Great Expectations by Charles Dickens- A Revisited Review and analyis.

Great Expectations begins in a churchyard with a young boy called Pip trying to work out how he came to be born. He believes that he can begin to define who he is through a lively, inventive yet naive curiosity about his past. So he starts to read the graves of his family and make up stories about them. He attempts to write himself out of the left over signs of death and away from the brutality of Mrs Joe’s abuse; his Uncle Pumblechook’s sanctimonious hypocricy and dare I say it, even ‘loyal’ Joe’s weakness and impotency  in the face of Mrs Joe’s insane rages, her ‘rampages’.  

Armando Iannucci writes that Dickens is a ‘night’ writer and this applies to his daytime wonderings and wanderings as much as the literal ‘Night Walks’ for which he is famous. ‘Things’ are solid one moment in Dickens, Iannucci believes, and then ‘pure spirit’ the next, calling into question all that we could claim as solid or ‘real’  in life . The ‘real’ is always under the threat of ‘night’ in Dickens, hence his unwavering dedication to the grotesque.  I have always refuted the dismissive claims for Dickens being a mere creator of caricature. I believe he writes people inside out, their inner life, their secret drives and obsessions,  quite literally sprawling   out there, all over the page.  He is to use his own self title, the inimitable!

In the  opening chapter of Great Expectations, Pip is bravely attempting a defining moment for himself in the village churchyard, where his family are all tragically buried,  only to find that  his defining moment is dramatically hijacked away  by another figure with a more pressing claim on Pip’s innocence and birth narrative; the convict Magwitch, who literally turns the small Pip and his world, upside down.   

The irony of the novel is that there are others who are very keen on re-birthing Pip too( Jaggers, Drummle, Miss Havisham, even Trabb’s boy)  and so the shape of his life and expectations becomes twisted and his destiny scripted out of his control. He is born again in the graveyard and then born yet again at Satis House and neither births show any recgonition or respect for Pip’s own ‘unborn’ agency or autonomy.

The graveyard meeting with the convict Magwitch and the perverse invitation to ‘play’ at Miss Havisham’s Satis House shatter his previously treasured relationships. He becomes haunted by guilt and shame and ‘home’ is transformed into awkwardness and ridicule. All the details of ‘home’ become repugnant in their familiarity. He fails to notice that Satis House is no ‘home’ for either Estella or Miss Havisham and that their web of words are without compassion. Both women are locked into a heartless combat of revenge and blame; both a ‘victim’ to each other and to the malevolence of fate.

It is a commonplace to talk of Pip’s snobbery and false pride, and his vain foolishness in persistently ‘clinging’ to his love for Estella, the ice cold instrument of Miss Havisham’s revenge upon men. Yet I do not find his behaviour culpable. He feels alive when he meets Miss Havisham and her ward, Estella. He is so used to condemnation at the hands of his sister and Uncle Pumblechook, that he cannot recognise the dead land of madness that is Satis Hosue and its inhabitants.

I can sympathise with his life long worship of Estella. She captures him off guard. Indeed he doesn’t even own a guard. For his ‘home’ being a place of violence and compromised affection, has not gifted him with the learnings and resources that help us differentiate between this experience and that, that help us recognise when someone is more dangerous than good.  He is besotted with Estella because he has no resources to identify her lack of ‘home’ spiritually, or emotionally. Estella is not a good person to fall in love with and she can never make him happy or indeed herself happy, but the book needs him to be foolish and for Estella to be cruel, because it is psychologically inevitable and ‘true’. Good choices do not necessarily make for compelling narratives !

We do not enjoy the book because it is sensible, and we may even fall in love with novel because it is not sensible. Imperfection in ourselves and others is far more compelling than perfection as Wilde suggested, another wildly(!) insensible lover and writer of much ‘nonsense’ that remains gorgeously unforgettable!

When Pip climbs the stairs to meet Miss Havisham he mistakenly( yet sensibly? )  believes that his movement upwards corresponds to hope and aspiration.He is brave enough to attempt to ‘play’ according to the diseased  nonsense of both Miss Havisham and Mrs Joe. 

 Part of the unnverving brilliance of the novel is that both his first meeting with Miss Havisham and his renewed meeting with his benefactor Magwitch involve stairs going UPWARDS! ‘Life-changing’ climbs as Michael Rosen would say, but not for the reasons poor Pip might have hoped!

(More to come)

We all need our dreams. We have all fallen in love. Dickens’s susceptible hero Pip believes that the ‘star’ of his dream is the beautiful Estella, because she had been granted to him by his fairy God-mother Miss Havisham, in a rare moment of compassion. Every turn of Pip’s first person narration in the novel shouts ‘No!’ to his interpretation of the world and its tricksy words. Yet Pip’s near fatal fallibility and misreading of his expectations humanises him and aligns his desperate romantic hopefulness to our own. Uneasily we admit our own private quests for love, and what a big love we crave after all!

‘Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of my self. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here…You have been in every prospect I have ever seen…You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with….’

Pip’s incantatory admission that love has engulfed his life is gloriously obsessive and bravely embarrassing. Like Carol Ann Duffy in Rapture: ‘When did your name change from a proper noun to a charm?’ Dickens’s hero gives voice to love’s piratical need to ambush all signs of the beloved and claim them greedily for oneself. Pip’s ‘wonder’ in the light of his icy star Estella anticipates Gatsby’s ‘wonder’ at Daisy’s famous ‘green light’ in Fitzgerald’s much later novel.

Read and be awed. We all love dangerously once!