Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861)

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Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. Pub. 1861. Ed. David Trotter. Penguin Classics, 2002. Print.

Overall

  • The possibility of forgiveness at the end of GE is better than mimetic or corresponding to reality: it imagines a world in which Joe really can forgive Pip and where all the ritualistic, repetitive suffering can be endured socially, which is crucial -- not individually. The formal involutions, repetitions, doublings make it quite densely worked and on different levels: verbal, generic, character, etc. The ontological status of the first person narration is on the face of it more straightforward than Bleak house, but I'd say the interaction between the retrospective first-person and the dense temporal patterning - repetitions, stalled time, characters emerging at different times to create complex connections within the narrative - to make it satisfyingly complex. Writing and reading are very much a tool of relationality here. Pip's narrative itself isn't tied to a specific material circumstance.
  • The extend to which this is an emergent multimedia object if you look at the number plans: Dickens evidently planning both for weekly serial numbers in AYR and for three-volume publication with "This is the end of the first stage of Pip's expectations" (p. 160/ch. 19), and second (p. 324, ch. 39) since this is already embedded in the AYR numbers. Also, he started it in AYR because of the failure of Lever's A Day's Ride.

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 (1853) (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 Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861) 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 (vaguely rem. of Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853))
  • 93-4 again Pip's guilty conscience
  • 95 the displaced sexual energy of Miss H's relationship with Estella
    • 302 she "hung upon" Estella, devours her
    • 303 almost a lover's quarrel "you are tired of me" (distant echo of Prospero and Caliban, or even Frankenstein [direct reference to the monster in Pip talking about the Avenger on 218] in the relationship)
      • 339 this time Pip feels like Frankenstein and Magwitch is his monster
  • 125 Pip returning to Satis House, the dark, gothic space which he internalizes as self-loathing and shame
  • 183-4 Herbert the capitalist (in "look[ing] about you") and how close empire and trade are of course related
  • 229-30 The coincidence of being on the stage coach with the prisoner from the Bargemen
    • nb Dickens describes it as "coincidence," not fate (it effects resolution, not frustrating it, unlike in Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 1886))
    • 312 the fate, or the slow drawing together of processes, in "the Eastern story" before something befalls Pip at the end of Vol 2
  • 231-2 Satis House presents a mystery of which Pip sees himself as the "hero"
  • 240 love, desire, humiliation, and violence closely linked for Miss H
  • 253 Pip and Herbert talking about "realizing Capital" (Kornbluh)
  • 260 Pip and Wemmick visit Newgate prison
  • 264 again Pip feels shame at someone who has shown him kindness when he thinks of Wemmick and having Newgate on him for Estella -- she is the embodiment of his shame
  • 265 Estella says, "We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions." (Can that statement be related to informational genres in Copperfield?)
    • that sense that all is being orchestrated somehow by Havisham and Jaggers - what does it mean formally and generically for a narrative of individual development?
    • 359 when Pip confronts Ms H she says "His being my lawyer, and his being the lawyer of your patron, is a coincidence.... Be that as it may, it did arise, and was not brought about by any one." Interesting statement on Pip's need, and the reader's need, for narrative sense.
  • 303 the temporal modes of the "construction" of Pip's experience at Satis House
  • 320ff Magwitch's revelation -- the displacement of agency onto a young protege parallel between Havisham and Magwitch
  • The way that the formal logic of repetition extends backwards in time to Satis House and forward to Pip's expectations, and the way both stunt his moral development: he might have married Biddy if not for his repeated returns to Satis House (and by extension the Bentley house in Richmond where Estella stays), he might not be so cruel toward Joe if not for his expectations creating a sense of difference, inadequacy and shame
    • these repetitive structures recur on a small scale in characters' verbal tics: "what larks," nodding to the Aged Parent, Pumblechook as his earliest benefactor...
  • 364 Pip's speech about Estella having "been in every line I have ever read" - in a sense she is his development, crooked, backward looking, shameful
  • 376 contrast Herbert/Clara with Pip/Estella (as Pip himself does on 380)
  • 393 Estella's mother (Jaggers' housekeeper) "married very young, over the broomstick (as we say)" - therefore Estella is illegitimate
  • 399-401 repetition in Havisham and Pip's last conversation: "what have I done?", "we parted; we parted," and "write "I forgive her""
  • 416 getting Havisham's money to Clarriker for Herbert is "the only good thing I hadn't done, and the only completed thing I had done"
  • 426 orlick as pip's negative double
  • 462 Pip's fever dreams, imagining himself as an object
  • 479 Pip asking Joe and Biddy for forgiveness, echoing Havisham: saying it vs writing it
  • 480-1 how 11 years is contracted but earlier in vol 3 we were clearly going month by month
  • 481 Young Pip: a new double

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

  • The way texts seem to bounce off the protagonists here and in Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847) - I wonder if it's something to do with bildung, the telos of individual liberal subject development (see Armstrong 2005)? This isn't the case for Robert Audley, for example, who is suffused in and uses his French novels to interpret the world, or Dorothea Brooke
  • 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 - and then refracting his sister's assault throwing that play afterwards (Barnwell)
  • 122-3 handwriting and illiteracy with the Gargerys after Mrs Joe's assault
  • 133 Wopsle reading aloud to other men at the pub (the newspaper)
  • 147 Pip uncomfortable with the Bible reading at church - he seems at odds with texts as they intrude into the narrative, they're contested or inappropriate
  • 276 tallying Pip and Herbert's debts
  • 334 Magwitch's "greasy little clasped black testament" for swearing
  • 346 Magwitch describes being given useless tracts when he was young, hungry, and illiterate
  • 352 Herbert identifies Arthur and Compeyson "in the cover of a book"
  • 398 Havisham asking if Pip can ever write "I forgive her" under her name
  • 411 Wemmick and Jaggers trying to ignore Pip's revelation about Estella's parentage by focusing on writing (they're going over accounts)
  • 419 letter telling Pip to return to the marshes - difficulty of comprehending a letter with one reading
  • 464-5 Joe laboriously and comically writing (Biddy taught him)

Materiality

  • 57 Miss Havisham's dress
  • 122 Mrs Joe sees multiplied "visionary teacups" after her assault
  • 201 Wemmick: "...My guiding star always is, 'Get hold of portable property.'"
  • 209 Wemmick's "felonious" collection at the Castle
  • 331 Magwitch's "negro-head" tobacco -- connects to Freedgood 2006

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
  • 133 Wopsle becoming Timon and Coriolanus in reciting a murder inquest from a newspaper - though here it's Pip supplying the Shakespeare comparisons
  • 212 Pip compares Jaggers' housekeeper to a witch in Macbeth
  • 220 Wopsle's performance in Hamlet advertised
  • 253ff Wopsle's Hamlet
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