Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I’m usually in the middle of reading a Dickens novel on his birthday, and 2024 is no exception: I’m currently enjoying Great Expectations for, I think, the fourth time. My wife likes several of Dickens’s novels but hate Great Expectations. For many people, this is the Dickens book they had to read in some English class, and so they hate it. But I can’t help it; I love it!
For my wife, I think that everything about Miss Havisham is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed, and I suspect that the same is true for a lot of other people. To be fair to my wife, who isn’t here to defend herself and doesn’t have her own blog, she might simply say that Miss Havisham is too unpleasant to read about. So let me respond to the other, totally hypothetical people who hold that she is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed. To begin with, many things in Victorian literature seem overdone: a crazy wife kept secretly in an attic comes to mind. But I believe that Victorians lived more dramatically than we do, that angry women truly stomped their feet and that orating men posed and used lofty language that often got away from them. And that some jilted women lived as recluses. Check this recent-ish article claiming that one particular jilted recluse may indeed have been the real-life inspiration for Miss Havisham.
But I should also point out that Miss Havisham is a character in a book, with every right to memorable excess. And after all, she’s no more over-the-top than Scrooge or the hunchback of Notre Dame or Captain Nemo, and every bit as absolutely unforgettable. And she’s there for a purpose. We all know people who hold on perpetually to anger directed at some given person. And we see in the house in which Miss Havisham lives the representation of the life that results from her never-ending grudge: no sunlight ever enters, and spiders cover the uneaten wedding cake. She serves as the physical representation of the soul that Pip could shape for himself if he continues forever his determination to be a gentleman and his rejection of his brother-in-law, who is by his admission the kindest man he ever knew.
Dickens was, to put it mildly, in a bad mood when he wrote Great Expectations. His marriage had just fallen apart (remember the spiders and the wedding cake?), and he was in no frame of mind to write a book with a happy ending. You know that The Man Who Invented Christmas is off his usual game within the first few chapters of GE, when the family dinner that gets ruined – by tar-water in the brandy and by the sudden intrusion of a band of soldiers – is a Christmas dinner. And the book goes on gloomily from there. Dickens wrote this novel in first-person narrative, with Pip admitting in his confessional account the deepest flaws of any Dickens hero. And, in Dickens’s original ending, Pip enjoys nothing of the typical Victorian hero’s happy ending: he doesn’t get the money, and he doesn’t get the girl. (Dickens's friend John Forster convinced him that his public would feel cheated by a tragic resolution, and so our author rewrote the last page before publication. If you read this book be sure to read the original ending: it’s the only one that makes any sense.)
And yet, he was still Charles Dickens, and the Ghost of Christmas Present couldn’t keep his horn of good will from sprinkling cheer here and there on the pages of Great Expectations. One early breakthrough has the irrepressible Joe Gargery forgiving an escaped convict for stealing food from his house. “God knows you’re welcome to it,” says Joe. “We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.” At this the convict represses a sob. Generosity, forgiveness, and repentance. What could be more beautiful and uplifting?
Then there’s the hilariously ludicrous Mr. Wopsle, who reads in church as if he is acting Shakespeare and later acts Shakespeare as if he were a ten-year-old in a bad school pageant. And there’s Herbert Pocket, who stays cheery, identifies himself as an insurer of international trade even though he hasn’t been able to find the capital to start the business, loves his Clara with all the letters of the alphabet, and proves to be a faithful, helpful friend to Pip in his darkest hours. And then there’s . . .
Oh, but the best will have to wait for another post.
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