Charles Dickens: A Life (53 page)

Great Expectations
, begun in October 1860 and published weekly from December to June 1861, is something altogether different. It did not come from research or the theatre but out of a deep place in Dickens’s imagination which he never chose to explain, and perhaps never could, and it is all the better for that. It was also written more tightly than he originally intended, because he gave up his plan for twenty monthly numbers in order to run it weekly in
All the Year Round
, a task he found more difficult but carried off pretty well to perfection. It is a great book, delicate and frightening, funny, sorrowful, mysterious.

It is placed, like so many of his books, in the period of his own childhood and youth, and set in home territory for him, the Kentish marshlands and Rochester, and the London of the law courts, Newgate Prison, the Inns of Court, Soho, the Temple and the river. His hero walks one night from Rochester to London just as Dickens walked from Tavistock House to Gad’s Hill; but, as already suggested,
Great Expectations
is not a realistic account of how the world was but a visionary novel, close to ballad or folktale. The orphan boy, with dead parents and siblings in the graveyard in the marsh, has a cruel elder sister who treats him like a male Cinderella. He encounters monsters – Magwitch, Orlick, Miss Havisham, Jaggers and the nameless man with a closed eye and a file – and he can’t tell which threatens and which favours him. His innocence becomes tarnished by money and what it seems to promise. He neglects the good spirits who protect him – Joe the blacksmith and Biddy the simple schoolteacher – and is lured by Estella, a Belle Dame sans Merci.

The story begins in terror, the primal terror of the figure who rises up in the near-darkness to harm you, feared by all children. Pip is further terrified by the threat of being killed and eaten unless he performs the task he is given, which is to steal food and a file for his attacker, who is, we realize, an escaped convict. The guilt Pip feels for taking food from his home for the man on the marsh upsets him further, and he would like to confess to Joe, his only adult friend, but does not dare. He is then given two lessons in goodness, one from the recaptured convict, who tells the soldiers that he himself stole the food – this is to make sure Pip does not get into trouble – and the other from Joe, who tells the convict he is welcome to the food, as a fellow creature in need.

Pip’s life is changed and controlled by mysterious forces, which first put him in contact with the rich, eccentric Miss Havisham and her adopted daughter, Estella, and then raise him from poverty as an apprentice blacksmith to unexplained riches and ‘great expectations’. Pip is well intentioned and intelligent but passive, and he does not think of using the education he is given to take up a profession or make something of himself, but simply accepts that being a gentleman means a life of idleness. In charge of his affairs is the lawyer Mr Jaggers, a dark man with large hands and head, bristling eyebrows, a chin marked by the black dots of his beard, and a characteristic smell of the scented soap he uses to wash his hands. He tells Pip nothing about the source of his expectations, but from his first appearance he is seen to be the most powerful figure in Pip’s world. He is feared by the criminal community, knows everyone’s business and controls people as though they were his puppets; his scented hand-washing is to get rid of the dirty business he handles. His offices in Little Britain are decorated with casts of the faces of hanged men and, as Pip finds when he is summoned there, it is close to the meat market, Smithfield, ‘all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, [which] seemed to stick to me’ as well as ‘the great black dome of Saint Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison’.
¹⁵
This is the heart of London, a very dirty place.

Pip is the narrator, but Jaggers is the other pole of the book, connected to almost everyone in Pip’s world – Miss Havisham and her relatives, the convict Magwitch and his associates, Estella and her real mother – and the plot depends on Pip’s apprehensions of them being different from Jaggers’s. Between Pip and Jaggers stands his clerk, Mr Wemmick, who has two separate natures, severity and tight lips at the office, playfulness and gentleness at home. Wemmick replaces Joe as the good spirit in Pip’s life in London, this time a sophisticated and clever good spirit. He also does duty for Dickens’s wish to have something droll – his word – in the book, because Wemmick invites Pip to share his private idyll, taking him to see the tiny fortified and moated house he has built for himself and his old, deaf father, ‘The Aged P.’, in the south-eastern suburb of Walworth – a miniature urban Strawberry Hill – and showing off his drawbridge, flagpole, fountain and garden in which he keeps a pig, rabbits and hens, and grows cucumbers, confident that Pip will appreciate them and never mention them to Jaggers. Another inspired touch of drollery is Trabbs’s boy, Trabbs being the Rochester tailor who makes fine clothes for Pip when he comes into money: it is Trabbs’s boy who mocks him mercilessly for his new grandeur and later, as it turns out, saves his life, expecting no thanks for either service.

Pip’s narrative is full of mysteries, not all of which are explained: for instance, his two visions of Miss Havisham hanging from a beam. Nor can he, or we, ever be sure how mad Miss Havisham is. She seems mad enough when he first sees her, fixed in her distress at being jilted on her wedding day, yet she decides things for herself, gives orders to Jaggers and others, controls her money even though she chooses to let her house decay, and lives a life that is fantastical but deliberately so. She knows how to turn her adopted daughter into an instrument of revenge on the male sex, and she teases the relations who flatter her in the hope of an inheritance. She also changes, becoming remorseful as the story proceeds, and repenting of what she has done to Estella and to Pip. By the end she has almost restored herself to sanity, while Pip meditates on her ‘diseased mind’ and ‘the vanity of sorrow’ that has cursed her and all of them. Dickens leaves her case for us to observe without attaching labels or reaching after fact and reason, and by allowing this uncertainty he gives the portrait its truth.

Dickens’s working notes for Great Expectations from the manuscript (transcription opposite).

Another unfathomable Kentish character, Orlick, morose and dangerous as a dog, works at the smithy. He batters Pip’s shrewish sister to the floor in a fit of rage, leaving her brain damaged and speechless. No one can prove he did it, and Dickens introduces a black joke by making her, in her disabled condition, fix on Orlick as her favourite and insist on seeing him regularly. He remains a threat to everyone, and his plan to kill Pip would be horrific were it not weakened by being made theatrical. Orlick lures Pip with a fake message, ties him up, then pauses to boast lengthily of his wicked acts and intentions – he is going to throw his body into the lime kiln – and his rhetoric ensures a delay long enough to allow the rescue party to arrive, in time-honoured thriller style. Again, he goes free, but continues his aggressions until he is imprisoned, not villain enough, it seems, to be provided with a violent end like Sikes or Quilp.

Just as Dickens always felt himself a child of Rochester and the Kentish countryside, so Pip, even when he becomes a Londoner, living in chambers in Barnard’s Inn and then the Temple, remains tied to the marshes, Rochester and the river, and his observations of the landscape run through the book. At the start, in the bitter cold of winter, he thinks what it might be like to die on the marsh if you were on the run: ‘A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.’
¹⁶
He describes the white marsh-mist that veils the dykes, mounds, gates and scattered cattle, and carries the booming sound of the cannon from the prison ship, anchored off the coast. A red moon over the marsh lights him to his appointment with Orlick. And in summer, when the white sails of the ships on the Medway move up and down on the tide, he sees how ‘the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud or sail or green hill-side or water-line’,
¹⁷
and its beauty makes him dream of what he most desires. In London he has feverish and futurist nightmares as the story works to its grim conclusion, and in his dreams he is a brick in a wall from which he cannot escape, and then ‘a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf’. He begs to have the engine stopped ‘and my part in it hammered off’.
¹⁸

When Dickens told Forster he was going to write another story in the first person, he added an assurance that it would be nothing like
David Copperfield
, and of course it is not. David’s story is of a middle-class boy who overcomes cruel neglect by his own effort, becomes a successful writer, is allowed by fate to marry the girl he loves and then to lose her when she turns out to have been a mistake, and ends with a perfect wife and family. Not only is Pip quite a different sort of boy with a family background from the lowest, labouring level of society, his story is one of failure, failure to understand what is happening to him, failure to win the girl he loves, failure to save his benefactor, failure to make anything of himself. He just redeems himself morally, and that is enough, after all he has seen. It is enough for the reader too. His statement of what he feels for the indifferent Estella is the most powerful expression of obsessive love for a woman in Dickens: ‘when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.’
¹⁹
Nothing needs to be added to this, but Bulwer, in a foolish moment, wanted Pip to be given a happy ending with Estella and suggested to Dickens that he should set aside his bleak final vision and write a cheerful one. Amazingly, Dickens accepted Bulwer’s advice and rewrote, adding a chapter with a conventional variant and publishing it. Forster was told too late to object, but he was not pleased and thought it marred the book. He wisely kept a copy of the original ending to be compared with the substitute, and published it in the third volume of his
Life of Dickens
. Few critics since have disagreed with Forster, although the happy ending appears in every standard edition of
Great Expectations
.

Both books were written while Dickens was having trouble with his health. In June 1859 he told Collins, ‘The “cold” is pretty much in the old stage. So I have made up my mind to think no more of it, and to go (in a general way) the way of all flesh.’
²⁰
This may be interpreted to mean that his love for Nelly – the “cold” – remained unconsummated, and he looked elsewhere for sex. Not long afterwards he wrote to his doctor, Frank Beard, ‘My bachelor state has engendered a small malady on which I want to see you. I am at Gad’s Hill for the summer, but have come up this morning on purpose.’
²¹
Beard prescribed medicines which irritated his skin and did not entirely cure his ailment.
²²
He told both Collins and Forster that he could not get quite well, and that he thought only the sea would restore him, and he would go to Broadstairs. He wrote again to Collins, ‘Perhaps a tumble into the sea might — but I suppose there is no nitrate of Silver in the Ocean?’
²³
As silver nitrate was used against gonorrhoea in the nineteenth century, it may be that this was his trouble, a miserable and humiliating business.
²⁴

He was still unwell in the freezing new year of 1860, still taking medicine and seeing Beard. In March he had other ailments, a pain in his face, in June rheumatism in his back, so bad he was doubled up. They cleared up, but in December, as
Great Expectations
began its weekly publication, he was ‘not quite well again, and being doctored’, and he chose to stay at Wellington Street all through January 1861, refusing invitations and needing Beard’s attentions every few days. ‘I should like to be inspected – though I hope I can offer no new attractions,’ he told him at the end of the month, and at last this particular problem was dealt with.
²⁵
In May he was able to enjoy hiring a steamer on the Thames for a day out with friends and family, from Blackwall to Southend and back, and gave the impression he had no cares.
²⁶
Then he took himself to Dover alone to work on the last chapters of
Great Expectations
and breathe the sea air, again suffering from neuralgic pains in the face. He told Macready they had ‘troubled me a good deal, and the work has been pretty close. But I hope that the book is a good book, and I have no doubt of very soon throwing off the little damage it has done to me.’
²⁷
He did, and after this there were no more major problems with his health until 1865.