Difference between revisions of "Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861)"

Revision as of 17:06, 5 May 2017

General Notes

• 17 interchangeability of people within clothes, as in Bleak House
• 33 the sergeant recites a jingle for Musical Glasses as a toast - advertising
• amazing sentence about all the material things tending toward the fugitives
• 36-7 perception fuddled by atmosphere as they pursue the convicts to the Marshes, again reminiscent of Bleak House (though pitched differently since its through Pip's eyes vs the disembodied narrator, perhaps a little closer to Esther)
• 41 Pip's "cowardice" (that is his guilt and self-recrimination) - does this go through?
• 43 national debt - Framley mentions it was a big issue in late 1850s
• 60 the patterning of clocks: the Dutch clock at the Gargerys', at Satis house "everything in the room had stopped like the watch and the clock, a long time ago"
  • 80 the clock stopped at 8:40
• Satis House as the gothic space within the Bildungsroman, a place of weird stasis in a progressive trajectory
  • impt too that this is through Pip's perspective
• 63 P's disquisition on injustice, followed by seeing a ghost
• 93-4 again Pip's guilty conscience
• 95 the displaced sexual energy of Miss H's relationship with estella

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

• 3 Pip imagining his dead parents from the writing on their tombstones
• 45 Pip's slate and chalk letter to Joe
• 73 the tattered book for students at Mr Wopsle's great aunt's school
• 109 teaching Joe at the Battery
• 117 Pip being "read at" by Wopsle

Materiality

• 57 Miss Havisham's dress

Shakespeare References

• 25 Wopsle says Grace like "a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third"
• 44 again Wopsle reciting Mark Anthony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar to the children
• 77 Wopsle declaiming unspecified passage from Richard the Third, ending, "...as the poet said"
• 118 again Wopsle and Richard III, plus possibly misremembered King John