Social mobility – in other words, the difficult process of rising through the class system, with all that it implies about leaving or betraying your family origins - is one of the great persistent themes of the 19th-century novel, reflecting the fluidity of personal fortune which the advance of democracy and capitalism had precipitated. Success, money and power were up for grabs where church and state had yielded to ‘the march of progress’, and eager, handsome, clever young men from the provinces, itch with ambition to make their way in the world - often hampered by a slight chip on their shoulders, the result of a sense of disinherited birthright or an unfair disadvantage in their circumstances. Such figures abound in French (for example, Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, Lucien Rubempré in Balzac’s Illusions Perdus, Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale) as well as English fiction.
Several of Dickens’ early heroes fit the mould. Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield are all fighting against the odds. They are idealistic, energetic and bumptious – the first two pushy, the third a bit smug. In his mature novels, however, the testosterone level drops: the men at the centre of their plots can hardly be called heroes. Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend , George Silverman in the extraordinary late short story George Silverman’s Explanation are recessive, downbeat personalities, unsure of their identity or their place, held back by moral qualms and unable to muster the aggression necessary to hit back at the injustices done them.
Pip stands between these two types: he wants to get ahead as keenly as David, Martin or Nicholas, but he comes to learn the vanity of such worldly ambitions. At the novel’s end, he tries to turn back to where he came from, but having discovered that you can’t do that in life, he is left without any home – at least until he comes back to England after his decade in the east. David Copperfield’s efforts are rewarded with material prosperity and connubial bliss – ‘my domestic joy was perfect’ he tells the reader. No such triumphant happiness awaits Pip, chastened by the knowledge that – as the final sentence of the original ending puts it - it is suffering that gives one a heart and sympathy for others. Social mobility is a sham – all that matters, all that you are judged by, is your capacity for Christian compassion.
Pip, in a sense, is the novel - leaving aside Dickens’ authorship and the question of the extent of his personal experience to the story, every word of it is his. As its first-person narrator, we see everything though his eyes, and interpret people and events through what he chooses to tell us about them. Pip’s voice gives the tone of the novel its unity. A famous anecdote was told by a Victorian critic of a poor uneducated cleaning woman who belonged to a sort of reading group where serial novels were recited out loud to the illiterate as they appeared. After hearing Dombey and Son, it was explained that the author was one Charles Dickens. Such was the novel’s breadth and variety that the woman rather percipiently remarked in surprise, “Lawks, ma’am, I thought that three or four men must have put together Dombey”. But she could never have thought that of Great Expectations.
The impression which consolidates is that Pip is a middle-aged man writing his memoir in the here-and-now of 1860-1. The narration is retrospective, told from a distance of forty or fifty years – something the reader begins to intuit in the fourth line of Chapter 1, when Pip explains that his parents came from a time ‘long before the days of photographs’ (a phenomenon of the 1840s). There is no mention of the railway in the novel (another phenomenon of the 1840s), the police in Chapter 5 act ‘in the name of the King!’ (who became a queen only in 1837) and the laws relating to transportation reflect pre-Victorian legislation. Dickens – or should one say Pip? - is carefully vague about dates and ages in the novel, and any attempt to map the action along a historically precise timescale runs up against small anomalies, but it’s fairly clear from such evidence that the story runs from the late 1810s to the mid 1830s – a span corresponding roughly with Dickens’ own younger life.
This sense of long passages and gaps of time gives Great Expectations something of its melancholy colour. We don’t feel that the story is being told in the moment or just after it; although Dickens-Pip is extraordinarily sensitive to the inside of a child’s head and his thought-processes, he is always wryly looking down from a distance, framing, commenting and pondering things from the perspective of knowing how they have all unravelled. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield in J D Salinger’s The Catcher of the Rye tell their stories in the past tense, but they are clearly still teenagers as they do so, much closer to their experience than Pip is. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and even Esther Summerson in Bleak House - both seem anxious and less than adult as they write, as though they don’t yet know their own story’s end.
How do we imagine Pip? The later 20th-century novel has made fashionable a figure known as the unreliable narrator (Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita is the classic example) whose version of events is seductive but possibly misleading and not to be trusted. Pip does not seem untrustworthy; indeed, we take him to be a thoroughly reliable narrator, inasmuch as he is sceptical and unhysterical, and plainly not out to paint a flattering or defensive picture of himself. But he does leave a lot out. He doesn’t tell us where he is writing from or what made him put pen to paper, He never tells us anything at all about his circumstances after the reunion with Estella in his mid 30s and of his previous decade in the east working for Clarriker’s, he tells us nothing either, beyond the cursory paragraph at the end of Chapter 50, and a tantalising mention in Chapter 14 of ‘occasions in my later life … when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything except dull endurance’. So no love affairs, then, no fun – has he been treating his life as if it were a penance?
Whatever one’s speculations, it’s interesting to attempt an assessment of Pip from an angle other than his own - to imagine how he would have looked to an objective outsider or how he might appear if the novel was not narrated in the first person.
He appears lonely, and in comparison with the middle-class young Herbert Pocket, he is short and weedy. He is too modest to tell us that he is clever, but he clearly is quick to learn and bookish (‘I had a taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day’ he tells us in Chapter 39), with an intelligence is far above that of anyone else in his family circle. In other words, he is not cut out to be a blacksmith, any more than his creator was cut out to work in a blacking warehouse. Dickens once described himself to his biographer John Forster as ‘a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate and soon hurt, bodily or mentally.’ This is Pip too.
Fear, guilt and conscience dominate his childhood: Freudian psychoanalysis would judge that he had a severe case of an overactive superego, probably aggravated by a feeling that he was in some sense responsible for his parents and sibling’s early deaths. Being ‘always treated as if I had been born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends’ (Chapter 4) and subject to his sister’s constant accusations, unjustified nagging and ‘capricious and violent coercion’, Pip’s psyche is scarred, and it is no wonder he feels ashamed of his home and ashamed of himself and grows up oppressed by ‘the taint of prison and crime’ (Chapter 32) which seems to stick to him like dust in his coat.
Nor is it just to censure Pip for wanting to get out and find a better life. Critics from G K Chesterton to Robert Garis have labelled him a snob for his aspirations, but to leave it at that is surely sanctimonious. John Lucas is much nearer the mark when he points out that Pip’s ‘desire to atone for past errors leads him to identify error where none exists.’ Pip acts as anyone in his position would have done when offered a golden opportunity to escape the humdrum, and his subsequent embarrassment and discomfort at Joe’s awkward manners is entirely natural. Because he is so overburdened with guilt, Pip beats himself up for wishing that Joe was more refined and educated, but ironically it is Joe who understands the realities of the position, as he clarifies in the dignified speech he makes in Chapter 27, after his first visit to Pip’s London lodgings
‘Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s blacksmith, and one man’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Divisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been any fault to-day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to be together in London, not yet anywheres else but what is private and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen or off th’meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap. GOD bless you.’
This is right thinking. Divisions must come, and be met as they come, and all that Joe requires from Pip is his affection and the acknowledgment that Joe is content being what he is, where he is, in the forge and on ‘th’ meshes’. Pip never denies Joe that affection: he remains very fond of him and loyal to him throughout the novel. He may be excruciated by Joe’s doomed attempts to be genteel and wish to keep him away from sneering fools like Bentley Drummle, but he is never cruel or even rude to him – as Emma Woodhouse, for instance is cruel and rude to the garrulous Miss Bates on Box Hill in Jane Austen’s Emma. What Pip does have to learn, however, is (as J Hillis Miller puts it) that ‘all the claims made by wealth, social rank and culture to endow the individual with true selfhood are absolutely false.’ Joe must be loved for being Joe, what we now call ‘peer-group pressure’ must be resisted, human worth is not determined by position in the class system and that you are what you make yourself, not what you are born or inherit.
Pip is equally blameless in his treatment of Magwitch. His initial shock at finding him to be his patron is as humanly understandable as his reluctance to be associated with someone whom he has every reason to assume is a hardened, violent and dangerous criminal. His behaviour in the circumstances is impeccable and his decision to take no more of Magwitch’s money but to make his escape from Britain his responsibility demonstrates a mature moral conscience. But what makes the end of the novel so moving is that Pip moves beyond acting correctly to feeling compassionately: on Magwitch’s deathbed, Pip has something like a revelation of what Dickens regarded as the spirit of true unsectarian Christianity
For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully and generously towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe (Chapter 54)
which brings the novel to its spiritual climax.
One might also note in Pip’s defence the unselfish consideration he shows toward Herbert Pocket through the sensitive arrangements he makes with Miss Havisham in Chapter 49 for his friend’s financial future (ironically, in becoming his secret benefactor, he replicates Magwitch’s role). And is it not also possible to be on Pip’s side in his scratchy relationship with Biddy? Surely she is mean-spirited to the point of snideness in Chapter 36, both over her failure to write to him about his sister;
‘Biddy’, said I, ‘I think you might have written to me about these sad matters.’
‘Do you, Mr Pip?’ said Biddy. ‘I should have written if I had thought that.’
and when he subsequently tells her, in good faith
‘I am not going to leave poor Joe alone.’
Biddy never said a single word
‘Biddy, don’t you hear me?’
‘Yes, Mr Pip.’
‘Not to mention your calling me, Mr Pip – which appears to me to be in bad taste, Biddy - what do you mean?
Biddy’s passive-aggressive priggishness is in bad taste – the bad taste of the sour grapes of her disappointment that Pip’s amorous interest lie elsewhere. And isn’t it once again Pip’s over-active conscience that leads him to the ridiculous notion in Chapter 57 of going back to the marshes and marrying Biddy - not out of love (the word is never mentioned) so much as an infantile desire for the mothering he never had (as he puts it to her in his mind, ‘if you can receive me like a forgiven child (and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a hushing voice and a helping hand), I hope I am a little worthier of you than I was… ’)? Dickens knew better – Biddy will be far happier with Joe than she would be with the restless, ambitious, sophisticated Pip, who could never have settled back in the forge.
‘The reader cannot necessarily concur with Pip’s relentlessly harsh-self-estimation’ writes John Lucas, and Pip’s tendency to interpret all his actions in the worst possible light could even become tiresome, were it not evidently the result of a childhood designed to make anyone feel badly about themselves. Pip seems to think everything is his fault, but what does he actually have to be ashamed about?
Comments