‘Not as funny as it used to be’ was a common criticism of Dickens’ fiction throughout the 1850s, and although he didn’t read his reviews, it was one he was well aware of. A Tale of Two Cities, the novel he wrote before Great Expectations, was a historical romance set during the French Revolution and could hardly be expected to yield much in the way of light comedy. But when one of his closest friends John Forster suggested that it might now be time ‘to let himself loose upon some single humorous conception, in the vein of his youthful achievements’, a sensitive point was clearly hit. Dickens appears to have set out on Great Expectations with the intention of writing a comedy. ‘You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities’ he told Forster after writing the first chapters. ‘I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny.’ Even at Christmas, when he had reached Chapter 10 and introduced Pip to Miss Havisham he was still characterising the novel’s tone (in a letter to his friend Mary Boyle) as ‘very droll’.
‘Droll’ may hardly be the first adjective which springs to mind when one reads that darkly intense first section, dominated as it is by a violent escaped convict awaiting transportation, an abused and frightened child threatened with death, and the ghoulish mystery of Miss Havisham and Satis House. Yet even here a very complex sort of humour is at play, as Dickens shows us the world through the eyes of a sensitive child - but a child as remembered by his sophisticated adult self, who can be wryly ironic about what the child takes all too literally and seriously. Take this passage from Chapter 2, for example
Some medical beast had revived tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence.
This combines the child’s vividly immediate intuition that drinking the tar water makes him smell like a new fence with the longer adult perspective on that sensation, indicated by the ‘educated’ Latinate vocabulary which understands virtue being correspondent to nastiness and elixirs administered as a choice restorative.
If Dickens set out with the intention of writing a farcical or at least predominantly ‘droll’ novel, the story itself soon insisted on taking a more serious and melancholy turn. The sharply observant eye and drily self-deprecating intelligence that grown-up Pip casts over every page of his story (as in the piquant account of his and Herbert’s attempts at economy in Chapter 34) may make this the wittiest of Dickens’ novels, but comic it isn’t. One leaves Great Expectations with a sense of quiet sadness and resignation; – Pip’s life has turned out to be a much smaller affair than he had anticipated (in interesting contrast to David Copperfield, where the hero ends up self-satisfied and on top).
What further elements of comedy Great Expectations contains can be broadly divided into three categories. In Joe Gargery and Wemmick there are two richly and subtly conceived characters whose personalities may have comic aspects - Joe’s illiteracy and ‘larks’, Wemmick’s letter-box smile and castle in Walworth - but who are integral to the novel’s plot and themes.
Then there are the more typical Dickensian caricatures, such as Chumblechook, Mr Wopsle, the Pockets, Aged P and Miss Skiffins who are sketched in two dimensions. As their fanciful names indicate, the novel does not require us to take them seriously and they are primarily introduced for the purpose of entertaining the reader rather than driving the plot and theme forward.
Finally, there are the set-pieces or tableaux, written very much in the mode which made Dickens’ name when he published Sketches by Boz in 1836. Among them one might single out the portrait of the school run by Mr Wopsle’s great-aunt in Chapter 10, the performance of Hamlet in Chapter 31 and Mrs Joe’s funeral in Chapter 35. In all these little detachable episodes, Dickens is revisiting territory he had covered in previous novels (undertakers in Oliver Twist, theatricals in Nicholas Nickleby, dame schools schools in Dombey and Son, for example), and in reading them one senses that he’s going through the motions, with some rather forced or second-hand jokes.
The novel’s great comic master-stroke – something one would put into any anthology illustrating Dickens’ supreme and unique genius - is the scene in Chapter 30 in which Trabb’s boy mocks Pip on his return from London. Analysing its magic isn’t easy, but some of its effect comes from the contrast between Pip’s fragile attempt to maintain his dignity, described in stately, detailed and polysyllabic fashion, and the anarchic snook-cocking energy which galvanises Trabb’s boy, an all-too easily recognisable lout of a hormonally maladjusted teenager, in his brutal but spot-on demolition of Pip’s pretensions to a new social identity. And Pip the narrator sardonically understands exactly what the game is.
Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best beseem me and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb’s boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace ‘Hold me! I’m so frightened!’ feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance.
The rhythm is beautifully managed. The pattern is repeated twice, with Trabb’s boy popping up in new guises before he effectively kicks Pip out of town, ‘with crows as from an exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith.’ Pip walks on pretending not to notice his humiliation, and the episode is nicely rounded off with the final sting of Pip’s mock-pompous letter to Trabb, complaining about his employment of ‘a boy who excited Loathing in every respectable mind.’
In his less mature novels, Dickens sometimes overdoes his minor comic characters by an excessive repetition of their tics which yields diminishing returns. But here he handles things immaculately: the boy plays no part in Trabb’s arrangements for Mrs Joe’s funeral in Chapter 35, and it is only in Chapter 53 that he pops up again ‘where he had no business’, as Pip’s unexpected and unwitting saviour from the murderous Orlick. At this late point in the novel, it’s a lovely surprise to re-encounter him, especially as Pip treats his appearance with a scepticism which nicely deflates the melodrama of what has gone before.
We deemed it prudent to make rather light of the matter to Trabb’s boy; who I am convinced would have been much affected by disappointment, if he had known that his intervention had saved me from the limekiln. Not that Trabb’s boy was of a malignant nature, but that he had too much vivacity to spare, and that it was in his constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody’s expense. When we parted, I presented him with two guineas (which seemed to meet his views) and told him that I was sorry ever to have had an ill opinion of him (which made no impression on him at all).
Writing of this quality is beyond analysis.
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