Although Dickens is most widely celebrated for his creation of characters, he is equally remarkable among the masters of the English novel for his magnificent descriptive prose, in particular his ability to create richly atmospheric landscapes and interiors. These are urban rather than rural: born and raised in towns and enjoying metropolitan pleasures and pastimes, he had little genuine feeling for rusticity. The Wordsworthian idea of the natural world as an embracing, healing pseudo-maternal influence on humanity was a philosophy to which he paid only cursory homage - his pictures of rose-covered cottages in pretty villages are just postcard images - and he is more possessed by a sense of the countryside as a dark, threatening and confusing region in which an individual would feel isolated, deracinated and alienated rather than calmed and comforted.
Few passages in his work illustrates this more powerfully than the opening chapters of Great Expectations, where the bleakly dank wilderness of ‘marsh country’ is the setting. Dickens is vague as to names – the county of Kent and the town of Rochester are never specifically mentioned - but there is no doubt that Dickens was drawing on a landscape familiar from both his childhood and his new home at Gad’s Hill, and it is still possible to map the implied landmarks with a fair degree of certainty.
For the boy Pip, his daily surroundings are not a realm of beauty or a source of comfort; they are simply his daily surroundings, which Dickens refuses to romanticize
The marshes were just a long black horizontal line … the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black, and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermingled (Chapter 1)
At the beginning of Chapter 3, the clammy atmosphere which hangs over the marshes becomes an externalized expression of Pip’s anxious superego, and natural phenomena are anthropomorphically endowed with the power to threaten and judge
The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be. ‘A boy with somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!’ The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils ‘Halloa young thief!’ One black ox, with a white cravat on – who even had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air- fixed me obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved round that I blubbered out to him, ‘I couldn’t help it, sir, it wasn’t for myself I took it!’
In Chapter 53, when Pip is lured back to the kiln by Orlick, the marshes become positively hellish, illuminated by a ‘large red moon’ and the air heavy with ‘a sluggish stifling smell’. Only when Pip returns at the end of the novel with the intention of marrying Biddy, does his hopeful mood, combined with nostalgia, cast a benign light over the landscape
the sky was blue, the larks were soaring high over the green corn, I thought all that countryside more beautiful and peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be yet. (Chapter 58)
The marshes haunt the novel, but the theme of the hollowness of Pip’s expectations is most intensely bound up in Satis House and what it represents. Miss Havisham’s lair has the potency of the mysterious impenetrable castle of fairy-tales, but the dark, cobwebby creepiness of its interior is what we would expect. Far more poetically memorable is Dickens’ superb description of the abandoned garden and brewery where Pip is left to consume his lunch in Chapter 8, a place of such utter deadliness that even the pigeons have deserted the dovecot and the smell of beer evaporated from the vats. It is here that Pip imagines ghosts – ghosts not of the dead but the living: Estella, whom he sees ‘pass among the extinguished fires and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky’, and then Miss Havisham hanging from a wooden beam (a nightmare which returns in Chapter 49, just before she meets her real nemesis).
In Chapter 20, Pip moves to London - the city where all expectations, hopes and dreams are played out, where nothing can be easily trusted or fully known, as its inhabitants emerge out of or vanish into crowds, their identities and purposes uncertain. This is the city that obsessed Dickens and that he never tired of describing, a place to which he was addicted and from which he drew so much creative energy.
Dickens’ London is so intensely imagined and vivdly presented in Great Expectations that one can forget that Pip is actually recalling a place that no longer existed when the novel was written. Although he can be very specific about real locations, to the point of virtually giving the reader street addresses (in Chapter 20’s first paragraphs, for example, Pip is delivered by stage coach to ‘Cross-keys, Wood-street, Cheapside’, while Jaggers’ premises are in Little Britain ‘just out of Smithfield, and close by the coach office’), Pip’s London is a memory of the place Dickens knew in the 1830s, when he was a young man about town, before the transformative arrival of the railway, the sewer system and the embankments – the London still conversationally and nostalgically referred to as ‘Dickensian’, implying the sort of quaint soot-covered dinginess of Pip’s lodgings at Barnard’s Inn (Chapter 21).
Dickensian London doesn’t linger in the West End, or contemplate the stucco of Belgravia and Nash’s Regent’s Park. Jaggers lives in Soho and the Pockets in Hammersmith, while Estella lodges in Richmond and the Finches of the Grove seek entertainment in the theatreland of Covent Garden, but the focus of Dickensian London is always slightly to the east, in the Square Mile of the City and over the Thames in Southwark, where the texture of life is denser and wealth and squalor jostle.
Pip’s most notable excursions beyond this hub lead him downriver in Chapter 54 (a superb piece of descriptive reportage) during the attempt to smuggle Magwitch out, and into the modest suburb of Walworth where Wemmick has his castle and becomes another person (Chapters. 25, 37 and 55). To the disappointment of the social historian, Walworth is only passingly described as ‘a collection of back lanes, ditches and little gardens’, but one feels that Dickens sees the place clearly in his mind’s eye: as an obsessive walker through London, he certainly knew exactly how long it took to get from A to B, and if we are told in Chapter 25 that Wemmick leaves home at ‘half-past eight precisely’, that is because Dickens had calculated it would take this pedestrian commuter exactly an hour to walk a little under three miles to Little Britain and arrive at his desk exactly an hour later. In such accuracy over detail as much as in its freely imaginative gestures does Dickens’ genius as a landscape artist lie.
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