In the Company of Strangers

Literary modernism involves, almost by self-definition, a break with certain norms and assumptions of nineteenth-century novels. In part, the argument of this book is that Ulysses and the Recherche self-consciously abandon the dynastic family plot of the nineteenth-century English novel. But more interestingly, this break with the family is in fact anticipated and in certain respects already played out in the novels of Dickens. The relationship between the genealogical obsession of the Victorian novel and the queer visions of Ulysses or the Recherche is as much one of continuity as of rupture.

In contrast to the Victorian novelists, the debt of both Joyce and Proust to the French nineteenth-century novel, and to Flaubert in particular, has been widely studied and acknowledged, by the writers themselves as well as by later critics.¹ Yet in the family plots of Dickens, and especially in his novels of orphanhood, we can find a rather different sort of antecedent or parallel for the queer family dynamics of the modernists. All of the questions of legitimacy, continuity, inheritance, paternity, and transmission that shape the Recherche, Ulysses, and later Finnegans Wake on the deepest levels are already at the center of Dickens’s novelistic enterprise. And, perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century writer in English or French, Dickens explores the world of childhood as a universe unto itself and tries to understand the afterlife of this world in maturity, an aim that is central to the modernist enterprise in psychoanalysis as well as literature. Dickens’s plots of orphanhood or near-orphanhood may often revolve around ideas of biology and natural law, but they also concern the issues of precedence and attachment that are taken up by the modernists.

The question of Dickens and the family has been a controversial one since his novels were published. For Northrop Frye, Dickens plots “[move] towards a regrouping of society around the only social group that Dickens regards as genuine, the family.”² And Dickens was first lauded and later pilloried for this perceived investment in the traditional family at the expense of other forms of community.³ But in key respects, the family plots of Dickens are not only queerer than they may seem, but become gradually queerer of the course of his career.⁴

Oliver Twist is given his surname by the beadle of the workhouse in which he is born, not by his father, who is dead and unknown, or by his mother, who dies after planting a kiss on her newborn son’s forehead. Oliver is born into the world bereft of ancestry or family connections, but from the moment of his birth, a slow, single-minded genealogical plot is set in motion, designed to bring him back to his natural lineage and restore to him his forgotten family name—to de-Twist him. Before he is reunited with his lost legitimate kin, however, an alternative presents itself. As Oliver adventures through life alone and unparented, the streets of boom-time London offer him a set of interim, replacement connections. A random encounter with another orphan, the Artful Dodger, leads him to an ersatz family, the chaotic household of Fagin’s den, where he finds a network of community and solidarity and where he develops fraternal and filial attachments with the Artful Dodger, Nancy, and Fagin. The Artful Dodger’s name, indeed, already signals his belonging to the realm of constructed rather than inherited relationships; like Stephen Dedalus, he is an “artificer” and a negotiator of the city’s labyrinths.

It is not surprising that Oliver has become the icon of the orphan; his orphanhood is the key to the meaning of the novel, the wider resonances of its meaning illuminated not only by looking back to the eighteenth-century foundling tales, which Dickens was consciously deploying, but also, as we shall see, by looking forward to Ulysses. The narrative value of Oliver’s orphanhood is less a straightforward family romance, the fantasy of a glamorous inheritance and new parentage (though that is part of it), and more the fact that it highlights a more basic conflict between inherited and acquired connections; it raises the question of his origins and their recovery while also rendering him liable to make new attachments of his own.⁵

The story of Oliver Twist is divided into two chronological directions that encapsulate these different categories of connection, two competing models of social and personal formation, and two models of kinship: queer/outlawed and genealogical/lawful. On the one hand, Oliver is a lone agent looking for new friends and supporters wherever he can find them; on the other, he is (unbeknownst to himself) a dispossessed heir seeking out his lost ancestors. The passage of the years pushes the story forward, as Oliver grows up into Twist the pickpocket, who learns his trade and is gradually hammered into shape by the adventures and encounters of his daily life in institutions and in the criminal underworld of London. At the same time, the narrative is propelled backward, to a time before his birth, toward his forgotten genealogical relatives, and toward a lost, preestablished, legitimate family identity. But while the novel’s ultimate teleology is defined by the search for the right name, the story itself is about the wrong name, the twisted, bent one. The gradual de-Twisting of Oliver is coterminous with the progress of the narrative—the closer he is to shedding his criminal name, the nearer we are to the story’s end. But even if the plot resolution reads Oliver only according to his genes—the dénouement turns on his physical likeness to both his mother and father—for the reader, he is destined to remain Oliver the orphaned pick-pocket, and Bumble’s name for him gives the novel its title. By the same token, the world the novel transmits to our imaginations most vividly is not the idyllic, legitimate family household to which Oliver is eventually restored but the whirlpool of the London underworld, the powerful but precarious networks of fellowship among thieves and urchins.

Action and suspense are generated in Oliver Twist by the competition between the community of thieves, led by Fagin, and Oliver’s romance-genealogical family, headed by Brownlow (Brownlow is related to Oliver not by blood but by marriage; Oliver is returned to his in-laws in all senses). These two camps fight for possession of Oliver throughout the novel, for control of his character and destiny and for control over the outcome of the story itself. It is a struggle between the coincidence and the random encounter, a battle for form. As things work out, the novel’s overall form, its completed narrative arc, is sustained by the genealogical family, while the novel’s content is mostly produced by its criminal rivals. The “village” model of the family technically wins out over the queer metropolitan alternative to it. The plot even ends up physically moving Oliver from London to a rural village, from a queer tangle of crime and intrigue to a pastoral, family-centered happily-ever-after. Without the genealogical plot, the novel would have no structure; without its rival alternative it would have no adventures, no digression, no effective social vision.

In some obvious structural ways, then, Oliver Twist takes the form of a Freudian family romance,⁶ whereby a child fantasizes that he is really the offspring of a different, more socially exalted set of parents. In terms of genre, Dickens is employing the romances and picaresque novels of the eighteenth century, of which he was an avid reader, but he is also, in crucial ways, changing them.⁷ The family romance, in literature as in psychoanalysis, is about waiting and expectations, about “natural” realities that might transcend and miraculously redeem the unsatisfactory, picaresque quality of everyday life. In the face of the workings of the genealogical plot, immediate individual actions in Oliver Twist prove to be futile. It does not really matter how many pickpockets befriend Oliver or that he asks for more gruel or that he is fired from his job at the undertakers. Since he is the hero of a romance, family will always win out, genealogical coincidences will bring him home. The genealogical plot works itself out, mirabile dictu, without any action being required on the part of its protagonists. The novel’s long-term suspense, its structure, and Oliver’s identity are all determined by a natural family order working slowly, silently, and inevitably to foreclose on all this peripheral nonfamily action, to sew all this queer content back into the genealogical order. While Oliver’s wild adventures are taking place, the family plot is invisibly planning to take our hero away from the frenetic action of Fagin’s ersatz family and back to sweet waiting and inaction in the bosom of his genealogical kin.

But at the same time, it is these narratively futile actions—the friendship and fellowships forged from shared material hardship and physical proximity, the attempts at survival and dignity in unforgiving institutions, the schemes and stratagems hatched for economic survival—that provide the novel’s concrete material, its substance and action, and, most important, its vivid portrait of Victorian society.

The novel that preceded Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers is a picaresque novel, but, in terms of the family, ambiguously so.⁸ The Pickwick Papers gestures toward a marital, family resolution, but it remains in essence a picaresque novel of bachelordom.⁹ Oliver Twist is usually considered to be picaresque, too. But Oliver Twist is also a “village” family plot—in which the family is abandoned and restored after a carnivalesque interlude among strangers—imposed upon a metropolitan, picaresque context.¹⁰ If we remove the family frame of the novel, Oliver has much in common with the archetypal pícaro, the eponymous hero and narrator of La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Lazarillo, parentless and cast on the mercy of the world to earn his bread, gets caught up in criminal operations and finds himself at the mercy of unscrupulous or abusive employers. Like Oliver, the chief determinants of his life are physical hunger and the whims of corrupt, hypocritical employers. Lazarillo’s story begins, like Oliver’s, with a departure from his mother for an unscrupulous adoptive father; a blind man has offered to take Lazarillo on as his assistant and treat him “as his son, not just as his boy [me recibía no por mozo sino por hijo].”¹¹ It is clearly established from the outset that there will be no family reunion, that this is not a narrative of returns. His mother bids fare-well to him thus: “I know I’ll never see you again. Try and be good and may God guide you. I have raised you and placed you with a good master. Now you must look after yourself [Hijo, ya sé que no te veré más. Procura de ser bueno, y Dios te guíe. Criado te he y con buen amo te he puesto; válete por ti]” (7; 69 [translation modified]).

But unlike Oliver, who Lazarillo is and what he will become are wholly determined by these events and by his own actions. The grown-up Lázaro’s physical appearance is determined by the brutal scrapes and escapades of his working days. He loses his hair and teeth in violent incidents with his masters; miniatures and portraits or resemblances can play no part in the plot of his life. Lazarillo is literally bent into a new shape by the effects of his encounters and experiences and never straightened out again. None of his random meetings turns out to be a coincidence, none of them comes to reveal a retrospective back story. Individuals, events, and experiences simply accumulate one by one, and Lazarillo’s identity is the sum of the parts of his experience.

By contrast, Oliver’s adventures and friendships, his street smarts and survival strategies are not constitutive of his destiny or his identity: they are digressions—twists—from the straight and true path of the family. The beginning and the end of the novel find Oliver in the bosom of his family; all his exploits and fraternizations with outsiders in the meantime are just so many deviations that delay the movement from the genealogical beginning to the genealogical end; his physical resemblance to his mother and father is the crucial characteristic that shapes his destiny. The few moments of formal consonance in Lazarillo de Tormes—such as the fulfillment of a blind man’s prophesy that Lázaro will become a cuckold, or the network of Christological correspondences—are suffused with sad irony, designed to mock the whole idea of formal unity in an individual life.

Lazarillo de Tormes is episodic and cumulative, whereas in Oliver Twist past, present, and future are shown to be meaningfully, inevitably, almost mystically interrelated. A picaresque solution to the plot in which Oliver’s charm, luck, and scheming pull him out of crime and poverty but he is never reconnected to his original family and the mystery of his origins is never solved is unthinkable in Dickens’s framework.¹² Whatever modest destiny Lazarillo de Tormes has, he must be its sole author. While Lázaro pulls himself up by the bootstraps, Oliver’s actions are irrelevant to his destiny: he need only sit around and wait for his future to fall out of the past onto his lap. In Oliver Twist, waiting trumps action every time. Oliver’s passivity is, J. Hillis Miller says, the “passivity of waiting, of great expectations.”¹³

In this sense, the original subtitle of Oliver Twist, “The Parish Boy’s Progress,” is misleading. Unlike Lazarillo de Tormes, Dickens’s novel is not really interested in progress at all. Whatever progress there is takes place largely in the arms of Fagin’s unstable, surrogate family, and it is entirely undone by the dénouement, which returns Oliver to square one. The alternative family supplies the deviation from the genealogical plot and thus is rendered as criminal itself; outside the laws of narrative continuity and natural identity, its members are also rendered in the novel as literal outlaws.¹⁴

The family romance is thus part of the narrative of Oliver Twist, but only part of it.¹⁵ Critics have often noted uncanny correspondences between Fagin’s den and respectable Victorian family life. Catherine Waters, in particular, sees Fagin’s den as a parodic version of the family romance that frames it.¹⁶ But if we look at the roles of the two “households” in the novel’s narrative structure, there are other ways to understand the sinister family feel of Fagin’s den: not as a parody of the family, but as a rival to it. Fagin is not only outside the genealogical order, he is irreducible to it and to the law of the family (part of the reason for his depiction as a literal outlaw). The gravitational pull of Fagin’s cluster suggests that the choice might not be between individual, picaresque chaos—as for Lazarillo de Tormes, Tom Jones, Barry Lyndon, or Moll Flanders—and a miraculous genealogical romance, but between different and competing systems of kinship and connection. The family may win out at the end of Oliver Twist, but the narrative force of Fagin’s den suggests that genealogy might not be the only viable mode of community and continuity. Oliver Twist may also be a novel that attempts to deal with the specific upheavals and dislocations of industrialization, dramatizing the end of the “village” and the sudden explosion of London into a metropolis. At the same time, we must be careful not to overemphasize this relationship. After all, Lazarillo de Tormes takes on the disruptions of early Spanish capitalism but feels no need to tie the plot back up in a family romance. What is involved in the family plot of Oliver Twist is equally an extrapolation of the question, central to the world of childhood: what, if anything, can be lasting, legitimate, or “real” outside the parental family?

The contemporary double set of meanings, sexual and legal, attributed to the opposition “straight”/“bent,” where “straight” can mean either “law-abiding” or “heterosexual” and “bent” either “criminal” or “homosexual,” is telling in the context of Oliver Twist. As chief of a band of pickpockets, Fagin is clearly “bent” in the legal sense, and there is a definite air of sexual deviance about him, too. The hints of pederasty around Fagin’s position at the head of his family of boys, or of his homosexuality more generally, underlines the gang’s role as a queer (“bent”) alternative to the “straight” genealogical family.¹⁷ (Sexual exploitation seems to be part of Lazarillo’s experience of picaresque employment by thieves and swindlers, too.)¹⁸ Fagin’s sexual ambiguity is at the core of the story of form and family in the modern novel that this book will trace. The insinuations of pederasty also hint at his role as an agent of family possibilities outside of the heterosexual order.¹⁹ Or to put it another way: it is the dangerous presence of Fagin that requires a genealogical plot to defeat him, not the other way round.²⁰ With Fagin on the scene, the choice is no longer between social connection through the family or individualistic social disconnection, as it was for Lazarillo de Tormes, but between competing modes of kinship itself.

Fagin comes close to embodying the range of functions that the term “queer” has in the context of this book insofar as he offers an alternative to the social mechanisms of heterosexuality as a framework for ordering time and mediating relationships; in Fagin this narrative function of queerness expresses itself symbolically in specific character traits—which will recur in Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust—namely, homosexuality, Jewishness, and crime.²¹

The novel’s dénouement, its de-Twisting, thus straightens Oliver out in two senses, halting his formation as a criminal and extricating him from a queer antifamily. The characters of the criminals are likewise bent into interesting shapes by their environment, rich in content and engraved with the signs of their experience, in a way that the law-abiding members of legitimate families, such as Brownlow or Rose Maylie, are not. The accents and physical attributes of Fagin, Dodger, and Nancy are produced by their life in the world—they speak in slang and with local accents, they have scars, gin-noses, and limps. Brownlow and the Maylies, on the other hand, are blank, unblemished signifiers of goodness, respectability, and legitimacy, transcendent beings almost devoid of content.²² Critics have noticed that Oliver, taciturn at the best of times, talks and acts up a little in Fagin’s den but is positively mute and immobile, a vacant cipher whenever he is with the Brownlow-Maylies (compare this to Magwitch’s injunction to Pip to “speak up” and “give mouth” to his name in Great Expectations).²³

Mr. Bumble names Oliver deliberately. Bumble is in this sense the first parent who has an effect on him in the world, the first agent to form him. The fact that Oliver’s name is composed specifically for him, without reference to ancestral origins, points to a more radical agenda that the novel flirts with.²⁴ Mr. Bumble’s own proud account of his christening of Oliver highlights this queer subtext:

Mrs. Mann holds with the village model of kinship. She does not understand how a child without a family can possibly even have a name; her belief is that a name is there in order to denote family origins. Bumble disagrees and employs a queer onomastics of his own, with no reference to the family but still systematic and coherent. Bumble carefully names his foundlings “in order”—the order, that is, in which they actually appear on the scene in the workhouse. They are named according to a principle of concrete adjacency rather than imaginary precedence—in relation not to absent ancestors but to the other living and breathing foundlings born around them. What Bumble recites in this passage—Twist, Unwin, Vilkins—is a nongenealogical lineage. The novel does not open simply with a failure in genealogical continuity (as its corrective family plot would imply) but with an alternative to it.²⁶ Bumble’s alternative system may be parodic and may be fated from the start to be superseded by the traditional family system, but as a system of its own it reflects the realities of human community in Oliver’s world better than abstract ideas of family and paternity do. It implies, for a start, that the other human beings with whom Oliver exists most meaningfully in parallel are not his blood relatives, ghosts he has never met, but rather those who share his actual, lived circumstances, those in immediate, real proximity.

What happens to Oliver’s nearest “relations” in Bumble’s genealogy, his “brothers” Swubble, Unwin, and Vilkins, or where they came from, we will never know. The novel tells us unequivocally that Twist is not “really” Twist, but whether Swubble “really” is Swubble or whether, like the Artful Dodger or Charley or Lazarillo de Tormes, he is really product of his actions and environment is perhaps this novel’s most interesting unanswered question. The most curious anomaly in this regard is Dick, the saintly and brutalized orphan who is Oliver’s friend and companion through the beatings and starvation on Mrs. Mann’s child-farm. Whereas Oliver runs off to join first Fagin’s gang and then his own lost genealogical family, Dick remains on the child-farm until he dies of maltreatment, innocent, sweet-natured, and devout to the last.²⁷ Often overlooked in discussions and adaptations of the novel, Dick is the one actual friend Oliver makes in his picaresque adventures other than the pickpockets who pressgang him into service. Dick’s religious zeal (his dying wish is that Oliver pray for him), his respectable manner, and, most strikingly of all, his upper-middle-class English, are, like Oliver’s, totally at odds with the rough, impoverished environment of his upbringing, and out of keeping with the speech and attitudes of all of those around him—with the exception, of course, of Oliver himself.²⁸

Dick and Oliver are both first-class passengers with third-class tickets, as it were, and they cling to each other for comfort in their surroundings like deposed aristocrats in exile. Right up until his death, Dick never shows any signs of inhabiting the plebeian identity that circumstances have allotted to him. Unlike Oliver, Dick is never reunited with his true identity; he lives, suffers and expires, speaking the Queen’s English and spouting Christian piety to the end, in the anonymous squalor of Mrs. Mann’s child-farm. Dick is a parish boy whose progress is all too linear and who functions in the novel partially as a reminder that not all returns are assured, not all expectations come through, that sometimes waiting is not enough. Dick is left (like, for all we know, Swubble, Unwin, and Vilkins) languishing in the novel’s formless “middle”; his beginnings and his ends are never meaningfully realigned with each other. No revelations will give a formal shape or symmetry to the story of his life.

Where do Oliver and Dick get their accent and attitudes from?²⁹ Why are they, too, not products of their environment?³⁰ Why does Dick not speak like his peers and run off and train as a pickpocket, as Fagin’s well-populated home suggests many orphans did? Like Oliver, Dick suggests that, even when lost in the maelstrom of Industrial Revolution society, the family remains the true determiner of identity. Like Oliver, he is forever unmarked by his environment or the people he actually meets, and thus, like Oliver, Dick can never belong to the world around him. He “really” belongs to the no-longer-knowable family he has been uprooted from and is too much part of it (which the novel reads as his being too innately “good”) to put down new roots in the criminal world he is transplanted to. Unable to become part of the world he is physically in but unclaimed by his natural family, he must simply fade out of existence altogether. Dick’s presence and fate in the novel underline what Oliver’s story tells us: that even for dislocated migrants in the melting pot of Victorian London, what counts are the family roots left behind, not the new associations made in the city; that reality and human identity are made of origins and immanent, transcendent links; that in this metropolitan world, the ties of everyday life do not bind.

In stark contrast to Dick are Jack Dawkins the Artful Dodger and Charley “Master” Bates.³¹ The Dodger’s and Charley’s names are, like Oliver’s, “inwented,” but with the difference that the Dodger and Charley go on to invent themselves. Born to the streets, they are made by the streets. They live up to the circumstances of their birth and are “really” the products of their environment, true natives, not secretly linked to an invisible set of origins and relations but formed only by the world they are in and the company they keep. Nobody wonders who their biological parents were or thinks they are liable to show up. Jack Dawkins speaks Cockney, learns to pick pockets, and proudly styles himself after his new, nongenealogical name. The Dodger and Charley are orphans like Dick and Oliver, but they create their family around them. They live fully within the deviant, narrative “middle,” and they “inwent” family and form independently of genealogy. In the end, however, the two pickpockets’ world is extinguished by the genealogical dénouement, their links broken, their colorful criminal identities punished and obliterated.³²

Oliver is unsteadily situated between these two poles. On the one hand, there is Dick, forever lost to his ancestry and destiny, imprisoned in a no-man’s land between a vanished family and a forbidden underworld, expecting only his own anonymous extinction, devoid of any connections and listlessly awaiting an inheritance that will never come through, a pre-figuration of the troubling Richard Carstone in Bleak House, so obsessed with his imminent inheritance from the Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit that he cannot dedicate himself to any profession or activity. On the other side stand the self-made Dodger and Charley, waiting for nothing, frenetically generating connections, conspiracies, and selves, founding relationships and professional contacts in the crucible of the city. From the moment of Oliver’s birth, the novel cleaves into these two opposing directions: genealogy and city, family and environment, the law of the family and the reach of vibrant, seductive, criminal networks. The novel is divided from the start into these two competing plots, Dick and Dodger, straight and bent, genealogical and queer, legitimate and criminal, the village and the city.³³

It is not only in its picaresque subtitle that the novel falsely claims to hold that environment and experience, not blood, produce character and identity.³⁴ This is, after all, part of the novel’s “generous social vision.” When Charlotte Sowerberry says to her mother after Oliver attacks Noah Claypole (his tormentor and her fiancé) that she hopes her father will henceforth learn not to employ “any more of these dreadful creatures that are born to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle” (50), we are supposed to chafe at the injustice of the accusation against Oliver and also against the idea of biological determinism itself. Luck, circumstances, environment, and influence are what, in theory, produces personality in Oliver Twist. Fagin certainly believes so: “Make ’em your models, my dear,” he says to Oliver about the Dodger and Charley, “do everything they bid you, and take their advice in all matters, especially the Dodger’s. He’ll be a great man himself, and make you one too, if you take pattern by him” (72). And later: “Once let him feel that he is one of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief, and he’s ours,—ours for his life!” (159). At a couple of brief moments, it seems as though Oliver is beginning, despite himself, to enjoy the prospect of life in Fagin’s den, joining with gusto in the practice games of pickpocketing, laughing at the bawdy jokes, and downing ale with the rest of them.³⁵ Food, Eagleton points out, is always an important signifier in Dickens’s world, and “the sausages Fagin is frying when Oliver arrives to his den count very much in his favour.”³⁶ The sausages highlight how spontaneous networks arise in Dickens from immediate, material needs (sausages play a similar role in Lazarillo de Tormes), whereas the genealogical family is an immaterial, abstract, almost spiritual network of belonging.

But when Oliver joins in with the activities of his new, material family, it is always very much despite himself (Dick would never permit himself to slide so far down the slope), and despite the spirit of natural law and immanent family belonging that moves through the novel, Oliver is always different from those around him.³⁷ His accent, bearing, and beliefs are always at odds with those of others of exactly the same background and upbringing, with the exception of his unfortunate double, Dick. Fagin tells Monks that he saw right away that it “was not easy to train [Oliver] to the business … he was not like other boys in the same circumstances.” “Curse him, no!” Monks replies, “or he would have been a thief long ago” (214). So while some personages, like the Artful Dodger, do “full justice to [their] bringing-up” (369), Oliver among the thieves, no matter how young he is, how unformed his character still is, is in the wrong place. When other characters in the novel remark it in his appearance and manners, it is as though they were intuiting glimmerings of the invisible hand of the romance plot, which has been machinating behind the scenes since the opening paragraphs of the novel to restore Oliver to his right name, his real life, and his blood kin.³⁸ As far as one side of the plot is concerned, he is not really Oliver Twist, even if we sometimes suspect that at times, when he is guzzling gin and sausages, he might secretly wish he was.

As soon as Oliver establishes links with the thieves, as soon as he is tied to them—as soon as he starts to be in danger of “really” becoming Oliver Twist—the genealogical plot begins its process of untying him, extricating him from it. Another chance encounter, this time with Mr. Brown-low, who recognizes Oliver’s innate noncriminality and takes him in, unties the bond of the first meeting with the Artful Dodger and Fagin. But although the circumstances of the encounter with Brownlow seem to be just as random as those that led him into the company of the Dodger, it belongs to the other order of Dickensian encounters, the kind of meeting underpinned by the legitimating genealogical family: the coincidence. The meeting with the Artful Dodger could in no sense be described as a coincidence, since the two boys have no prior history, no preexisting connection, no friends or relations in common. Whatever meaning or fruits their interaction will have will be determined by their continuing contact, by its progress; whatever relationship will come to exist between them will be made up as they go along. But the lines that connect Oliver to Brownlow are latent and preexisting. They are not generated by their meeting but activated by it.

It is through coincidences that the genealogical plot asserts itself, and in Oliver Twist, the number of coincidences is famously improbable. Philip Horne lays them out as follows:

The novel’s claims to verisimilitude are obviously compromised by this extravagant series of fortuitous events on which the plot turns. What are such contrivances doing in a novel so seriously and passionately concerned with painting a realistic portrait of society? In fact, this distortion in the novel’s realism shows just how important the family question is for Dickens: every single one of these coincidences has to do with the genealogical family, and specifically with Oliver accidentally running into or being recognizable to his family members.⁴⁰ The novel seeks, on the one hand, to portray the brute facts of the material world, but the abstract idea of genealogy is always working in opposition to this aim. Characters in the novel reflect openly on the coincidences, again, almost as though they recognize the genealogical plot at work. Brownlow tells Grimwig that Oliver was delivered to him “by a stronger hand than chance” (312). Why could Oliver not simply have found favor and fortune with Brown-low without it also involving the revelation of his parentage and his reunion with his relations?⁴¹ (Moll Flanders, after all, begins with a detailed account of the circumstances of her own birth in which her paternity is not mentioned at all).⁴²

The question of the family is thus the key pressure point in the novel. At issue is not so much family relationships themselves—the bland, motionless, pastoral households of Brownlow and the Maylies—but the alternative to them: the criminal, illegitimate relationships created in the mill of London life for which the lifeless construct of the blood family is an antidote. It is the tendency of these bonds to exceed their immediate, functional character as impermanent byproducts of public institutions and economic hardship and to congeal into actual coherent, self-perpetuating structures that provokes the genealogical dénouement to break them apart. The material reality of nonfamily communities in the city is a powerful and fascinating one, the novel seems to say, but it cannot offer a formal, ideal structure on which to map time, identity, or the world.

The dénouement of Oliver Twist is unflinching and brutal in its uprooting and dissolution of the nonfamily bonds that have started to sprout in the city. Fagin and Bill Sikes are both killed. Fagin, the magnetic nucleus around which the networks threatened to stabilize and the one who hints at an alternative to biological reproduction by actively inducting young new recruits into his household, is the one whose death is described at most length and with the most drama. His latest recruit, Noah Claypole, does not end the novel as part of a community, but as a lone agent operating the streets with his unloved girlfriend, adrift of any sort of fellowship. The Artful Dodger is transported to the colonies, implicitly figured here—as they will be explicitly in Conan Doyle—as a world populated by migrants without family ties or history, a place where London’s nongenealogical tendencies can be extrapolated to their full extent.

The nonfamily ties made in London itself, however, are all undone, and Oliver is bound back permanently to his (unfamiliar) kin. In fact, the novel’s conclusion seems to suggest that the purpose of the dénouement is not to serve up justice to individual wrongdoers (the dastardly Noah Claypole, after all, escapes punishment), but to dissolve and disperse illegitimate communities: “Monks retired … to a distant part of the New World. … As far from home died the chief remaining members of his friend Fagin’s gang” (451).⁴³ Why could these anonymous survivors not have spent their days in the workhouse, like the Bumbles, or ended up in the criminal justice system? After all, there is no apparent reason, since Oliver has been delivered safely home and crime proven not to pay, that they should not have regrouped, joined other gangs, or even remained in London and turned to an honest trade (as Nancy is entreated to do by Rose Maylie). The emphasis the novel places on their dispersal is designed as a contrast with Oliver’s kinship group, which leaves the tangles of the city and retreats to tightly clustered family life in the knowable world of the countryside:

As the thieves of Fagin’s gang are scattered round the world, the characters associated with Oliver’s blood family conversely gather themselves together into a single tribal unit, centered around the marriage of Rose Fleming and Harry Maylie. It could be argued that this community is pushing the limits of the traditional family—it includes, after all, an adoptive father, and eventually attracts such extraneous appendages as Mr. Grimwig, the Colonel Pickering to Mr. Brownlow’s Henry Higgins. Waters is right that “despite the importance of genealogy in securing Oliver’s personal and social identity, the family that is reconstituted at the end of the book contains only one relationship that is based on blood,” Oliver and his newfound aunt, Rose Maylie.⁴⁴ But at the same time, what bind this happily-ever-after community, in contrast to Fagin’s dissolved fraternity, are the marriage of Rose and Henry, the blood relationship between Oliver and his aunt, and the ties between Oliver and Brownlow, which have their origins in Oliver’s dead parents. Genealogy and marriage are the glue that holds this final, rural community together and give their group meaning and structure, even if its density also pulls in the odd peripheral satellite.

This ruthless and far-fetched genealogical conclusion to Oliver Twist has understandably induced critics to see the family plot in Dickens as being an “anti-nomadic wish-fulfilment dream,” a blind assertion of the monopoly of the family in the face of rival constellations thrown up by industrialization and urban expansion.⁴⁵ But such an interpretation defers unduly to the end of the novel, when the family implausibly triumphs and obstacles to its progress are dissolved and dismissed by its natural force. To read the plot of Oliver Twist as a pure victory for the genealogical family misses the fact that the situations and individuals with whom Oliver associates in his long wait for his inheritance are not simply impediments to a genealogical wish fulfillment but constitute a robust alternative to it, a whole other model of identity and community that theoretically could have won out. It is Oliver’s participation in criminal activity, moreover, that actually causes the great family reunion to come about—first, the expedition to pick pockets with the Dodger and Charley that leads to the run-in with Brownlow and, later, the botched burglary with Bill Sykes that delivers him to the Maylies. The activity of the deviant networks generates even the genealogical coincidences that are their ultimate undoing. The novel’s form consists less of a family plot that is hindered and delayed by various setbacks and blocking agents, and more of a struggle for control between two different types of family plot: preindustrial, dynastic marriage and paternity narratives, where all relations are preordained, visible, and immutable, against the new clusters that coalesce through necessity, convenience, and chance in the urban jungle.⁴⁶

This struggle between the two models of family is figured most graphically by the way the two groups spend so much of the novel physically snatching Oliver back and forth between them: lost by his mother to the workhouse, and then to Bumble, Sowerberry, and finally Fagin; restored by the “stronger hand than chance” to Brownlow; kidnapped again by the thieves; returned by coincidence to the Maylies; and so on. A bet that Grimwig lays with Mr. Brownlow before Oliver is kidnapped back by Nancy and Bill sums up the dynamics of this family plot. Oliver has been rescued from Fagin’s den by Brownlow and wishes to do his benefactor a favor by delivering books and money to a bookseller across town; Mr. Brownlow thinks that Oliver should be back in twenty minutes.

Grimwig’s bet goes to the heart of the novel. Oliver is about to leave the “family” home presided over by a portrait of his own late mother and make a trip through the green world of the city outside (a little like Red Riding-Hood). There has been some doubt and discussion already between them about whether Oliver is really the innocent victim of unscrupulous criminals, as he says he is, and as his angelic features, so strikingly similar to those of the woman in the portrait on Brownlow’s wall would indicate, or whether he is really a pickpocket on the make—whether, in fact, he is really Oliver Twist. Grimwig thinks he is, that he is a product of his environment and training and thus a pickpocket. And if he is really Oliver Twist then he won’t come back; he will go out the door and slot right back into the criminal underworld where he belongs. Brownlow disagrees; in fact, he is so convinced that Oliver Twist is not really Oliver Twist that he initially mishears his name as “Oliver White.” It is a telling mistake, for Brownlow believes Oliver to be white not only in the sense that he is morally pure but also in the sense that he is a blank page, unmarked and unwritten upon. For Brownlow (and ultimately for the novel), Oliver arrives at his doorstep remarkably unshaped by the “buffetings,” friendships, and experiences of his rough and colorful life. His character and his face are marked only by his heredity. Incidents, contacts, adventures do not etch themselves anywhere on his personality or features.

Brownlow’s prediction that Oliver will come back, and Grimwig’s counter-assertion that he will not, are presented in the text in an offhand way, a comical difference of opinion about the boy’s honesty. But Brown-low’s view is also an encapsulation of the novel’s faith in the “stronger hand than chance” that more than once, against all odds, delivers Oliver back to his genealogical family. What Brownlow predicts is the dénouement, in which Oliver will sooner or later be cut loose from whatever entanglements he might find in the city outside his door and rejoin his natural fold. Grimwig—who has no relations, no family, and no history of courtship himself (as Brownlow does), and who attaches himself unconventionally as an outsider to the family group at the end of the novel—represents the countercurrent to this view. For Grimwig—as his own relationship with Brownlow attests—the city is a place that creates lasting affinities.

Brownlow’s confident prediction that Oliver will come back underlines Oliver’s role as a hero of inaction, a protagonist who has but to wait for his family expectations to come through, kill time until his genealogical ship comes in. On one level, as we know, the action of the novel finally bears Brownlow out: Oliver is miraculously restored to them, the “anti-nomadic wish-fulfillment” fantasy is satisfied. But at the end of the novel, there is still some disagreement on the subject:

It may be a joke, but in a novel whose central plot concern has been the question of Oliver’s return or disappearance, it is a significant exchange. In an immediate sense, Grimwig was right: Oliver did not return. Not only in terms of the original wager, when the boy left the house with the books and the money and failed to show back up, but also in the wider and more important sense that Oliver, passive hero, never returns of his own accord; he is returned by invisible forces, not by any action or effort either of his own or on the part of Brownlow and his associates.

This is in contrast to the ways in which Oliver is returned and rebound to Fagin’s family. Oliver’s initial meeting with the Artful Dodger was a random encounter but not a coincidence, as those with Brownlow and the Maylies were. By the same token, whereas Brownlow can have an almost mystical faith that Oliver will be returned to him by invisible forces of natural law, Fagin can have no such belief in a magical power that will deliver Oliver back to his den. Waiting and passivity are on Brownlow’s side, on the side of genealogy; coincidences happen, things “turn up.”⁴⁷ For the criminals, however, there are no coincidences or expectations: like Lazarillo de Tormes, they have to make things happen through their own plans and efforts. Compare the certainty and passivity of Brownlow—who lets Oliver leave and sits in the drawing room waiting for his return as the sun goes down outside and the clock hands advance—with the flurry of activity and frantic scheming of the thieves when they lose Oliver. No natural law will kick in on their behalf; they must work and plot to get Oliver back. They operate by design, stratagem, and activity—they plot against the plot. (There is a relationship here, which we will see more clearly in later chapters, between queerness and manual labor—working, manufacturing, and producing—and, conversely, between the genealogy and inherited or commodified wealth whose labor goes unexamined). This plotting takes on a significant form, on that occasion when Oliver does not, as Grimwig says, come back. “Oh my dear brother,” Nancy first shouts as she physically pulls Oliver away from his life with Brownlow, before elaborating to the alarmed bystanders that Oliver “ran away near a month ago from his parents, who are hard-working and respectable people, and joined a set of thieves and bad characters, and almost broke his mother’s heart” (122–23). This stratagem, to pretend that they are his family and that Brownlow and his household are the thieves, tells something close to one of the novel’s deeper truths: in concrete, everyday terms, Nancy is an older sister to Oliver. As she says, quite truthfully, to the bystanders in the same scene, “he knows me”; she is familiar. In this scene, the criminal network is trying to usurp the genealogical family’s hold on Oliver, and Nancy’s protestations highlight the parallels between the two groups, the criminals’ claims to legitimacy.

The fact that this criminal family mimics and threatens Oliver’s natural family is given further force by the fact that Oliver does have an actual, natural brother, one Edward Leeford, known as Monks. Nancy brings about her own demise through her heroic fulfillment of her sisterly duty toward Oliver. It is the strength and reality of her bond with him that secures his future and her end. The malevolent Monks, on the other hand, proves to be the novel’s most hardened and relentless criminal, but, in the final, merciless settling of genealogical accounts, he is allowed to survive. The opposition between Monks and Nancy—the fake sister who behaves like a real one, and the natural brother who behaves as an implacable, criminal enemy—points to the novel’s ambivalence about its own genealogical dénouement. Brownlow’s prediction about Oliver, after all, could be made with equal confidence about Monks—namely, that he will come back. The invisible hand of genealogical coincidence ensures that Monks remorselessly shadows Oliver, turning up to thwart and harass him at every unlikely turn. Monks is a dark double of the genealogical plot, the sinister expression of this invisible hand which defeats all initiative and effort in a predetermined, inexorable persecution of the individual, whatever he might do or whomever he might meet.

Another interesting doubling, as Philip Horne points out, is the one between Fagin and Brownlow, both capitalist “old gentlemen.”⁴⁸ Fagin’s imitation of Brownlow in the pickpocketing game played for Oliver’s benefit goes along with the group’s general doubling and imitation of Oliver’s upper-class blood relatives. An interesting biographical note is the source of the name Fagin; it seems to originate in Dickens’s traumatic childhood days working in the blacking factory.⁴⁹ It is the name not of a tormentor or exploiter but a benefactor, an older boy in the factory who showed him “the trick of using the string and tying the knot.”⁵⁰ “Benefactor” will be a key term in Great Expectations, the very term, in a sense, that leads us from the paternity plots of the Victorian novel to the radical narrative experiments of Joyce and Proust. It is hard not to be struck also by the fact that the original Bob Fagin taught Dickens how to tie literal knots, when the Fagin of the novel is the one who ties figurative ones, who tries to keep Twist twisted. (Again, the connection between the queer family and manual labor is striking). The last word of Oliver Twist, a novel characterized so strikingly by a battle between wandering and stillness, homelessness and home, is “erring.” The knots of the novel are ultimately untied by the dénouement in this case, but Fagin has descendants in the later Dickens whose errant bonds will be not so easy to undo.

The family dynamics of Oliver Twist reach a fuller and more troubled expression in Bleak House (1852–53). This novel, too, is built around the battle for control of plot and character between the genealogical family and the queer attachments of the city, but in Bleak House the outcome of this struggle is quite different. As the city expands and its deviant networks proliferate, the genealogical plot charged with undoing them starts to creak and fail itself. Even more powerfully than in Oliver Twist, the London of Bleak House is figured as a whirlpool that draws everything into it. Its underworld networks have a new density and solidity to them; they are becoming true centers of gravity. The novel’s first sentence is the single word “London.” Bleak House depicts the city as a universe unto itself, and Dickens takes the queer laws of identity, community, and personal formation that operate in this universe as his subject.⁵¹

Unattached, anonymous individuals are always prone to gather into ad hoc clusters in all corners of the city’s world, in networks of criminal conspiracies, in unofficial erotic arrangements, in ramshackle shelters such as Tom-All-Alone’s, in public institutions (Chancery), in boarding-houses, under bridges, in forgotten corners of the city. In Oliver Twist, the lawless city crowds were ultimately regulated, contained, and kept in check by the formal structure of the genealogical plot, a natural law powerful enough to impose order on the chaos. In Bleak House, however, the “criminal” content of the city has grown too big for the family plot to contain. The book’s own length reflects this, in a sense, as does the family court case at the novel’s heart, which will be overwhelmed by the complexity of its own content, offering a troubling parallel to the novel’s own structure.

Symbolically and literally, Bleak House is divided between the city and the country. The “London” which opens the novel, a world of unattached, and thus infinitely attachable, strangers, is countered by a rural countryside mapped in terms of great family houses: the great Dedlock estate at Chesney Wold, most of all, but also, to an extent, Bleak House itself, a house whose inhabitants are bound to one another by transparent genealogical ties of blood and marriage. As in Oliver Twist, a genealogical plot engine operates in Bleak House to provide a solution (or dissolution) to the problem of the new root systems sprouting across the city. The dénouement of Bleak House, too, works its way through the tangled mass of the city’s networks as it uncovers and picks out hidden strands of genealogy that tie the protagonists back to the knowable world of Chesney Wold and transparent lineage. As the long dénouement restores individuals to their genealogical roots in the countryside, it simultaneously, as in Oliver Twist, undoes the new, unstable connections they make in the city.

The key difference between Oliver Twist and Bleak House is that in the later novel the web of illegitimate connections generated by “London” has become so complex and unwieldy that the genealogical plot is unable to disentangle it of its own accord and outside help has to be brought in to unravel the mysteries, to pick out the genealogical threads that are hidden in the web of city connections. This help takes the form of a detective, an intervention that critics have in other contexts understood to be a signal of modernity and which is a development of great significance for the shifting role of the family in Dickens and for the modernist novels that come later.⁵² Inspector Bucket is not a modern-feeling gimmick, there to complicate and update a tried and tested plot formula; nor is he one more character type for Dickens to “throw on the fire,” to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase. Rather, his late arrival onstage seriously affects the very ideas of structure and plot as they were understood in Oliver Twist.⁵³

The whole point of Dickens’s genealogical plot, after all, and the whole point of its trademark device of coincidence, is that it is natural and unforced, that it happens automatically. The aloof passivity of the family plot—its sense of narrative entitlement—sets it apart from the effort, activity, and stratagems required of its criminal rivals. It is for this reason that the question “Will Oliver come back?” gets an automatic “yes” in Oliver Twist; however much the criminals scheme and maneuver to prevent its happening and to keep Oliver twisted up in relationships outside the family, however much they intervene to make him stray (and the narrative digress), the law of the family guarantees his return (and the plot’s return to its own beginnings). This helps to explain one of the most controversial moments in Bleak House, the death of Krook, who possesses the key family document of the plot. The way the novel dispenses with Krook, by having him inexplicably burst into flames, was famously criticized by George Henry Lewes as absurd (and was defended by Dickens in the preface to the second edition), but we can also read Krook’s sudden, improbable immolation as a graphic representation of the crisis in the automatic family plot that necessitates the intervention of Bucket. The spontaneous combustion parodies the genealogical dénouement, the “stronger hand than chance” that sets the world in order, undoes unnatural ties, and removes obstacles to the plot’s resolution. Krook’s fate mocks the way the family plot miraculously intervenes to put things to right and shows just how stretched the relationship between the family plot and reality has become.⁵⁴ The provocative implausibility of Krook’s end caricatures the way the genealogical romance must contrive to remove obstacles or remainders to the family system; his demise, in other words, satirizes the fates of Fagin, Dodger, and Nancy.

By the same token, Bucket’s intervention marks the end of family as the natural order of plot; he points to a queer narrative shift that will prove central to Joyce and Proust. But Bleak House itself, of course, is not a modernist novel. The orphans Esther and Jo introduce the mystery of paternity into the novel, and in the end, Esther’s parentage is revealed, tying her to the Dedlock lineage (perhaps the name Dedlock itself even anticipates the dead end of this genealogical plot).⁵⁵ This discovery turns out to have little material import for Esther. Nonetheless, the revelation is of the same order as that which extricates Oliver from Fagin’s fraternity and ties him back to the pastoral, genealogical world of Brownlow and the Maylies, and therefore it is significant for the novel’s structure. It is underscored by a “below-stairs” double, the reunification of Mrs. Rouncewell, the housekeeper at Chesney Wold, with her long-lost son, George. George is deeply entangled in the nonfamily networks of the city, a player in the murky, parallel underworld of Krook, Smallweed, Tulkinghorn, Jo, and Nemo, which, like Fagin’s gang, gives the novel most of its realist or colorful social content. George is an important symbolic figure in Bleak House, a sort of Oliver who leaves behind his natural family (strikingly, a saintly mother and unsympathetic brother), moves to London, gets caught up in criminality, and replaces his genealogical ties with expedient, outlawed attachments. George’s reattachment to his family and to Chesney Wold is a subplot that draws attention to the genealogical plot in operation as it tries to sort out all of the novel’s illegitimate relationships. However, George’s restoration to the genealogical order is not brought about by miraculous coincidences but by the deliberate machinations of Inspector Bucket.

In Bleak House the “stronger hand than chance” cannot deliver the dénouement of its own accord. Chance is what creates the tangled alternative networks of London in the first place, and in Bleak House chance and hazard prove to be stronger than coincidence and paternity. It is not the plot on its own, but the tireless plotting of Inspector Bucket that delivers the genealogical resolution. And even after Bucket’s intervention, long after the revelation of Esther’s parentage, the extrafamilial networks of the city—Tom-All-Alone’s, Chancery, the criminal underworld—remain extant and even vibrant, quite a contrast to the dramatic, conclusive dispersal of the criminal family at the end of Oliver Twist.

It was the natural legitimacy of the blood family that brought about the dénouement of Oliver Twist, in spite of the energetic contrivances of its criminal rivals. In Bleak House, legitimacy alone is not enough to guarantee success, and active intervention is required not just by a specially assigned agent but specifically by an enforcer of the law. The battle between Fagin and Brownlow for Oliver and for Oliver Twist was a battle between legitimate and illegitimate connections. At stake in Bleak House, the reason a law enforcer is necessary, are the relative statuses of legitimacy and illegitimacy themselves. It is fitting, for this reason, that this novel takes the law courts as the centre of its action, and the working-through of the law, its procedures, consequences, successes, and failures, as one of its central subjects. The law in Bleak House functions as an allegory for the family, the system that provides for inheritance, control, and legitimacy. As a policeman, Bucket is a guarantor of legitimacy and the rule of law, the enemy of criminal conspiracy. In narrative terms, too, he is the agent of natural law and legitimate bonds, the opponent and unraveler of illegitimate connections, the enforcer of the family plot. Bucket highlights the connection between the police and the family, both institutions invested in the maintenance of order and, especially, both the enemies of individual anonymity.⁵⁶ Bucket is needed in Bleak House because, in this bigger, queerer, more complex London, the family is no longer able to do its novelistic job of maintaining narrative order and undoing anonymity. Waiting will not work in Bleak House, and this is why it engages, in its story of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, in such a savage satire of the whole idea of “expectations.”

A graphic allegory for the family plot lies at the heart of Bleak House, in the shape of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a mammoth court case which, as it winds its way slowly through the courts, touches almost every character in the novel in one way or another. The suit is charged with the settlement of an estate on the rightful heirs, who must be identified from among a morass of competing claimants and documents, and it is thus concerned in the most immediate sense with legitimacy, continuity, and the question of family.⁵⁷

Critics have differed on the symbolic meaning of Jarndyce and Jarndyce within the novel. The lawsuit occupies a great deal of space in Bleak House, and it is responsible for many of the twists and turns of the novel’s plot. It is obvious to any reader that the story of the case has an important symbolic role not only because it determines the fortunes of many of the novel’s protagonists but also because in its length and complexity, it is so often described in terms applicable to the novel itself.⁵⁸ I want to suggest that its allegorical significance can be extended beyond Bleak House to Dickens’s narrative world as a totality. The morbid, obsessive waiting for this inheritance to come through, not only on the part of the presumptive heir, Richard Carstone, who is destroyed by it, but also of Ada, John Jarndyce, Miss Flite, and many others—is a ferocious satire on the passive waiting of Oliver Twist, the automatic model of inheritance that the genealogical plot implies. Again and again, the novel uses Jarndyce and Jarndyce to warn that waiting and hoping are at odds with the ordinary exigencies of lived reality. Instead of waiting for his inheritance to be assigned to him, Richard is admonished to make himself; Richard’s mistake is to think that he is made by his imaginary genealogical destiny instead of his immediate, material existence.

Richard is distinct from other disappointed heirs in Victorian fiction in that, while in theory he is not disappointed (he is eventually named heir), in practice, in material terms, his expectations come to naught. In the lawsuit—an explicitly family affair—what we see is a form—the legal system—dealing with content. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a figure for the failure of the family plot, for the breakdown of the device that ought to be containing and structuring the content of the novel’s world, as it did in Oliver Twist, but that now, though formally it does reach its dénouement, fails to deliver reality. The plot goes through its motions but has no material significance; real life takes place outside it. The suit is a reflection on late style, or better, on late form, on the changing deep structure of Dickens’s novelistic world.

Spawning paperwork and expectations as it goes along, moving inexorably through distractions and digressions, sorting through a range of apparently unrelated characters, unknotting the legitimate from the illegitimate, the suit goes through a process very similar to that of the family dénouement of Oliver Twist.⁵⁹ Like Oliver in the matter of his own family inheritance, the parties to Jarndyce and Jarndyce are rendered passive and incapable of affecting its outcome (a point that the novel underlines most dramatically in the case of Richard). The suit works away behind the scenes, invisibly and inscrutably, while the hopeful, expectant parties stand helplessly by, waiting for the twists to be over and for the expectations delivered into the laps of the rightful, natural heirs. Like the genealogical dénouement, it is the job of the Chancery suit to sort out from among a tangled mass of pretenders who is legitimately connected to whom and how and what the rightful, natural links between present and past are. Like the dénouement of the family plot, the suit dissolves false claims to kinship, rearranges chaotic, confusing clusters of individuals into a transparent genealogical array, and dispenses with those who do not fit into its strict schema of legitimacy.

As a representation of the genealogical plot which ought to be untwisting and reordering the disordered, makeshift networks of London, but which in this novel is clearly overwhelmed by the sheer power and complexity of these networks, Jarndyce and Jarndyce offers a troubled reflection on the fate of the family plot since Oliver Twist.⁶⁰ Most troubling of all as an allegory for the family plot is the suit’s pointless end: the true legatees are discovered and definitively identified as our heroes Richard and Ada, but the fortune has been entirely consumed by legal costs. So the estate is legally, theoretically settled, but in concrete terms it “lapses and melts away.” While the process of the Chancery suit shapes the lives and destinies of characters in Bleak House, its result has no bearing on the plot at all. The parallel with the device of the family plot is clear: the jumbled realities of the world are so tangled and complex that the project of a family dénouement that would unknot and rearrange then in genealogical terms has become an unnatural stretch. The family plot is simply overwhelmed by the abundance of claims, parallels, and alternatives to it. The narrative device of genealogical resolution, like the legal machinery of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, instead of delivering actual results, instead of neatly packaging content, becomes pure form, empty packaging.⁶¹

The genealogical dénouement in Bleak House, like the Jarndyce suit, technically achieves its work: Nemo’s identity is discovered, in parallel with the settlement of Jarndyce on the Carstones. But like the suit’s settlement, this result is futile: Nemo and Lady Dedlock are gone, and Esther remains effectively an orphan.

The contrast, in terms of material outcome, between Esther’s family romance and Oliver’s shows how the genealogical plot begins to run into difficulty in later Dickens novels. But outside of its formal proceedings, Jarndyce and Jarndyce does have an accidentally productive effect on its world. Although the actual legal proceedings, like the genealogical dénouement, are supposed to have the effect of dissolving illegitimate bonds and claims, the suit in fact generates, as a sort of byproduct, alternative, nonfamily communities around it. The case goes on for so long—like the apparently endless “middle” of the novel itself—that impromptu, make-shift fraternities cluster and solidify around it. Miss Flite, Nemo, Krook, and all of the other individuals who drift through the world of the Chancery end up remaining there long enough to take root. Their community above Krook’s rag-and-bottle shop is an ersatz-family offshoot of the very process that is meant to reassert the family and undo nongenealogical ties.

The antifamilies that accumulate around Chancery are symbolically reflected in Krook’s inscrutably arranged collection of innumerable letters and artifacts and in Miss Flite’s weirdly named family of birds. The organization of both collections suggest deviant, nonstandard forms of ordering that recall Bumble’s antigenealogical system of naming foundlings. Miss Flite’s system for naming her “family” of birds (twenty-five fixed hereditary “titles”: Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach) is redolent of Mr. Bumble’s fanciful genealogy—Swubble, Twist, Unwin, Vilkins.⁶² Bleak House is full of piles and collections with no commonly accepted system of order, categorization, or continuity. There is always a sense in Dickens of the potential value of random accumulations of junk or stolen objects, and in fact they are often set up in opposition to the family: Fagin’s hoard of pilfered handkerchiefs, necklaces, and pocket watches; Krook’s shop; the dust heaps or Venus’s rag-and-bone operation in Our Mutual Friend.⁶³ When the abstract fact of belonging to a notional line of ancestors is no longer sufficient to constitute an identity, then the individual must marshal the actual, concrete material of the world and build something meaningful for herself from it. Like the flotsam that Stephen ponders on the beach in Ulysses when mulling over the question of his own relationship, Dickens’s scrap heaps represent unofficial cultural material on which his plots of identity often turn.

The endless collections of objects in Bleak House are a double for the extemporized affiliations that spring up around the London of the novel: the antifamilies that grow like dustballs in the corners of the metropolis and its institutions, around Chancery, in Krook’s boardinghouse, and, most of all, at Tom-All-Alone’s, where characters remain anonymous, where associations are fleeting and contingent on immediate exigencies and rarely outlast them. With these accumulations of people and objects, Dickens elaborates a strain already present in Oliver Twist and develops it into something approaching a fully fledged narrative possibility. In the end, these collections of objects and people, and the strange systems according to which they are ordered, have more purchase on the content of lived reality than the legitimating procedures of either the law courts or the family plot. Form, that is, must ultimately be generated by its content, and in Bleak House the queer content of metropolitan London is chafing under the genealogical form imposed on it. (Moreover, the novel offers a number of strikingly negative portraits of the domestic nuclear family, such as the Jellybys).⁶⁴ The metropolitan muddle that the family dénouement restrains and undoes is itching to thrive on its own queer terms. But the novel’s view of the nongenealogical home is, indeed, as quite a bleak house; as the fate of the lawsuit emphasizes, the collapse of the family under the weight of deviant metropolitan communities is viewed as just that: a collapse.⁶⁵ The novel sees no possibility of continuity, coherence, or form in the networks that overwhelm the genealogical plot. When the automatic links of the knowable, family universe no longer hold, Bleak House suggests, our search for enduring connections with others is reduced to that of detectives trying to discern individuals through the fog. The “stronger hand than chance” is reduced to literally blowing up characters who stand in the way of the dénouement; the alternative to the family, in the murky, fallen world of Bleak House, is summed up by the twin fates of Lady Dedlock and Jo—disorder, isolation, and a homelessness that is both literal and existential.

The competition between the family and criminal outsiders as centers of narrative coherence is decisively resolved in favor of the criminals in Great Expectations. The great question of the novel is that of time and experience: how to give meaningful narrative shape to a life. The most structurally self-conscious of Dickens’s novels, Great Expectations is obsessed in equal measure with formal coherence and with the inadequacy of the family to provide it. Its first-person point of view, compacting several temporal perspectives, poses in itself the problem of the concert of beginnings and endings. With its foreshadowings, doublings, repetitions, keen sense of chronological development, periodic recurrence of symbols and motifs, and complex, highly self-conscious interrelationship of beginning, middle, and end, the novel has a much tighter and unified symbolic architecture than its predecessors. But this form is the result of a painful struggle in the novel, through guilt and horror and loss, to find a fitting frame for Pip’s life; it is an attempt to answer the question posed by D. A. Miller in Bringing Out Roland Barthes: “So long as narrative is wedded to marriage and kin to the family, what is left for us to tell?”⁶⁶

Miller asks this question in the context of homoerotic subtexts in certain plotlines in David Copperfield that are never fully assimilated to the official story of David’s life. But Great Expectations offers a model of narrative in which illegitimate relationships can be not only included but also form-giving. The novel’s opening encapsulates in a concentrated form the story of family and narrative in modernism. The action begins, literally, in the family graveyard with a futile attempt by the young protagonist to connect with his dead siblings and parents through their tombstones; he forms instead an unbreakable tie there with a criminal stranger.⁶⁷ The first scene of the novel encapsulates the queer family system to which Dickens has been tending: the biological family is in the grave; life and meaning are generated by a connection with a queer outlaw.

A turning point between the Victorian family novel and the revolutionary experiments of high-modernist narrative, Great Expectations is a novel about lasting bonds outside the legitimate, genealogical family and about the potential of these bonds to endure and to give coherent shape to time and experience. If Bleak House shows the family plot sinking helplessly into fog and chaos, the drama of Great Expectations is about how experience and time might be meaningfully arranged otherwise, about other kinds of relationships that might shape the story of the self across time. The novel experiments with the creation of a stable narrative world that is formally sustained by ties outside those of family and marriage—ties that displace several ostensible promises of genealogical dénouements.

The title immediately announces the novel as a self-conscious reflection on the major preoccupations of Dickens’s oeuvre: the nature and meaning of future hopes and past inheritances. The novel opens by referring to and spelling out the expectations its own title ironically alludes to with its opening four words: “My father’s family name.” And so Pip, like Oliver, begins his life with a misnaming: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.” Like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations opens with a gap between a “true” formal name—a lost, ideal father’s family name—and a “false” name, one used in everyday lived life. Where Oliver’s everyday, functional name is the “wrong” name, Pip’s father’s family name is wrong, and the garbled—twisted—version with which he baptizes himself, twists into his own shape, is the “right” one, a nonfamily name that he will grow into. In other words, whereas Oliver Twist is not “really” Oliver Twist, the persona created by his crossing paths with beadles, pickpockets, and prostitutes, but a whole preformed family identity with which he is presented, Pip’s growing up consists of his being forged and his forging himself into Pip. Oliver is not himself until he has shed the identity of his everyday, criminal life, but Pip is nothing else. He will inhabit and inherit the name that happenstance throws his way and that, early in his life, the convict makes him enunciate with conviction (“Give it mouth!”). Pip’s stuttering over all the Ps that would constitute his father’s family name, Philip Pirrip, signifies not only his own but the novel’s lack of faith in genealogical identity.

The failure of genealogy to create a framework for the self in relation to society and time, and the consequent appeal to the queer realities of the world instead, is played out in dramatic, compressed form in the famous first pages of the novel. Pip immediately follows the story of his failure to pronounce his father’s family name with an attempted genealogical solution to the problem of his identity as he tries to link himself to the past and to the rest of humanity, to get a relative sense of his own identity through his family’s tombstones—the abstract sign of their posthumous presence in the world. Unable to baptize himself with his family name, Pip looks for his expectations, for his sense of himself in time, among the graves of his dead kin, hoping to transform the symbol of their vanished presence into living reality and place himself in the world by inserting himself into a family line:

Great Expectations thus opens with a dramatic failure of the family as a system of connection between the individual and the world. This failed connection is immediately followed by a spectacularly successful and powerful one: the sudden appearance of Magwitch. In Pip’s encounter with the criminal on the fens, Magwitch usurps the role of the family in the novel. The encounter with Magwitch, releasing energies that, in Peter Brooks’s terms, must be “bound,” ensures the meaningful connection between different points in time, and it is Magwitch’s bequest, both economic and psychological, that “gives mouth” to the different chronological Is of the narrator.⁶⁹ The passage of the years in the novel is given rhythm and regularity mostly by the punctuated aftermath of this encounter. Objects, such as the file that Pip steals from Joe for Magwitch and that shows up again, years later, at various moments across the novel; characters, such as Jaggers, Wemmick, or the mysterious man who gives Pip two pound notes; and, in parallel with them, the feelings that are the issue of the encounter with Magwitch all return at intervals throughout the narrative, giving a retrospective pattern and sequentiality to the novel and a sense of wholeness and unity to Pip’s life.

Wholeness, unity, and coherence are supposedly the preserve of the family, things that can be guaranteed only by marriage and reproduction. As D. A. Miller suggests, whatever falls outside these heterosexual rituals is by definition partial, broken, or marginal, yet Pip’s encounter with Magwitch is a bond of inheritance that the novel can never undo. Great Expectations is a novel of gravestones, of connection to the dead; in the scarred face of Magwitch looming through the fog over the Pirrip family tombstones, we have the face of modernism, of a living, contingent, illegitimate father superseding the narrative of the family graves, a deviant, queer, affiliative binding-together that no genealogical dénouement can untie. Consider the way in which the incident is narrated:

Pip’s failure to pronounce his father’s family name in the first lines of the novel is followed immediately by a fugitive criminal directing him to articulate his own garbled name—not only to utter it but to repeat it, to “give it mouth”—to believe in it, to inhabit it. “Giving mouth” to his criminal name is exactly what Fagin wanted Oliver to do when he tried to train him as a pickpocket, and it is exactly what Oliver does not do (which is why Brownlow cannot even hear it correctly). But in Great Expectations Pip does do what his criminal benefactor wants; the whole novel is concerned with how to give full moral expression to the twisted name. Magwitch, a criminal like Fagin, gives authenticity and legitimacy to the name “Pip.” (Later on, he will make it a stipulation of his secret bequest to Pip that he keep the name for the rest of his life.) This underlines the connection, as in Oliver Twist, between a nonfamily name and criminality, but here Dickens also emphasizes Magwitch’s legitimization of this name, its transformation from a mistake, a deviation, into a fully fledged viable truth. Maturity in the novel will be almost synonymous with Pip’s gradual embrace of the “criminal” self of his childhood. The great inheritance delivered by this novel’s dénouement and the material and moral expectations that the novel finally bequeaths consist of nothing more than this.

The first physical description of Magwitch underscores this aspect of the novel’s new vision of how identity is created: “A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars.” In the schema of Oliver Twist, Oliver is a pure family being to whom nothing sticks, whose character and identity have not been marked in any way by his experiences or interactions. Pip, however, will become what experience and encounters twist him into; he is not “really” Philip Pirrip. Similarly, our first view of Magwitch is of a man whose physical appearance is wholly created by the marks of experience, whose body clearly bears the traces not of his genetic identity but of his interactions with the world. Magwitch’s features, like Pip’s self, are sculpted by interaction, encounters, and experience.

The novel’s dramatic climax is when Magwitch returns to London to inspect his grown gentleman, and the adult Pip simultaneously realizes that the rough man in front of him is both the criminal who haunted his childhood and the author of his expectations. Since the recognition scene between child and parent (as occurs, mutatis mutandis, in both Bleak House and Oliver Twist) is the classic scene that resolves the foundling narrative, the space and dramatic energy that Great Expectations gives to this moment between Pip and Magwitch is a clear signal that their relationship is usurping the narrative function usually reserved for paternity.

The importance of the encounter with Magwitch for giving shape and structure to novelistic time is underscored by its double, the meeting with Herbert Pocket. Herbert remains Pip’s companion and parallel throughout the novel. No secret revelation of kinship ever links the two. Pip first meets Herbert (“the pale young gentleman”) by chance in Miss Havisham’s garden, where they fight. Years later—a purely nongenealogical coincidence—the pale young gentleman resurfaces as the son of Pip’s tutor, Matthew Pocket. They become friends, room together, and later open a business. Their bond is forged outside the framework of the family, a version of the one between Oliver and the Artful Dodger, a random encounter. Similarly, the relationship between Pip and Herbert is never invested with more than chance, but in giving a sense of continuity to Pip’s life narrative, it fulfils the function of a genealogical connection: it forges its own coincidences. If Magwitch fulfils the narrative function of Pip’s father, Herbert is his brother. Like Magwitch, (or Bumble with Oliver), Herbert even gives Pip a name, Handel.

A small linguistic detail connected to Herbert’s own name highlights the fact that the association between the two unrelated boys displaces and replaces the genealogical axis of fraternity: Pip’s initial impression of his dead biological brothers was 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” (3). In a novel that is so concerned with formal and symbolic consonance as well as with the whole question of names and naming, this, coming in the book’s crucial opening section, is a revealing detail. In the passage, Pip is futilely attempting to connect with his dead brothers by imagining what they looked like on the basis of their tombstones. The novel takes the attribute—pockets—that Pip substitutes for the features of his dead family, and transfers it as a name—a father’s family name, at that—onto Herbert, a living, extrafamilial outsider, the association with whom will usurp the narrative role of siblings in the novel. (Towards the end of the novel, Herbert’s role in the alternative family structure of the novel is bolstered further when Pip moves in to live with him and his wife).

The marriage plot, too, is overtly dislodged by Great Expectations. The encounter with Magwitch seems to be over almost immediately; the first sustained “event” of the novel is the plotline initiated by Pip’s visit to Miss Havisham and Estella in Satis House. This event, so clearly signaled in the novel as a significant beginning, sets off a train of narrative expectations in the reader and in Pip. These are the expectations of the marriage plot: erotic fulfillment with a correlated economic transference between the generations, the promise of the future. In setting the Satis House plot up like this as a false family promise, Dickens is playing with his readers’ expectations of his own conventions.⁷⁰ Little in Dickens’s work up to now would lead a reader to imagine that the plotline that begins with Pip’s visit to Satis House could possibly fail to have some sort of genealogical outcome, some revelation of heredity, some purchase on the future; we are trained to expect a family romance whenever it is signaled. But the dénouement shows Miss Havisham to have no material effect on Pip’s destiny or the shape of the narrative. Despite the intimations of long-lasting and fundamental narrative consequences that surround the opening of the Satis House plot, the big surprise of Great Expectations is that it leads nowhere and produces nothing.⁷¹ Expectations, the novel tells us, are something other than what we thought they were, something other than they were in Oliver Twist or Bleak House.

Great Expectations begins in world centered around a blacksmith’s forge, and although Pip does not become the blacksmith as planned by Joe with the aid of Miss Havisham, the forge remains at its symbolic heart. Pip, who ostensibly breaks off his blacksmith’s apprenticeship, learns to forge rather than inherit links between himself and the world. He learns not to wait for the miraculous unveiling of the threads binding him to the world but to forge ties, in the “smithy of his soul,” between past and present, between himself and others, and between different selves within himself.

Most tellingly of all, Great Expectations does include an elaborate and theoretically successful genealogical dénouement (Estella, Magwitch, and Molly), which yet remains irrelevant to the novel’s meaning and structure (Estella never has a relationship with either of her natural parents and remains, despite herself, Miss Havisham’s daughter to the end).⁷² Appropriately for a novel that opens in the graveyard of the family, it also includes a number of genealogical plot expectations—including Pip’s failed marriage plots to Biddy and Estella—that prove to be dead ends. The only kinds of bonds that produce structure and order in Great Expectations are precisely those “criminal” ties that were undone by the family dénouement in Oliver Twist and—with greater difficulty—in Bleak House. All of the vital narrative functions performed in earlier novels by family dénouements of heredity or marriage—the formal harmony of beginning and end, the retrospective revelation of significance, the transformation of random encounters into meaningful events—are carried out in Great Expectations by affiliations with antifamily criminal outsiders, chance encounters that are never justified as genealogical coincidences, that are never validated by genealogical discoveries, that never legitimize themselves through marriage. The novel emphasizes this by plotting a number of storylines that seem to promise to become formally constitutive family plots—that create the expectations of genealogical dénouement—but that are subsumed to the greater ordering force of the novel’s nonfamily plots. Most spectacular is the array of high narrative hopes that cluster around the Miss Havisham/Estella plotline, the expectations of marriage, kinship, and inherited wealth that are set up from almost the beginning of the novel, for the young Pip and Mrs. Joe as well as for the reader, and that are all, like Miss Havisham’s own marital hopes before them, destined to fail.

Great Expectations opens twice, with two powerful, unexpected encounters: first the terrifying meeting with the escaped convict on the fens and then the mysterious invitation to visit Miss Havisham in her gothic mansion. This double opening implicitly poses the question of which of these two, Magwitch or Miss Havisham, will turn out, in the final reckoning, to have been the “real” benefactor, the legitimate smith of Pip’s life, which one will turn out to be “family.” The clear suggestion is that it will be Miss Havisham, partly, of course, because a marriage prospect is so clearly flagged with Estella but also because Miss Havisham’s interest in Pip is—like Lady Dedlock’s for Esther—mysterious, deliberate, abstract, and associated with a great house, whereas Magwitch’s interest in him is—like Fagin’s for Oliver—accidental, immediate, material, and homeless. Miss Havisham is associated with a great house while Magwitch is a vagrant on the run and Fagin is the figure of the Wandering Jew. Fagin and Magwitch are not only associated with crime and homelessness but also with food (Fagin’s sausages, Magwitch’s “wittles”), professional “tools” (pocket-picking, the file), and immediate necessity. Miss Havisham and Lady Dedlock are positively anorexic: the wedding cake rots, uneaten; they have no material needs; they disdain vulgar expediency; and they are associated with the imagination rather than the body.

Narratologically, the similarities between Fagin and Magwitch are structural, synchronic ones; they embody the queer narrative element, the “stranger” who threatens the family, a figure who recurs in varying forms in all sorts of narratives. But the differences between them show how the function of this figure changes from the early to late Dickens. Fagin and Magwitch are hardened criminals who terrify the young protagonists of the novels even as they take them under their wing. Oliver’s relationship with Fagin is an attachment destined to be undone; it can only ever be an aberration, a deviation from the true plot of his life. In Oliver Twist, suspense and color and delay are provided by Fagin and crime, but form and coherence come through the law-abiding genealogical family to which he is opposed. Whereas Brownlow’s plot pushed Fagin to the margins of Oliver Twist and finally out of its world altogether, it is Magwitch (who returns from exile in the periphery of New Zealand) who becomes the center of the formal structure of Great Expectations; it is Herbert Pocket who is Pip’s lifelong companion; and it is unexamined family ties—such as Miss Havisham and the Pockets—that are consigned to the margins.

The novel’s nongenealogical resolution, however, is not simply a reverse dénouement, in which the family is abandoned and ties with strangers exalted. Some family relations in Great Expectations do last and are cherished—Pip’s relationship with Joe, for example, and the new family Joe founds with Biddy. The presence of Joe and Biddy’s son, “little Pip,” does offer the narrator some sort of melancholy comfort at the end of the novel, but it does not offer him a sense of continuity or a meaningful guarantee of the future. Big Pip remains very much extraneous to this settled domestic world, on the outside looking in, and neither he nor the novel as a whole ever looks to the future, remaining quite outside the rhythms and promises of family life.

The idea of waiting, the expectations of an imminent family inheritance, so relentlessly satirized in Bleak House, is what gives Great Expectations its title. Like Oliver Twist, it is an orphan novel, and it ends, as Oliver Twist does, with the founding of a new, idyllic family unit—the married Biddy, Joe, and their offspring, especially Little Pip (“‘We giv’ him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe, … ‘and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and we think he do’” [481]). But in Great Expectations, the orphan protagonist is not part of this family. Both he and the novel he narrates explicitly reject marriage and paternity as solutions to the problems of personal identity and narrative time. Pip is a confirmed bachelor, living with his best friend, Herbert Pocket, and Herbert’s wife, Clara; a child is named after him, but it is not related to him, a son he says he hopes to “borrow” but not own, to whom he will be a benevolent outsider; he chooses, in other words, the role of benefactor over that of father. (“Biddy,” Pip says in the closing scene, “you must give [Little] Pip to me, one of these days; or lend him, at all events.” Biddy refuses: “No, no, you must marry.” Pip replies: “I don’t think I shall … I am already quite an old bachelor” [481]).

The new marital family between Joe and Biddy that we encounter just before the end of Great Expectations is deliberately constructed so as to resemble as nearly as possible the family that Pip himself would have formed if Great Expectations was, indeed, a genealogical novel, that is to say, if Pip were in a narrative life whose shape and meaning could be determined by marriage and paternity. The proximity of this family unit to Pip and to what our own expectations were for how Pip’s story would find its end emphasizes Pip’s exclusion from it and reminds us that he is the protagonist of a different kind of novel. It poses the question of what sort of significance can lie outside such an ending and its promise of the future. By underlining Pip’s extraneousness to it, Joe and Biddy’s new domestic unit also underscores the “modernist” vision of Great Expectations.

Like the readers of the novel who have been implicitly promised it, Biddy hopes for Pip to get married.⁷³ Her expectations for Pip are those of the novel’s first, outraged readers, that he would leave the queer margins to enter the realm of legitimacy. The subtext is that Pip would make an honest man of himself in many senses; by marrying or procreating he would finally undo the bond with the criminal benefactor of his past and with his “criminal” childhood self.⁷⁴ But Great Expectations and Pip both eschew the promises and obligations of legitimacy—Biddy’s “expectations”—and refuse to mortgage the present to an endlessly deferred future. On the last page of the novel, Estella tells Pip that “suffering … has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape” (484). While Oliver Twist was realigned with his true self by being straightened out by the family plot, brought unscarred from the criminal wilderness back to the family hearth, Pip and Estella’s “real” selves are the bent selves of experience and encounters. And when Estella then says that in this better shape she has learnt to understand “what [Pip’s] heart used to be,” she is expressing the novel’s view, that generativeness and meaning are located in the past, not the future.

The novel ends by revisiting its beginnings among the tombstones of Pip’s dead family. In the final pages, Pip walks, as he did in his boyhood, from the forge to Miss Havisham’s house. On Pip’s first journey there, the house represented the promises and fantasies of the future: marriage, inheritance, material wealth, erotic satisfaction. But now the house is ruined; these promises have come to nothing; and what Pip now inherits is not a link to the future but a reimagined version of the past. He has a melancholy affection for the vision of family life represented by Joe, Biddy, and their children, but he is fully—in both senses of the word—outside it. Rejecting the genealogical promises of futurity, he chooses to remain a bachelor and a borrower, not generator, of children. Gently, Pip turns his back on the family and the future—his project, and the project of the novel, is not to have children, to project outward into the future, but to return to, reassess, and settle his accounts with the past.

In terms of family and narrative, the modernism of Great Expectations can be most immediately discerned from this aspect of its plot structure, which initiates and showcases an implicitly promised genealogical plotline that turns out to have no issue. At the novel’s outset, Pip’s family romance, revolving around his dreams of Satis House, seems more overt even than Oliver’s. The play of differences and similarities between the two boy protagonists is complex and revealing. Waters suggests that, unlike Oliver, “the orphan in Great Expectations attempts to escape his origins and make a new social identity for himself.”⁷⁵ But, like Stephen Dedalus, Pip is depicted as an orphan without fully being one. While his biological parents are dead, unlike Oliver he has a family in place to raise him in his sister and brother-in-law, Mrs. Joe and Joe. His orphanhood is almost a spiritual one, and its resolution comes not in socially advantageous genealogical discoveries but in the discovery and acceptance of a nonfamilial origin for himself.

There is also the famous fact that Miss Havisham’s house and life are lurid symbols of a failed marriage plot, of family expectations that went nowhere. The house itself, still laid out for a wedding fatally postponed decades ago, with Miss Havisham still in her rotting wedding dress, graphically relates the failure of the Satis House narrative to a broader sense in Dickens that the family and marriage plots of his early novels are no longer viable frameworks for thinking about or describing the world. The stopped clocks and the frozen past that reigns within the house stand in contrast to the rich sense of time that we get from the Magwitch plot. Satis House is caught in an eternal anticipation of plenitude (a time when things will be full, finished, enough, satis). Held in the unrelenting thrall of a future that never arrives, the world of Satis House offers a nightmare vision of the marriage plot and its expectations. Great Expectations is a novel concerned with chronology, progress, and change; the position at its narrative core of this household where time has stopped because it is waiting for an endlessly deferred wedding is a sign that the novel has no confidence in the marriage plot as a means to structure and regulate novelistic time.

Miss Havisham is the emblem of the failure of the marriage plot, the narrative genre of hope in the future not only in terms of her own history and traumatized existence but also because of the possible plot line that issues from her household, but the marriage of Pip to Estella, hinted at and anticipated from the first pages, fails to happen.⁷⁶ The long buildup to this marriage that never takes place emphasizes the fact that narrative time in this novel is being constructed along radical new lines.⁷⁷

Genealogy and marriage are now peripheral to the tightly structured and powerful schema of transmission and kinship in the novel. In the final analysis, none of the narrative movement or human relationships of Great Expectations can be mapped with the templates of marriage and paternity that the novel sets up at the outset; contingent ties outside the family turn out to be the most abiding and generative. The investment in futurity that the family plot represents has been entirely foregone, and the novel’s only promises are retrospective.