It was a damp morning in the marshes, and a small boy named Pip sat among the gravestones of his family, scouting the neighborhood. He was an orphan, which in Dickens is less a misfortune than a career.
Out of the mist lurched a convict, who seized Pip by the chin and demanded a file and some food. Pip complied, being a child of tender conscience and no sense whatsoever, a combination that would serve him well for the next four hundred pages.
He was raised “by hand” by his sister, Mrs. Joe, a woman who kept an immaculate house and an immaculate grievance, and who dispensed love in the form of a cane called Tickler. Her husband, Joe, the blacksmith, was so good and so gentle and so thoroughly a doormat that one longs to see him lose his temper just once, if only to confirm he has one.
Then Pip was sent to Satis House, where Miss Havisham had sat for decades in her wedding dress, jilted, rotting, and delighted with herself. Every clock was stopped at twenty to nine. She had kept the cake on the table to molder, which is the sort of thing one does when one has money and no friends. It is not grief. It is a hobby.
She had adopted a girl, Estella, whom she raised to break men’s hearts, a pastime I understand is otherwise reserved for the middle classes. Estella told Pip his hands were coarse and his boots were thick. He fell in love instantly. Some people are born to be insulted by beautiful women, and Pip, to his credit, took to it like a vocation.
Then came the news. A lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, a man who washed his hands after every client, which is the most honest thing a lawyer has ever done, announced that Pip had Great Expectations. A benefactor, unnamed, would make him a gentleman.
Pip assumed it was Miss Havisham. Of course he did. It is the fatal flaw of the young that they believe the universe has been arranging itself on their behalf.
He went to London. He learned to dress, to dine, and to be ashamed of Joe, the only person in the book who had never wanted anything from him. He ran up debts with the easy grace of a man who believed he was owed them. A gentleman, I gather, is someone who has been told so often that he is one that he has stopped checking.
The benefactor, naturally, was the convict from the marsh, who arrived in London smelling of Australia and gratitude. Pip recoiled. The man had spent twenty years making a fortune in order to buy the boy a better class of contempt. It is the most touching thing in the novel, and Pip treats it like a stain on the carpet.
After that, everyone is punished, as is customary. The convict dies. Miss Havisham catches fire, which seems to have been the least she could do, and begs forgiveness, which seems to have been the most. Estella marries a brute named Drummle, because Dickens felt someone ought to pay for the cold hands, and that someone ought to be a woman.
And Pip, chastened, penniless, and finally humbled, went back to Joe, who forgave him at once. This is what is known as a happy ending, and also, I think, the cruelest thing in the book. Nothing is so unbearable as a man who will not hold your worst against you.
The last scene is a ruined garden, a mist, and two people who have wasted their lives on each other. Dickens wrote two endings. In the first they part forever, and in the second they may not. I prefer the first. I have been to a few reunions, and nobody ever looked better for the wait.
This one is meaner toward everyone, Pip included, and goes after the novel’s gentility, its love of punishing women, and the way goodness is mostly a license to be taken advantage of. Want Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities next?
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
