Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  IV

  I can never understand the righteous indignation of the Dickens critics at Pip for not being delighted to find Magwitch is his patron, or (admitting he might be shocked, having always supposed it would be Miss Havisham) that gratitude should not overcome all other considerations. Why, one of them demands, should he ‘recoil in horror’ from Magwitch? As though Dickens had not taken the greatest pains to make this inevitable and to give it justification! ‘Pip’s horror is not openly explained, although there is the suggestion that it is founded on the connection established between criminality and his own fortune’ (Dabney). Professor Christopher Ricks thinks Pip behaves badly. Behind these and similar attitudes to Pip’s reactions is an assumption that the critic in his postition would have behaved differently. Perhaps all Dickens’s art is wasted in the light of democratic sentiment of such theoretical strength that no realities can affect it. Not to understand Pip’s sickened sensations and his refusal to take the ex-convict’s money, though he wouldn’t have minded being supported by Miss Havisham’s, seem to be mostly American (Miss Havisham’s having an even greater disadvantage in being ‘a crazy old maid’s’, we gather). It seems necessary to make clear exactly what Dickens establishes in the peripeteia scene in chapter XXXIX. Pip’s reaction is shown to be much more complex and fundamental than a genteel squeamishness due to Magwitch’s manners and eating habits, though Dickens’s brilliant evocation of the man’s personality (‘there was Convict in the very grain of the man’) and speech-idiom reinforces the more serious horrors of the actualities behind his professed love of ‘his boy’ on which his claims to much more than gratitude are based – ‘You’re my son – more to me nor any son’. Even ignoring the art with which the scene has been led up to, from the very first chapter of the novel, so that it carries the added power of a hidden man-trap that has been suddenly sprung under the studious young man just about to go peacefully to bed, it must still be evident that the scene is the highest proof of the fineness of Dickens’s imagination. The incidents that lead up to the revelation are truly dramatic, and Pip then, without warning, sees that all the facts that he had interpreted one way, relating them to Miss Havisham, have now to be interpreted as referring to the convict, whom he has known only as a violent criminal: it is this realization, and that, further, it means he has no claim on Estella whatever, that makes him first tremble at the prospect of such an overthrow of all he had believed his life based on, and then turn dizzy. Nothing else could be expected. But, it is argued, on second thoughts he should have welcomed his benefactor in the spirit in which he had been approached, and been grateful for the money which had been honestly earned and cannot rightly be considered tainted. Pip is therefore dismissed as a snob and held as evidence for condemnation of the idea of a gentleman. Dickens didn’t intend this, since Herbert Pocket, who is certainly not a snob, has no false pride and is earning his living in an office as a clerk, reacts to the horror of Provis’s presence and his claims on Pip equally. Perhaps a Victorian gentleman’s view of having such a patron attached to him as father and house-mate cannot really be understood nowadays, particularly in a country that has accepted violence16 as a way of life, but Pip’s sense of the impossibility of offering the proud, fastidious Estella such a father-in-law and one who will always be there, or even of explaining him, must surely arouse sympathy. (That Provis is Estella’s father is an irony to be revealed later.)

  But the major shock for Pip is that Provis’s claims simply wipe out all that Pip has worked and suffered for, though Provis has actually already blighted Pip’s life and prospects by stipulating from the start that Pip should not be prepared for earning his living – the convict’s idea of a gentleman but not Dickens’s – thus condemning Pip, as we’ve seen, and as he knew, to an uneasy life without purpose and to incurring a burden of debt through boredom – Dickens knew the necessity for a vocation and hard work, and makes Jaggers disapprove of the patron’s stipulation also. Has Pip studied with such zeal17 so long in order to read books in foreign languages for Provis’s self-gratulation? For it is at once made plain to Pip that he has been plucked out of the forge and educated in London at Magwitch’s behest less from gratitude than as a means to an end, in which the boy was merely an instrument. This makes it plausible that the convict should have laboured to transmit his savings to England for someone whose only claim on him is once having got him food and a file – though we see that a deeper claim was Pip’s service in telling him Compeyson had also escaped, which made his own freedom useless but enabled him to punish Compeyson by dragging him back to prison, earning himself transportation to Australia and his first chance to go straight and make good. Pip’s place in Magwitch’s memory was therefore assured; but his reasons for determining to educate Pip are based on more plausible grounds than gratitude, a quality in which it is always unwise to place confidence and which Dickens himself, we know, discounted.18 Stronger than gratitude was the desire to revenge himself on the society that had unjustly discriminated in Compeyson’s favour at his last trial because Compeyson was privileged by education and manners, and the need to show to his own satisfaction that he is not the inferior of the ‘colonists’ as they insultingly maintained – for even in the colonies his manners and lack of education deprived him of a social position in spite of his honestly-earned wealth. Dickens’s understanding of these essentially human motives, which are not base, and with which we must sympathize, enriches the character of Magwitch and makes him much more than a convenience like Orlick or an unplausible character, a mere mouthpiece for Dickens, like Biddy. Thus his affection for Pip is for the idea of his ‘brought-up19 London gentleman’ and Pip is to be his puppet. Magwitch makes this very plain and it is this which revolts Pip, with reason, for he had not supposed this to be his function for his patron. Assuming the patron was Miss Havisham whom he was fond of and who had certainly affectionate feelings for him, and who, he thought, meant well by him as to Estella ultimately, and whose money was derived honourably from her father’s brewery (a highly respectable traditional English way of making a family’s fortunes), there was no reason why he shouldn’t accept her help in achieving an education and status, though Dickens implies he ought to have had a profession and have justified himself by working at it. So it is natural that Pip should now feel, as he says, a Frankenstein in reverse, for he is bound to a compact he never voluntarily or knowingly assented to, forever to be linked to a monster. ‘Provis’ reveals himself by saying:

  ‘Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! … I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman – and, Pip, you’re him! … You shall show money with lords for wagers, and beat ’em! … And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me to know in secret that I was making a gentleman … I says to myself, “If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no learning, I’m the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?” This way I kep myself a going.’

  Dickens even explains how Magwitch brought primitive superstition to aid his undertaking: ‘“Lord strike me dead!” I says each time – and I goes out in the open air to say it under the open heavens – “but wot, if I gets liberty and money, I’ll make that boy a gentleman!” “Lord strike a blight upon it,” I says, wotever it was I went for, “if it ain’t for him!”’ The psychological truth is as convincing as the lively expression of it.

  The reader will, and is meant to, find this pathetic, but we cannot but sympathize also with Pip, to whom it represents a nightmare he has done nothing to deserve and can never wake up from. Provis not only says he is Pip’s owner, he at once behaves accordingly with complete confidence: he turns the ring on Pip’s finger (hadn’t he paid for it?), takes the watch out of Pip’s pocket, demands to be read foreign languages to and ‘While I complied he, not comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air of an Exhibito
r.’ Surely anyone would find this role insufferable, even if one’s handler were not known to one as a violent criminal. Pip now realizes that he has been bought and paid for and that he is merely a valuable property to Provis; Miss Havisham was a lady, which would have made all the difference, and Pip could have respected himself as a protégé in such a relation. Pip knows his ‘owner’ only as the wild beast struggling murderously with another convict in the ditch who terrified his childhood, and in fact the man is still desperately lawless, drawing his jack-knife when he hears Herbert’s footsteps and sleeping with a pistol on his pillow.

  It is intolerable and yet Pip sees that he cannot go on being supported by this man’s money if he is unwilling to play his part as Provis’s gentleman-exhibit. He now reflects that it is owing to Magwitch that he has no means of earning a living and wishes that he had been left in honest independence, if not content, at the forge. Even assuming Estella would have him, he cannot support Estella without Magwitch’s money, which he can’t take now, or Miss Havisham’s, which he now knows is not destined for himself. And Magwitch even anticipates that Pip may be in love and that money (his money) will ‘buy’ the girl, thus laying his hands on Pip’s dream too. Magwitch’s blind egotism undercuts the pathos of his position as a man also deluded, who also had great expectations (of being loved by ‘his boy’) which are now seen ironically by us. The horror and despair of Pip’s position is completed when Herbert points out that Pip cannot reject his patron since he may then have the returned transport’s blood on his conscience for ever. Pip says ‘I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he is strongly attached to me. Was there ever such a fate!’ Here ‘attached’ neatly combines both the bond of affection of Provis for his creation and that chain, forged link by link by Pip’s fate without his knowledge, that we have had demonstrated in the making and that now fetters him apparently without hope. This is marked as ‘The end of the second stage of Pip’s expectations.’

  We now see the part to be played by Pip’s ‘guilty’ past. The dormant sympathies Pip had, as we’ve seen, for the guilty and the law-breakers (being consciously one himself) are activated next by Magwitch’s telling the story of his life. The arbitrariness of ‘justice’ in this society is again emphasized by the greater consideration shown for the really vicious Compeyson than for his tool; and the heartlessness of the respectable, compared with the sympathy and good offices shown the boy Magwitch by social outcasts and unfortunates, makes the class issue now a matter of the difference between righteousness and charity. It is a characteristic Dickens touch that whereas the prison visitors only give the boy tracts that he can’t read,

  ‘A deserting soldier in a Traveller’s Rest, what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read; and a travelling Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me to write.’

  This, though picturesque, is not sentimental, and is recognizable as corresponding with the actual state of things, as we repeatedly find – e.g. one of Mayhew’s vagrants told him how he woke up frozen in a haystack covered a foot deep in snow and said, ‘An old farmer came up with his cart and pitchfork to load hay. He said: “Poor fellow! have you been here all night?” I answered, “Yes”. He gave me some coffee and bread, and one shilling. That was the only good friend I met with on the road. I got fourteen days of it for asking a gentleman for a penny.’

  Pip cannot help reflecting that it is society which is guilty towards Magwitch, whereas Compeyson, starting with the advantages of being educated, made himself into a criminal. Magwitch is evidently not named ‘Abel’ for nothing: one sees who is Cain, and remembers the title in Our Mutual Friend: ‘Better to be Abel than Cain’, a maxim Dickens is already promoting in Great Expectations. So that at the end of Abel’s history Pip says:

  He regarded me with a look of affection that made him almost abhorrent to me again, though I had felt great pity for him.

  ‘Almost’ is a sign that Pip has begun to slip over from abhorrence to sympathy with him, in spite of being unable to accept the affection yet, and to realize the true nature of the Cain-like society which he had elected to join to become one of the privileged. He had already reflected consciously that it was for the expectations represented by Magwitch’s patronage that he had deserted Joe, thus deepening his sense of guilt.

  Returning to Satis House and finding the truth about Estella, he has no further illusions to cherish and only realities face him when he comes back. He has Magwitch’s safety on his mind to create a real demand on him, a demand whose validity he now reeognizes and it is this, together with the sympathy, and self-reproach, that makes him find his convict more tolerable. An admission of the bond between them is elicited by Pip’s suffering him to take his hands affectionately, though he had resented the man’s desire to do so on their first meeting in London. Pip is surprised to find that their positions have been reversed by these undercurrents of feeling from the time ‘when I little supposed my heart could ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him as it was now’. Finding that Compeyson is dogging him increases his concern for Provis. His misery at losing Estella makes him feel for Miss Havisham who had been deceived like himself once, just as her sight of Pip’s misery had woken her to the realities of her use of Estella for revenge: thus freed from being the woman of Pip’s vision deliberately hanging in martyrdom by the neck, she burns up in what seem to be Dantean flames of penitence; Pip kisses the dying woman’s lips in forgiveness of the harm she had done him, his own hands and arm being scorched by his involvement with her. These things take place neither exactly in a real world nor in a wholly symbolic context, though the dispersal of ‘the heap of rottenness and all the ugly things that sheltered there’ is one of the many suggestive notes of a double meaning, and the intensities of this last experience of Satis House prepare us for the astonishing chapter LIII when Pip involuntarily goes back through the phases of his early life to the sluice-house on the marshes. The portentousness of Wemmick’s warning note ‘DON’T GO HOME’ that reverberates through chapter XLV is not exhausted there but remains in the reader’s mind to sound its warning note again now though ignored by Pip when, in answer to the summons, he reluctantly retraces his steps immediately before he intends leaving England with his convict: ‘Towards the marshes I now went straight, having no time to spare.’ ‘I left the enclosed lands and passed out upon the marshes’:

  There was a melancholy wind and the marshes were very dismal. A stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But I knew them, and could have found my way on a far darker night, and had no excuse for returning, being there. So, having come there against my inclination, I went on against it. The direction that I took was not that in which my old home lay, nor that in which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned towards the distant Hulks as I walked on.

  The gravity and loaded meaning of all these words, the suggestion of an ordeal unwillingly undertaken and yet inescapable, prepares us for the realization that we are in the presence of a mystery, that Pip’s back being turned towards the Hulks, for which in childhood he believed himself destined, is one of the reverse symbolic actions of the second half of the book. Pip is keeping a tryst, he knows not with whom, but we can see that the journey takes place in his ‘inner self’, as we proceed with intimations of a spiritual pilgrimage: Pip passes the lime-kiln with its hellish vapours and takes the road that goes down through a stone-quarry and up again, in the dark. Anyone who has read The Pilgrim’s Progress – and in Dickens’s time everyone had – would recognize that Christian’s pilgrimage through the Valley of the Shadow of Death was being echoed. Sure enough, in the sluice-house Pip encounters his Apollyon; in Bunyan’s allegory Christian had had to meet and overcome the Devil’s advocate in the Valley of Humiliation. Old Orlick tells his enemy to prepare to die and worse, and faces him with charges of his guilt, as Apollyon had Christian. Like Christian, Pip admits those sins of which his enemy a
ccuses him, expresses contrition and hope of forgiveness, is fought with flame and wounded; similarly, his devilish assailant is unexpectedly routed only after the man had given up hope of saving his life. That The Scarlet Letter and The Pilgrim’s Progress were drawn on by Dickens as sources for inspiration and method for this novel shows us the kind of undertaking Great Expectations was, and how we should respond to the presence in it of these forces and parallels. The reliance on recollections of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the recognition of Orlick as performing the part of Apollyon in this scene, are so obvious when one sees it is so that one wonders that this is not a commonplace. This realization would have spared us the antics of critics searching for Freudian explanations of this scene and of the role of Orlick. The ordeal that culminates in the admission of guilt, and in repentance, suffering, humiliation and a fight for life was in a popular English literary tradition treating spiritual experience. Dickens has made sketchy indications of Orlick’s being in the Devil’s service from when he was first introduced – refusing to spend Sunday properly, frightening little Pip with his intimacy with the fiend, and so forth – but he has been unable to resist the temptation to make Orlick a character-of-all-work, in league where necessary for the plot with Compeyson and Drummle, and even brought in to make a comic scene at the end (robbing Pumblechook for us to remember the old humbug with his mouth stuffed with flowering annuals and Orlick pulling his nose, for which Orlick deserved, we feel, to escape his spell in the county jail, where we leave him).