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Great Expectations (changes)
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As Dickens ages, he loses faith in the inevitability of the righteous ending (published 1862, the latest book of his that I’m reading)
Dickens’ Career
- b. 1812; d. 1870
- Disappointed by violent, uncivilized America in early 1840s
- Books so pirated in US, which got US angry when he mentioned it…
- His second tour of America was more successful
- Childhood: Factory worker
- age 12, dad bankrupt, imprisoned for debt until rescued by family member
- family taken to debtor’s prison with him
- Except for Charles, made to work
- A relative’s boot-black factory: 10 hrs/day, 6 days/week
- Lived alone in London, self-supported, feeling deserted
- Spent his time walking through London
- Finally, at mother’s insistence, when father sees him at work at a window, they take him out of factory, but Dickens is forever mad at his father for doing it
- Victorian Background
- Speculating booms of 1825-6, 1837, railway boom of 1845-6, lead to introduction of limited liability to protect people, 1855-6
- So, increase in small investors, moen yas system 1850-66, not individual people doing it themselves
- Natural history
- 1830, Lyle, Principles of Geology, uniformitarian: the earth changed slowly over the years, not God making it, period
- 1859, Darwin, Origin of Species, where Darwin asks us to rethink ourselves
- From seven-year voyage of Beagle, brings home immense number of specimens
- Mutability of species: they aren’t constant, but change (evolution), so God not in charge
- While human beings be evolved? Will we become extinct?
- Depressing: you mean we exist just to perpetuate ourselves?
- Depressing: you mean that physical fitness matters, not moral fitness?
- Victorians talked about nothing but sex…but in a different way!
- 18th century: chain of being (God, Angels, Man, Animals, Matter), see Poope’s “Essay on Man,” order, coherence, correctness: as a cultural feeling: no evil because everything has its place; there is no chance
- Voltaire uses Pangloss in Candide to ridicule it: weed your garden, do a little bit of good
- Dickens is part of this critique: not being happy with things as they are: he is a great champion of worker’s and women’s rights
- Urbanization
- By 1830, no longer pastoral, agricultural, rural
- Invention of steam power
- Malthus: population increases geometrically, but food supply only arithmetically, so there’s gonna be a crisis (but that didn’t ever occur) (people believed it anyway)
- Hence, Enclosure Acts: the commons (grazing, crops, firewood) are closed
- Why? Theory that the more you centralize production, the more efficient you’ll be)
- But without subsistence help, people starve, so move to city
- Once people stop caring about threat of Napoleon, they turn inward: attention to UK problems:
- Nonexistence sanitation
- Inadequate water supply
- Nowhere to bury people
- A fully employed man couldn’t sustain self, wife, and one child
- Worker supply huge, so wages low
- Hence, child labor
- Orphans roaming the streets (cf Estella. found on streets)
- People could die while fully employed
- Fear of revolution runs rampant, esp before 1850
- (Question: where did that fear go? I’d say underground, but didn’t disappear)
- Committees from Parliament investigate, Blue Ribbon Reports
- Child Labor Laws
- Safety laws
- Theme of childhood emerges
- The first serial is his book, The Pickwick Papers, creating a rage for serialized works (1837)
- He’s one of the first professional authors, earning lots of money off serialization
- He sees himself as defined against the gentlemen-authors of entrenched culture/academia
- Tries to form author’s society with Thackeray and Carlyle
- Promotes Gaskell
- Wants to see writing as profession, not an art
- Composes the books as people read them
- He can react to the readers’ reactions, give them what they want
- Journalist, novelist, play-wright, director
Folks
- Pip, Philip Pirrup, is a sad story about the collapse of dreams, the opposite of Oliver Twist, but like A Beast in the Jungle constantly waits for something to happen, for his expectations to realize, but it turns out to be empty: instead, you are determined from a very early part in your adventure: the part of you that you want to escape, forget about, is what creates your horizon of expectation. Like the Victorian Empire, he’s a little ashamed about the source of his wealth.
- Mrs. Gargery, the abusive aunt of Pip
- Joe Gargery, the soft-hearted blacksmith who acts as Pip’s friend and surrogate father.
- Mr. Pumblechook, the tailor of Pip’s small town
- Miss Havisham, the eerie eternal bride who breeds Pip and Estella so that she can break his heart and avenge her barren past. Surrounded by relatives who only want her money, she had been tricked by her potential husband and half-brother in leagues to get her cash.
- Estella, an orphan Havisham picked up off the streets for a cosmic retaliation of her past. Cold and cruel, she only learns her lesson not to be such a cold coquette when she marries an abusive husband.
- Matthew Pocket, cousin of Havisham, probably her heir. He’s a nice guy, a tutor whom Pip studies under for a bit.
- Herbert Pocket, son of Havisham’s nice cousin, Matthew; he’s a friend for Pip in London tho’ they first fight when they meet. He marries the virtuous Clara, a poor girl who takes care of her dissolute papa.
- Dodge, Joe’s apprentice in the smithy who is jealous of Pip and tries to kill him
- Bentley Drummle, fellow student at Matthew Pocket’s; he is rude and ill-treats his wife, Estella.
- Biddy, a virtuous orphan who grow up somewhat alongside Pip (she helps run the day-school). She loves Pip, but he ignores her for Estella, and finally, when he realizes that she’s the one, it’s too late cuz she married Joe happily.
- Mr. Jaggers, the attorney who’s in charge of Pip’s estate, crazy about evidence, and evidence only. Not amiable. Both Jaggers and Wemmick try to impress each other with their business-like impersonality, even though both of them would rather be personal. They keep up the impersonality to please what they think the other one wants: how funny is bureaucracy.
- Wemmick, Jaggers’ clerk, quite soft at heart, who becomes Pip’s friend and helper. He takes care of his father, the Aged One, and lives in a fake castle, where one doesn’t act in a business-like manner like in the City, but instead you act like a friend. One of my very favorite characters of Dickens’ creation, he’s very much in the spirit of Pickwick Papers and “Donkeys, Janet!” in David Copperfield. For me, he’s the odd survival of feudalism in England: he lives in a castle, with a working moat and drawbridge, representing the land-based wealth of England’s past: it’s a “freehold” he owns himself, no debt; tiny and gothic, with a real flag, an a tiny turret bedroom for visitors, cannon going off each Sunday. It’s a heterotopia, marked off by drawbridge (a plank really), for Pip says it’s cut off from rest of world as if the rest didn’t exist: it only takes the tiny plank, but they’re truly cut off b/c of the different behavior and language they display. And his love of his father shows how he doesn’t abandon the past, shows that he’s courtly. He has an official self that won’t do a thing for Pip, but he insists that his “extra official” and “private” identity will have partiality for Pip. He always says you need to have portable property, and he makes mechanical contrivances to please his father. We know he’s good cuz he gets to marry a lovely (in spirit) woman, Miss Skiffins, “a good sort of fellow” (294). (Wemmick: 204-10; 259; 292-9, 368-73, 452-5). Fortifications, besieged: the equipment is used to make a leisure space inside of London-area: the division between work and personal life.
- Abel Magwitch, the convict, responsible for Pip’s fortune
Themes
Disenchantment Social from difference/social Youth climbing Culture
Doesn’t Impossible think running with the fast and loose is fun “There Magwitch was thinks he can purchase a gay gentleman fiction by among giving us Pip that money, we but were it constantly won’t enjoying work ourselves, out and a skeleton truth that we never did.” (274)
- Deception: money creates opportunities for crime and suffering
- Havisham’s fortune
- Magwitch’s money: getting money from a criminal
- Expectations
- First stage: as Miss Havisham’s companion, but also Joe’s apprentice
- He wants to be a gentleman: the second third of the book is about him in London as someone’s chosen heir; he starts to disown Joe Gargery and his past
- Third: Magwitch Revealed: his expectations collapse and he can’t fit in his old town anymore (off to Empire, of course): slowly learning lessons
- Ending: real ending is that he can’t get Estella, but readers and publishers got mad so he made it potentially happy
- Disenchantment from Youth Culture
- Doesn’t think running with the fast and loose is fun
- “There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did.” (274)
- Fate of England Allegory
- The fall of the progress narrative
- Having to come to terms with your ill-gotten gains, repent, and start over? Maybe.
- Can’t get away from your past
- Pip only sees Magwitch as a convict: can’t erase the convict inside you just for time (indeed, Magwitch does call himself “low”): “convict in the very grain of the man” (337)
- Pip must see his indebtedness to Biddy and Joe
- Leisure space: Wemmick’s Castle
Revised on September 9, 2008 13:12:39
by
Shawna?
(71.58.78.59)