Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the wall of the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough fence, and looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin … I could trace out where every part of the old house had been, and where the brewery had been, and where the gates, and where the casks.

  We are not surprised to find Estella there too; it seems inevitable, as she belongs to the place in his memory. That Pip should marry Estella without the jewels that had enhanced her beauty for him (that is, stripped of her pride, social superiority, aristocratic grace, youth and fortune, and also of the illusions Pip had had, lost when he learnt of her parentage) shows him to have recovered from the spell Satis House had cast over him. Estella is now saddened, a poor widow, has passed through Drummle’s distasteful hands, and has nothing left but the site of Satis House. The old Pip would have shuddered away from her, and he says she is almost unrecognizable. But for the first time she is not walking away from him – he notes ‘She let me come up with her.’ She has gone through a process comparable with Pip’s self-knowledge and humiliation so that they can truly come together at last.22 Her appeal for Pip now is that they have this experience in common, as they have a common past history, both having been made use of and having much to regret. This fits them for each other and no one else. So they leave ‘the ruined place’ hand in hand, in a ‘broad expanse of tranquil light’, a picture that is not theatrical, nor is it Academy art, nor a happy ending, but a true symbol of the successful end of Pip’s pilgrimage. And this does offer an answer to the implicit question in the novel. How can one live without the crushing burden of guilt that this society imposes, yet without cutting oneself off from all society? It would have been easy for Dickens to have made his protagonist more than a gifted man – Jaggers is merely that – one who, like Dickens himself, was a man with a vocation who could respect himself therefore; but he would have evaded the problem. Pip, who has been much criticized as weak, uninteresting, tame, and otherwise lacking in spirit and force, was designed for the purpose as representative of the ordinary man, but with greater sensitiveness so that he cannot rest under the load of guilt and shame that other ordinary men managed not to notice. But it is the very fact of this awareness that makes Pip able to exercise moral choice, and even in such a constricting society as Dickens saw his to be. Pip’s moral sensibility is shown to be the product in fact of the very conditions that made his sufferings: Dickens wrote of himself that he coudn’t resent his unhappy experiences in childhood ‘for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am’. We see Pip at the end freed from the oppressive fantasies and fears that were the result of his guilt, and equally from the shame that produced his false aspirations after a gentility of unearned income. He is content to work as a clerk under Herbert having resigned himself to the knowledge that in such a society there can be no great expectations – the charge that he ought to have worked in some capacity to bring about a better state of society ignores Dickens’s (and Hawthorne’s) point that this is the human condition: we cannot escape the necessity for the prison and the graveyard.

  A Shakespearean (in two senses) comic under-plot is seen in Mr Wopsle’s career which counterpoints Pip’s; dissatisfied with the social position of parish clerk and indignant at social discrimination (because, he believes, if the Church were ‘thrown open’ he would rightfully be the parson) he goes up to London with the ambition of becoming a great tragedian and reviving the drama – his ‘great expectations’. Conceit blinds him to the humiliating reality and unlike Pip he never learns the truth of things. The account of his deception is apparently humorous but really rather painful because of the indignities Wopsle incurs, also because Dickens, who was steeped in Shakespeare and saw as many of the performances of the tragedies as he could, implies disgust at the production (a travesty of Hamlet) and at the audience who are worthy of nothing better. The whole plays a part in characterizing Newgate London, along with Barnard’s Inn, Smithfield, the hotel where Pip is humiliated because they can’t provide a decent tea for Estella, Herbert’s counting-house, Jaggers’s performances in the police-court and with his clients in the street, and his dinner-parties in Gerrard-Street. The state of the theatre and its public is part of this degradation of a society, which no one felt more intensely than Dickens. And this carries on from a similar undercurrent of his theme in Little Dorrit, where society is defined by its attitudes to the arts – by Mrs Gowan’s ‘afflicted feelings’ at her son’s going in for ‘that dreadful Art’, by the degraded idea of the Opera represented by the governing-class conception of it as, in Mrs Merdle’s euphemism, the place whose function is to provide dancers for ‘fascinating’ young men in Society, and the degraded idea of the theatre where the former patron of the arts, Frederick Dorrit, who has been ruined by the Barnacle society, plays in its orchestra for a wretched living, never looking up at the stage, and the Puritan and bourgeois attitudes expressed by Mrs Clennam as ‘those accursed snares which are called the Arts’.

  1. e.g. I have noted a series of recent objections to the ‘implausibility’ of the novel: i. We are not told why Compeyson didn’t marry Miss Havisham – when in fact we are told by Magwitch that a few years after the jilting Compeyson certainly had a wife ‘which Compeyson kicked mostly’ (suggesting a marriage of long standing), and as though Miss Havisham’s brother would have ventured on such a conspiracy with a man free to double-cross him, Arthur’s declared aim being to get a share of the loot as well as to humiliate his sister! ii. That Magwitch isn’t much like an old lag – as though Dickens’s point weren’t that he isn’t a natural old lag (through low mentality or vicious instincts) but a potentially decent fellow driven to crime in childhood, and who at the first chance makes good in Australia, with a motive – to vindicate himself indirectly against the ‘gentlemen’, ‘from the judge in his wig, to the colonist’ who despised him, by setting up ‘his boy’ in London, iii. Pip never seems to meet any girl but Biddy and Estella – this betrays a failure to grasp the whole method of the novel which works in representative experience: Biddy is the best that village life can produce and she can gain no hold on Pip’s imagination because she is only the product of the village, while Estella, who does incarnate values that satisfy his imaginative needs, so permeates his life that no one else is necessary or possible for him. iv. Why do we not hear anything about Pip’s feelings towards his sister between his childhood and Orlick’s insulting her? The reason is that the novel pursues a theme and is not a total recall of Pip’s memories even though Pip is the narrator, and to suppose the scenes of his life are chosen for theatrical effect or some other arbitrary or derogatory reason is to ignore the art which furnishes the right, expressive occasions for advancing that theme.

  2. Dickens has emphasized this for the reader by marking the sections as ‘This is the end of the first’ (or ‘second’) ‘stage of Pip’s expectations.’ The true artist, exhausted and yet triumphant, is shown in what he writes about the novel as he ended: ‘It is a pity that the third portion cannot be read all at once, because its purpose would be much more apparent; and the pity is all the greater, because the general turn and tone of the working out and winding up, will be away from all such things as they conventionally go. But what must be must be. As to the planning out from week to week, nobody can imagine what the difficulty is, without trying. But, as in all such cases, when it is overcome the pleasure is proportionate.’ The extra difficulties he gave himself by undertaking weekly publication and thus shorter portions than his usual numbers, make it even more remarkable that Great Expectations is such a tight, economical and yet infinitely suggestive and complex work of art.

  3. At dawn on the wedding-day George goes out to see the sunrise on the seashore and feels that Nature approves his actions; he sees that in such signs as ‘the orderly withdrawal of the stars, the calm promise of coming day, the ineffable splendour that the
n burst forth’, etc. Thus the help he once got from nature when felt to be sympathetic to his anguish, is now invoked again as a sanction. Dickens’s intelligence is shown here in his remarkable comprehension of the psychological truths on which Wordsworthian beliefs were based, while showing clearly his own dissociation from them as beliefs.

  4. ‘Romantic’ here is used basically in the sense it bears in Jane Austen’s novels, meaning to feel excessively about things and not be directed by reasonable considerations.

  5. Dickens here, as so often, seems to have arrived independently at an insight close to Blake’s in ‘Songs of Experience’ rather than to be merely translating theological dogma into psychological fact.

  6. The Scarlet Letter was so influential on English novelists and the Victorian reading public that it is really part of the English 19th century tradition, as witness its influence on, e.g., Dickens and George Eliot (who also greatly admired it – v. Anna Karenina and Other Essays, ‘Adam Bede’, where F. R. Leavis discusses the influence on that novel of The Scarlet Letter). Its steady sales here from the beginning in innumerable cheap editions showed that it was recognized as a classic of our own. The highly stylized settings and the schematic technique of The Scarlet Letter seem to have an affinity in the very deliberately selected simple settings of Great Expectations, as well as in its salvationist outcome and its exploration of the effects of guilt. Hawthorne opens his novel outside the prison, uses the Scaffold for public expiation, has his little settlement surrounded by woods where lurk the Devil and his instruments, all as the background for the sinful consciousness of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, with the incidental revelation by Hawthorne, with devastating irony, that the society that condemns these sinners is far more really evil. The two characters have to work out their own salvation by suffering, contrition, confession, self-abnegation and atonement, and, in the case of Hester the survivor, by a life of useful work and humble acceptance of her lot. Miss Havisham’s being seen by Pip in a vision as first and last hanging from a beam reminds one of Hester forced to stand on the Scaffold at the beginning and end of her sufferings. Though the likeness of Great Expectations to Hawthorne’s novel is pronounced in these respects, yet Dickens’s masterpiece is unique – thus one creative genius can make use of another’s work without being parasitic or even imitative. I provided a critique of The Scarlet Letter in its context of Hawthorne’s whole creative oeuvre in my essay ‘Hawthorne as Poet’ (1951) which is available in the volume Hawthorne in the Twentieth-Century Views series (Prentice-Hall).

  7. Pip makes this reflection after visiting ‘Wemmick’s greenhouse’ in Newgate while waiting for Estella and ‘thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her’. She then refers to the inmates of Newgate, which he points out to her, as ‘Wretches!’ with disdain, not knowing she is the child of such. The point that emerges from the deadly irony that thus pervades the novel is Father Zossima’s ‘All are responsible for all’.

  8. I suspect Dickens had in mind Fielding’s allegory of the coachload of travellers and servants that represent Fielding’s society in Joseph Andrews, and their characteristic reactions to the man robbed and left naked by the wayside. Dickens’s has the great advantage of not being an obtrusive parable like Fielding’s but a delicate creation of a complex attitude that raises issues at once moral, psychological and sociological. Fielding’s is comparatively simple-minded – he is satisfied with the satiric contrast between the selfishness of social man (even when allegedly Christian) and the spontaneous human sympathy that the classless poor can afford to manifest.

  9. If Pip seems excessively young to have been so momentously struck by Estella’s beauty and grace, we may recollect that when Dickens was removed from Chatham to London at the age of nine, he was stricken by the loss of what were the equivalents of Estella and her romantic ambience: ‘Cobham park and hall, Rochester cathedral and castle, and all the wonderful romance together, including a red-cheeked baby he had been wildly in love with, were to vanish like a dream.’ – Forster, Life, on Dickens’s own information.

  10. Sometimes the reality is forced on his notice, as when he sees her ‘quick delight at having been the cause of’ the tears in her eyes, or the ‘bright flush on her face’ at the pleasure of seeing the boys fighting on her account, or that when she lets him kiss her, first as a boy and later as a man, he can get no gratification from it.

  11. Dickens’s conception of Joe was of a ‘foolish, good-natured man’ originally: subsequent accretions of virtues tend to disguise this but though gentle and affectionate he remains a very limited person and one who did not protect little Pip from Mrs Joe, as he ought, he knew, to have done, which deprives him of Pip’s confidence.

  12. One is prepared for Dickens to make use of Estella’s heredity – her gypsy mother murdered her rival – by making Estella murder the brutal husband who ill-used her, in the original ending when she wasn’t to marry Pip; but Dickens did not, either because it would have been too melodramatic or because he held that nurture is stronger than nature.

  13. This is made twice in our novel in an interesting way. When Pip reproaches Miss Havisham for leading him on in the false supposition that she was his patron, she replies: ‘You made your own snares. I never made them.’ Pip seems to be recollecting this when he subsequently defends himself against Orlick’s charge of having ruined him (expressing Pip’s sense of guilt at having had Orlick discharged from his post as porter at Satis House) with ‘I could have done you no harm, if you had done yourself none’.

  14. The characteristic humour of this novel appears in the satiric note struck about the class assurance of superiority in Herbert’s management of the fight, which is picked up when Pip and Herbert meet again as young men when it turns out that though beaten then Herbert remembered the fight as a victory for himself over ‘the prowling boy’. This time Herbert, before he recognizes in ‘Mr Pip’ his ‘prowling boy’ of old, says innocently: ‘We shall be alone together, but we shan’t fight, I dare say’ – immediately after which he makes the identification of Pip, the innocent cliché having been the memory-rouser presumably. This is a good instance of Dickens’s keen and consistent interest in how the mind works.

  15. It is extraordinary how people can read the novel without taking the impact, some critics complaining of the ‘unpleasant’ tone of the discussion between Wemmick and Jaggers about whether Drummle will beat his wife or cringe (which is actually more damaging if we remember that Jaggers has a personal responsibility for Estella) as though this were out of character. We must not forget ‘the two brutal casts’ which Pip says were ‘always inseparable in my mind from the official proceedings’ between Wemmick and Jaggers, and that Jaggers has no life that is not ‘official’ – of the office.

  16. Thus Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels, ‘reinterprets’ Great Expectations as ‘an embodiment of Freud’s theme in one of his most important works, Civilization and its Discontents’, because he can’t see any creditable evolution in Pip, and wants to explain what he feels to be the unsatisfactoriness of Pip, Herbert and Joe – unsatisfactory because non-violent characters who would have liked to be, or ought in a better state of society to be, uninhibited characters like Orlick, he thinks. A modern tendency to explain Orlick as acting out the suppressed desires of Pip at least, is in line with this rejection of the merits of civilization.

  17. Dabney complains that because there is no detailing of Pip’s studies there is no reason for believing in them, that he is merely stated to be educated. Of course it is in his reactions and conversation that our conviction lies, and a realistic novel was ruled out by the nature of Dickens’s undertaking. George Silverman’s much more specialist education is even more briefly but still sufficiently indicated for a similar purpose.

  18. V. Forster, Book XI, Section III.

  19. Obviously Magwitch desired to ‘own’ a real gentleman – one brought up in London, the capital, and it is the bringing-up as to
which he has made specifications. Dabney renders the adjective ‘bought-up’, I don’t know on what authority but it is clearly wrong, though it suits Dabney’s ‘theme’: Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens.

  20. These names were evidently chosen as ugly and grotesque, to suggest yokels; they are quite different from the alarming sharpness and hardness suggested by the London names like Wemmick, Jaggers, Skiffins, Clarriker.

  21. There is plenty of available information as to the social position and educational level of the village schoolmistress in Victorian England. A good source for the later, and therefore most favourable, phrase is Lark Rise, Flora Thompson’s autobiography of a cottage childhood in Oxfordshire. In her childhood, as long before, the village schoolmistress had only to teach the elements of the three Rs and needlework. Her first teacher was satisfied to marry the squire’s gardener, a later one had the ambition of being received at the front door of the manor house but was deflected to the kitchen. ‘At that time the position of a village schoolmistress was a trying one socially … In the eighties the schoolmistress’ (now the new type ‘fresh from her training-college’) ‘was so nearly a new institution that a vicar’s wife, in a real dilemma, said: “I should like to ask Miss — to tea; but do I ask her to kitchen or dining-room tea?”’ (Equals would of course take tea in the drawing-room.) The old type, like Biddy, would naturally take tea in the kitchen at the rectory or the manor house, Flora Thompson shows. Biddy and Pip were of an earlier generation altogether, the age of the dame-schools kept by such as Mr Wopsle’s great-aunt or rather better, like Biddy, but certainly not our idea of a teacher. ‘Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a halfpenny’, is Dickens’s way of conveying this fact. Jane Eyre when destitute was considered a phoenix of a village schoolmistress, we remember, but this was because she had been educated at a boarding-school to be a private governess and was a lady; and she had herself replaced by someone more appropriate as soon as she inherited money – Charlotte Brontë knew all about these matters. Clothes were also an immediate class-index in the 19th century, as we can see from the discomfort suffered at Wuthering Heights when Catherine Earnshaw comes home to the farmhouse after her stay at the Grange unsuitably – impossibly – dressed like a young lady; and Biddy did not even belong to the farmer class. Cottagers had a recognizable women’s costume. Biddy would neither have dressed nor spoken like a lady, her hands would have been coarsened by rough work as Mrs Joe’s substitute (in the days when everything from floors upwards had to be constantly scrubbed), and unlike Pip Biddy is shown to have taken to the Hubble and Gargery households as congenial enough. For all these reasons (and more) there was a real barrier between Biddy and Herbert’s Handel which had nothing to do with ‘snobbery’ unless any manifestation of real differences that are more than merely social in fact though classified for convenience under that head, are to be dismissed thus. To say that there was ‘more of a class barrier between Joe and Biddy’ is nonsense, if only because there is no suggestion that Biddy had anything to overcome in marrying Joe – she was doing well for herself, like Flora Thompson’s teacher who married the squire’s gardener. Dickens assumes the reader understands all this without being told, and of course his readers did, ‘Biddy’ inevitably suggesting to them the Irish peasant.