The very title of this book indicates the confidence of conscious genius. In a new aspirant for public favour, such a title might have been a good device to attract attention, but the most famous novelist of the day, watched by jealous rivals and critics, could hardly have selected it, had he not inwardly felt the capacity to meet all the expectations he had raised. It has appeared in installments and can testify to the felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story. In no other of his romances has the author succeeded so perfectly in at once stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers. He stirred the dullest minds to guess the secret of his mystery. It has been all the more provoking to the former class, that each surprise was the result of art, and not of trick for a rapid review of previous chapters has shown that the materials of strictly logical development of the story were freely given. Even after the first, second, third, and even fourth of these surprises gave their pleasing electric shocks to intellectual curiosity, the denouement was still hidden, though confidentially foretold. The plot of the romance is therefore universally admitted to be the best that Dickens has ever invented. Its leading events are consecutively, artistically necessary, yet, at the same time, the processes are artistically concealed.
Great Expectations, better than any of his previous stories, is noticeable as indicating the individuality of Dickens's genius. Everybody must have discerned in the action of his mind two diverging tendencies, which in this novel, are harmonized. He possesses a singularly wide, clear, and minute power of accurate observation, both of things and of persons, but his observation, keen and true to actualities as it independently is, is not a dominant faculty, and is opposed or controlled by the strong tendency of his disposition to pathetic or humorous idealization…
Charles Dickens's masterpiece is a bildungsroman, as his great expectations arrive in the form of his fortune and are embodied in his dream of becoming a gentleman. These expectations also take the shape of his longing for a certain cold star named Estella. Most people would assume that through age and maturation, a boy with a wonderful heart and personality would further develop into a kind-hearted, considerate gentleman. Yet, Pip changes his perspectives on life.
Each of the three parts of the novel treats a different expectation, and in each part Pip changes in the face of his changing expectations.
1. Dickens in the “Mirror”
1.1. Dickens as a Dickens
"It was interesting to watch ... the mind and muscles working (or if you please, playing) ... as new thoughts were being dropped upon the paper": [98:3]1 described him, Nelson Harland, watching the author at work. Dickens, one of history's most prolific authors, is remembered as a curious picture of playfulness, energy, and stubborn will, a man given to working on three huge books at the same time and dashing off to the English countryside for twelve-mile constitutional walks. In a life that spanned fifty-eight years, Dickens wrote fifteen novels, most of which were over a thousand pages, in addition to countless novellas, stories, articles, sketches, and letters. When one thinks of Dickens, as the critic Nelson Harland says, it's necessary to think big: a big life and big, big books, full of "shoals of characters, acres of plots, geysers of language."
Charles Dickens was born in 1812, in Portsmouth England. His father was eager to climb the social ladder and to make more of his life than his parents had been able, who were illiterate servants. When Dickens' father was hired as a clerk, this shaky ascent up England's relatively hostile social ladder began. Charles' childhood was subsequently rocky - lots of moves and minor financial windfalls, followed by bad wipeouts. To help his family, Charles was sent to work in a rat-infested shoe polish factory, where he worked twelve-hour days sticking labels on pots of polish. This job seemed to scare something in the young Dickens--perhaps showing him how easily one's hopes and ambitions could be cast aside by circumstance.
As a result, Charles was determined to be more successful than his father. He taught himself shorthand as a teenager and became a court reporter, allowing him to resume his education. Soon after, some of his character sketches were accepted into monthly magazines – in The Atlantic Monthly. These were gathered later into a book, which sold well. From there, Dickens launched his lifelong career as a novelist, work that he supplemented with long hours in the theater and publication businesses. Most of his books were published serially, in magazines, during his lifetime. His more popular works include Oliver Twist (1838), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), David Copperfield (1849), Hard Times (1854), "A Christmas Carol" (1943) and Great Expectations (1860).
1. Richard Dutton. “An Introduction to Literary Criticism”. Hong Kong: Longan York Press,1984.
Along with David Copperfield, Great Expectations is arguably Dickens' most autobiographical story, as it mirrors and permeates some of his past life. Pip, the central character of the novel, is a person who has many things in common with the very person who created him; he hates his job and he feels as though he's superior to everyone around him.
By the time he wrote Great Expectations, Dickens was separated from his wife and was involved in a trying affair with a young actress. Perhaps as a consequence, the endings Dickens wrote for Pip and Estella (in which the two characters presumably never reunite) was not a happy one. But an editor convinced Dickens to change his novel's conclusion to the sunnier one which now remains. Many, like the British playwright George Bernard Shaw, were disappointed with this new ending. Shaw said of the book: "Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy, and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it." But, if the beginning is unhappy; the middle is unhappy; and the unconventional ending may be happy.
Charles Dickens does have his share of critics. Some say his characters are flat, his writing is moralizing, his plots arbitrary. A common criticism is that his characters are exaggerated - as the critic Angus Wilson put it: "we see them as if we've had three or four glasses of champagne". But others find the glimmering, colliding worlds of Dickens' novels delightful; there are worse things, certainly than seeing the world through several glasses of bubbly.
Dickens died in 1870, and was laid under a tombstone that read: "England's Most Popular Author." More than a century later, his books continue to charm and engage young children, and eminent literary critics alike, as David Lodge observes in his May review of the latest Charles Dickens biography: “Dickens was as brilliant an entrepreneur and self-promoter as he was an artist. Indeed, his well-developed knack for selling himself to the masses may have made him the first true literary celebrity”.
1.2. Hero’s “Great Expectations”: Plot Overview
Great Expectations charts the progress of Pip from childhood through often agonizing experiences to adulthood, as he moves from the Kent marshes to busy, commercial London, encountering a variety of extraordinary characters ranging from Magwitch, the escaped convict, to Miss Havisham, locked up with her unhappy past and living with her ward, the arrogant, beautiful Estella.
One of the main components that make Great Expectations so immortal is what is found at the core of its central story. Great Expectations is a story about both the pains and pleasures of growing up, and since everybody has in some way or other experienced those moments, it all feels universal. The personages within the novel don't lead wholly happy lives. They have their own problems, doubts, and confusion; it is clear that not everything is going as well as they'd like it to be. Pip must discover his true self and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values permit one to prosper in the complicated world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Expectations.
Love is not blind in Great Expectations, but it blinds. Pip, the hero, is admirably delineated throughout. "Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since - on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!" [“Great Expectations”: 3:44:70] This is pretty much one of the best love speeches ever. What’s interesting is that in describing his love for Estella, he grounds this description in images of nature and of the landscape that surrounds him. Estella is superhuman in his eyes; she is found in the very particles around him. Here Pip maturely grasps the irrationality of his love and reasserts his philosophy that humans are innately good, and that Estella is innately good.
"It is a pity that the third portion cannot be read all at once, because its purpose would be much more apparent; and the pity is the greater, because the general turn and tone of the working out and winding up, will be away from all such things as they conventionally go. But what must be, must be”… One other letter throws light upon an objection taken not unfairly to the too great speed with which the heroine, after being married, reclaimed, and widowed is in a page or two again made love to, and remarried by the hero. This summary proceeding was not originally intended. But, over and above its popular acceptance, the book had interested some whose opinions Dickens especially valued (Carlyle among them), and upon Bulwer Lytton objecting to a close that should leave Pip a solitary man, Dickens substituted what now stands. "You will be surprised," he wrote, "to hear that I have changed the end of Great Expectations from and after Pip's return to Joe's, and finding his little likeness there. Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken by the book, so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and supported his view with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the change. You shall have it when you come back to town. I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration." This turned out to be the case; but the first ending nevertheless seems to be more consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale, and for this reason, it is preserved in a note.
Originally, Pip meets Estella on the streets of London and they exchange brief pleasantries. Unexpectedly, Pip states that while he could not have her in the end, he was at least glad to know she was a different person now, changed from the coldhearted girl Miss Havisham had reared her to be. The novel ends with Pip saying he could see that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching and had given her the heart to understand what my heart used to be: "It was two years more before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse, and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed on an occasion when he was in professional attendance upon Mr. Drummle and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich and that they lived on her own personal fortune. I was in England again - in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip - when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another. "I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!" (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.) I was very glad afterward to have had the interview; for in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her the heart to understand what my heart used to be.
In the revised version, Pip, without money or expectations, leaves England to take a clerk's position in Herbert's firm. After many years he returns to visit Joe and Biddy at the forge and finds a copy of himself, Joe and Biddy's son, sitting in his old corner in the kitchen firelight. He visits Satis House, now in ruins, and meets a now softened Estella with the "freshness of her beauty gone but its indescribable majesty and its indescribable charm remaining" and sees "no shadow of another parting from her": "We are friends," said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. "And will continue friends apart," said Estella. “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her”.
Great Expectations is not a time-dependant story, it's just timeless. The themes that Dickens uses - love, redemption, courage, betrayal all seem to be as fresh as they were 145 years ago. The novel does not rely on the subjects that concerned or interested people at those times; it simply touches issues that never die. Dickens uses language as a means of communication; he talks to us via the stories that he tells us while enthralling us with the magic that is found in the novel.
1.3. “Great Expectations” Blames the Time
Great Expectations is set in early Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the nation. The Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as the abolishment of slavery in the British colonies in 1834 had transformed the social landscape, enabling capitalists and manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although the social class was no longer entirely dependent on the circumstances of one’s birth, the divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as wide as ever. London, a teeming mass of humanity, lit by gas lamps at night and darkened by black clouds from smokestacks during the day, formed a sharp contrast with the nation’s sparsely populated rural areas. More and more people moved from the country to the city in search of greater economic opportunity. Throughout England, the manners of the upper class were very strict and conservative: gentlemen and ladies were expected to have thorough classical educations and to behave appropriately in innumerable social situations.
When Pip arrives in London, one of the first things he sees in the public yard where criminals are whipped, punished or hanged for anyone to see. His first tour guide tells him to come back in a few days so that he can watch the execution of four men. Mr. Jaggers’ office is right next to Newgate Prison, and Pip encounters a long line of criminals and their families waiting to speak to Mr. Jaggers. Crime and reminders of crime are all around Pip.
These conditions defined Dickens’s time, and they make themselves felt in almost every facet of Great Expectations. Pip’s sudden rise from country laborer to city gentleman forces him to move from one social extreme to another while dealing with the strict rules and expectations that governed Victorian England. Ironically, this novel about the desire for wealth and social advancement was written partially out of economic necessity.
2. The Analysis of Major Characters in “Great Expectations”
2.1. Pip; Estella; Miss Havisham
One of Dickens' greatest weapons in his armory is, indeed, the variety of characters. It is the main strength which makes the book incredibly rich; many characters have their own illusions, dreams, and hopes, many individuals found in the novel possess their own views for a better future and have great expectations. Not only are they all vastly different from each other, with their own psychological complexities and diverse feelings and emotions - what makes them so great is that they all flow with life. Dickens illustrates his characters with admirable skill; he provides them with a voice of their own, a heart, a soul. They are all very memorable and it is the immense range of characters that make it all the more special, given that one can see both quantity and quality.
The characters of “Great Expectations” generally provide curiosity and piercing humor which is the result of Dickens's creative power. Great Expectations presents the growth and development of a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip. As the focus of the bildungsroman, Pip is by far the most important character in Great Expectations: he is both the protagonist, whose actions make up the main plot of the novel and the narrator, whose thoughts and attitudes shape the reader’s perception of the story. As a result, developing an understanding of Pip’s character is perhaps the most important step in understanding Great Expectations.
Because Pip is narrating his story many years after the events of the novel take place, there are really two Pips in Great Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character—the voice telling the story and the person acting it out. Dickens takes great care to distinguish the two Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with perspective and maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels about what is happening to him as it actually happens. This skillfully executed distinction is perhaps best observed early in the book, when Pip the character is a child; here, Pip the narrator gently pokes fun at his younger self, but also enables us to see and feel the story through his eyes.
As a character, Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones.
On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert’s way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all those who love him. Pip’s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.
Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip’s desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness. But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pip’s oversimplified sense of his world’s hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses and that his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about him most. Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the man who narrates the novel, completing the bildungsroman.
Pip’s expectations of life are constantly unmet. It’s like a train of expectation-demolition. Upon being introduced to "high society," Pip expects to one day have the wealth and privilege that that society represents. Upon coming into a fortune, Pip expects to become a gentleman and to marry Estella. Upon meeting his benefactor, Pip’s hopes for love and money are dashed, but he has a new expectation: that he will help Magwitch safely leave the country.
Dickens had one party of time cooking up the names in this novel. Names serve to highlight an aspect of a character’s personality in Great Expectations. For example, Pip is the nickname Pip gave himself because he could not say his full name (Phillip Pirrip). So, the name Pip is a distilled, simplified, and compact version of his full name. Pip is a very complex character, and it’s interesting to consider that such a complicated boy would have such a simple name. There are innocence and simplicity inside his name that contrasts heavily with the man he becomes. (It's even spelled the same forwards and backward.) Correspondingly, another person in the novel who also has a monosyllabic, three-lettered name is Joe. Therefore, Dickens seems to link Pip and Joe visually through their names, perhaps to intensify their connection and relationship.
Often cited as Dickens’s first convincing female character, Estella is a supremely ironic creation, one who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to torment men and “break their hearts,” Estella wins Pip’s deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she represents Pip’s first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip; as Pip learns near the end of the novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the coarse convict, and thus springs from the very lowest level of society.
Despite her cold behavior and the damaging influences in her life, Dickens nevertheless ensures that Estella is still a sympathetic character. By giving the reader a sense of her inner struggle to discover and act on her own feelings rather than on the imposed motives of her upbringing, Dickens gives the reader a glimpse of Estella’s inner life, which helps to explain what Pip might love about her. Estella does not seem able to stop herself from hurting Pip, but she also seems not to want to hurt him; she repeatedly warns him that she has “no heart” and seems to urge him as strongly as she can to find happiness by leaving her behind. Finally, Estella’s long, painful marriage to Drummle causes her to develop along the same lines as Pip—that is, she learns, through experience, to rely on and trust her inner feelings. In the final scene of the novel, she has become her own woman for the first time in the book. As she says to Pip, “Suffering has been stronger than all other teachings. . . . I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”
The mad, vengeful Miss Havisham, a wealthy dowager who lives in a rotting mansion and wears an old wedding dress every day of her life, is not exactly a believable character, but she is certainly one of the most memorable creations in the book. Miss Havisham’s life is defined by a single tragic event: her jilting by Compeyson on what was to have been their wedding day. From that moment forth, Miss Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak. She stops all the clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the moment when she first learned that Compeyson was gone, and she wears only one shoe because when she learned of his betrayal, she had not yet put on the other shoe. With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded vengeance pursued destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer greatly because of her quest for revenge. Miss Havisham is completely unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella. She is redeemed at the end of the novel when she realizes that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own. Miss Havisham immediately begs Pip for forgiveness, reinforcing the novel’s theme that bad behaviour can be redeemed by contrition and sympathy.
The triangle in Great Expectations composes a unique solution to human nature. It carefully involves the positive, neutral, and negative strings of humane music, which ends with a sigh of positive creation.
2.2. The Voices of “Great Expectations”
The novel is typically a fictional memoir for it implies a biographical notice. Pip is the novel's narrative voice, who, at the age of fifty-seven, is recalling his whole life’s story at once. In Chapter 19 Pip gives an account of a conversation with Biddy: he wishes her to educate Joe so as to make him a more suitable companion to the gentleman, who plans to "remove" him "into a higher sphere". When Biddy retorts that Joe "may be too proud to let anyone take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well and with respect" she is accused by Pip of envy. Consequently, Pip (as the narrator) has so presented the conversation as to ensure the reader's disapproval of his own conduct and approval of Biddy as a person, and in her view of Joe.
Dickens allows Pip to speak with a distinctive voice: the storytelling is vivid, the sentences fluent and varied and the honesty of the narrator is shown in his self-condemnation. Pip may have a distinctive voice, but allows others to speak with their own voices in a way which establishes character: Joe is uneducated but often most articulate, as when he observes of his blacksmith father: "he hammered at me with a vigour only to be equaled by the vigour with which he didn't hammer at his anvil", or as in the comment on Barnard's Inn quoted above. The hypocritical Pumblechook, the cold Mrs. Joe, polite but plain-speaking Biddy, the snarling Orlick, the rough but kindly Magwitch - all these have their characteristic voices.
Of course, Dickens exploits the conventions of the first-person narrative with skill: we can believe that the story is all Pip's but the voice is not unlike Dickens' own in third-person novels. More tellingly, Pip is able to recall verbatim complete conversations that take place when he is seven, even though he is at least in his mid-thirties when he is supposed to be telling the story. Thus Pip is the mere reflection of Dickens’ two-staged voice.
3. The Stylistic “Frames” Used in “Great Expectations”
3.1. The “Behaviour” of “Great Expectations”
Dickens likes to create little rooms with his sentences, rooms that are so inviting and interesting that you feel that if you don’t go inside and explore right away, you will be missing out on something big. And when you do go inside and look around for a while, you then suddenly realize that you are twenty miles away from where you should be. You’ve wandered too far, and you have to somehow find your way back. Consequently, Dickens loves details, and he loves spinning elegant language, and sometimes those two loves meet to create new worlds within his overarching story. Stories within stories are found everywhere in Great Expectations.
Is there any punctuation mark in the passage? And how amazing is the phrase, "gorgeous toothache"? Reading a Dickensian novel is like wading through miles of language and then suddenly stumbling upon a pearl: a piece of juicy gossip, a beautiful speech, a revelation of truth. And the fact that one waded through that language and hiked through the foliage of words makes the discovery all the sweeter and more profound.
It is Dickens' astute overlapping of genres, which proves to be very effective for the novel's rhythm. Great Expectations contains a vast amount of richness, some of it due to the variety of genres that can be found within the book. Great Expectations is a drama; but in between all that there is horror, romance, thriller, action and even a tiny bit of the fairy tale genre; all these are very well handled by Dickens, who continually keeps changing them with no previous warning, thus unexpectedly plunging the reader into different situations of different sorts. It all manages to work wonderfully.
The horror genre is masterfully crafted; from the very first page, one could instantly assume that he's reading a horror story because of the atmosphere that is described, what with the cemetery, the shivering cold, and the misty night. Miss Havisham's mansion is also another key aspect, which has a lot to do with this. It is when she first appears in chapter 8 that Dickens once again plunges the reader with no previous warning into the horror genre. Just like Pip, the reader feels discomforted by the unsettling atmosphere that Dickens carefully weaves. "This was very uncomfortable and I was half afraid”: Pip recalls while in Satis' house. The typical old mansion, the obscure, long corridors, the cobwebs, the wax candles, the absence of light; all these certain horror elements combine to craft a rare sense of intense unexpectedness which lurks everywhere, meaning that Pip is not aware of what's going to happen next and nor are the readers. While shuddering with dread, it is unsettled what will then happen; until, suddenly, the reader is thrown into the romance and fairy tale genre.
The fairy tale genre contrasts with the darkness that often lurks in the novel. At the beginning of the book, when Pip first ventures into the streets of London he's depicted as a rather naïve character, with a desire to know it all, hope for a grand future, and, of course, great expectations. He thinks that things are going to run so smoothly from then on, that everything's going to work just fine, that his life is going to be filled with colour and eternal happiness. As opposed to that, Pip's expectations could not be more erroneous. Figuratively speaking, Pip is at first a tiny little gnome who is in danger of getting caught by the nasty ogres (Magwitch, Miss Havisham, etc).
Dickens amazingly combines the scheme of genres in the novel. Each genre stands out with its typical characteristic features and colours – horrifies, pleases, thrills, allures.
3.2. Theme of Society and Class of “Great Expectations”
Notion and obsession with society and class lead the protagonist of Great Expectations into self-destruction and a loss of dignity. In the world of this bildungsroman, society is divided among class lines, creating impenetrable barriers between social classes. When characters attempt to break through these barriers, they only find loneliness and loss. Society is both exalted as a productive and efficient means of organizing human chaos and it is revealed to be internally rotten.
Some of the major themes of Great Expectations are crime, social class, empire, and ambition. From an early age, Pip feels guilt; he is also afraid that someone will find out about his crime and arrest him. The theme of crime comes into even greater effect when Pip discovers that his benefactor is in fact a convict. Pip has an internal struggle with his conscience throughout the book. Great Expectations explores the different social classes of the Georgian era. Throughout the book, Pip becomes involved with a broad range of classes, from criminals like Magwitch to the extremely rich like Miss Havisham. Pip has great ambition, as demonstrated constantly in the book.
a) Themes
The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class. Dickens establishes the theme and shows Pip learning this lesson, largely by exploring ideas of ambition and self-improvement—ideas that quickly become both the thematic center of the novel and the psychological mechanism that encourages much of Pip’s development. At heart, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can conceive of something that is better than what he already has, he immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees Satis House, he longs to be a wealthy gentleman; when he thinks of his moral shortcomings, he longs to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to learn how. Pip’s desire for self-improvement is the main source of the novel’s title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement in life, he has “great expectations” about his future.
- Social Class
Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores the class system of Victorian England, ranging from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss Havisham). The theme of social class is central to the novel’s plot and to the ultimate moral theme of the book—Pip’s realization that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth. Pip achieves this realization when he is finally able to understand that, despite the esteem in which he holds Estella, one’s social status is in no way connected to one’s real character. Drummle, for instance, is an upper-class lout, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has a deep inner worth. In this way, by connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and self-advancement, Dickens subtly reinforces the novel’s overarching theme of ambition and self-improvement.
1. Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
- Ambition and self-improvement
Ambition and self-improvement take three forms in Great Expectations—moral, social, and educational; these motivate Pip’s best and his worst behavior throughout the novel. First, Pip desires moral self-improvement. He is extremely hard on himself when he acts immorally and feels powerful guilt that spurs him to act better in the future. When he leaves for London, for instance, he torments himself about having behaved so wretchedly toward Joe and Biddy. Second, Pip desires social self-improvement. In love with Estella, he longs to become a member of her social class, and, encouraged by Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, he entertains fantasies of becoming a gentleman. The working out of this fantasy forms the basic plot of the novel; it provides Dickens the opportunity to gently satirize the class system of his era and to make a point about its capricious nature. Significantly, Pip’s life as a gentleman is no more satisfying—and certainly no more moral—than his previous life as a blacksmith’s apprentice. Third, Pip desires educational improvement. This desire is deeply connected to his social ambition and longing to marry Estella: a full education is a requirement of being a gentleman. As long as he is an ignorant country boy, he has no hope of social advancement. Ultimately, through the examples of Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch, Pip learns that social and educational improvement are irrelevant to one’s real worth and that conscience and affection are to be valued above erudition and social standing.
- Dress and speech
Dress and speech are two things that mark a person's social class. Among the first things Estella says in the novel is her reproach of Pip for speaking of "Jacks" rather than "knaves" (this refers to playing cards - in modern English Pip's term jack is the more common, though we meet the Knave of Hearts as a stealer of tarts in the nursery rhyme). Pip is conscious of his own dress in visiting Satis House; he repeatedly remarks that Joe looks well in his working-clothes, but in his "best" resembles a scarecrow. When Pip begins his elevation in fortune both Biddy and Joe take to calling him "sir". Pip dislikes this, but they would feel uneasy not to use formal terms to one of Pip's new station. When Magwitch returns, Pip finds it impossible to disguise him effectively: whatever he wears, he retains the bearing and actions of a convict.
- Crime, Guilt, and Innocence
The theme of crime, guilt, and innocence is explored throughout the novel largely through the characters of the convicts and the criminal lawyer Jaggers. From the handcuffs Joe mends at the smithy to the gallows at the prison in London, the imagery of crime and criminal justice pervades the book, becoming an important symbol of Pip’s inner struggle to reconcile his own inner moral conscience with the institutional justice system. In general, just as social class becomes a superficial standard of value that Pip must learn to look beyond in finding a better way to live his life, the external trappings of the criminal justice system (police, courts, jails, etc.) become a superficial standard of morality that Pip must learn to look beyond to trust his inner conscience.
b) Motifs
One of the most remarkable aspects of Dickens’s work is its structural intricacy and remarkable balance. Dickens’s plot involves complicated coincidences, extraordinarily tangled webs of human relationships, and highly dramatic developments in which setting, atmosphere, event, and character are all seamlessly fused.
In Great Expectations, perhaps the most visible sign of Dickens’s commitment to intricate dramatic symmetry—apart from the knot of character relationships, of course, is the fascinating motif of doubles that runs throughout the book. From the earliest scenes of the novel to the last, nearly every element of Great Expectations is mirrored or doubled at some other point in the book. There are two convicts on the marsh (Magwitch and Compeyson), two invalids (Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham), two young women who interest Pip (Biddy and Estella), and so on. There are two secret benefactors: Magwitch, who gives Pip his fortune, and Pip, who mirrors Magwitch’s action by secretly buying Herbert’s way into the mercantile business. Finally, there are two adults who seek to mold children after their own purposes: Magwitch, who wishes to “own” a gentleman and decides to make Pip one, and Miss Havisham, who raises Estella to break men’s hearts in revenge for her own broken heart. Interestingly, both of these actions are motivated by Compeyson: Magwitch resents but is nonetheless covetous of Compeyson’s social status and education, which motivates his desire to make Pip a gentleman, and Miss Havisham’s heart was broken when Compeyson left her at the altar, which motivates her desire to achieve revenge through Estella. The relationship between Miss Havisham and Compeyson—a well-born woman and a common man—further mirrors the relationship between Estella and Pip. This doubling of elements has no real bearing on the novel’s main themes, but, like the connection of
1. Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Weather and action - it adds to the sense that everything in Pip’s world is connected. Throughout Dickens’s works, this kind of dramatic symmetry is simply part of the fabric of his novelistic universe.
Throughout Great Expectations, the narrator uses images of inanimate objects to describe the physical appearance of characters—particularly minor characters, or characters with whom the narrator is not intimate. For example, Mrs. Joe looks as if she scrubs her face with a nutmeg grater, while the inscrutable features of Mr. Wemmick are repeatedly compared to a letter-box. This motif, which Dickens uses throughout his novels, may suggest a failure of empathy on the narrator’s part, or it may suggest that the character’s position in life is pressuring them to resemble a thing more than a human being. The latter interpretation would mean that the motif, in general, is part of a social critique, in that it implies that an institution such as the class system or the criminal justice system dehumanizes certain people.
a) Symbols
- Satis House
In Satis House, Dickens creates a magnificent Gothic setting whose various elements symbolize Pip’s romantic perception of the upper class and many other themes of the book. On her decaying body, Miss Havisham’s wedding dress becomes an ironic symbol of death and degeneration. The wedding dress and the wedding feast symbolize Miss Havisham’s past, and the stopped clocks throughout the house symbolize her determined attempt to freeze time by refusing to change anything from the way it was when she was jilted on her wedding day. The brewery next to the house symbolizes the connection between commerce and wealth: Miss Havisham’s fortune is not the product of an aristocratic birth but of a recent success in industrial capitalism. Finally, the crumbling, dilapidated stones of the house, as well as the darkness and dust that pervade it, symbolize the general decadence of the lives of its inhabitants and of the upper class as a whole.
- Marshes
The setting almost always symbolizes a theme in Great Expectations and always sets a tone that is perfectly matched to the novel’s dramatic action. The misty marshes near Pip’s childhood home in Kent, one of the most evocative of the book’s settings, are used several times to
2. Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Symbolize danger and uncertainty. As a child, Pip brings Magwitch a file and food in these mists; later, he is kidnapped by Orlick and nearly murdered in them. Whenever Pip goes into the mists, something dangerous is likely to happen. Significantly, Pip must go through the mists when he travels to London shortly after receiving his fortune, alerting the reader that this apparently positive development in his life may have dangerous consequences.
- Statue
Whenever Pip kisses Estella’s cheek it feels like that of a statue. Statues are representations of humans, animals, or events, and they are usually made out of stone or other cold materials. Hearing of "statue," one thinks of kings, queens, smoothness, quiet, and rigidity. Estella, though human, tells Pip that she doesn’t have a heart, and in this way, her statue-ness is emphasized.
- Shadows
Shadows always abound when Estella is around. Pip often notices a shadow passing across Estella’s face. When she arrives in London for the first time, Pip asks, "what was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?" [“Great Expectations”: 2.32.47], and when Pip and Estella are reunited in the (rewritten) end of the novel, Pip sees "no shadow of another parting from her" [“Great Expectations”: 3.59.46]. The negative nature of the sentence ("I saw no shadow"), while telling us that Pip and Estella live happily ever after, serves to emphasize the shadow part more than the happily ever after part. In this way, Estella remains kind of shadow. Pip does not protect himself from the shadows in his story, but he exposes them in full. Pip understands humans to be composed of darkness and light, shadows, and light. He realizes that Miss Havisham did not intend to hurt those around her, but that she was too overwhelmed with pain. Miss Havisham finances Herbert’s career, and, thus, Pip’s career. In this way, she is both good and bad. Shadows in this refer to the truths that are hidden and of the incredibly complex nature of humans.
Sometimes, there’s more to light than meets the eye. Themes, motives and symbols are the devices that lead the reader for ore complicated reading and deeper understanding. Sometimes there are objects or subjects which conceal clues. These very abstract devices inspect and reveal the veil of impossibility. Sometimes, there’s more to light than meets the eye.
4. The Impact of “Great Expectations”
4.1. Film, TV and Theatrical Adaptations of “Great Expectations”
Great Expectations depicts early Victorian life in England during the time of the Industrial Revolution where the social structure was experiencing great upheaval. It was a time when the rich were very rich and the poor led a life near to slavery. The novel provides an insight into both country life and city life where the only advantages that the poor have in the countryside is a clean environment. Dickens deals with the power that money has and documents Pip’s struggle from being a bound apprentice in the forge to one of the rich gentlemen in the city.
This attracted many directors to draw the reflection of Great Expectations. Like many other Dickensian novels, Great Expectations has been filmed several times, including:
- 1917 – a silent film, starring Jack Pickford, directed by Robert G. Vignola.
- 1922 – a silent film, made in Denmark, starring Martin Herzberg, directed by A.W. Sandberg.
- Great Expectations – a 1934 film starring Phillips Holmes and Jane Wyatt, directed by Stuart Walker.
- Great Expectations – a 1946 film starring John Mills as Pip, Valerie Hobson as Estella and Jean Simmons as Young Estella, directed by David Lean.
- 1954 – a two part television version starring Roddy McDowall as Pip and Estelle Winwood as Miss Havisham. It aired as an episode of the show Robert Montgomery Presents.
- 1959 – a BBC television version starring Dinsdale Landen as Pip, Helen Lindsay as Estella and Derek Benfield as Landlord.
- 1967 – a television serial starring Gary Bond and Francesca Annis.
- Great Expectations – a 1974 film starring Michael York and Sarah Miles, directed by Joseph Hardy.
- 1975 – Stage Musical (London West End). Music by Cyril Ornadel, starring Sir John Mills. Ivor Novello Award for Best British Musical.
- Great Expectations – a 1981 BBC serial starring Stratford Jones, Gerry Sunquist, Joan Hickson, Patsy Kensit and Sarah-Jane Varley. Produced by Barry Letts, and directed by Julian Amyes.
- 1983 – an animated children's version, starring Phillip Hinton, Liz Horne, Robin Stewart, and Bill Kerr.
- Great Expectations – a 1989 film starring Anthony Hopkins as Magwitch and Jean Simmons as Miss Havisham, directed by Kevin Connor.
- Great Expectations – a 1998 film starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.
- Great Expectations – a 1999 film starring Ioan Gruffudd as Pip, Justine Waddell as Estella, and Charlotte Rampling as Miss Havisham (Masterpiece Theatre—TV)
- 2009 - Directed by Steve Eagles at 'The Gantry' with Emily Jean, Reza Rajraj, Holly Granger, Hannah Scott and Sam Walshaw.
- 2009 – Performed at Theatre Clwyd by Graham Bickley, Eleanor Howell, Steven Meo, Rhiannon Oliver, Greg Palmer, Vivien Parry, Robert Perkins, Steffan Rhodri, Simon Watts and directed by Tim Baker.
A number of the early reviewers of Great Expectations hailed it as a return to the old Dickens.
E. S. Dallas in the Times, 17 October 1861, rejoiced that: “Mr. Dickens has good-naturally granted to the hosts of his readers, to the desire of their hearts… Without calling upon his readers for any alarming sacrifices, Mr. Dickens has in the present work given us more of his earlier fancies than we have had for years. … Great Expectations has that flowing humour in it which disarms criticism, and which is all the ore enjoyable because it defies criticism”.
CONCLUSION
In Great Expectations, Dickens seems to have attained the mastery of powers which formerly more or less mastered him. The author palpably uses his observations as materials for his creative faculties to work upon; he does not record, but invents, and he produces something which is natural only under conditions prescribed by his own mind. He shapes, disposes of, penetrates, colours, and contrives everything, and the whole action is a series of events that could have occurred only in his own brain. It is difficult to conceive of as actually happening.
A subtle penetration into character marks the unlikeness in the likeness; there is enough at once of resemblance and of difference in the position and surroundings of each to account for the divergences of character that arise; the child is good-hearted, and has the advantage of association with models of tender simplicity and oddity. What a deal of spoiling nevertheless, a nature that is really good at the bottom of it will stand without permanent damage, is nicely shown in Pip; and the way he reconciles his determination to act very shabbily to his early friends, with a conceited notion that he is setting them a moral example, is part of the shading of a character drawn with extraordinary skill. His greatest trial comes out of his good luck; and the foundations of both are laid at the opening of the tale, in a churchyard down by the Thames, as it winds past desolate marshes twenty miles to the sea, of which a masterly picture in half a dozen lines will give the only average example of the descriptive writing that is everywhere one of the charms of the book.
Written in the Victorian age "Great Expectations" is a bildungsroman, as it follows the steps of Pip's transformation from a poor boy to a highly educated gentleman. Within his transformations Pip unexpectedly changes his perspectives on life and begins to be ashamed with his poor relatives, becoming superficial and ungrateful. His ungratefulness caused a change in his relationship with Joe and Biddy. But he rediscovered his love for his family when realizing that status and wealth were unimportant and that their love meant more than he once believed. Sometimes we must stay away from what we know and look back, to realize what we truly left behind.
The central theme of the novel is the moral growth from moral ignorance to wisdom, which is a first-person narrative that is a matter of self-discovery, from rejection to acceptance, from innocence to maturity. After completing the archetypal journey of initiation, Pip finds his true identity and realizes that love is above everything else.
Pip as the protagonist, belongs to the young idealistic characters with a lofty personality and “noble features”. The character is not only powerful in itself, but it furnishes pregnant and original hints to all philosophical investigators into the phenomena of crime. In this wonderful creation, Dickens follows the maxim of the great master of characterization, and seeks "the soul of goodness in things evil."
Great Expectations depicts a process of maturation and self-discovery through experience as a protagonist moves from childhood to adulthood. “For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to ... think; and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces”[ “Great Expectations”: 2:39:97].
This is the connection between those ships that Pip used to watch on the marshes at home those many years ago and his current circumstances. When he watched the ships on the horizon, he used to always think about Estella, Miss Havisham, and the life he couldn’t have. The ships became a metaphor for a life of money and privilege. This moment would suggest that Pip eventually reached the ships, but that they only led him to destruction. What does he have on his horizon now to dream about?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Charles Dickens. “Great Expectations”. London: Chapman & Hall, Weekly: December 1, 1860 – August 3, 1861.
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Collins, Philip. Dickens and Education. New York: St. Martins, 1963.
Drabble, Margaret, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (1997), Oxford University Press
History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography William Morros, 1988
Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis. Dickens the Novelist. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979.
Manning, Sylvia Bank. Dickens as Satirist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.
Richard Dutton. “An Introduction to Literary Criticism”. Hong Kong: Longan York Press,1984.
Slater, Michael. "Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812 – 1870)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing, 2009 New Haven/London: Yale University Press
The Atlantic Monthly. September 1861; Great Expectations; Volume 8, No. 47.The Cambridge Tredell, Nicolas, ed. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Wilson, Angus. The World of Charles Dickens. New York: Viking, 1970.
REFERENCES
Great Expectations – Crossref-it.info
Great Expectations – HTML, PDF, and MP3 versions, with lesson activities.
Original manuscript – held at Wisbech & Fenland Museum, Wisbech.
http://articles.famouswhy.com/great_expectations_by_charles_dickens/#ixzz190pcOrDs
http://www.dickens-literature.com/Great_Expectations/58.html