Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861)
From Commonplace Book
Contents
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"
- 63 P's disquisition on injustice, followed by seeing a ghost
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
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 rochard the Third