by F. R. Leavis
III
To show the relation between shame and guilt, while keeping them distinct, is part of Dickens’s undertaking. He shows that the effects of Pip’s introduction to the idea of shame (at being ‘coarse and common’) is to reinforce his sense of guilt, which becomes then social as well as moral. This is demonstrated by the episode of the two one-pound notes, an episode which shows the economy with which Dickens works throughout Great Expectations, as in George Silverman’s tale, though this being a novel needs fully imaginative realization. It keeps alive Pip’s sense of guilt because he knows the gift must come from ‘his’ convict since the messenger stirs his drink with Joe’s old file that Pip had stolen; his sense of guilt makes him think the messenger’s cocking his eye at him (to imply a secret understanding) is ‘as if he were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun’, a loaded simile which we remember when Magwitch, having thus fired his money at Pip, lays Pip low on his return. This image naturally causes the boy to have nightmares, but behind them is the real nightmare, the thought ‘of the guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts – a feature of my low career that I had previously forgotten’. Thus the old guilt about his forced theft gets fused with social shame because he can imagine what Estella would say about his being, though already ‘low’, connected with convicts in addition (there is now yet another convict in his life, the messenger). Pip continues as to the revival of his sense of guilt by this message from the past he had hoped buried:
I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear … and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it.
The irrational dread, and the consequent fantasy forcing itself on him in dreams, are psychologically true. And he is right. The file reappears duly as the source of the instrument with which Pip’s sister is struck down. Though Pip is morally convinced that instrument was wielded by Orlick, he can’t be sure, and, in another sense, he feels he himself was responsible: hence it does indeed come at him without his being able to see who held it. Finally, the two one-pound notes recur as central in the scene of Magwitch’s return. They are revelatory to Pip that he won’t be able to get rid of his troublesome visitor from the past by repaying them, and they are central also to the moral issue of his indebtedness to Magwitch, having first appeared as Magwitch’s down-payment on his ownership of ‘a brought-up London gentleman’, which Pip had had to accept though he tried to return them to the messenger, who had disappeared.
The next link in the chain of shame and guilt follows in the fight with ‘the pale young gentleman’, a class episode14 from which Pip again emerges as ‘guilty yet innocent’ – the fight is forced on Pip and he only defends himself of necessity, he is even at a disadvantage from being overawed by Herbert’s social superiority in his alarming knowledge of the ritual of boxing and its techniques: winning therefore leaves Pip morally even guiltier, expecting vengeance from the Law because he knows that low boys can’t be allowed to injure (possibly murder) young gentlemen. So getting bound apprentice next at the Town Hall seems to him another guilt-proving ordeal and he is reproached with not enjoying himself in addition!
Thus when it is proved that the attack which ultimately kills Mrs Joe was made with the leg-iron the availability of which, is Pip’s responsibility, though involuntary, Pip immediately feels that he must be the criminal: again he is ‘guilty yet innocent’. Legally he is of course innocent, but he holds himself morally guilty because in his heart he detested his sister and his accumulated sense of guilt had just then been activated by Mr Wopsle’s having thrust on him a part in the popular melodrama of George Barnwell who ungratefully murdered his uncle. Pip is thus in even more confusion as to his identity than usual when the news of the murderous attack on his sister is told him. Garis says that the reading of George Barnwell and the leg-iron striking down Pip’s sister are ‘both theatrical “pretexts” for Pip’s false sense of guilt’ (as part of his case against Dickens’s art generally). But Pip’s sense of guilt is not false, as we have seen, and they are not ‘theatrical pretexts’ but psychologically sound devices used perfectly legitimately within the world Dickens has created as Pip’s. The sense of guilt provides its own logic and guilty fantasies, and those related by Dickens are right in the context created already. By this logic Pip’s irrational sense of guilt is greatly heightened, so that when his sister dies that doesn’t help him, on the contrary, for he now expects to meet her accusing ghost everywhere, and feels guiltier than ever because he can’t feel any regret or tenderness for her now she is dead, as he knows he ‘ought’. Dickens, with his keen interest in the self-deceptions of civilized man, makes Pip note that to compensate he ‘was seized with a violent indignation against the assailant from whom she had suffered so much’ – believing him to be Orlick but of course still feeling as though it was himself. Hence when he confronts Orlick in the unearthly scene in chapter LIII we are not surprised, having been led by stages to comprehend the nature of this scene, that Orlick (in the role of Satan the Accuser of Blake’s theology) says:
‘It was you as did for your shrew sister. I tell you it was your doing – I tell you it was done through you.’
Pip must surely be entitled to sympathy for his explanation in chapter XIV of his misery at losing his simple belief in the merits of his home and the satisfactions of a blacksmith’s life, and in suppressing this not to hurt Joe. It was a stroke of Dickens’s genius to choose the calling of blacksmith, since the smith was indispensable in an agricultural community dependent on horse-drawn ploughs and a society dependent on horse transport, doing work requiring exceptional strength as well as skill, a kind of work that was both a craft and an art, which even had a mystique; and therefore he was highly respected on many grounds. Yet his work dirtied the hands and covered the smith with ‘sut’, in an age when a gentleman was known by his clean hands and refined appearance. No wonder that Pip was haunted by the dread of seeing Estella looking in at the forge window and seeing him grimy. Still, he had spells of feeling that the forge life ‘offered me sufficient means of self-respect and happiness’ though these were sooner or later dispelled by memories of ‘the Havisham days’. Inevitable therefore that he should accept a patron’s offer to make a gentleman of him by educating him – it is the chance to be better educated that Pip tells Jaggers he ‘had always longed for’ – even if he hadn’t been sure that the patron must be his old friend Miss Havisham ‘up town’ to whom he had often mentioned this desire.
How could he know what London was, where he hopes to fulfil his dream and make a fresh start? He encounters on arrival a London that is characterized as ‘ugly, crooked, narrow and dirty’ (all terms morally as well as literally unpleasant) and we note that Mr Jaggers’s office is in ‘Little Britain, just out of Smithfield’ – Smithfield was then as well as a cattle-market the place where cattle were publicly slaughtered. Pip looks in there while waiting for his guardian:
So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison.
– we are left in no doubt of the relative standing of church and prison, the former blackened by the prison in front of it which blots out most of the great church. The parallel between Newgate and Smithfield is underlined when Pip is then conducted round the prison and told, with awful immediacy, that ‘“four on ’em” would come out at that door the day after tomorrow at eight in the morning to be killed in a row.’ The word ‘killed’ instead of ‘executed’ makes the identification with ‘the shameful place’ inescapable, and the whole tells us with the force and simplicity of Blake’s poem ‘London’ what aspects of the metropolitan culture the village boy is to find representative of the nation. Ev
idently a society that butchers people as callously as animals, it is later, at Magwitch’s trial, to pass sentence of death with sickening inhumanity on the ‘two-and-thirty men and women’ at once, and one at least of them we know to have been made a criminal by the refusal of his society to do anything for a child but drive him to thieve from hunger and thence to prison and a life of crime.
Jaggers is the representative figure-head of London, and Pip’s introduction to his office and himself in a throng of clients reveals shatteringly that his great abilities and unsparing labours are habitually devoted to defeating the purpose of justice: yet he is paradoxically rewarded for this by high reputation, wealth and a unique status (still the characteristic feature of the legal career). The fascination and high spirits with which Dickens explores his case must not divert us from taking the impact of the horror Jaggers evokes.15 Jaggers’s self-respect inheres in his professional reputation and he can’t be bought off (his substitute for integrity) but his work being what it is his only satisfaction is gained from the visible exercise of personal power – over his housekeeper (whom he exhibits cruelly as a wild animal he alone can handle), his clients, his guests, and the Law itself – Pip is shown him at work in a police-court where ‘he seemed to be grinding the whole place in a mill’, terrifying prisoners, officials and witnesses alike. He is as decent as circumstances permit but his potential goodness is powerless in such a morally perverted society, in which he acquiesces because he profits by it, though that state of things has made him uncomfortable enough to have made an effort to rescue one child, Estella, from becoming, like other children ‘so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come into his net’. It is true that God or Nature has been revenged on him, since he has no private life, no real home, thinks it proper to conduct experiments on his guests as to their potential criminality, has no idea of conversation except as a cross-examination, has no manner except bullying (‘he even seemed to bully his sandwich as he ate it’, says Pip, and his characteristic gestures, of biting his forefinger and deploying his handkerchief to terrify, are not engaging either. The only person ever to intimidate him is Joe, who turns on the bully in a pleasing scene.) His objection to anything not evidence is revealing, especially in the scene where he and Wemmick, having been drawn by Pip into an unprofessional confession of harbouring ‘poor dreams’ once, that is, a confession that their sordid ‘real’ life is not enough, turn together on the wretched client who sheds a genuine tear, and by this display of strength of mind ‘re-establish their good understanding’. Here, as in Great Expectations generally, comedy is in the service of a very serious master. Jaggers is probably Dickens’s greatest success in any novel. This is because he is truly in and of the novel, brilliantly created in action, gesture and dialogue, and exemplifying in his situation the theme of the book, as does even his manner, admired by Wemmick: ‘“Suddenly – click – you’re caught!”’
But even Jaggers cannot escape a sense of guilt for the way he earns his living, for his whole mode of life, and he betrays this by his habit of washing his hands of his unsavoury clients at the end of the day, like Pontius Pilate in disclaiming human responsibility thus, though Jaggers needs heavily scented soap to drown rather than wash off the contamination of which he thus shows himself conscious. Pip had said of Estella: ‘It was impossible for me to separate her from the innermost life of my life’ – everyone has an ‘innermost life’, except Jaggers, for whom life is therefore only self-assertion. Hence his daring the thieves with his massive gold watch and chain and by leaving his doors unlocked at night – his need for the assurance of power is strong enough even to make him risk his life nightly to prove it. The tremendous creative effort Dickens put into Jaggers shows how serious a criticism of his society – a Newgate London – he felt him to represent. Jaggers is the richest of all Dickens’s characters who live for the exercise of power – that so many are to be found in leading positions in his later novels shows how important Dickens saw this characteristic, a psychological perversion, to be in revealing what he found wrong with the life of his time. Wemmick, with his dual life of office and Castle that must be kept separate even to the extent of requiring twin selves with different ethics, is a variation on the Jaggers conception and extends the implications of the idea, for Wemmick keeps guilt at bay by rejecting his office self altogether in his home existence, a grimly realistic fact of Victorian life rather than a whimsicality as it may seem in the way it is presented in the private life of Wemmick.
Wemmick is necessary also to establish other aspects of the theme. What seems at first a jocular description of Pip’s London home, Barnard’s Inn, acquires sinister implications which reinforce the impressions of Newgate London – the window he throws up in order to get some fresh air nearly guillotines him, he has a sense that someone is dead and buried on the premises, and that the whole place is verminous and rotting away – and that this is the ‘realization of the first of my great expectations.’ But this is only a preliminary:
So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr Wemmick. ‘Ah!’ said he, mistaking me; ‘the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.’
This is more than a joke. That Dickens intends us to realize that this break in the continuity of memory of nature – of what is really ‘the country’ – is a proof of the breakdown of full humanity in social living is proved by what immediately follows this when Pip tells us, Wemmick having said ‘Good day’ to indicate the conversation is ended:
I put out my hand, and Mr Wemmick at first looked at it as if he thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting himself,
‘To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?’
I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion, but said yes.
‘I have got so out of it!’ said Mr Wemmick – ‘except at last.’
Later Pip learns that he shakes a client’s hand when sentence of death is to be carried out, in order to be assured that the client doesn’t bear him a grudge for failing to get him off, his own office morality consisting solely in doing the utmost to get a client off, however guilty he knows the client to be.
Thus, Jaggers being his guardian, Pip’s fresh start in London amounts only to a closer involvement with crime and guilt. He goes down to see Miss Havisham on the coach with the convicts. He finds that Orlick the suspect is now porter of Satis House. On consideration Pip feels obliged to tell Jaggers that Orlick ought not to be in a position of trust, so Orlick is dismissed, necessarily, but Pip though, or through, having acted for the best has Orlick on his conscience as though the situation of being ‘guilty yet innocent’ were the human condition, inevitable; and Orlick has yet another grudge to notch up against Pip. Turning Orlick out of a job drives him, it appears, into a life of crime, into working for the master-criminal Compeyson, and it is through Orlick’s spying and knowledge of old of Pip’s circumstances that Magwitch is tracked down for Compeyson and caught by the law again, as a returned transport – a turn of events Pip could not have then foreseen and hardly deserved, but Dickens is consistent in showing in Great Expectations that the logic of events is not just nor are consequences foreseeable. Thus Orlick’s accumulated grievances against Pip drive him to attempt Pip’s murder (at one level – at another, we see that Pip is drawn back to his past to face the causes of his guilt in confrontation with Orlick): Pip is then only saved by the power of friendship (by Herbert and Startop) directed by Trabb’s boy who alone knew the paths across the marshes to show them the way in time. Trabb’s boy is an unconscious instrument of Providence, for Pip notices that Trabb’s boy was rather disappointed at finding he hadn’t been killed. The sense that life consists of traps and mines that cannot be foreseen or evaded becomes dreadfully ominous in the detailed account of the Eastern tale (in chapter XXXVIII) with its laborious preparations for setting such a machine in motion, a tale that enacts that overthrow of all his hope
s that Pip is about to endure from the revelation of who his patron is. Another instance, with an equally powerful simile, is when Pip finds Compeyson has been sitting behind him at the theatre:
For if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard after all my care, was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow.
This has nothing to do with Nemesis or poetic justice but provides a similar forceful conception of the nature of life: life is shown as a dangerous enterprise where we must make decisions without being able to foresee their outcome or consequences and where intention or will go for nothing. Nevertheless, Dickens shows, in spite of our having to live blindfolded, and in spite of being handicapped by nature and fettered by the social condition, we can achieve contentment and self-respect if not happiness. This is what Pip is shown winning his way to in the face of apparent total disaster; the second half of the novel is devoted to it.