You might have read it in your youth, but, unless you had a dedicated teacher, were already accustomed to reading 19th-century English, or had an especial soft spot for orphans, it probably didn’t go so well. But if there is a single classic that deserves a second chance now that you’re an adult, it’s Great Expectations. Bleak House has the widest scope of any of Dickens’ novels, but Great Expectations is surely his most immediately gratifying and accessible—and one of the shortest.
But let’s get this out of the way first: it is not, I repeat, not, a children’s book. Yes, the protagonist, Pip, is a boy when the novel begins; yes it’s G-rated, uplifting, and morally benign; but Great Expectations calls out to fully formed hearts and active minds, and even an attentive teenager will access only a tenth of its glory (though that tenth might still be enough for them to like it).
Now, I want to stress one more thing: there might only be a few books that you enjoy more than Great Expectations—ever. I’m not exaggerating. It overflows with such warmth, humanity, humor, and, dare I say it, sweetness that you literally won’t be able to keep yourself from loving it. The fact that everybody doesn’t already realize that Great Expectations is one of the most delightful books of all time absolutely befuddles me—and is a testament to how badly we mishandle literary education. What should be a cherished favorite in everyone’s library is too often squandered by being assigned to people who can’t go alone to R-rated movies.
Part of the problem is that Dickens is deceptively hard, or, to put it better, much of his greatness purls just beneath the obvious, so unless you’re doing attentive, line-by-line reading, you’ll only be seeing the novel’s proverbial tip. I don’t want you to have to take my word on this, so to prove my point, I’m going to quote from the second paragraph and show you how it works (Dickens really doesn’t wait long to get himself going). Pip is speaking:
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine—who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.
We’re two paragraphs in, and you already have both the glory and the challenge of Dickens. By my count, there are at least two successful jokes and one confusing sentence (I have no idea what the line about his brothers being born on their backs with hands in the trouser pockets means). And there’s the problem: if you stumbled on the confusing bit and didn’t catch the two jokes that preceded it, I can see why you would already be working up a yawn.
The key is to get the wit. The line about the headstone letters suggesting to him that his dad was square, stout, dark, and curly is meant to be a joke but isn’t that funny—to me at least. But the wife’s inscription “Also Georgiana”—that’s great, if subtle. Think of the Industrial Age British. Think of the back-broken, hard-drinking, closed-lipped working-class men of that era. So, in the spouting effusive adoration of the period, the mother gets “Also Georgiana.” Claim to fame: wife of the above. A life lived, a life gone, seven foaled, five dead: “Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above.” Sad—but also funny.
Then the quip about the brothers giving up early in “that universal struggle” of “trying to make a living”—again gallows humor (for all five boys died young) but again pretty amusing, and no doubt apt regarding the struggle part.
I’m not saying that these jokes are amazing; they’re not, and I’m kind of sad they aren’t better so you’d get a sense of how good Dickens often is from the get-go (as in the neglected sarcasm of the first line of A Tale of Two Cities, as mentioned in the last chapter). But what they do demonstrate is that there’s always a lot going on; virtually every line in the paragraph has a joke in it, and if you miss them and only notice the confusing stuff, the ship’s all but sailed.
But let’s take a better line—again subtle—so you can really get the swing of the Dickens thing. This is from twenty pages into the novel, early in Chapter 4. So far we’ve had some excellent plot—Pip being forced by a runaway convict to steal him some food, feeling guilty, etc.—and then this description of his guardian, his sister who takes her name from her husband: “Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.” The literal level is pretty clear: Mrs. Joe (an unyielding battle-axe whose real name we don’t learn till much later) is clean to the point where you’d rather be in filth—it would feel better. We all know people like that, and the phrase nails them remarkably efficiently. But it’s the addendum that I really like: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion,” i.e., they make their religion so constrictive and uncomfortable that you’d rather live among pagans. This is Dickens in a nutshell: quietly, gently sliding his épée deep into the self-righteous. It’s brilliant, but it’s also really quick and easy to miss.
From there the novel simply blossoms. The plot might be familiar: Pip is sent to play at the rich lady Miss Havisham’s, where he meets her pretty and condescending “niece,” Estella (who says, “He is a common labouring-boy!” and Miss Havisham responds glacially, “You can break his heart.”). The older lady turns out to be a little gaga, having shut herself indoors since being spurned at her wedding decades before, still wearing her dress, stopping all the clocks, and keeping the cake, now spider-covered, at hand. Estella makes Pip wish he wasn’t working-class (leading to his famous “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home” line) and lose track of what he is and has, especially his simple but supremely loving brother-in-law, Joe—heartbreaking. Eventually Jaggers, the shark-to-end-all-sharks lawyer, shows up and declares that Pip has “great expectations” (a sizable trust fund coming his way), and from that point the mystery is on: who is the money from, and how will it turn out? It’s a near-perfect class-mobility parable where Pip makes most of the mistakes you can make, but life, as it often does, teaches him—and us—all the right lessons.
Instead of wasting any more of your time or mine trying to convince you to read Great Expectations, here’s a simple gambit: Go online (google “Great Expectations text”) and just read Chapter 7 on Joe’s illiteracy, what the “drawback” on his learning was, how his wife is “given to government” and “comes the Mogul” over him and Pip. It’ll take you twenty minutes, and you’ll be sold. I have no doubts.
And once you’re fully a-swim, do what one should always do reading Dickens: give yourself over to the story and the characters (you’ll love, to name but a few, Pip, Joe, Jaggers, the good-hearted Biddy, Magwich the callused criminal, and Jagger’s assistant Wemmick with his “aging parent”—perhaps my favorites), but don’t forget about the language either. For once you’ve trained yourself to read slowly and catch all Dickens’ wryness, you’ll understand why I’ve read all fifteen thousand pages of his novels, many multiple times, and can’t wait to read them all again.
A final word should be said about sentimentality in Dickens. Yes, he gets a little melodramatic at times (okay, lots of times), and this rubs certain heartless, bad, mean mean people the wrong way. Oscar Wilde, for example, referring to Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop, famously said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” He’s got a point, sort of. Reading Dickens, I occasionally think, “This might turn a few stomachs.” Of course everyone will have a different level of tolerance of the Dickensian treacle (and mine, I’ll confess, is very high), but you should never lose track of the fact that his sentimentality is never naive and is always balanced elsewhere in the novels by critique. Dickens simply believed in his heart that humanity could, at times, be good, and wanted to put that on display. If we have a hard time believing his noble characters, that’s only because of the infrequency with which we see such levels of goodness in everyday life. And that fact alone helps to underscore both Dickens’ critiques and his necessity. Now as in his day, Dickens shows how desperately we need models of human goodness.
The Buzz: The three characters people tend to speak of in Great Expectations are Pip, Miss Havisham, and Estella. Of course, Miss Havisham’s crumbling yellow wedding dress and cobweb-covered cake stick in the memory rather forcibly. As always, though, I think Dickens distinguishes himself through his bit characters as much as through his protagonists, so don’t think these three are the only ones that will entertain you.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): Apart from Great Expectations not being a children’s book, people seem to forget the ambiguity of the ending. In the penultimate line, when Estella says to Pip, “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be,” it seems as if they are going to part forever. But then … but then … read the last six words and decide for yourself.
Best Line: I’m giving you two. The first shows you again how subtle the Dickensian joke can be (the subject, by the way, is prison): “a certain part of the world where a good many people go, not always in gratification of their own inclinations, and not quite irrespective of the government expense.” The second is a summation of the goodness that Dickens not only believes in but puts on such exquisite display: “It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by.” Wow.
What’s Sexy: Again, Dickens is not the place to go to for nook-nook. The closest we get is Wemmick’s hysterical attempts to put his arm around his girlfriend, Miss Skiffins, at dinner.
Quirky Fact: During the time when Dickens was writing this novel, the weekly magazine he was editing, All the Year Round, started to flag in popularity. To fix the problem, he decided to publish Great Expectations there, forcing himself to turn it in in weekly chunks (he was used to doing monthly installments), but thus saving his magazine. I’d like to see Tina Brown do that.
What to Skip: Nothing at all. But, as I said in the last chapter, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Hard Times or A Tale of Two Cities are among Dickens’ better novels; they aren’t. I actually consider them his two worst—and Oliver Twist is near the bottom too.