes.

Biddy is kind, grateful, and helpful.  She improves herself and grows up from being a dirty, clever street urchin to a self possessed young woman, comfortable with herself, intelligent, an able to teach others. 

The psychological drama and suspense are riveting in this novel.  An early film version plays a prominent role in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour.  In fact, the novel itself was an influence on Rice’s work.

By the end of Great Expectations, Pip has lost Biddy to Joe Gargery, and Miss Havisham, who has repented her behavior after she is burned in a terrible household accident.  Her demise reminds me a lot of Birdie’s in Rumer Godden’s The Doll’s House, except that Birdie has a much kinder personality.

Pip in the end, manages to gain a career, and as an accounting clerk, learns to account for his behavior and the cruel way he has treated Biddy and Joe.  He learns Estella is Magwitch’s daughter, and the daughter of  lawyer Jaggers’ servant, Molly.   For all her airs, her background is far more debased than his.  In an early ending, Pip remains a bachelor, unhappy, but serviceable.  He could have been an employee in Melville’s story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.”  In the second ending, he and Estella find each other, a happier ending, perhaps, for an audience that craved them.

Lawyer Jaggers  is fearsome, even to the criminals he deals with.  He sets up Estella’s adoption by Miss Havisham, and does fairly by Pip, but he is hard and emotionless for the most part.  Dickens worked as a law clerk, and his sympathy’s lie not with the profession.  As someone who has spent years using her law degree in firms, public sector law, and legal studies, my sympathies tend to lie with Dickens’.  Read an article called “The Emotional Labor of Paralegals “ to learn more.

Dickens has influenced a world of writers, and he lives in novelists as diverse as Thomas Hardy and Stephen King.  His plots have shades of Shakespeare, as do his characters, albeit sprinkled by a little Greek Tragedy.

In a world as crazy diverse and turbulent as ours, Dickens still holds a place, and he fulfills many of our own great expectations when it comes to reading for escape as well as pleasure.