My review of Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Without a doubt my favourite Dickens novel. First serialised in 1860-61, this Victorian classic, narrated in first person though not autobiographical, chronicles orphaned protagonist Pip's formative years around the Kent marshes, then in London, in the early to mid-1800s.

The story opens circa 1812 with seven-year-old Pip's frightening Christmas Eve graveyard encounter with escaped prison ship convict Abel Magwitch. The man scares the child into stealing food and a file to grind away his shackles, from Pip's custodian sister's kitchen. The next day, as Magwitch brawls with a fellow escapee, soldiers recapture the pair and return them to the ship, bound for the penal colony of New South Wales.

We next meet wealthy spinster recluse Miss Havisham, a jilted bride permanently clad in her old wedding dress, cloistered in her dilapidated house. She asks Pip's Uncle Pumblechook (actually Pip's brother-in-law's uncle) to source a male playmate for her young ward, Estella. After visiting Miss Havisham several times, at the old woman's urging Pip becomes enchanted with the petulant girl.

As they mature, Estella goes away to study, on the Continent, while Pip becomes his brother-in-law Joe Gargery's blacksmith apprentice. One day a lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, arrives at Joe's shop, announcing that an anonymous benefactor has provided Pip with a generous allowance. The conditions require Pip to move to London and become a gentleman. Assuming Miss Havisham his provider, Pip visits her to find Estella returned from overseas and more disdainful than ever.

After years pass, gentrified Pip gets himself into financial debt in London. Convict Magwitch returns from New South Wales a wealthy, self-made man and, to Pip's horror, reveals himself to be the mysterious longstanding benefactor. With a warrant out for Magwitch's arrest in England, he risks being captured and hanged. Pip and his friends Herbert Pocket and Startop hatch a plan for Magwitch to flee by boat. Pip also now discovers that Estella is Magwitch's natural daughter with Jaggers's housemaid, Molly, whom Jaggers had defended in a murder charge. Jaggers had then assigned Estella to Miss Havisham for adoption.

Pip learns that Miss Havisham's eccentric matchmaking behaviour is driven by her desire to avenge men, that she has used Estella to break Pip's heart. After Pip confronts the old woman with this in a showdown, she accidentally sets herself alight. Pip rescues her from the flames but she dies, remorseful of her cruel machinations.

Caught escaping England, Magwitch is jailed and becomes gravely ill. Visiting, Pip informs him that Estella, his daughter, is alive, but Magwitch dies behind bars, narrowly escaping his scheduled hanging. On losing Magwitch's lavish allowance after his sudden death, Pip is no longer a gentleman.

Having taken ill himself, Pip faces arrest for debt. His widowed brother-in-law Joe arrives in London, nurses Pip back to health, pays off his debt and returns to Kent. Pip realises that in his selfish pursuit of romance and riches, he has neglected kindly Joe, now alone in the world. Ready to make amends and begin anew, Pip returns to Kent to propose to his childhood companion Biddy, only to find that she has just married Joe. Pip begs Joes forgiveness anyway, and receives it. Promising to repay Joe's money and kindness, Pip moves to Egypt to live with Herbert and his wife, working as a clerk.

On another homecoming eleven years later, Pip revisits the ruins of Miss Havisham's house, where he finds the now widowed Estella, who had been harshly ill-treated by her husband, Bentley Drummle. She asks Pip's forgiveness for her past treatment of him, declaring that misfortune has changed her for the better. Taking Estella's hand, Pip leaves the old Havisham house, foreseeing 'no shadow of another parting from her.'

These characters seem deeper and more dynamic than the more widely satirical ones of Dickens' other works in a denser, more concise telling. The title refers to the 'Great Expectations' Pip holds of coming into his wealth and his elevation from bumpkin to gentleman. 'Expectations' refers to its Victorian definition, 'a legacy to come'. This title infers that wealth versus poverty is a significant theme, while others include social class, empire and ambition, love and rejection, homecoming, crime and the power of good over evil. Pip has great ambition yet fights guilt over various things almost throughout the book. The plot explores the social strata of Georgian England.

Of the numerous screen adaptations, many have been widely disappointing, the one notable exception being director David Lean's brilliant 1946 version, starring John Mills as Pip, Bernard Miles as Joe, Alec Guinness as Herbert, Finlay Currie as Magwitch, Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham, Anthony Wager as Young Pip, Jean Simmons as Young Estella and Valerie Hobson as the adult Estella.

Masterful storytelling with haunting eccentrics like the frail and embittered, but generous, Miss Havisham, never leaving her house since that fateful day at the altar, inhabiting a shadowy, unlit world of cobwebs and mice. The cold and beautiful Estella, who our hero falls for, is someone we hope will come to her senses about him. Pip's bossy sister and big-hearted brother-in-law, their extended family who come and go, somehow resonate powerfully even today.

The sounds and sights and smells of the story's many and varied scenes are remarkable.

Exquisite.