A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club)

by Charles Dickens

  “But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “‘God bless you, God forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now—now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”

  “We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.

  “And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.

  I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.

  THE END

  Appendix:

  The Ending as Originally Conceived

  “Dear Pip,” said Biddy, “you are sure you don’t fret for her?”

  “I am sure and certain, Biddy.”

  “Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?”

  “My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!”

  It was two years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.

  I was in England again—in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip—when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

  “I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

  I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

  PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES

  Early Reception of Great Expectations

  “ . . . he gives to you humanity in all its little details.” —Eclectic Review (Oct. 1861)

  By the time Great Expectations was running in its serial form, Dickens’s readers—and the critics—had “great expectations” of the author. A survey of early criticism of the novel reveals reiterations of long-established views of Dickens’s stylistic weaknesses as well as genuine appreciations of the novel’s tight construction, exhilarating pacing, and suspenseful plotting.

  If you’ve read Bleak House or David Copperfield, you already know that Great Expectations is a rather compact novel by Dickens’s standards. Critics were divided about this condensation; some applauded it, others felt dissatisfied. The review in Blackwood’s Magazine, by Margaret Oliphant (May 1862), has little to recommend. She finds the novel “feeble, fatigued and colourless.” Oliphant interprets the brevity of the novel in this way: “One feels that [Dickens] must have got tired of it as the work went on, and that the creatures he had called into being but who are no longer the lively men and women they used to be, must have bored him unspeakably before it was time to cut short their career, and throw a hasty and impatient hint of their future to stop the tiresome public appetite.” Her assessment, however, is contradicted by other critics—in addition to posterity.

  The Saturday Review’s anonymous review (20 July 1861) of Great Expectations was highly favorable (though considered it “too slight”): Dickens “has written a story that is new, original, powerful, and very entertaining.” The reviewer predicted, “It has characters in it that will become part of common talk, and live even in the mouths of those who do not read novels.”

  In another appreciative review in the Athenaeum (1861), H. F. Chorley charged Great Expectations “with only one fault—that of being too short.” Chorley finds it “a work of Art arranged from the first moment of conception with power, progress, and a minuteness consistent with the widest apparent freedom.” He lauds, “There is nothing in English fiction, not even ‘the print of the man’s foot in the sand’ in Robinson Crusoe, fuller of engrossing and legitimate terror than the night scene of convict’s return, dogged from its first moment by Death. From this point to its close, the interest of the romance increases with a resistless and steady power never before attained by Mr. Dickens. [. . .] Great Expectations, we are satisfied, will add to Mr. Dickens’s reputation, and is the imaginative book of the year.” Similarly, Edwin Whipple, in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1861), could “testify to the felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story. In no other of his romances has the author succeeded so perfectly in at once stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers.” Even more creditable, according to Whipple, is the fact that “each surprise was the result of art, and not of trick; [. . .] the dénouement was still hidden, though confidentially foretold.” Upon rereading, the critic discovered all the hints—cleverly planted.

  Critics of Dickens often comment on two apparently contradictory impulses in his style: an astute observation of detail and a tendency toward humorous exaggeration. Critics who used the standards of realism to judge Dickens’s writing admitted its humor but tended to denigrate his comic exaggerations—as well as the popular audience’s positive response to them. “[I]n Mr. Dickens’s many volumes how many characters would a fair critic deem wholly true to nature or to any reasonable conception of natural chances?” the Dublin University Review (Dec. 1861) asks. Another common critique is found in an anonymous review in the Eclectic Review (Oct. 1861): “[. . . Dickens] piles absurdities in rapid succession upon each other, like the very bricks of his humorous building. He sees in the most out-of-the-way objects grotesque, and queer, and comical analogies [. . .]. Indeed many will be inclined to regard them as one of his chief excellencies; on the contrary they are the vice of his writings.” But Great Expectations, the reviewer was pleased to note, had less of this “profusion of absurdity” than earlier Dickens fictions. On the whole, the Eclectic Review’s assessment was more positive: “Amid much that charms to laughter, there runs the perpetual feeling of a thoughtful mind, to whom life, and man, and society, present perpetual thoughts of sorrow and of mystery.”

  Whipple’s Atlantic Monthly appraisal finds the two strains “harmonised” in Great Expectations: “Everybody must have discerned in the action of his mind two diverging tendencies, which, in this novel, are harmonised. He possesses a singularly wide, clear, and minute power of acute observation, both of things and of persons; but his observation, keen and true to actualities as it independently is, is not a dominant faculty, and is opposed or controlled by the strong tendency of his disposition to pathetic or humorous idealisation [. . .].” The most humorous idealization, most reviews agreed, was the character of Wemmick. Though the Saturday Review criticized Miss Havisham as “one of Mr. Dickens’s regular pieces of melodramatic exaggeration,” like other critics, it found in Wemmick “the great creation of the book, and his marriage as the funniest incident.” Other reviews, such as that in the Dublin University Review, estimated Joe Gargery the most “natural” and sympathetic portrayal, and somewhat grudgingly admitted that Grea
t Expectations “contains a good many striking passages, a few racy and one or two masterly portraits, a story for the most part cleverly sustained and wrought out to no lame or disjointed issues” and a plot that has “a kind of artistic unity and clear purpose.” The Times review, by E. S. Dallas (17 Oct. 1861) ranked Great Expectations, if not among Dickens’s best novels, (in an odd choice of adjective given the novel’s dark tone and muted ending), his “happiest”: “There is that flowing humour in it which disarms criticism, and which is all the more enjoyable because it defies criticism.” Certainly, Dickens’s wide readership and enduring popularity has defied those early negative reviews and validated the insight of his most sympathetic critics.

  What Is “Dickensian”?

  Depending on the context, the adjective “Dickensian” is sometimes used to refer to the Victorian era, or even more vaguely, to an old-timey past that was more warmhearted and communitarian than our own times. In a derogatory sense, it may imply a description that is either overly sentimental or extravagantly expressed. In social-critical terms, “Dickensian” sometimes indicates the abject condition of some group, as in the phrase “Dickensian poverty,” which relates to the critique of the living and working conditions of the poor that is a prominent part of Dickens’s novels. But “Dickensian” most often refers to his characteristic style: an acute perception exaggerated to comic effect. This effect often included giving life to inanimate objects and the reverse, mechanizing the animate. Dickens routinely employed this style in describing his characters’ physical appearance, especially his one-dimensional, minor characters, though he sometimes extended its use to houses and other objects, and to bureaucratic systems, such as the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. Critics point out that a Dickensian character’s odd or eccentric behavior refers to a deeper lack in their nature; this, added to the fact that these characters are rarely depicted as transforming in any psychological detail, makes them, in narrative terms, “flat.” Examples abound in every Dickens novel: in Bleak House, Miss Flite, the crazy old woman who befriends Esther Summerson and is never absent from the court carrying her bag of nonsensical documents, while awaiting a favorable judgment of her case; the villainous Marquis of Evremonde, in A Tale of Two Cities, who has a face like a “fine mask . . . of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it”—an expression of cruelty. (Appropriately, the château belonging to the Marquis has a similarly “stony” aspect.) The lawyer, Jaggers, in Great Expectations, has “bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling,” and Pip always associates him with the smell of scented soap, with which the man has a habit of washing his hands after leaving the court, as well as his creaking boots. Mr. Wemmick is introduced as having a “square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel” and later is described as having “such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling.” Wemmick, as Jaggers’s chief clerk, must keep his knowledge close. But this businesslike manner conceals another side to his personality. Whereas Dickens’s early critics—using realism as a standard—found these kinds of fanciful association to detract from his greatness as a writer, most readers, then as now, consider the vividness and imaginativeness of these descriptions as his peculiar genius.

  Gothic Elements in Dickens

  The Gothic was a popular late-eighteenth-century and Romantic literary form that united the characteristics of terror and romance. Fictions such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), and The Mysteries of Udolfo by Ann Radcliffe (1794), established the genre. Elements of the gothic in literature survived well beyond Jane Austen’s parody, Northanger Abbey (1817). In the nineteenth century the gothic eventually developed into related genres such as sensation fiction and the detective novel, and a new form of the gothic emerged at the end of the century, with novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Characteristically, gothic fictions employed the supernatural—ghosts, monsters of various sorts, such as vampires, werewolves, and other undead (Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein is a notable example)—to evoke psychological and physical terror. Gothic atmospheres and settings include dungeons, castles, and cemeteries, and its stock plots involve innocent maidens imprisoned by villains, as well as madness and secrets, aristocratic decay, doubles, and hereditary curses.

  Although the gothic is supplanted by realism for most of the nineteenth century, one does find these characteristics in Victorian fiction. Robert Mighall claims that Dickens’s novels are the best evidence to the persistence of the gothic during its putative Victorian hiatus. Arguably the most gothic of all of Dickens’s fictions is A Tale of Two Cities. Dr. Manette is imprisoned in the famous Bastille prison by secret means for his knowledge of an act of brutality. He is driven to madness by his solitary confinement, and even reverts to his traumatized state in moments of trouble and psychic pain. His buried curse, resurfaced, causes his son-in-law, Charles Darnay, to be re-imprisoned. Darnay tries to keep his aristocratic identity a secret from his wife but is persecuted for his lineage and his uncle’s sins by the vengeful revolutionary Madame Defarge. The cemeteries where Jerry Cruncher robs graves for bodies to sell to the surgeons are another gothic element, in which Dickens weaves the ironic moniker “Resurrection Man” with the Christian theme of sacrifice, personified in Sydney Carton’s final act.

  Miss Havisham, “the strangest lady that [Pip] has ever seen,” and her Satis House—both in states of moral as well as material decay—are the most obvious gothic elements in Great Expectations. Arrested in time, all the white bridal objects have become “faded and yellow,” including the bride within the bridal dress, who reminds Pip of both a skeleton and a waxwork figure he once saw. “Now wax-work and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me,” he recounts upon meeting the weird recluse for the first time. All natural light is shut out of Satis House, its garden “overgrown and rank,” the wedding feast moldering upon the dining table.

  The secrecy of Pip’s benefactor; the “nameless shadow” that dogs Pip’s memory whenever he is in Estella’s presence; the revenge that Miss Havisham intends to wreak upon mankind through Estella; Pip’s sense that he is “taint[ed]” by prison and crime—all these details are Victorian echoes of the gothic. But Dickens also creates a little gothic parody in Wemmick’s “castle” in Walworth, with its assortment of ingenious devices and odd architectural adornments, such as the drawbridge and “the queerest gothic windows [. . .] and a gothic door almost too small to get in at,” as well as in Wemmick’s penchant for collecting mourning rings and other paraphernalia from dead criminals.

  The popular 1860s novels of sensation and detection successfully adapted gothic themes. Dickens’s friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins, as well as another prolific sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, both relied on gothic tropes, as did the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. The gothic as a literary phenomenon is pre-Victorian in its origins yet has a more than ghostly Victorian existence: the gothic continues to be modified, parodied, and reinvented even into our twenty-first-century culture.

  Dickens and Victorian Servants

  Domestic service was the most common source of employment for women and girls during the nineteenth century. By the mid- to late-Victorian years, about a third of all women employed worked as domestic servants. According to the 1851 census, 13.3 percent of employed men and women were in domestic service, and this number increased as the middle classes grew wealthier. By 1881 this number had risen to nearly 16 percent. Young girls generally entered service by the time they were twelve or thirteen.

  Victorian servant life depended a great deal on the size and wealth of the house in which a servant was employed. The number of domestics in a household defined a servant’s duties, which in turn defined their status in the house. Three servants staffed a typical middle-class
home—a cook, a housemaid, and either a nurse or parlor maid, depending on the ages of the family’s children. Servants worked long hours and had strict rules about behavior applied to their employment, often including being denied visitors. Their duties included everything from cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, carrying coal and tending to the fires that heat the home, hauling water upstairs and waste back downstairs, ordering supplies from tradespeople, and keeping track of accounts, child care, and chaperoning. Without refrigeration, even daily meals required frequent marketing, baking, and preserving, and in homes heated by coal fire, and without indoor plumbing, heavy items such as water and fuel were carried by women servants.

  The heaviest manual labor was done by a maid-of-all-work, who might be the only servant in the home of a tradesperson or a skilled worker. Her day might last as long as seventeen hours, arising before the family to start the fire and not retiring until the family did. Her bed was often a simple pallet on the floor of the basement kitchen, where she labored most of her day. At the other end of the scale, a country estate or wealthy town house would keep a large staff, with a strict hierarchy that mirrored that of their masters’ society. In these homes, servants were divided into “upper” and “under” servants. The principal staff were the butler, the housekeeper, and the head cook. The second rank of servants included footmen, assistant cooks, ladies’ maids, parlor, nursery, and housemaids. Depending on the size and type of grounds, other servants that might be employed included additional maids for the kitchen, scullery, and dairy, and laundresses and boot-boys; grooms, gardeners, watchmen, coachmen, and carpenters also might be hired, though as outdoor staff they would typically report to the landowner’s agent. The butler and housekeeper divided responsibility of under servants according to gender. The mistress gave orders directly to the head cook, who was also responsible for the supplies and staples. The butler’s duties included serving the wine, as well as securing the wine cellar and the silver and plate. Personal attendance and the maintenance of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing were the duties of the gentlemen’s valets and ladies’ maids. These positions were much less demanding than a scullery maid’s, yet they nevertheless required skills in hairdressing and dressmaking and they were not exempt from more physically demanding (and distasteful) tasks—sweeping, building fires, and carrying slops.