Great Expectations

Of Charles Dickens’ 14 finished novels, “Great Expectations” has more endurance in the popular imagination than others. I’d never read it, and yet I knew the wreck of Miss Havisham in the decay of her wedding finery, cloistered in her dark mansion with her stopped clocks. She exists as a symbol of the dead hand of the past which is never truly dead. Its grip spans generations, altering fortunes even of those who weren’t yet born when its fingers first flexed.

Threaded in, of course, is one of Dickens’ favorite themes: that redemption is within the reach of anyone who wants it. No one falls so low that they can’t turn themselves to the benefaction of others, and no one rises so high that they’re incapable of bending their show more will to the blight of others. You can’t choose your misfortunes, but you can choose whether to use your sorrow as a motivation to bless others, or as a justification to bequeath your pain to the next generation.

That all sounds very somber and weighty, but “Great Expectations” is actually a light and accessible read for Dickens. This is his fourth-shortest novel, and only one of two narrated in the first person. Pip’s reminiscence of his adventures in the marshes and of his great expectations in London is lively and relatable, especially given his perspective of a grown man reflecting ruefully on his youthful underestimation of those who loved him and overblown estimation of himself. I expect that resonates greatly with many of us. show less

By 1860, Charles Dickens was a national celebrity and a sort of "elder statesman", now devoting much of his life to speeches, essays, social work, and generally not writing so many novels. Great Expectations is his 21st major work and 13th novel (of 15), and is - I would argue - his third masterpiece, following on from Bleak House and Little Dorrit, although in a very different way to either of them.

The psychological development of Pip Pirrip is perhaps unequalled in Dickens' canon, and it feels as if this is a breakthrough in terms of character. I've not yet read Our Mutual Friend, which I'm told takes this further, but it's certainly a good feeling. Estella herself is an interesting figure but ultimately more of a paper moth than a show more full human, although that is in some ways deliberate. More to the point, Great Expectations achieves its targets by applying characterisation to numerous supporting characters, such as Orlick and Magwitch, and in the rich history of Miss Havisham, a character who has so haunted Western culture ever since.

It is also perhaps the most challenging of Dickens' novels in its more complicated moral message. Pip's "Great Expectations" in many ways don't seem so bad: success! comfort! Dickens' arguments against them, along the lines of a younger generation coming of age and staying steadfast to moral development, seem admirable, although I can't help seeing him as a man growing older and more disconnected from the younger members of his society.

There's plenty of comedy sandwiched amongst the Gothic here, but what stands out most - as often with Dickens - is the beauty, from the ruined Satis house to the thriving metropolis and back to the rural marshes of Pip's youth. A truly poetic novel, that should cater to even the most Flaubertian of Dickens critics. (I hope!) show less

While many things happen, at its core this is the most straightforward plot that Dickens has mustered since the Curiosity Shop. Young Pip is destined for a lowly life as a blacksmith's apprentice, until he is introduced to Miss Havisham and her ward. Shortly afterward he comes into a bit of property and takes up the life of a gentleman, as if this were the story of Little Dorrit again. Dickens loves to repurpose ideas from former novels in new clothes, but there's some fun (eventual) twists to this one that make it unique.

It never does to have too great expectations before reading any novel, and mine were relatively low after Two Cities didn't live up to its billing. Plus I had spoilers this time, vague memories of when I ripped through show more this novel as a teen reading every third or fourth word after it felt like treacle. Thirty-some years later it has none of those problems and proves to be one of my favourites among all of Dickens' work, although I wonder how much my opinion is influenced by having enjoyed the dramatic irony. A couple of minor quirks stand out. I don't like how Orlick enters the story out of nowhere in Chapter 15 as if he'd been there all along, and I couldn't shake thoughts of Dickens' poor reputation as a father that drained the fun from his depicting the Pockets' hopeless parenting. The coincidences nearly choked me this time and the conclusion feels too prolonged. I also can't help wondering (perhaps am meant to wonder) if Pip's original destiny he was steered from wouldn't have been the happiest outcome.

This is a textbook study of the reckless ways one can get up to when coming into money without guidance; note to self, if I ever win the lottery. Its most true-to-life aspect is Pip's self-awareness of this weakness and yet how he continues being prey to it, demonstrating how pernicious it can be. He has a similar challenge in the romance department, where again he knows his object is a poor choice but he's unable to direct the stirrings of his heart. Saying 'no' to yourself can be a difficult thing to do. Continually saying 'yes' to every temptation is the root of more evil than all the money and batting eyelashes in the world. show less

Frightened and confused by his surroundings, Pip wonders through Miss Havisham’s home, a veritable sarcophagus filled with the detritus of her pain. She is frozen in time, all of the clock’s stopped at the very minute of her misery, and her wedding table daily feasted upon by spiders and beetles and rats. As he wonders, he believes that she is following him, haunting him, her decaying, yellowed wedding dress betraying as it scrapes on the dusty floor. He looks up to the rafters and sees her hanging from a rope there, mournfully swinging.

As an adolescent boy, I was tasked to read [Great Expectations] by Susan Smith, my 8th grade English teacher. She was both English and an English teacher. So, her favor of Dickens was no surprise. show more Though, looking back, much about her was a surprise. She also held a deep affection for Willie Nelson, evidenced by the life-size poster glimpsed only when she retrieved books from a closet in the corner of the room. Willie records often blared out from her room at the end of the day, echoing through the tiled halls. She only indulged Willie after classes were over. During class, she set a mood to read by with Wagner or Vangelis records, played at maximum volume.

I hated [Great Expectations]. I hated Dickens. I revolted at the idea of reading page after page after page about some poor British boy who is led by the nose through a series of unfortunate experiences, only to be destroyed in the end. I hated that he learned something only for it not to mean anything in the end. I hated having to read paragraphs and pages that I thought could be condensed to a few words. I hated the cute devices used to obscure the connections between everything that was happening. I hated Susan Smith for wasting my time.

But years later, even as I looked down my nose at Dickens, I could still call up an extremely vivid image of that shriveled woman with the yellowing dress, sitting at the head of a table festooned with cobwebs and insects. She could still strike the same note of terror that Pip felt at imagining her feet swinging toward him. I didn’t realize how much of the story I could remember, how much of Dickens’ message could still broadcast through my mind.

Was I simply too young to be faced with the ideas of Dickens? Was it too much for an adolescent boy to read about another adolescent boy’s tragic love? Was my teacher too big for my small world?

Whatever the reason, I lived on in my hate for Dickens many years, until my wife challenged me and all I could offer was that I’d read [Great Expectations] and didn’t like it. She persisted, arguing that such a lover of books and stories should love a writer like Dickens. Dickens is a writer’s writer, one who gives all of his characters such full life and his stories such breadth. So, I read [A Christmas Carol], a story so familiar to me, and anyone who’s drawn breath, that I figured it would be the perfect test. Even though I hadn’t read about him, I knew Jacob Marley and Scrooge and Tim. I thought I knew how the chains sounded as they scratched along behind Marley. I thought I knew Scrooge’s fright at seeing his own gravestone and seeing, at seeing the joys of his life he’d abandoned. But reading about them for the first time was a revelation. [A Tale of Two Cities] followed quickly after.

And now, I’ve read [Great Expectations] again, with new eyes, much more loving ones. So many of the reasons I hated the book became reasons I loved it. After all, isn’t destiny, or whatever else you might call it, leading us all by the nose like Pip. Remember, Pip is perfectly happy and content in his circumstances, notwithstanding a shrew of a sister. It isn’t until he is offered a glimpse of something different that he begins to yearn for it. That Dickens offers that glimpse in the form of a near schizophrenic and her house of horrors cements his genius. In the end, I loved following Pip’s journey through to the end. I loved that he finally saw all the emptiness in his choices but could not overcome them and was left alone. I loved the detail that Dickens used in telling the story and the breadth of the story, page after page. I loved discovering the connections, even though I knew them already – life is connected like that, whether we choose to see it or not. My English English teacher had been right to be enamored of Dickens and [Great Expectations] and now I am, too.

The more I read Dickens, the more I see how he, and his pal Wilkie Collins, laid all the groundwork our modern masters of horror – not the ones who are only interested in shock value, but the ones who see the terror in everyday life. And the reason these characters and stories have survived and become a part of our cultural memory is a testament to Dickens.

Bottom Line: A classic in the truest sense of the word.

5 bones!!!!!

An All-Time Favorite. show less

I first read this book in Junior High. Sixty years later I remembered Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, and the poor repair of Miss H's estate. Oh, and the gate. I remembered the gate. Not sure why, that. And I remembered that Estella wasn't a nice person.

Which is to say that I *didn't* remember the story in any meaningful sense. So I'm glad I reread it here in my old age.

As an American teen, I'd have missed a bunch of English references--for instance, right at the start there's some mention of the Hulks; I'd have recognized those were prisons of some sort, but not that they're retired warships. Unpleasant and unhealthy, the hulks, no wonder Provis/etc escaped.

And I'd have missed all sorts of nuances, mostly from inexperience. And I'd have show more been less appreciative of the complexities of the various story lines, and the way many things turned out to be unexpectedly related.

A fun read. There's a reason this is a classic. show less

I picked this up again for the first time since reading it in high school. All I remembered of it was that it was long and bleak, like a foggy autumn morning. Now you might think that that would be the typical reaction of a schoolboy forced to read a book for English class, and it was more than a decade ago, but I remember enjoying Macbeth and To Kill a Mockingbird in the same class (and they remain two of my favourites), so I don't think I can put my opinion of it at the time down to teenage restlessness. But do those impressions of bleak and long fog revisit me now, as I read it again?

To be honest, after trudging through Great Expectations for the last week, I don't have many impressions. Only exhaustion and boredom. The book is long show more at 440 pages, and it is a long 440. The Victorian style and social norms do not age well, and Dickens is the poster boy of overwrought prosing. Great Expectations could be his Exhibit A. The common myth is that he was paid by the word and whilst this is not strictly true, he was paid to spread a story out over the periodicals. Reading him, you can see why the myth has endured.

The book is painfully overwrought and bordering on the turgid at times. Whatever the firing of prose is that a writer can bring when he is inspired, Great Expectations is the near opposite. When not completely dulling our senses, the book is engaging in laboured humour like muddy water to those dying of thirst, or in sidebars which have no bearing to the plot (which itself lacks any compelling themes), or in whimsy. And there is nothing so grating as whimsy.

And despite the book's density, key plot points happen by brazen coincidence or are presented without much-needed qualification (such as how Magwitch made his fortune, or why Compeyson goes out of his way to disrupt him after so many years, or Pip's accumulating debts, or Miss Havisham's repentance, or… I could go on). There are good characters but there are also terrible ones, including some prominent ones, and they have stupid, whimsical names like Pumblechook and Biddy and Wopsle. No real themes to speak of, and dialogue of the "A-ha! So now you see, sir, Providence has laid its hand upon me!" kind. Why my once English teacher chose this book is a mystery, and she would have been better served getting our class of restless teenagers to read through the Yellow Pages. Perhaps she was seeking to impress upon us Estella's maxim from the final chapter: "… suffering has been stronger than all other teaching…"

This is not a book which is easy to read. That in itself would not be a fatal flaw – I have proven willing to persevere with thick books in the past and found value there – but this is not a book in which a lot happens. To be sure, you could rattle off a summary of things that happen and it would all sound very exciting, but in the context of the book's swampy weight, it is not a lot that happens. And it is not a book that responds well to deeper analysis.

I find I have little opinion on anything about it. Not even the common debate about whether the original or the new ending is best, save for my opinion that, after such investment in a long book, having an open-ended final chapter in which our characters are left dissatisfied is a decision bordering on cruelty towards the reader. The book for me quickly became merely a feat of endurance, and try as I might, I could not shake off this feeling. The only expectation I considered great was the prospect of being done with it. show less

This was my second Dickens book ever. As before, I was surprised that so much humanity, sass, and humor could be couched in such circuitous sentences. Though I anticipated the plot twists, I still enjoyed them. But I would like Dickens more if he wasn’t so goddamned antisemitic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone was back then. But I don’t find that a very good excuse given that so many of Dickens’s other sociological leanings were so modern for his time (on issues like child labor and classism).