Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
(1861)

Great Expectations is a sensation novel written by Charles Dickens. It is a buildungsroman that retrospectively depicts the personal growth and development of an orphan named Pip. The symbolic settings in which key events occur is one of the most memorable aspects of the novel: from the misty marshes near Pip's childhood home which reflect his own fears and uncertainties, to the decaying Gothic 'Satis House' which presents Miss Havishams attempts to freeze time and preserve her suffering but also is symbolic of the general decadence of the upper classes. The plot follows Pip's ambition to become a gentleman in order to gain the heart of Estella, who had been raised by Miss Havisham to be entirely heartless. The narrative weaves inextricably intertwined characters and a multitude of coincidences that are characteristic of Dickens. It explores themes of wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Themes and Relevant Quotes

Wealth/Class	Attitudes to Love	Time
"But, I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and it was worth nothing." "It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home... it was all coarse and common, and I would not have Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account." "But if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child - what come to the forge - and ever the best of friends! - " "I fancied, as I looked at her, that I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and common boy again. O the sense of distance and disparity that came upon me, and the inaccessibility that came about her!" "Let me confess exactly with what feelings I looked forward to Joe's coming... considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money."	"Break their hearts, my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!" "I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be." "'Oh I have a heart to be stabbed or shot in, I have no doubt,' said Estella, '... But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no - sympathy - sentiment - nonsense.'" "When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all." "but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love - despair - revenge - dire death - it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse." "It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter" "suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be."	"But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow." "It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped like the watch and the clock, a long time ago." "... this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects," "The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clock all stopped together."

Critical Responses

• "Pip regrets that he had not "risen to manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest old forge". The key word here is ‘honest’. The means on which he lived were dishonest and devoid of personal meaning. He felt further alienated from his actual needs; he was functioning as a commercial entity rather than a human one. As Marx said, a relationship based on capital showed that “the need of a thing is the most evident and irrefutable proof that the thing belongs to my essence.”" - A Marxist Critical Reading of Great Expectations (Luke McKay)
• "Dickens’s achievement is to create a sense of the felt multiplicity of the future in a narrative form that tends towards ordering it into a neat chronology, structurally equivalent to the past. At the climax of the novel, it is also to create a sense of the shock that occurs when the future no longer conforms to previously anticipated narrative structures and to do so in a narrative that constantly creates a sense of onward movement through its own logic, its organization, and even through the syntax of its individual sentences." - Feeling for the Future: The Crisis of Anticipation in Great Expectations (Daniel Tyler)
• "For Estella most overtly seems what Pip is not: a child cherished by a loving parent and surrounded by every material comfort and security. The narrative quickly moves to establish the Otherness of Estella. Even her name is the sign of a distance. Estella is a star, an unreachable object, an illusory expectation upon which life’s happiness founders." - Modern Critical Views (Harold Bloom)