Great Expectations

I'm no expert on Charles Dickens--this is only the third of his novels I've read, after Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities--but I've come to be both charmed and annoyed by them. I suppose that has something to do with coming to know these stories through other means, as if they were fairy tales, and then the actual tackling of the source material seems like a chore.

First published in serial form in 1860-61, Great Expectations is a bildungsroman about a lad called Pip. We first meet him when he is living with his shrewish older sister and her kind-hearted husband, Joe, a blacksmith, near the marshes. While visiting his parents' graves he is accosted by a pair of convicts. One of them is quite menacing, and threatens Pip with bodily harm unless he comes back with a file to unclasp his manacles and some grub. Pip agrees.

Over time that incident is forgotten, but of course, with Dickens, nothing is idly mentioned. Pip is enlisted to visit an eccentric old woman, Miss Havisham, in order to provide a plaything for her adopted daughter, Estella. Miss Havisham is one of those creations that Dickens is known best for--she does not go out, all the clocks are set at twenty after nine, and she wears a rotting wedding dress and only one shoe. A wedding cake, ridden with vermin, sits on top of a table. We learn that she was jilted at the altar and stopped time at that moment.

Pip falls in love with Estella, and it's one of those classic masochistic relationships that many men can understand. Estella is beautiful, but treats Pip like crap. Come on now, you can relate guys, can't you? Because of her disappointment, Miss Havisham has raised Estella to be a bitch. "'You must know,' said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and beautiful woman might, 'that I have no heart--if that has anything to do with memory...Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,' said Estella, 'and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no--sympathy--sentiment--nonsense.'"

Pip is then surprised to learn from a Mr. Jaggers, a lawyer, that he has an anonymous benefactor. (Mr. Jaggers is a great character, too, a man so self-possessed that he lives with the doors and windows of his house unlocked and dares thieves to break in). "'I am instructed to communicate to him,' said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, 'that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman--in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations."

Pip goes to London and endeavors to be a gentleman. He makes a good friend in Herbert Pocket (who he meets by having a fistfight over Estella) and racks up huge debts. He becomes callow, turning his back on Joe, and continuing to pine over Estella, while ignoring the right girl for him, the much more simple and kind Biddy. It's an interesting gambit for Dickens to make his narrator a shit.

Much of this was already familiar to me. I've seen the re-imagining of the story in Alfonso Cuaron's film of the 1990s (the David Lean film is in my Netflix queue and will be discussed here shortly). What always happens with me and Dickens is that the story itself is much more complicated than any film version. There is a lot of complication, much of it needless, in Dickens. The final quarter of the book deals with the convict, Abel Magwitch (one of Dickens' great character names), but I won't spoil it, even if the book is over 150 years old. The nature of a serial lends itself to exaggerating the cliffhanger ending, so that a final novel version becomes ragged in its narrative.

But, of course, Dickens could write. Great Expectations is drolly funny, as Pip has a keen eye for those who would mistreat him. His sister, known to him as Mrs. Joe, beats him unmercifully, and he cast a gimlet eye on those around him. For example, "I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an animated rag-bag whom she called her niece; and to keep a room secret from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that was their only reliable quality besides larceny."

And then there is Dickens, the prose stylist. At times this gets lost, as his plots were so ornate, but he could stop and set a scene like the best of them: "It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped of their roofs; and in the country, trees and been torn up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come from the coast, of shipwreck and death."