Great Expectations — Commentary

In brief

Great Expectations is told by a man who got almost everything wrong and knows exactly how. Pip, an orphan “brought up by hand” by his sister at a Kent forge, helps an escaped convict on the marshes, is hired as a plaything by a jilted heiress, and is told one day that an unnamed benefactor will make him a gentleman. He assumes the heiress is paying and that her ward Estella is meant for him. He is wrong on both counts, and the discovery of who has actually been paying is one of the great reversals in English fiction.

The novel is also Dickens’s tightest long book and one of his funniest. It runs to fifty-nine short chapters, it has almost nothing in it that the ending does not need, and its comedy keeps breaking into a story about shame without ever letting the shame off. If you know only one Dickens novel, this is the one to know, because it does in a single first-person voice what his bigger books spread across a hundred characters.

The argument

The novel’s claim is that gentility is a manufactured article, and that its raw material is other people. Pip’s ascent is paid for by a transported sheep-farmer who wants a gentleman of his own: “Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you!” (ch. 39). The money is honestly earned in Australia, which makes the insult sharper. Nothing is wrong with the cash except where it has been, and Pip’s horror shows what his education has actually taught him.

The law agrees with Pip’s education. When Magwitch and Compeyson stand trial together, the one with the manners gets the lighter sentence: “ain’t it him as gets seven year, and me fourteen” (ch. 42). Against that stands the maxim Herbert Pocket has from his father, that “no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner” (ch. 22). The only character who meets that test without trying is a blacksmith, and Pip is ashamed to be seen with him.

What makes this more than a moral about snobbery is that Dickens puts the guilt in place before any of it has been earned. The child who steals a pie for a convict lives “under the weight of my wicked secret” (ch. 4), and when his sister is struck down he is “at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister” (ch. 16). Late in the book Orlick tells him he was right: “It was you, villain” (ch. 53). The accusation is insane and not quite false, since Pip has wanted to be rid of that kitchen for years. Pip’s one clean act with his money is to buy Herbert a partnership in secret (ch. 37), and the method he chooses is his benefactor’s.

The shape of the book

Dickens marks the structure himself, in capitals: “This is the end of the first stage of Pip’s expectations” closes ch. 19, and the second stage closes with Magwitch asleep in Pip’s rooms at the end of ch. 39. The three stages are nearly equal in length: the forge, London, the reckoning. Weekly serial forced short chapters and a hook every few pages, and the book is better for it.

The hinge is a pair of chapters. In ch. 38 Estella tells Miss Havisham, who has trained her to break hearts and now wants love from her, “I am what you have made me.” In the next chapter Magwitch climbs the stairs to inspect what he has made. Two damaged people have each built a young person as an instrument of revenge on the world, and the novel sets them side by side before Pip understands.

The coincidences of the last third are often held against the book: Jaggers’s housekeeper Molly is Estella’s mother (ch. 48), Magwitch is her father, and Compeyson is the man who jilted Miss Havisham. They are better read as the argument finished. Everything Pip wanted, the fortune and the girl and the grand house, turns out to rest on the same convict’s yard, and the star he has been looking up at is the daughter of a felon and of a woman tried for murder.

The voice

There are two Pips on every page, the boy who suffers and the middle-aged man who remembers, and the book’s tone lives in the gap between them. The opening shows the method whole. After an elaborate adult sentence about “my first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things”, the catalogue of churchyard and marsh ends with “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip” (ch. 1), and a voice shouts “Hold your noise!”

The older Pip is merciless and rarely preaches. His sharpest judgements come as plain statement: he calls it “a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home” (ch. 14) and leaves it there. He allows himself one open appeal to the reader, in ch. 9, about “the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

The comedy is structural. Dickens promised John Forster, “You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities”, and he kept the promise in Pumblechook’s bullying, Wopsle’s Hamlet (ch. 31) and above all Wemmick, for whom “the office is one thing, and private life is another” (ch. 25), and whose wedding is staged as a chance discovery: “Here’s Miss Skiffins! Let’s have a wedding” (ch. 55). Wemmick is a joke with a point. A man needs a drawbridge and a toy cannon to stay human while working for Jaggers.

The two endings

The novel has two endings, and the argument over them has lasted since they became known. In the ending Dickens first wrote, Pip, unmarried, is walking along Piccadilly with little Pip, Joe’s son, when Estella stops her pony carriage. Drummle has died and she has married a Shropshire doctor. They exchange a few words and that is the end. Edward Bulwer-Lytton read the proofs and urged a change. Dickens told Forster, “I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.” The first ending stayed unknown until Forster printed it in his biography after Dickens’s death.

In the published ending, eleven years after leaving England Pip walks into the ruins of Satis House at dusk and finds Estella there, widowed (ch. 59). Forster thought the first ending more consistent with the drift of the tale. Gissing thought the change spoiled the book, the 1937 Limited Editions Club text, with a preface by Shaw, used the first ending, and most readers have followed them in treating the revision as a concession to sentiment.

That verdict is too easy. The essential sentence survives the change. In the cancelled ending Pip reads in her face that “suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.” In the published one Estella says it herself: “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be.” And the revision promises less than it is remembered as promising. Her last words are “And will continue friends apart”, Pip takes her hand anyway, and the book ends on the sentence “I saw no shadow of another parting from her”. That reading comes from a later revision, and earlier printings have him see the shadow of no parting. Either way the speaker is a man who has misread every sign in his life and is now reporting that he sees no bad ones. The first ending is the more severe. The second may be the more ironic, and it is hard to be sure Dickens did not know it.

The people

Pip

Pip is the rare Dickens hero whose faults are the subject. He is snobbish, idle, generous, cowardly with Joe and brave with Magwitch, and the book’s real climax is not the river chase but his sitting by a dying felon and saying “O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!” (ch. 56).

Joe Gargery

Joe could have been a sentimental fixture, and his dignity comes from understanding the situation better than Pip does. His visit to London (ch. 27) is excruciating until he excuses himself: “I’m wrong in these clothes”, and “life is made of ever so many partings welded together.” He later nurses Pip through fever and pays his debt (ch. 57), then leaves before he can be thanked.

Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham, with her clocks at “twenty minutes to nine” and her rotted wedding feast (ch. 8), is the book’s Gothic set piece and the character everyone remembers. Her definition of love is the most frightening thing in it: “It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world” (ch. 29). Her repentance, “What have I done!” (ch. 49), arrives just before the fire.

Estella

Estella is honest from start to finish, which is what makes her cruel. She tells Pip she has no heart, he declines to believe her, and his declaration in ch. 44, “You are part of my existence, part of myself”, is the one speech in the book in which the narrator is allowed no irony.

Magwitch

Abel Magwitch begins as a terror and ends as the book’s moral puzzle. His history is one sentence, “In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail” (ch. 42), and his love for Pip is real, possessive and insulting all at once.

Jaggers and Wemmick

Jaggers lives by “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence” (ch. 40) and washes his clients off his hands with scented soap. His one hypothetical, “Put the case” (ch. 51), reveals that he saved a child from the criminal life he profits from. Wemmick’s advice to “get hold of portable property” (ch. 24) is the novel’s bleakest joke.

How it was made

Dickens had the idea in the autumn of 1860 and called it to Forster a “grotesque tragi-comic conception”. It was planned for monthly numbers until his weekly, All the Year Round, began losing sales on Charles Lever’s serial A Day’s Ride. He “called a council of war” at the office and decided that “the one thing to be done was, for me to strike in”. The novel ran weekly in thirty-six parts from 1 December 1860 to August 1861, and came out in three volumes that year.

Before starting, he read David Copperfield again to avoid “unconscious repetitions” and was deeply moved. Copperfield is the success story and this is its correction. Dickens wrote it after separating from his wife and during his secret relationship with Ellen Ternan, and some critics have seen something of her in Estella, though that remains conjecture. The country is his own: the graves at Cooling are widely held to have suggested the five little stone lozenges of the opening, and Forster said Satis House was based on Restoration House in Rochester.

Readers and critics

Sales of the magazine recovered at once, and Carlyle is said to have laughed aloud at “that Pip nonsense”. Margaret Oliphant attacked the book in Blackwood’s in 1862, but later judgement has been kinder: Swinburne compared its faults to spots on the sun, and Shaw called it “compactly perfect”. Critics agree on the merit and disagree on the meaning. Chesterton found it optimistic and Edmund Wilson pessimistic, and Orwell, while judging the later part psychologically “about the best thing Dickens ever did”, argued that Dickens shares Pip’s recoil from Magwitch and is at bottom a snob.

Modern readings have gone in two main directions. Julian Moynahan’s essay on the hero’s guilt makes Orlick Pip’s dark double, doing what Pip wishes done. Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot (1984), uses the book to study how plots depend on repetition and return. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), objects that Australia and Magwitch serve an English story of redemption and are then put back in their place, a reading that Pip’s later career in the East rather supports.

Afterlives

David Lean’s 1946 film, with John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Jean Simmons as young Estella and Alec Guinness as Herbert, remains the standard screen version, and its churchyard opening is among the best-known scenes in British cinema. It invents a third ending in which Pip tears down the curtains at Satis House and leads Estella into the light. Alfonso Cuarón moved the story to modern New York in 1998, Mike Newell filmed it again in 2012, and Steven Knight’s 2023 BBC series put Olivia Colman in the wedding dress.

The novel has also bred novels. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) gives the convict’s side of the story, with a novelist in it who is stealing his life. Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) has a teacher reading the book to children during the war on Bougainville.

How to read it

Read it slowly at the start. The first six chapters plant nearly everything, and they repay a second look after ch. 42.
Read chapters 38 and 39 together. The two makers are meant to be seen side by side.
Keep an eye on Orlick. He seems a minor brute until ch. 53, and then the earlier scenes look different.
Read both endings. The Gutenberg text has the published one, and the cancelled one is in Forster’s Life (Book 9). Decide after chapter 59, not before.
Use an annotated edition for the wording. The Norton Critical Edition gives the textual history of the conclusion.