I first read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens in
1966, in my first semester at the Bronx High School of Science. Almost half a
century later, I listened to the audiobook of the novel, and entirely different
facets of the book stood out for me.
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| Charles Dickens |
When I was
fourteen years old, I was so put off by the artificial aspects of Great Expectations. I wasn’t used
to nineteenth century novels, and the exaggerated speech of Dickens’s working class
characters such as Joe Gargery felt unreal to me. I was particularly troubled
by the plot’s many coincidences, which seemed less than nitty gritty to me, and
didn’t pass the test of strict authenticity that my adolescent self applied to
everything that an adult tried to present to me as authoritative.
It’s true that
novelists in the 1800s had an almost occult reliance on coincidences. It wasn’t
until many years later that I learned how writers of that century serialized
their novels in newspapers or magazines, publishing one chapter at a time. Once
a novelist had painted a character into a corner with a particular plot
device, the writer couldn't go back and correct the story—the earlier
installments were already public. A good coincidence was a clever way out of a
tight squeeze, but beyond that, some writers have a predilection for
coincidence, maybe even an affection for it.
Dickens is certainly one of them.
In Great Expectations, for instance,
it’s not necessary to the plot for Pip to find out who both of Estella’s parents
are, but Dickens can’t resist including those details, even though they involve improbable serendipities. Those coincidences do add irony, since
Estella is at first very haughty for a young woman whose forebears turn out to
be of such humble origin.
Somehow the
coincidences hardly bothered me at all this time. They seemed almost like
gewgaws in a Victorian parlor, charming in their outmoded and
elaborate way.
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| A Pre-Raphaelite frontispiece for Great Expectations |
What did strike
me about the book this time was how complex some of the characters are. Abel
Magwitch was particularly fascinating to me. At the midpoint of the novel, I think
the reader would probably identify Magwitch as the least likeable and most threatening
character in the book, and there’s plenty of competition for that niche. By the
end of the story, it might be fair to say that Magwitch is one of the most
sympathetic, and perhaps the most compelling character. That turnabout in the reader's perceptions of Magwitch is one of the novel's many triumphs.
My favorite
section in the novel is Chapter XLII, where Magwitch narrates his life story in
his own words. It’s an incredibly poetic dramatic monologue, full of amazing
metaphors that are perfectly suited to Magwitch’s rough-and-tumble existence,
in and out of jail starting at a young age: “I’ve been done everything to,
pretty well—except hanged. I’ve been locked up as much as a silver
tea-kittle.…I’ve no more notion where I was born that you have—if so much.”
One character I
changed my opinion of since my teenage reading of the book is Joe Gargery, the
brother-in-law and dear companion of the protagonist, Pip, during the main
character’s youth. Joe’s wildly uneducated speech just seemed clownish
to me when I was a teenager. .Now it makes me laugh. At one point, Pip is attempting
to teach Joe the alphabet, and Pip tries to get him to write his last name.
“How
do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him…
“I
don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.
This time, Joe
came across as a nuanced character. He is a big, strong guy—a blacksmith—but in
some ways he’s weak, at times to Pip’s detriment. Joe is too self-effacing to protect
Pip from the physical and emotional abuse of his wife, Pip’s sister. And yet,
it’s hard to fault Joe. He’s loyal to Pip till the end, even though he deals
Pip one of his worst disappointments, inadvertently.
I also didn’t
realize as a teenager that Dickens actually wrote two different endings to Great Expectations. Dickens declined to publish the original ending that he wrote, on the advice of his friend, the
novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I think Bulwer-Lytton's counsel was suspect. The ending that Dickens
initially penned seems to me more poignant and more faithful to the direction of
the book than the version that Dickens chose to include. But maybe that's the uncompromising teenager in me surfacing again.
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
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How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
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Putting Together a Book Manuscript
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Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
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