Great Expectations

This article is about the Charles Dickens novel. For other uses, see Great Expectations (disambiguation).

Great Expectations

Title page of Vol. 1 of first edition, July 1861
Author	Charles Dickens
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Published	Serialized 1860-1; book form 1861
Publisher	Chapman & Hall
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print
Pages	544 (first edition 1861)

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel and his penultimate completed novel; a bildungsroman which depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.

It is set among marshes in Kent, and in London, in the early to mid-1800s, and contains some of Dickens' most memorable scenes, including the opening, in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty; prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the kind and generous blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations is popular both with readers and literary critics, and has been translated into many languages, and adapted numerous times into various media.

Upon its release, the novel received near universal acclaim. Thomas Carlyle spoke disparagingly of "all that Pip's nonsense". Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as "All of one piece and consistently truthfull." During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales; when the plot first formed in his mind, he called it "a very fine, new and grotesque idea".

Development history

Charles Dickens, c. 1860

As Dickens began writing Great Expectations, he undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours. His domestic life had, however, disintegrated in the late 1850s and he had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens, and was having a secret affair with the much younger Ellen Ternan. The introduction of the 1984 Penguin English Library edition suggests that the reluctance with which Ellen Ternan became his mistress is reflected in the icy teasing of Estella in Great Expectations.

Beginning

In his Book of Memoranda, begun in 1855, Dickens wrote names for possible characters: Magwitch, Provis, Clarriker, Compey, Pumblechook, Orlick, Gargery, Wopsle, Skiffins, some of which became familiar in Great Expectations. There is also a reference to a "knowing man", a possible sketch of Bentley Drummle. Another evokes a house full of "Toadies and Humbugs", foreshadowing the visitors to Satis House in chapter 11. Margaret Cardwell discovered the "premonition" of Great Expectations from a 25 September 1855 letter from Dickens to W. H. Wills, in which Dickens speaks of recycling an "odd idea" from the Christmas special "A House to Let" and "the pivot round which my next book shall revolve." The "odd idea" concerns an individual who "retires to an old lonely house…resolved to shut out the world and hold no communion with it."

In an 8 August 1860 letter to Earl Carlisle, Dickens reported his agitation whenever he prepared a new book. A month later, in a letter to John Forster, Dickens announced that he just had a new idea.

Publication in All the Year Round

Advertisement for Great Expectations in All the Year Round.

Dickens was pleased with the idea, calling it "such a very fine, new and grotesque idea" in a letter to Forster. He planned to write "a little piece", a "grotesque tragi-comic conception", about a young hero who befriends an escaped convict, who then makes a fortune in Australia and anonymously bequeaths his property to the hero. In the end, the hero loses the money because it is forfeited to the Crown. In his biography of Dickens, Forster wrote that in the early idea "was the germ of Pip and Magwitch, which at first he intended to make the groundwork of a tale in the old twenty-number form." Dickens presented the relationship between Pip and Magwitch pivotal to Great Expectations but without Miss Havisham, Estella, or other characters he later created.

As the idea and Dickens's ambition grew, he began writing. However, in September, the weekly All the Year Round saw its sales fall, and its flagship publication, A Day's Ride by Charles Lever, lost favour with the public. Dickens "called a council of war", and believed that to save the situation, "the one thing to be done was for [him] to strike in." The "very fine, new and grotesque idea" became the magazine's new support: weeklies, five hundred pages, just over one year (1860–1861), thirty-six episodes, starting 1 December. The magazine continued to publish Lever's novel until its completion on 23 March 1861, but it became secondary to Great Expectations. Immediately, sales resumed, and critics responded positively, as exemplified by The Times's praise: "Great Expectations is not, indeed, [Dickens's] best work, but it is to be ranked among his happiest."

Dickens, whose health was not the best, felt "The planning from week to week was unimaginably difficult" but persevered. He thought he had found "a good name", decided to use the first person "throughout", and thought the beginning was "excessively droll": "I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny." Four weekly episodes were "ground off the wheel" in October, and apart from one reference to the "bondage" of his heavy task, the months passed without the anguished cries that usually accompanied the writing of his novels. He did not even use the Number Plans or Mems; he only had a few notes on the characters' ages, the tide ranges for chapter 54, and the draft of an ending. In late December, Dickens wrote to Mary Boyle that "Great Expectations [is] a very great success and universally liked."

Revising

Charles Dickens, Jr. (in 1874), possibly the model for Herbert Pocket

Dickens gave six readings from 14 March to 18 April 1861, and in May, Dickens took a few days' holiday in Dover. On the eve of his departure, he took some friends and family members for a trip by boat from Blackwall to Southend-on-Sea. Ostensibly for pleasure, the mini-cruise was actually a working session for Dickens to examine banks of the river in preparation for the chapter devoted to Magwitch's attempt to escape. Dickens then revised Herbert Pocket's appearance, no doubt, asserts Margaret Cardwell, to look more like his son Charley. On 11 June 1861, Dickens wrote to Macready that Great Expectations had been completed and on 15 June, asked the editor to prepare the novel for publication.

Revised ending

Following comments by Edward Bulwer-Lytton that the ending was too sad, Dickens rewrote it. The ending set aside by Dickens has Pip, still single, briefly see Estella in London; after becoming Bentley Drummle's widow, she has remarried. It appealed to Dickens due to its originality: "[the] winding up will be away from all such things as they conventionally go." Dickens revised the ending for publication so that Pip meets Estella in the ruins of Satis House, she a widow and he single. His changes at the conclusion of the novel did not quite end either with the final weekly part and the first bound edition, because Dickens further changed the last sentence in the amended 1868 version from "I could see the shadow of no parting from her." to "I saw no shadow of another parting from her". As Pip uses litotes, "no shadow of another parting", it is ambiguous whether Pip and Estella marry or Pip remains single. Angus Calder, writing for an edition in the Penguin English Library, believed the less definite phrasing of the amended 1868 version perhaps hinted at a buried meaning: '...at this happy moment, I did not see the shadow of our subsequent parting looming over us.'

In a letter to Forster, Dickens explained his decision to alter the draft ending: "You will be surprised to hear that I have changed the end of Great Expectations from and after Pip's return to Joe's...Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken with the book, strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and supported his views with such good reasons that I have resolved to make the change. 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 discussion between Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton and Forster has provided the basis for much discussion on Dickens's underlying views for this famous novel. Earle Davis, in his 1963 study of Dickens, wrote that "it would be an inadequate moral point to deny Pip any reward after he had shown a growth of character," and that "Eleven years might change Estella too." John Forster felt that the original ending was "more consistent" and "more natural" but noted the new ending's popularity. George Gissing called that revision "a strange thing, indeed, to befall Dickens" and felt that Great Expectations would have been perfect had Dickens not altered the ending in deference to Bulwer-Lytton.

In contrast, John Hillis-Miller stated that Dickens's personality was so assertive that Bulwer-Lytton had little influence, and welcomed the revision: "The mists of infatuation have cleared away, [Estella and Pip] can be joined." Earl Davis notes that G.B. Shaw published the novel in 1937 for The Limited Editions Club with the first ending and that The Rhinehart Edition of 1979 presents both endings.

George Orwell wrote, "Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did," but, like John Forster and several early 20th century writers, including George Bernard Shaw, felt that the original ending was more consistent with the draft, as well as the natural working out of the tale. Modern literary criticism is split over the matter.

Publication history

In periodicals

Dickens and Wills co-owned All the Year Round, one 75%, the other 25%. Since Dickens was his own publisher, he did not require a contract for his own works. Although intended for weekly publication, Great Expectations was divided into nine monthly sections, with new pagination for each. Harper's Weekly published the novel from 24 November 1860 to 5 August 1861 in the US and All the Year Round published it from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861 in the UK. Harper's paid £1,000 for publication rights. Dickens welcomed a contract with Tauchnitz 4 January 1861 for publication in English for the European continent.

Editions

Robert L. Patten identifies four American editions in 1861 and sees the proliferation of publications in Europe and across the Atlantic as "extraordinary testimony" to Great Expectations's popularity. Chapman and Hall published the first edition in three volumes in 1861, five subsequent reprints between 6 July and 30 October, and a one-volume edition in 1862. The "bargain" edition was published in 1862, the Library Edition in 1864, and the Charles Dickens edition in 1868. To this list, Paul Schlicke adds "two meticulous scholarly editions", one Claredon Press published in 1993 with an introduction by Margaret Cardwell and another with an introduction by Edgar Rosenberg, published by Norton in 1999. The novel was published with one ending, visible in the four on line editions listed in the External links at the end of this article. In some 20th century editions, the novel ends as originally published in 1867, and in an afterword, the ending Dickens did not publish, along with a brief story of how a friend persuaded him to a happier ending for Pip, is presented to the reader (for example, 1987 audio edition by Recorded Books).

First edition publication schedule

Part	Date	Chapters
1–5	1, 8, 15, 22, 29 December 1860	(1–8)
6–9	5, 12, 19, 26 January 1861	(9–15)
10–12	2, 9, 23 February 1861	(16–21)
13–17	2, 9, 16, 23, 30 March 1861	(22–29)
18–21	6, 13, 20, 27 April 1861	(30–37)
22–25	4, 11, 18, 25 May 1861	(38–42)
26–30	1, 8 15, 22, 29 June 1861	(43–52)
31–34	6, 13, 20, 27 July 1861	(53–57)
35	3 August 1861	(58–59)

Illustrations

Publications in Harper's Weekly were accompanied by forty illustrations by John McLenan; however, this is the only Dickens work published in All the Year Round without illustrations. In 1862, Marcus Stone, son of Dickens's old friend, the painter Frank Stone, was invited to create eight woodcuts for the Library Edition. According to Paul Schlicke, these illustrations are mediocre yet were included in the Charles Dickens edition, and Stone created illustrations for Dickens's subsequent novel, Our Mutual Friend. Later, Henry Mathew Brock also illustrated Great Expectations and a 1935 edition of A Christmas Carol, along with other artists, such as John McLenan, F. A. Fraser, and Harry Furniss.

Reception

Robert L. Patten estimates that All the Year Round sold 100,000 copies of Great Expectations each week, and Mudie, the largest circulating library, which purchased about 1,400 copies, stated that at least 30 people read each copy. Aside from the dramatic plot, the Dickensian humour also appealed to readers. Dickens wrote to Forster in October 1860 that "You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities," an opinion Forster supports, finding that "Dickens's humour, not less than his creative power, was at its best in this book." Moreover, according to Paul Schlicke, readers found the best of Dickens's older and newer writing styles.

Overall, Great Expectations received near universal acclaim. Not all reviews were favourable; Margaret Oliphant's review, published May 1862 in Blackwood's Magazine, vilified the novel. Critics in the 19th and 20th centuries hailed it as one of Dickens's greatest successes although often for conflicting reasons: GK Chesterton admired the novel's optimism; Edmund Wilson its pessimism; Humphry House in 1941 emphasized its social context. In 1974, Jerome H. Buckley saw it as a bildungsroman, writing a chapter on Dickens and two of his major characters (David Copperfield and Pip) in his 1974 book on the Bildungsroman in Victorian writing. John Hillis Miller wrote in 1958 that Pip is the archetype of all Dickensian heroes. In 1970, QD Leavis suggests "How We Must Read Great Expectations." In 1984, Peter Brooks, in the wake of Jacques Derrida, offered a deconstructionist reading. The most profound analyst, according to Paul Schlicke, is probably Julian Moynahan, who, in a 1964 essay surveying the hero's guilt, made Orlick "Pip's double, alter ego and dark mirror image." Schlicke also names Anny Sadrin's extensive 1988 study as the "most distinguished."

Plot summary

File:Carte G. E.jpeg

Locations in the novel

On Christmas Eve, around 1812, Pip, an orphan who is about seven years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother, father and siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food and a file to grind away his shackles, from the home he shares with his abusive older sister and her kind husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. The next day, soldiers recapture the convict while he is engaged in a fight with another escaped convict; the two are returned to the prison ships.

Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who wears an old wedding dress and lives in the dilapidated Satis House, asks Pip's Uncle Pumblechook (who is Joe's uncle) to find a boy to visit. Pip visits Miss Havisham and her adopted daughter Estella, falling in love with Estella on first sight, both quite young. Pip visits Miss Havisham regularly until it comes time for him to learn a trade; Joe accompanies Pip for the last visit when she gives the money for Pip to be bound as apprentice blacksmith. Pip settles into learning Joe's trade. When both are away from the house, Mrs. Joe is brutally attacked, leaving her unable to speak or do her work. Biddy arrives to help with her care and becomes 'a blessing to the household'.

Miss Havisham with Estella and Pip. Art by H. M. Brock

File:Expectations london map.jpg

London locations

Four years into Pip's apprenticeship, Mr. Jaggers, a lawyer, approaches him in the village with the news that he has expectations from an anonymous benefactor, with immediate funds to train him in the gentlemanly arts. He will not know the benefactor's name until that person speaks up. Pip is to leave for London in the proper clothes. He assumes that Miss Havisham is his benefactor. He visits her to say good-bye.

Pip sets up house with Herbert Pocket at Barnard's Inn. Herbert tells Pip the circumstances of Miss Havisham's romantic disappointment, her jilting by her fiancé. Pip goes to Hammersmith, to be educated by Mr Matthew Pocket, Herbert's father. Jaggers disburses the money Pip needs to set himself up in his new life. Joe visits Pip at Barnard's Inn, where Pip is a bit ashamed of Joe. Joe relays the message from Miss Havisham that Estella will be at Satis House for a visit. Pip and Herbert exchange their romantic secrets - Pip adores Estella and Herbert is engaged to Clara.

Pip and Herbert build up debts. Mrs Joe dies and Pip returns to his village for the funeral. Pip's income is fixed at £500 per annum when he comes of age at twenty-one. Pip takes Estella to Satis House. She and Miss Havisham quarrel. At the Assembly Ball in Richmond Estella meets Bentley Drummle, a brute of a man. A week after he turns 23 years old, Pip learns that his benefactor is the convict from so long ago, Abel Magwitch, who had been transported to New South Wales after that escape. He became wealthy after gaining his freedom there. As long as he is out of England, Magwitch can live. But he returns to see Pip. Pip was his motivation for all his success in New South Wales. Pip is shocked, ceasing to take money from him. He and Herbert Pocket devise a plan to get Magwitch out of England, by boat. Magwitch shares his past history with Pip.

Pip tells Miss Havisham that he is as unhappy as she can ever have meant him to be. He asks her to finance Herbert Pocket. Estella tells Pip she will marry Bentley Drummle.

Miss Havisham tells Pip that Estella was brought to her by Jaggers aged two or three. Before Pip leaves the property, Miss Havisham accidentally sets her dress on fire. Pip saves her, injuring himself in the process. She eventually dies from her injuries, lamenting her manipulation of Estella and Pip. Jaggers tells Pip how he brought Estella to Miss Havisham from Molly. Pip figures out that Estella is the daughter of Molly and Magwitch.

Magwitch makes himself known to Pip

A few days before the escape, Joe's former journeyman Orlick seizes Pip, confessing past crimes as he means to kill Pip. Herbert Pocket and Startop save Pip and prepare for the escape. On the river, they are met by a police boat carrying Compeyson for identification of Magwitch. Compeyson was the other convict years earlier, and as well, the con artist who wooed and deserted Miss Havisham. Magwitch seizes Compeyson, and they fight in the river. Magwitch survives to be taken by police, seriously injured. Compeyson's body is found later.

Pip visits Magwitch in jail and tells him that his daughter Estella is alive. Magwitch responds by squeezing Pip's palm and dies soon after, sparing an execution. After Herbert goes to Cairo, Pip falls ill in his rooms. He is confronted with arrest for debt; he awakens to find Joe at his side. Joe nurses Pip back to health and pays off the debt. As Pip begins to walk about on his own, Joe slips away home. Pip returns to propose to Biddy, to find that she and Joe have just married. Pip asks Joe for forgiveness, and Joe forgives him. As Magwitch's fortune in money and land was seized by the court, Pip no longer has income. Pip promises to repay Joe. Herbert asks him to join his firm in Cairo; he shares lodgings with Herbert and Clara and works as a clerk, advancing over time.

Eleven years later, Pip visits the ruins of Satis House and meets Estella, widow to the abusive Bentley Drummle. She asks Pip to forgive her, assuring him that misfortune has opened her heart and that she now empathises with Pip. As Pip takes Estella's hand and leaves the ruins of Satis House, he sees "no shadow of another parting from her."

Characters

Pip and his family

• Philip Pirrip, nicknamed Pip, an orphan and the protagonist and narrator of Great Expectations. In his childhood, Pip dreamed of becoming a blacksmith like his kind brother-in-law, Joe Gargery. At Satis House, about age 8, he meets Estella, a contact which destroys his peace of mind. He tells Biddy that he wants to become a gentleman. As a result of Magwitch's anonymous patronage, Pip lives in London and becomes a gentleman. Pip assumes his benefactor is Miss Havisham; the discovery that his true benefactor is a convict shocks him.
• Joe Gargery, Pip's brother-in-law, and his first father figure. He is a blacksmith who is always kind to Pip and the only person with whom Pip is always honest. Joe is disappointed when Pip decides to leave his home to live in London to become a gentleman rather than be a blacksmith in business with Joe. He is a strong man who bears the shortcomings of those closest to him.
• Mrs. Joe Gargery, Pip's hot-tempered adult sister Georgiana Maria, called Mrs. Joe, 20 years older than Pip. She brings him up after their parents' death. She does the work of the household, but too often loses her temper. Orlick, her husband's journeyman, attacks her, and she is left disabled until her death.
• Mr. Pumblechook, Joe Gargery's uncle, an officious bachelor and corn merchant. While not knowing how to deal with a growing boy, he tells "Mrs. Joe", as she is known, how noble she is to bring up Pip. As the person who first connected Pip to Miss Havisham, he claims to have been the original architect of Pip's expectations. Pip dislikes Mr. Pumblechook for his pompous, unfounded claims. When Pip stands up to him in a public place, after those expectations are dashed, Mr. Pumblechook turns those listening to the conversation against Pip.

Miss Havisham and her family

• Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who takes Pip on as a companion for herself and her adopted daughter, Estella. Havisham is an eccentric woman who has worn her wedding dress, and one shoe since the day the she was jilted at the altar by her fiancé, She hates all men, and plots to wreak a twisted revenge by teaching Estella to torment and spurn men, including Pip, who loves her. Miss Havisham is later overcome with remorse for ruining both Estella's and Pip's chances for happiness. Shortly after confessing her plotting to Pip, she dies as the result of being badly burned when her dress accidentally catches fire.
• Estella, Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, whom Pip pursues. She is a beautiful girl, and grows more beautiful after her schooling in France. Estella represents the life of wealth and culture for which Pip strives. Since Miss Havisham ruined Estella's ability to love, Estella cannot return Pip's passion. She warns Pip of this repeatedly, but he will not or cannot believe her. Estella does not know that she is the daughter of Molly, Jaggers's housekeeper, and the convict Abel Magwitch, given up for adoption to Miss Havisham after her mother was arrested for murder.
• Matthew Pocket, Miss Havisham's cousin. He is the patriarch of the Pocket family, but unlike her other relatives, he is not greedy for Havisham's wealth. Matthew Pocket tutors young gentlemen, such as Bentley Drummle, Startop, Pip and his own son Herbert.
• Herbert Pocket, the son of Matthew Pocket, who was invited like Pip to visit Miss Havisham, but she did not take to him. Pip first meets Herbert as a "pale young gentleman" who challenges Pip to a fistfight at Miss Havisham's house when both are children. He later becomes Pip's friend, tutoring him in the "gentlemanly" arts, and sharing his flat with Pip in London.
• Cousin Raymond, a relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money. He is married to Camilla.
• Georgiana, a relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money. She is one of the many relatives who hang around Miss Havisham "like flies" for her wealth.
• Sarah Pocket, the sister of Matthew Pocket, relative of Miss Havisham. She is often at Satis House. She is described as "a dry, brown corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made out of walnut shells, and a large mouth like a cat's without the whiskers."

From Pip's youth

• The Convict, who escapes from a prison ship, whom Pip treats kindly, and who in turn becomes Pip's benefactor. His name is Abel Magwitch, but he uses the aliases Provis and Mr. Campbell when he returns to England from exile in Australia. He is a lesser actor in crime with Compeyson, but gains a longer sentence in an apparent application of justice by social class.
• Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, simple folk who think they are more important than they really are. They live in Pip's village.
• Mr. Wopsle, clerk of the church in Pip's village. He later gives up the church work and moves to London to pursue his ambition to be an actor, adopting the stage name Mr. Waldengarver. He sees the other convict in the audience of one of his performances, attended also by Pip.
• Biddy, Wopsle's second cousin and near Pip's age; she teaches in the evening school at her grandmother's home in Pip's village. Pip wants to learn more, so he asks her to teach him all she can. After helping Mrs. Joe after the attack, Biddy opens her own school. A kind and intelligent but poor young woman, she is, like Pip and Estella, an orphan. She acts as Estella's foil. Orlick was attracted to her, but she did not want his attentions. Pip ignores her affections for him as he pursues Estella. Recovering from his own illness after the failed attempt to get Magwitch out of England, Pip returns to claim Biddy as his bride, arriving in the village just after she marries Joe Gargery. Biddy and Joe later have two children, one named after Pip. (In the ending to the novel discarded by Dickens but revived by students of the novel's development, Estella mistakes the boy as Pip's child.)

Mr. Jaggers and his circle

Mr. Wemmick and "The Aged P.", illustration by Sol Eytinge Jr.

• Mr. Jaggers, prominent London lawyer who represents the interests of diverse clients, both criminal and civil. He represents Pip's benefactor and Miss Havisham as well. By the end of the story, his law practice links many of the characters.
• John Wemmick, Jaggers' clerk, who is Pip's chief go-between with Jaggers and looks after Pip in London. Wemmick lives with his father, "The Aged Parent", in a small replica of a castle, complete with a drawbridge and moat, in Walworth.
• Molly, Mr. Jaggers' maidservant whom Jaggers saved from the gallows for murder. She is revealed to be Magwitch's estranged wife and Estella's mother.

Antagonists

• Compeyson (surname), a convict who escapes the prison ship after Magwitch, who beats him up ashore. He is Magwitch's enemy. In some editions of the book, he is called "Compey." A professional swindler, he was engaged to marry Miss Havisham, but he was in league with Arthur Havisham to defraud Miss Havisham of part of her fortune. Later he sets up Magwitch to take the fall for another swindle. He works with the police when he learns Abel Magwitch is in London, fearing Magwitch after their first escapes years earlier. When the police boat encounters the one carrying Magwitch, the two grapple, and Compeyson drowns in the Thames.
• Arthur Havisham, younger half brother of Miss Havisham, who plots with Compeyson to swindle her.
• Dolge Orlick, journeyman blacksmith at Joe Gargery's forge. Strong, rude and sullen, he is as churlish as Joe is gentle and kind. He ends up in a fistfight with Joe over Mrs. Gargery's taunting, and Joe easily defeats him. This sets in motion an escalating chain of events that leads him to secretly injure Mrs. Gargery and try to kill Pip. The police ultimately arrest him for housebreaking locally.
• Bentley Drummle, a coarse, unintelligent young man from a wealthy noble family. Pip meets him at Mr. Pocket's house, as Drummle is also to be trained in gentlemanly skills. Drummle is hostile to Pip and everyone else. He is a rival for Estella's attentions and eventually marries her and is said to abuse her. He dies from an accident following his mistreatment of a horse.

Other characters

• Clara Barley, a very poor girl living with her gout-ridden father. She marries Herbert Pocket near the novel's end. She dislikes Pip at first because of his spendthrift ways. After she marries Herbert, they invite Pip to live with them.
• Miss Skiffins occasionally visits Wemmick's house and wears green gloves. She changes those green gloves for white ones when she marries Wemmick.
• Startop, like Bentley Drummle, is Pip's fellow student, but unlike Drummle, he is kind. He assists Pip and Herbert in their efforts to help Magwitch escape.

Background

Great Expectations's single most obvious literary predecessor is Dickens's earlier first-person narrator-protagonist David Copperfield. The two novels trace the psychological and moral development of a young boy to maturity, his transition from a rural environment to the London metropolis, the vicissitudes of his emotional development, and the exhibition of his hopes and youthful dreams and their metamorphosis, through a rich and complex first person narrative. Dickens was conscious of this similarity and, before undertaking his new manuscript, reread David Copperfield to avoid repetition.

The two books both detail homecoming. Although David Copperfield is based on much of Dickens personal experiences, Great Expectations provides, according to Paul Schlicke, "the more spiritual and intimate autobiography." Even though several elements hint at the setting — Miss Havisham, partly inspired by a Parisian duchess, whose residence was always closed and in darkness, surrounded by "a dead green vegetable sea," recalling Satis House, and the countryside bordering Chatham and Rochester — no place name is mentioned, nor a specific time period, which is indicated by, among other elements, older coaches, the title "His Majesty" in reference to George III, and the old London Bridge prior to the 1824–1831 reconstruction.

The theme of homecoming reflects events in Dickens's life, several years prior to the publication of Great Expectations. In 1856, he bought Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent, which he had dreamed of living in as a child, and moved there from faraway London two years later. In 1858, in a painful divorce, he separated from Catherine Dickens, his wife of twenty-three years. The divorce alienated him from some of his closest friends, such as Mark Lemon. He quarrelled with Bradbury and Evans, who had published his novels for fifteen years. In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens burned almost all of his correspondence, sparing only letters on business matters. He stopped publishing the weekly Household Words at the summit of its popularity and replaced it with All the Year Round.

The Uncommercial Traveller, short stories, and other texts Dickens began publishing in his new weekly in 1859 reflect his nostalgia, as seen in "Dullborough Town" and "Nurses' Stories." According to Paul Schlicke, "it is hardly surprising that the novel Dickens wrote at this time was a return to roots, set in the part of England in which he grew up, and in which he had recently resettled."

Margaret Cardwell draws attention to Chops the Dwarf from Dickens's 1858 Christmas story "Going into Society," who, as the future Pip does, entertains the illusion of inheriting a fortune and becomes disappointed upon achieving his social ambitions. In another vein, Harry Stone thinks that Gothic and magical aspects of Great Expectations were partly inspired by Charles Mathews's At Home, which was presented in detail in Household Words and its monthly supplement Household Narrative. Stone also asserts that The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, written in collaboration with Wilkie Collins after their walking tour of Cumberland during September 1857 and published in Household Words from 3 to 31 October of the same year, presents certain strange locations and a passionate love, foreshadowing Great Expectations.

Beyond its biographical and literary aspects, Great Expectations appears, according to Robin Gilmour, as "a representative fable of the age." Dickens was aware that the novel "speaks" to a generation applying, at most, the principle of "self help" which was believed to have increased the order of daily life. That the hero Pip aspires to improve, not through snobbery, but through the Victorian conviction of education, social refinement, and materialism, was seen as a noble and worthy goal. However, by tracing the origins of Pip's "great expectations" to crime, deceit and even banishment to the colonies, Dickens unfavourably compares the new generation to the previous one of Joe Gargery, which Dickens portrays as less sophisticated but especially rooted in sound values, presenting an oblique criticism of his time.

Conciseness

The format of the weekly periodical more-or-less limited Dickens, notes Paul Davis. It required short chapters, centred on a single subject, and an almost mathematical structure. Pip's story contains three stages: his childhood and early youth in Kent, dreaming to rise above his humble station; his time in London after receiving the eponymous "great expectations"; and his final disillusionment when he discovers the source of his fortune and slowly realises the vanity of his false values. The novel further divides each stage into twelve parts of equal length. This symmetry contributes to the impression of completion, underlined by a number of commentators, including George Gissing, who, when comparing Joe Gargery and Dan'l Peggotty (from David Copperfield), preferred the former, as he was a stronger character who lives "in a world, not of melodrama, but of everyday cause and effect."

G. B. Shaw called the novel "compactly perfect"; similarly, Algernon Swinburne stated, "The defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadow on a sunlit sea." This impression of excellence also comes from, according to Christopher Ricks, "the briskness of the narrative tone." Pip's thoughts while he is in London, preparing for a visit from Joe, his oldest friend and protector demonstrates this:

Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.

Similar brevity is key to the "decantation", stated Ricks, particularly in the second sentence, showing Pip's chilling, pitiless indifference but "without making a terrific demonstration of mercilessness."

Further, as explained by Henri Suhamy in his course on Great Expectations, beyond the chronological sequences and the weaving of several storylines into a tight plot, the sentimental setting and morality of the characters form a consistent "pattern". He describes this pattern with two central poles, that of "foster parents" [parents adoptifs] (Miss Havisham, Magwitch, and Joe) and that of "young people" [jeunes gens] (Estella, Pip and Biddy) between two other poles called "Dangerous Lovers" [dangereux amants] (one of Compeyson, the other of Bentley Drummle and Orlick). Pip is the centre of this web of love, rejection and hatred [amour, rejet, haine]. Biddy and Joe grow from friendship [amitié] to love [amour], in their relationship over the course of the story.

Diagram (in French) of the structure of Great Expectations

This is "the general frame of the novel", as of the overwhelming crisis when Pip realises his and Estella's situations. Suhamy specifies that the term "love" is generic, applying it to both Pip's true love for Estella and the social attraction Estella harbours for Drummle, the former of which she cannot feel and the superficiality of the latter she does not conceal. Similarly, Suhamy adds, Estella's "rejection" of Magwitch becomes a matter of interpretation; the young lady does not know he is her father but still holds contempt for everything that appears below her station.

Great Expectations appears then as a tragedy, since the characters suffer physically, psychologically or both, or die, often violently, while suffering. Happy resolutions of the web of love remain elusive, while the web of hate thrives throughout the novel. The only happy ending is Biddy and Joe's friendship sealed in marriage by the birth of two children, since the final reconciliations, except that between Pip and Magwitch symbolising Pip's maturation, do not alter the general order. Though Pip extirpates the web of hatred, the first ending denies him happiness and the second leaves his future uncertain, punctuating his storyline with a question mark.

Point of view

Pip before Magwitch's return, by John McLenan

Although the novel is written in first person, the reader knows — as an essential prerequisite — that Great Expectations is not an autobiography but a novel, a work of fiction with plot and characters, featuring a narrator-protagonist. In addition, Sylvère Monod notes that the treatment of the autobiography differs from David Copperfield, as Great Expectations does not draw from events in Dickens's life; "at most some traces of a broad psychological and moral introspection can be found".

However, according to Paul Pickrel's analysis, Pip being both narrator and protagonist; recounts with hindsight the story of the young boy he was, who did not know the world beyond a narrow geographic and familial environment. The novel's direction emerges from the confrontation between the two periods of time. At first, the novel presents a mistreated orphan, repeating situations from Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, but the trope is quickly overtaken. The theme manifests when Pip discovers the existence of a world beyond the marsh, the forge and the future Joe envisioned for him, the decisive moment when Miss Havisham and Estella enter his life. This is a red herring, as the decay of Satis House and the strange lady within signals the fragility of an impasse. At this point, the reader knows more than the protagonist, creating dramatic irony that confers a superiority that the narrator shares.

It is not until Magwitch's return, a plot twist that unites loosely-connected plot elements and sets them into motion, that the protagonist's point of view joins those of the narrator and the reader. In this context of progressive revelation, the sensational events at the novel's end serve to test the protagonist's point of view. Thus proceeds, in the words of A. E. Dyson, "The Immolations of Pip".

Theme

The titular "Expectations" refers to its Victorian definition, "a legacy to come". The title immediately announces that money plays an important part in the novel and its themes but is only part of a broader package whose coherence John Hillis-Miller highlights in his book, Charles Dickens, The World of His Novels.

Exclusion and hope

Mr Pumblechook: "And may I--May I--?", by John McLenan.

Hillis-Miller states that, as in other Dickensian novels, most characters are "outcasts" living in insecurity. The novel opens with the orphaned Pip, growing up in a world full of sinister tombs, dangerous swamps, and threatening masses of prison ships emerging from the fog that dominate the shores. His existence reproaches him: "I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion and morality".

The exclusion makes Pip feel superfluous, according to Hillis-Miller, and his attitude towards society reflects society's against him. He becomes aggressive and tries to win his place within it through any means. The oppressed become the oppressor: Jaggers dominates Wemmick who dominates Jaggers' clients; Magwich uses Pip as an instrument of vengeance, and as a first symbolic gesture, Pip returns to the cemetery with his head down to see Magwich with his feet propped up; Miss Havisham uses Estella to destroy "with my jewels and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her, a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place".

Hope parallels the exclusion that drives the protagonist, adds Henri Suhamy: Pip is convinced that divine providence owes him a place in society and that Estella is his destiny. When fortune comes his day, he shows no surprise: finally have his value as a human and his inherent nobility been recognized, justice exercised for once in the right place. Besides, Pip accepts Pumblechook's flattery without blinking: "That boy is no common boy" and the "May I? May I?" associated with handshakes.

From his hope comes what Jack B. Moore calls Pip's "great capacity for love" and "uncontrollable, impossible love for Estella", despite the humiliations she has subjected him to. For Pip, winning a place in society would also win him Estella's heart.

Social illusions

With Pip's entrance into London society, the novel introduces two themes that correspond to his foremost concerns: wealth and gentility.

Wealth

Chapter 20, outside Bartholomew Close, Jaggers threatening a woman with a shawl called Amelia, by F.A. Fraser.

Suhamy poses the question: where does wealth in Great Expectations come from? Wealth, he states, comes from labour but is only acceptable if it comes from the labour of others. Miss Havisham's wealth comes not from the sweat of her brow but from rent collected on properties she inherited from her father, a brewer. Her wealth is pure, and somehow her father's profession as a brewer does not contaminate it; Herbert states in chapter 22 that "while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was and brew." Because of her wealth, the old lady, despite her eccentricity, enjoys public esteem. She remains in a constant business relationship with her lawyer Jaggers and keeps a tight grip over her sycophantic court. Suhamy concludes that, far from representing social exclusion, she is the very image of a powerful landed aristocracy frozen in the past and "embalmed in its own pride".

While A. O. J. Cockshut views Magwitch's wealth as a replica of Miss Havisham's, Suhamy asserts that Dickens made differences between them an axis for his novel. According to him, Magwitch's wealth is socially prohibited for three reasons: it comes from a convict, has been earned in a penal colony, though honestly and hard labour. The contrast is symbolic: his money smells of sweat, the bills greasy and crumpled ("two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle market in the country") while the coins Miss Havisham gives for Pip's "indentures" still shine as if new. Suhamy states that Pip demonstrates his good breeding when Pip discovers that he owes his transformation into a "gentleman" to an already-contaminated windfall, as he has acquired enough prejudice to be repulsed in horror.

Gentility

"Do you take tea, or coffee, Mr. Gargery?" by F. A. Fraser. c. 1877

The idea of gentility haunts many characters: Magwitch, who covets it by proxy; Pip, who benefits from it; Mrs Pocket, who dreams of acquiring it; Pumblechook, whose syncophancy precipitates in the hands of those he castigated before; Joe, who stammers between "Pip" and "Sir" during his visit to London; and even Biddy, whose letters suddenly become reverent.

Suhamy notes that the above list excludes those who did not earn their gentility, like Miss Havisham's seducer, Compeyson, who is none other than the scarred-face convict. While Compeyson is corrupt, even Magwitch does not forget Compeyson is a gentleman: "He's a gentleman, if you please, this villain. Now the Hulks has got its gentleman back again, through me". Estella also counts; though she ignores it, she is the daughter of Magwitch and a criminal, taken in by Jaggers, whose only source of gentility is the "portable property" he earns as a middleman through the work of model employee Mr Wemmick.

Suhamy poses another question: how does one acquire "gentility"? A title or, failing that, family ties to the upper middle class: thus, Mrs Pocket bases every aspiration on the fact that her grandfather failed to be knighted, and Pip hopes that Miss Havisham will eventually adopt him, as adoption, as evidenced by Estella, who behaves like a born and bred little lady, is acceptable; even more important, though not sufficient, are wealth and education, the latter of which excludes any occupational apprenticeships. Pip knows that and endorses it, as he hears from Jaggers through Matthew Pocket: "I was not designed for any profession, and I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could hold my own with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances". At that rate, neither the educated Matthew Pocket, nor wealth, nor Jaggers who has both but earned his status solely through his intellect, can aspire to gentility; in fact, Bentley Drummle embodies the social ideal, as Estella weds him without hesitation.

Futility of Pip's expectations

Julian Monayhan claims that the best way to identify Pip's personality, or fathom Dickens' intentions for it, is not to analyze his relationship with Magwitch but with Orlick, the criminal laborer who works at Joe Gargery's forge.

Orlick as Pip's double

Joe and Biddy followed by Orlick (chapter 17), by John McLenan

David Trotter incorporates Monayhan's analysis into the introduction of the 1996 Penguin edition: Orlick, he notes, is Pip's shadow; coworkers in the forge, both find themselves at Miss Havisham's, where Pip enters and becomes company, while Orlick, attending the door, stays out. Pip considers Biddy a sister; Orlick has other plans for her; Pip is connected to Magwitch, Orlick to Magwitch's nemesis, Compeyson. In sum, Orlick also aspires to "great expectations" and resents Pip's ascension from the forge and the swamp to the glamour of Satis House, from which he is excluded, and the dazzling London society that he cannot share: the cumbersome shadow Pip cannot get rid of.

Then comes the punishment, the savage act of aggression against Mrs Gargery before the criminal vanishes into the jungle of swamps or of London, only to reappear in chapter 53 in a symbolic act. Orlick then lures Pip into a locked, abandoned building in the marshes; he has a score to settle before going on to the ultimate act, murder, and the reproaches fuse: Pip hampers Orlick, showing his privilege, while Orlick remains a slave of his condition, solely responsible for Mrs Joe's fate. Similar inversion of responsibilities, according to Trotter, falls from a logic of paranoia and makes Orlick "Pip's double".

But Orlick does not complete the picture and to discard Pip's last illusions, Dickens uses his upper class counterpart, Bentley Drummle, "the double of a double", according to Trotter. Like Orlick, Drummle is powerful, swarthy, unintelligible, hot-blooded, and lounges and lurks, biding his time. Estella rejects Pip for this rude, uncouth but well-born man, extinguishing Pip's ultimate hope. After that, concludes Trotter, the two wicked paths end in violence, like Mrs Joe's: they serve no further purpose, as they do not appear in the rest of the novel; what remains is guilt, which undermines the heroes.

London as prison

Herbert Pocket and Pip in London, by John McLenan

In London, neither wealth nor gentility brings happiness. The gentleman apprentice constantly bemoans his anxiety, his feelings of insecurity, multiple allusions to overwhelming chronic unease, to weariness draping his enthusiasm (chapter 34), the worst state of mind when at Joe's forge, he saw that "restless aspiring discontented me". Wealth, in effect, eludes his control: the more he spends, the more he deeper he goes into debt to satisfy new needs, which were just as futile as his old ones. His unusual path to gentility has the influence opposite to what he expected: infinite opportunities become available, certainly, but willpower, in proportion, fades and paralyses the soul. In the crowded metropolis, Pip grows disenchanted, disillusioned, and lonely. Alienated from his native Kent, he has lost his unique support in the form the village blacksmith. In London, he is powerless to join a community, not the Pocket family, much less Jaggers' circle. London has become Pip's prison and, like the convicts of his youth, he is bound in chains: "no satis House can be built merely with money".

Dickens' attitude

Trotter emphasizes the importance of Magwitch's greasy banknotes. Beyond the protagonist's psychological emotions, Trotter notes, they reveal the author's views on social and economic progress ten to fifteen years before publication of Great Expectations. His novels and Household Words extensively reflect Dickens' views, and according to Trotter, his efforts to contribute to social progress expanded in the 1840s, which is reflected in his later novels. To illustrate his point, he cites Humphry House who, succinctly, writes that in Pickwick Papers, "a bad smell was a bad smell", whereas in Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations, "it is a problem".

Joe commenting on Pip's good fortune, by John McLenan

At The Great Exhibition of 1851, Dickens and Richard Henry Horne (1802-1884), poet and critic, an editor of Household Words wrote an article comparing The Crystal Palace to a few artifacts presented by China, which they viewed as extreme signs of progress and its reactions: England, open to worldwide trade, represented movement; China, isolationism. "To compare China and England is to compare Stoppage to Progress", they concluded. According to Trotter, this was a way to target the Tory government's return to protectionism which they felt would make England the China of Europe. In fact, Household Words championed international free trade: they compared the constant flow of money to that of money in an issue published 17 May 1856. In the 1850s, Dickens still believed in genuine wealth, which Trotter compares to fresh banknotes, crisp to the touch, pure and odorless.

With Great Expectations, the view has changed, explains Suhamy, in a small way: certainly, satire exists, sometimes in terms of a final hardness; for all that, no character in the novel plays the role of the moralist to condemn Pip and his society, Joe and Biddy themselves, paragons of good sense, are complicit, through their exaggerated innate humility, in Pip's social deviancy. The conviction is first made by contrast: only a few characters keep, despite their quirks, to the straight and narrow path; Joe, whose values remain unchanged; Matthew Pocket whose pride renders him, to his family's astonishment, unable to flatter his rich relatives; Jaggers, in a sense, who keeps a cool head and has no illusions about his clients whose interests he manages; Biddy, who overcomes her shyness to, from time to time, bring order. The narrator-hero is left to draw the necessary conclusions: in the end, he finds the light and embarks on a path of moral regeneration.

Moral regeneration

File:Pip has a visitor at night, by Ardizzone.jpeg

Pip has a visitor at night, by Edward Ardizzone

In chapter 39, the novel's turning point, Magwitch visits Pip to see the gentleman he has made, and once the convict has hidden in Herbert Pocket's room, Pip realises his situation:

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. Miss Havisham's intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella not designed for me...But, sharpest and deepest pain of all -- it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out of those rooms where I sat thinking, and hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe.

Hillis-Miller writes that to get out of this situation, Pip can only rely on the power of love, the persistance of his feelings for Estella, and his learning that he now needs Magwitch, a hunted, injured man who traded his life for Pip's. Suhamy does not disagree but adds that this positive process is, at each of its stages, accompanied by successive realisations about the vanity of the prior certainties.

First revelation: wealth corrupts

Joe learns to read by John McLenan

Suhamy explains that Dickens gave Pip more impact by making him less needy: neither idyllic nor sordid, Joe's forge does not resemble the gothic lair of Gabriel Varden in Barnaby Rudge, the Gargery residence has nothing of the slums of Hard Times: the hearth is full, the pantry filled, and Mrs Gargery ensures cleanliness without moderation.

Thus, the problem is more psychological and moral than social. Pip's ascension accompanies degradation of his integrity. At the end of his first visit in Miss Havisham, the innocent young boy of the marshes, once respectfully gathered at his parents' tombs, suddenly turns into a liar to dazzle his sister, Mrs Joe, and his Uncle Pumblechook with the tales of a carriage and veal chops, the most expensive meat in the kingdom. More disturbing is his irresistible fascination with Satis House, where he is despised and even slapped, beset by ghostly visions, rejected by the Pockets; and the gradual growing of the mirage of London. Suhamy writes that wealth's allure overpowers all: loyalty and gratitude, even conscience itself, awakening turpitude. This is evidenced by emblematic occurrences: the urge to buy Joe's return in chapter 27, the haughty glance as Joe deciphers the alphabet, not to mention the condescending contempt he confesses to Biddy, copying Estella's behaviour toward him.

Second revelation: failure of gentility

Trabb's boy mocks Pip in the village highstreet outside the post-office by John McLenan

The gentlemen devote themselves to showing their gentility, for their own and others' benefit. Aping their good reciprocal ways, and especially those of the aristocracy, the cultivate a shame of work labour and a lifestyle of idleness. Estella, of low birth, is systematically formed from pride, and sent to Richmond to learn how to behave like a lady, and falls into the trap of a well-bred lout; similarly, Matthew Pocket, lucid and intelligent, now depleted of that but conscious of his rank, does not discourage the aristocratic pretensions of his wife, however ridiculous.

Pip represents, as do those he mimics, what Hillis-Miller calls "the bankrupcy of the idea of the gentleman": dominant by law, offering to help the less fortunate, he cuts down, suddenly of impostures and injustices, the human community, and becomes the sole beneficiary of vulgarity, inversely proportional to his mounting gentility. Dickens' repudiation of the gentleman, already begun in Little Dorrit and confirmed in Great Expectations, is not necessarily shared by his contemporaries: G. N. Ray shows that for William Makepeace Thackeray, the idea of the gentleman needed to be reassessed but remained indispensable. Whereas for the more conservative Anthony Trollope, actions under ethics cannot be spontaneous with these qualities defying the analysis that demonstrates members of gentility.

In chapter 30, Dickens argues his point with a sidekick, irrelevant to the plot, whom he promotes to the rank of parody to reveal the new disease that corrodes the protagonist; the only one not to be fooled, unable to stoop to flattery, Trabb's Boy parades through the main street of the village with boyish antics and contortions meant to imitates the beautiful manners new to Pip. Frights simulated before this august presence, overly dandy looks, haughty speech, accent that reeks of elocution lessons, the mime of Trabb's Boy openly exposes the hoax of this new gentleman in a frock coat and top hat, a gross caricature and puppet to its own strings:

Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon me by Trabb's boy, when, passing abreast of me, he pulled up his shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his attendants, "Don't know yah, don't know yah, pon my soul don't know yah!" The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith, culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to speak, ejected by it into the open country.

Trotter attaches much importance to the antics of this clown, as did Chesterton before him. Trotter speaks of "savage fun", "wonderfully catching the sheer unfamiliarity of the self created by desire". Chesterton thought that George Eliot and Thackeray would have known to describe Pip's humiliation not as Trabb's boy's strength but as his "irrepressible and unerring vengefulness".

Trabb's boy reveals that appearance has taken precedence over being, protocol on feelings, decorum on authenticity. As Suhamy summarizes, labels reign to the point of absurdity, and human solidarity is no longer the order of the day.

Third revelation: neither wealth nor gentility bring happiness

Mrs Pocket and her children indulging in idleness by Harry Furniss (1910)

Estella and Miss Havisham represent rich people who enjoy a materially easier life but cannot cope with a tougher reality. Miss Havisham withdrew from life at the first sign of hardship, like a melodramatic heroine; Estella, excessively spoiled and pampered, sorely lacks judgement and falls prey to the first gentleman who approaches her, though he is the worst. Suhamy believes that Dickens married Estella to a brute to demonstrate the failure of her education: used to dominating, she is supposed to bend men, as she succeeded so easily with Pip, but becomes a victim to her own vice, brought to her level by a man born, not made, in her image.

London, paradise of the rich and birthplace of the ideal of the gentleman, has the grandeur of its mounds of filth, juxtaposed against the villages, as Pip describes, all crooked, decrepit, and greasy, form a dark desert of bricks oozing soot, rain, and fog and a supernatant in a sea of detritus. What little surviving vegetation remains stunted, confined to dark fenced-off paths, without air or light, doomed to wither. Barnard's Inn, where Pip dines, offers nauseating food, and its lodgings, despite its furnishing provided, as Suhamy states, "for the money", remains the most uncomfortable, a far cry from Joe's large kitchen, radiating hearth, and his well-stocked pantry.

Suhamy concludes that a world dominated by the lure of money and social prejudice leads to the mutilation of being, to family discord, war between man and woman, and cannot lead to any happiness whatsoever. Joe, in whom the values of the heart prevail and who, despite intellectual and social limitations, naturally reaches wisdom is an example a contrario.

Conquest of conscience

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 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 Abel Magwitch to the extremely rich like Miss Havisham. Pip has great ambition, as demonstrated constantly in the book.

Pip's pilgrimage

Magwitch's arrest after his capture on the Thames while trying escape to France, by John McLenan

The theme of the moral regeneration thus emerges opposite the false values stated previously. Dickens, however, takes care to show that a genuine sense of reality is decreed but won. Hence the long and painful process of redemption he inflicts the hero, a true pilgrimage punctuated by suffering. Like Christian from The Pilgrim's Progress, Pip makes his way up to light through a maze of horrors afflicting his body as his mind: burns from saving Miss Havisham from the fire; threat of disease requiring months of recovery; that of violent death at Orlick's hands; the hassle of debt and worse, the obligation of repaying them; hard work, which he recognises as the only worth source of income, hence his return to Joe's forge. Even more important, as Hillis-Miller highlights, is accepting a coarse outcast of society, then an almost filial affection felt towards those banished from Earth, a "hunted dunghill dog".

Hillis-Miller shows that this return to origins implies their transformation into their opposites. At first, the link to Magwitch appears guilty, real harm to the integrity of the home, shameful tie with society's slums, because of social isolation. Henceforth, while in chapter 53, Pip prepares to go down the Thames to rescue the convict, a veil lifted from the river and his spirit. Symbolic fog enveloping the marshes as Pip left for London has finally lifted, and he feels ready to become a man.

As I looked along the clustered roofs, with Church towers and spires shooting into the unusually clear air, the sun rose up, and a veil seemed to be drawn from the river, and millions of sparkles burst out upon its waters. From me too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt strong and well.

Redemption through love

Magwitch's death by John McLenan.

The redeemer is love, that, for Dickens as for generations of Christian moralists, explains Hillis-Miller, is only acquired through sacrifice. Pip's reluctance completely disappears, he writes, in chapter 54; in the injured and pursued convict, he no longer sees a man inhabited by affection, who risked his freedom and life for him. Their powerful initial embrace, a gesture of ownership and possession from the marshes, now expressed in vulnerable clenching hands, becomes the symbol of their love and their mutual desire for sacrifice. After the action, Pip's loyalty remains foolproof, that appears publicly during imprisonment, trial, and death of the convict. He grows selfless, concealing the end of his "expectations" in the confiscation of his property by the Crown. Moments before Magwitch's death, Pip reveals that Estella, Magwitch's daughter, is alive, "a lady and very beautiful. And I love her". Here, Hillis-Miller writes, the greatest sacrifice: the recognition that he owes everything, even Estella, to Magwitch; his new debt becomes his greatest freedom.

Conclusion

From a social point of view, Pip's ultimate decision agrees with the view Joe and Biddy already express: choice of employment, thus the deserved serenity, quiet life, and peaceful death. Pip returns to the forge, his previous state. This doctrine of meaningful work, the philosophy of a person happy with their contribution to the welfare of society, explains Earle Rosco Davis, is in line with Thomas Carlyle's theories who, in his Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), condemns the system of social classes flourishing in idleness, much like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did. So knowingly that Dickens chose as a hero neither an aristocrat nor a capitalist but a working-class boy who cannot enjoy with impunity the fruit of his hard and honest work.

But who in the novel, quips A. E. Dyson, will approve, other than Joe and Biddy? He adds: "Mercifully...Joe and Biddy have married one another just in time. But what an escape for all three of them!" The epilogue of the novel releases Pip to Estella, while ambiguous in its formulation is not in its tone: Dyson writes that it is "barely" possible that they marry, "barely" possible that they are happy if they ever do. Yet, the last words of the novel, do not say what will happen or pronounce judgement, but - repeating Gissing's formulation, "because they complete the peculiar music, silvery and autumnal, of the tale".

For all that, concludes Suhamy, in Great Expectations, the true values are childhood, youth, and heart. The heroes of the story are the young Pip, true visionary, a still developing person, open, sensible, persecuted by soulless adults; the adolescent Pip and Herbert, imperfect by free, intact, playful, endowed with fantasy in a boring and frivolous world. Magwitch also, a man of heart, victim of false appearances and of social images, formidable and humble, bestial and pure, vagabond of God, despised by men, leprous messenger of good news; and Joe, enemy of the lie, the neighborly friend; Finally, the women, real, whose weakness is strength, whose silence is their intuition.

Imperialism

Edward W. Said, in his 1993 work Culture and Imperialism, proposed an interpretation of Great Expectations in relation to imperialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pip's disillusionment when he learns his benefactor is an escaped convict from Australia and his acceptance of Magwitch as surrogate father can be read as part of "the imperial process". Like Magwitch, several characters in David Copperfield relocate to Australia, becoming "outsiders". They have the right to return, while for Magwitch, a deported convict, returning is a capital crime. Said states that Dickens has Magwitch return to be redeemed by Pip's love, paving the way for Pip's own redemption. Cairo's status as a "normal" colony legitimatises Pip's work as a clerk but not Magwitch's honest labour because Australia is not "normal". The book, Said concludes, reinforces rather than condemns standards that established the hierarchy of the British empire.

Open University's course, "Approaching literature: Reading Great Expectations", notes that the novel's alternative, Gothic, and Romance genre elements validate Magwitch's experiences as an outsider, questioning Said's assumption that Great Expectations is a purely realist novel like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

Novels influenced by Great Expectations

Dickens' novel has influenced a number of writers, Sue Roe's Estella: Her Expectations (1982), for example explores the inner life of an Estella fascinated with a Havisham figure. Miss Havisham is again important in Havisham: A Novel (2013), a book by Ronald Frame, that features an imagining of the life of Miss Catherine Havisham from childhood to adulthood. The second chapter of Rosalind Ashe's Literary Houses (1982) paraphrases Miss Havisham's story with details about the nature and structure of Satis House and coloured imaginings of the house within. Miss Havisham is also central to Lost in a Good Book (2002), Jasper Fforde's alternate history, fantasy novel, which features a parody of Miss Havisham. It won the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association 2004 Dilys Award. Magwitch is the protagonist of Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which is a re-imagining of Magwitch's return to England, with the addition, among other things, of a fictionalised Dickens character and plot-line. Carey's novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1998. Mister Pip (2006) is a novel by Lloyd Jones, a New Zealand author. The winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Lloyd Jones's novel is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s, where the young protagonist's life is impacted in a major way by her reading of Great Expectations.

Film, TV and theatrical adaptations

Like many other Dickens novels, Great Expectations has been filmed for the cinema or television numerous times, including:

• 1917 – Great Expectations, 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.
• 1934 – Great Expectations film starring Phillips Holmes and Jane Wyatt, directed by Stuart Walker.
• 1946 – Great Expectations, the most celebrated film version, starring John Mills as Pip, Bernard Miles as Joe, Alec Guinness as Herbert, Finlay Currie as Magwitch, Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham, Anthony Wager as Young Pip, Jean Simmons as Young Estella and Valerie Hobson as the adult Estella, directed by David Lean. It came fifth in a 1999 BFI poll of the top 100 British films.
• 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.
• 1955 - An Orphan's Tragedy, a Hong Kong film adaptation starring a teenage Bruce Lee. Filmed in Cantonese, the setting was moved to early 20th century Hong Kong and characters were renamed, where Pip was renamed as Frank whom was portrayed by Lee.
• 1959 – a BBC television version starring Dinsdale Landen as Pip, Helen Lindsay as Estella, Colin Jeavons as Herbert Pocket, Marjorie Hawtrey as Miss Havisham and Derek Benfield as Landlord.
• 1967 – a television serial starring Gary Bond and Francesca Annis.
• 1974 – Great Expectations – a film starring Michael York as Pip and Simon Gipps-Kent as Young Pip, Sarah Miles and James Mason, directed by Joseph Hardy.
• 1981 – Great Expectations – a BBC serial starring Stratford Johns, Gerry Sundquist, 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.
• 1986 – Great Expectations: The Untold Story, starring John Stanton, directed by Tim Burstall is a spin-off film depicting the adventures of Magwitch in Australia.
• 1989 – Great Expectations, a Disney Channel two-part film starring Anthony Hopkins as Magwitch, John Rhys-Davies as Joe Gargery, and Jean Simmons as Miss Havisham, directed by Kevin Connor.
• 1998 – Great Expectations, a film starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. This adaptation is set in contemporary New York, and renames Pip to Finn and Miss Havisham to Nora Dinsmoor. The film's score was composed by Patrick Doyle.
• 1999 – Great Expectations, a film starring Ioan Gruffudd as Pip, Justine Waddell as Estella, and Charlotte Rampling as Miss Havisham (Masterpiece Theatre—TV)
• 2000 – "Pip", a South Park episode that parodies and retells the Charles Dickens novel, and stars the South Park character Pip.
• 2011 – Great Expectations, a three-part BBC serial. Starring Ray Winstone as Magwitch, Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham and Douglas Booth as Pip.
• 2012 – Great Expectations, a film directed by Mike Newell, starring Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch, Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Jeremy Irvine as Pip.
• To be released 2016 – Fitoor, an Indian adaptation directed by Abhishek Kapoor, starring Katrina Kaif, Aditya Roy Kapur and Tabu.

Stage versions have included:

• 1939 – London stage adaptation made by Alec Guinness, which was to influence David Lean's 1946 film, in which both Guinness himself and Martita Hunt reprised their stage roles.
• 1975 – Stage Musical (London West End). Music by Cyril Ornadel, starring Sir John Mills. Ivor Novello Award for Best British Musical.
• 1988 – Glasgow Mayfest, stage version by the Tag Theatre Company in association with the Gregory Nash group
• 1995 – Stage adaptation of Great Expectations at Dublin's Gate Theatre by Hugh Leonard.
• 2002 – Melbourne Theatre Company four hour re-telling, in an adaptation by company director Simon Phillips
• 2005 – Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation by the Cheek by Jowl founders Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, with Sian Phillips as Miss Havisham
• 2013 – West End adaptation written by Jo Clifford and directed by Graham McLaren. Paula Wilcox as Miss Havisham, Chris Ellison as Magwitch.
• 2015 – Dundee Repertory Theatre adaptation written by Jo Clifford and directed by Jemima Levick.

Works

Text

• Charles Dickens (1993), Great Expectations, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, ISBN 1-85326-004-5, with an unsigned and unpaginated introduction
• Charles Dickens (1993), Great Expectations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, ISBN 978-0-19-818591-8, introduction and notes by Margaret Cardwell
• Charles Dickens (1996), Great Expectations, London: Penguin Classics, ISBN 0-141-43956-4, introduction by David Trotter, notes by Charlotte Mitchell

French translations

• Charles Dickens (1896) [1864], Les Grandes Espérances (in French), Translated by Charles Bernard-Derosne, Paris: Hachette
• Charles Dickens (1954), De Grandes espérances, La Pléiade (in French), Translated by Lucien Guitard, Pierre Leyris, André Parreaux, Madeleine Rossel (published with Souvenirs intimes de David Copperfield), Paris: Gallimard, ISBN 9782070101672

General sources

• Michael Stapleton (1983), The Cambridge Guide to English Literature, London: Hamlyn, ISBN 0600331733
• Margaret Drabble (1985), The Oxford Companion to English literature, London: Guild Publishing
• Andrew Sanders (1996), The Oxford History of English Literature (Revised Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-871156-5
• Paul Schlicke (1999), Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, New York: Oxford University Press
• Paul Davis (1999), Charles Dickens from A to Z, New York: Checkmark Books, ISBN 0816040877
• John O. Jordan (2001), The Cambridge companion to Charles Dickens, New York: Cambridge University Press
• David Paroissien (2011), A Companion to Charles Dickens, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-470-65794-2
• Robin Gilmour (1981), The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, ISBN 9780048000057
• Paul Davis (2007), Critical Companion to Charles Dickens, A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, New York: Facts on File, Inc., ISBN 0-8160-6407-5
• Jerome Hamilton Buckley (1974), "Dickens, David and Pip", Season of Youth: the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780674796409
• Edward Said (1993), Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, ISBN 9780679750543, retrieved 11 December 2015

Specific sources

About the life and work of Charles Dickens

• John Forster (1872–1874), The Life of Charles Dickens, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, edited by J. W. T. Ley, 1928
• John Forster (1976), Life of Charles Dickens, London: Everyman's Library, ISBN 0460007823
• Hippolyte Taine (1879), History of English Literature, Translated from French by H. Van Laun, New York{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• G. K. Chesterton (1906), Charles Dickens, London: Methuen and Co., Ltd.
• G. K. Chesterton (1911), Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dicken, London: J. M. Dent
• S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald (1910), Dickens and the Drama, London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd.
• Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1911), Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, London{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• George Gissing (1925), The Immortal Dickens, London: Cecil Palmer
• Humphry House (1941), The Dickens World, London: Oxford University Press
• Una Pope Hennessy (1947), Charles Dickens, London: The Reprint Society, first published 1945
• Hesketh Pearson (1949), Dickens, London: Methuen
• Jack Lindsay (1950), Charles Dickens, A Biographical and Critical Study, New York: Philosophical Library
• Barbara Hardy (1952), Dickens and the Twentieth Century. The Heart of Charles Dickens, New York: Edgar Johnson
• Edgar Johnson (1952), Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols, New York: Simon and Schuster
• Sylvère Monod (1953), Dickens romancier (in French), Paris: Hachette
• John Hillis-Miller (1958), Charles Dickens, The World of His Novels, Harvard: Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780674110007
• E. A. Horsman (1959), Dickens and the Structure of Novel, Dunedin, N.Z.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• R. C. Churchill (1964), Charles Dickens, From Dickens to Hardy, Baltimore, Md.: Boris Ford
• Earle Davis (1963), The Flint and the Flame: The Artistry of Charles Dickens, Missouri-Columbia: University of Missouri Press
• Steven Marcus (1965), Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey, New York{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• K. J. Fielding (1966), Charles Dickens, A Critical Introduction, London: Longman
• Christopher Hibbert (1967), The Making of Charles Dickens, London: Longmans Green & Co., Ltd.
• Harry Stone (1968), Charles Dickens' Uncollected Writings from Household Words 1850–1859, vol. 1 and 2, Indiana: Indiana University Press, ISBN 0713901209
• F. R. & Q. D. Leavis (1970), Dickens the Novelist, London: Chatto & Windus, ISBN 0701116447
• A. E. Dyson (1970), The Inimitable Dickens, London: Macmillan, ISBN 0333063287
• Angus Wilson (1972), The World of Charles Dickens, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ISBN 0140034889
• Philip Collins (1975), Charles Dickens: The Public Readings, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• Robert L. Patten (1978), Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198120761
• Virginia Woolf (1986), Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1928, London: Hogarth Press, ISBN 978-0-7012-0669-7
• Harry Stone (1979), Dickens and the Invisible World, Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Novel-Making, Bloomington and Londres: Indiana University. Press
• Michael Slater (1983), Dickens and Women, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., ISBN 0-460-04248-3
• Fred Kaplan (1988), Dickens, A Biography, William Morrow & Co, ISBN 9780688043414
• Norman Page (1988), A Dickens Chronology, Boston: G.K. Hall and Co.
• Peter Ackroyd (1993), Charles Dickens, London: Stock, ISBN 978-0099437093
• Philip Collins (1996), Charles Dickens, The Critical Heritage, London: Routletge

About Great Expectations

• Mary Edminson (1958), "The Date of the Action in Great Expectations", Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (1): 22–35, JSTOR 3044100
• Richard Lettis and William Morris, ed. (1960), Assessing Great Expectations, San Francisco: Chandler, texts from Forster, Whipple, Chesterton, Leacock, Baker, House, Johnson, van Ghent, Stange, Hagan, Connolly, Engel, Hillis Miller, Moynahan, Van de Kieft, Hardy, Lindberg, Partlow
• Julian Moynahan (1960), "The Hero's Guilt, The Case of Great Expectations", Essays in Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 60–79
• Henri Suhamy (1971), Great Expectations, cours d'Agrégation (in French), Vanves: Centre de Télé-Enseignement, p. 25
• Edgar Rosenberg (1972), "A Preface to Great Expectations: The Pale Usher Dusts His Lexicon", Dickens Studies Annual, 2
• Edgar Rosenberg (1981), "Last Words on Great Expectations: A Textual Brief ln the Six Endings", Dickens Studies Annual, 9
• Michael Peled Ginsburg (1984), "Dickens and the Uncanny: Repression and Displacement in Great Expectations", Dickens Studies Annual 13, University of California Santa Cruz
• George J. Worth (1986), Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland
• Anny Sadrin (1988), Great Expectations, Unwin Hyman, ISBN 978-0048000514
• Michael Cordell, ed. (1990), Critical Essays on Great Expectations, Boston: G. K. Hall, pp. 24, 34
• Michael Cotsell, ed. (1990), Critical Essays on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Boston: G.K. Hall, texts from Chesterton, Brooks, Garis, Gissing, et al
• Jerome Meckier (1992), "Dating the Action in Great Expectations: A New Chronology", Dickens Studies Annual, 21: 157–194
• Elliot L. Gilbert (1993), "In Primal Sympathy: Great Expectations and the Secret Life", Critical Essays, pp. 146–167
• Roger D. Sell, ed. (1994), Great Expectations: Charles Dickens, London: Macmillan, texts from Brooks, Connor, Frost, Gilmour, Sadrin et al.
• William A. Cohen (1993), "Manual Conduct in Great Expectations", ELH (English Literary History), 60, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, pp. 217–259
• Susan Walsh (Autumn 1993), "Bodies of Capital: Great Expectations and The Climacteric Economy", Victorian Studies, 37 (1), Indiana University Press: 73–98
• Nicholas Tredell (1998), Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Cambridge: Icon Books (distributed by Penguin)

External links

• Great Expectations public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Online editions

• Great Expectations at Internet Archive
• Great Expectations at Project Gutenberg
• Great Expectations – Easy to read HTML version
• Great Expectations – PDF scans of the entire novel as it originally appeared in All the Year Round

Other

• Original manuscript – held at Wisbech & Fenland Museum, Wisbech
• David Parker's article on the London Fictions site about the London of Great Expectations
• Map of Dickens' London
• 1953 Theatre Guild on the Air radio adaptation at Internet Archive