Old Bestseller Review: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Thoughts on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

by Rich Horton

What to say about Great Expectations, one of the most famous English novels of all time? I don’t really have an awful lot to add to the voluminous critical views. I am still in a sense quite new to Charles Dickens. I’ve read five of his novels (if we call A Christmas Carol a novel): Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol in my teens, and David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit, and now Great Expectations within the last couple of years. In that list I would rank Great Expectations second behind David Copperfield.

Great Expectations was serialized in Dickens’ own magazine All the Year Round in 1860 and 1861, and published in book form (three volumes) by Chapman and Hall in 1861. It is a long book by most measures -- about 500 pages in my edition, nearly 200,000 words. I say long by most measures -- it’s not nearly as long as some other Dickens novels -- David Copperfield is 800 pages or about 370,000 words, and Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House are both nearly as long as David Copperfield.

I’ll summarize the familiar story very quickly. There are some spoilers, though not for the very end, so skip this if you want, especially the third paragraph, which corresponds to the third volume of the novel. The hero is Philip Pirrip, called Pip for obvious reasons. He is an orphan who is raised by his rather abusive older sister and her very kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. As a young boy he meets an escaped convict who forces him to steal some tools from Joe so that he can free himself from his shackles, and he also gives the man some food. When Pip gets a bit older he is hired to regularly visit a strange woman, Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster (in her 40s or early 50s though she is often portrayed as elderly) and Miss Havisham’s beautiful but very cruel adopted daughter Estella, and Pip conceives an unrequited love for Estella.

When Pip grows near adulthood, he is given a mysterious gift that will allow him to go to London and learn to be a gentleman. He is assured that there are "great expectations" for his future. He is sure that Miss Havisham is his sponsor, and that she intends for him to eventually marry Estella. In London he makes friends with a couple of men -- Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor Matthew, who is also a relative of Miss Havisham; and John Wemmick, the clerk to the lawyer Mr. Jaggers who handles Pip’s "expectations", as well as Miss Havisham’s business. Pip learns gentlemanly ways but doesn’t really learn to be a man -- he runs into debt, spurns his old friends such as Joe as well as Biddy, a sweet and honest country woman who had seemed to love Pip when they were younger. 

And then one night he is surprised by a strange visitor -- Abel Magwitch, the escaped convict he had helped as a young child. Magwitch had been transported for life to Australia, and had become rich there. He had vowed to help his young benefactor -- to see him become a gentleman. Pip is astonished, and at first repulsed, and vows not to accept any more money from Magwitch. But over time he realizes that for all Magwitch’s coarse ways, and his truly criminal past, he is a loyal and fundamentally honest man. Pip comes to appreciate his friend Herbert more as well, and is given examples in behavior by people like Wemmick as well; and his character begins to take a turn, even as his expectations dwindle. I won’t detail the climax, or the various revelations that tie the intricate plot together, but novel comes to a powerful (and slightly ambiguous) conclusion.

I was delighted as the novel closed to find myself having guessed right about how much of it would work out -- from such small things as John Wemmick’s marriage to Miss Skiffins to larger things like the eventual fate of Biddy. In certain novels this is a source of satisfaction -- these revelations should be on the one hand surprises but surprises that arise properly from what came before, so that eventually they are not surprises. If you see what I mean. And of course there is Pip’s fate -- which is honestly worked out, and which, as I hint, ends a bit ambiguously. (And, apparently, somewhat differently than Dickens originally planned.)

It’s a wonderful novel, it really is. I have said that I prefer David Copperfield, and I do. That novel is bigger and baggier, fuller, messier. As I put it, if a novel is a prose work of some length with a flaw, David Copperfield is a prose work of great length with great flaws -- and amazing virtues as well, and a great heart. There is just more there, and more that I love. 

But it must be said that Great Expectations is more unified, more tightly plotted, better structured. And there are the joys of Dickens’ eccentrics: John Wemmick and his father, "the Aged"; the expert lawyer Mr Jaggers; the hypocritical Uncle Pumblechook, a slightly less evil version of Mr. Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit; the obsessed Miss Havisham herself; loyal and exceedingly honest Joe Gargery; Miss Havisham’s relatives and their "expectations"; Trabb's boy, Pip's tormentor but also a key helper at one point; the aspiring actor Mr. Wopsle; and the villainous Orlick.

My final question, for anyone who has gotten this far, is -- what to read next by Dickens? Bleak House is an obvious answer, and I’ll certainly get there. I also want to read some more of the Christmas novellas -- "The Cricket on the Hearth", perhaps? But what other novels? Dombey and Son? Oliver Twist? Little Dorrit? What do people suggest?