Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861)

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
• 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 relared

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

The way texts seem to bounce off the protagonists here and in Wuthering Heights - I wonder if it's something to do with bildung, the telos of individual liberal subject development? This isn't the case for Robert Audley, for example, who is suffused in and uses his French novels to interpret the world

• 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

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

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