Great Expectations slides.pptx

Charles Dickens: Great
Expectations
A Bildungsroman

Lecture 1: Approaching Literature
 One of the first things to consider when approaching the study of a work of literature is
the genre (or type/class/category/form) that the work of literature belongs to. There are
four main literary genres: (i) the novel (or long fiction); (ii) the short story (or short
fiction); (iii) drama (or play); and (iv) poetry. Within these main genres, are many sub-
genres (or sub-categories). One example from each would be:
 1. The novel called the Bildungsroman: “the novel of education”;
 2. The short story called the parable: the story told to reveal a hidden truth about some
aspect of human nature or the nature of the world, etc.
 3. The play or drama called a Tragedy: the play in which the protagonist (or main
character) experiences suffering, often unredeemed, culminating in a tragic end (death
or banishment or loss of status, etc.).
 The poem called the sonnet: a fourteen-line poem popular in the Middle Ages (1300s)
to the Renaissance period (1500s-1600s) in Europe (most notably in Italy).

Approaching Literature
 Another point to consider when approaching a work of literature is its context, that
is, the time and place where it was written. Let’s consider, for instance, Roman
Jakobson’s Communication Model, which outlines some of the elements that come
into play in the production and reception of a literary text.

Story and Plot
“The king died and then the queen died is a story”
“The king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot”
The difference is that the story tells us what happened, and the plot asks why it happened.
It is from the perspective of its plot, rather than its story, that Great Expectations can most productively be
read and analysed.

Approaching Literature
 All literary genres or forms have histories and serve certain functions. For instance,
in The Theory of the Novel (1971), Hungarian philosopher Georg (György)
Lukács says the following about the novel in general:
The novel tells of the adventure of interiority; the content of the novel is the
story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be
proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence. (89)
In essence, what Lukács suggests here is that the content of the novel
already orientates the protagonist’s inner life (his “soul”) towards self-
discovery, that is, towards a kind of bildung or education or self-
formation.

Approaching Literature: The
Bildungsroman
 However, in Speech Genres (1986), Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin considers
what Lukács says about the novel in general to be, in fact, a specific type of novel ⎯
a subcategory ⎯ in the much longer history of the Bildungsroman. Bakhtin calls this
specific type of novel “the novel of ordeal”, which is “constructed as a series of tests
of the main heroes, tests of their fidelity, valor, bravery, virtue, nobility, sanctity, and
so on” (11). He goes on to say that,
This is the most widespread subcategory of the novel in European literature. It encompasses a
considerable majority of all the novels produced. The world of this novel ⎯ the arena of the struggle
and testing of the hero; events and adventures ⎯ is a touchstone for the hero. The hero is always
presented as complete and unchanging. All his qualities are given from the very beginning, and
during the course of the novel they are only tested and verified. (11-12).

Bildungsroman
 Other subcategories that Bakhtin discusses as part of the history of the Bildungsroman, including
the novel of ordeal, are:
 (i) the travel novel: in this type of novel, Bakhtin says, “[t]he hero is a point moving in space. He has
no essential distinguishing characteristics, and he himself is not at the center of the novelist’s
artistic attention. His movement in space ⎯ wanderings and occasionally escapade-adventures
(mainly of the ordeal type) ⎯ enables the artist to develop and demonstrate the spatial and static
social diversity of the world (country, city, culture, nationality, various social groups and the specific
conditions of their lives)” (10).
 (ii) the novel of ordeal: I have noted Bakhtin’s description of this type of novel above.
 (iii) the biographical (and autobiographical) novel: Bakhtin says, “the biographical form, as distinct
from the travel novel and the novel of ordeal, is constructed not from deviations from the normal
and typical course of life but precisely on the basic and typical aspects of any life course; birth,
childhood, school years, marriage, the fate that life brings, works and deeds, death, and so forth,
that is, exactly those moments that are located before the beginning or after the end of a novel of
ordeal” (17). Thus, while “[t]he hero’s life and fate change, they assume structure and evolve, . . . the
hero himself remains essentially unchanged” (17).

Bildungsroman
 (iv) the Bildungsroman: Bakhtin says that,
In the Bildungsroman, human emergence is of a different nature. It is no longer man’s own private
affair. He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself.
He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from
one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a
new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a
new man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not,
of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future. (23)

Bildungsroman
 Bakhtin’s concern with the history of these subcategories, as he puts it, is “how the
image of the main hero is constructed” (10).
 From this perspective, what is evident in Bakhtin’s account of the history of the
Bildungsroman, is that in this type of novel the image of the main hero has shifted
from the margins to the centre of the novelist’s artistic attention. In the travel novel,
the novel of ordeal and biographical novel “the hero remains essentially
unchanged” (17), while in the Bildungsroman the hero “is forced to become a new,
unprecedented type of human being” (23). As Bakhtin further remarks, “What is
happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force
held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the
private biographical future, but the historical future” (23).

Term 3: The Bildungsroman
 In term 3, you will study two novels – Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, and
Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Both novels are examples of the
Bildungsroman (also known as the Erziehungsroman).
 This type of novel features a protagonist (main character), already grown up, reflecting
on her/his development from childhood to adulthood, innocence to experience, and
ignorance to knowledge. Along this path of development, the protagonist is “educated”
in the ways of life. The protagonist’s education takes various forms – moral, intellectual,
social, cultural, political, personal, etc., depending on the themes of the novel that you
are reading.
 The narrative is either in the first-person (“I”) or third-person (“she”, “he”, ”they”). This is
important, as it indicates a certain degree of subjectivity (first-person) or objectivity
(third-person) in the point of view expressed in the story.

Great Expectations: A Bildungsroman
 Great Expectations is a nineteenth-century British novel. It is realist in its narrative
style. Realist novels attempt to portray “the lives, appearances, problems, customs,
and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the
humble, and the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to
reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society—its
mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions”.
 The protagonist of Great Expectations is a young boy named Philip Pirrip (or Pip),
an orphan who grows up in what he calls “the marsh country” under relatively
difficult conditions of poverty and seeks fortune and success in the city, London. It
is the time of England’s rise as a powerful nation, under the rule of Queen Victoria,
and the ‘great expectations’ that fire Pip’s imagination are largely a function of
England’s powerful place in the nineteenth century as a major colonising empire.

Lecture 2: The Victorian Age
 “Nothing characterizes Victorian society so much as its quest for self-definition. The
sixty-three years of [Queen] Victoria’s reign were marked by momentous and
intimidating social changes, startling inventions, prodigious energies; the rapid
succession of events produced wild prosperity and unthinkable poverty, humane
reforms and flagrant exploitation, immense ambitions and devastating doubts.
Between 1800 and 1850 the population doubled from nine to eighteen million, and
Britain became the richest country on earth, the first urban industrial society in
history. For some, it was a period of great achievement, deep faith, indisputable
progress. For others, it was “an age of destruction,” religious collapse, vicious
profiteering. To almost everyone it was apparent that, as Sir Henry Holland put it in
1858, “we are living in an age of transition” (“The Victorian Age”, The Longman
Anthology of British Literature, 2003: 1009).

The Victorian Age
 There is no doubt that in Great Expectations Pip is caught in this transition taking
place in England in the nineteenth century and, indeed, the contradictions that
characterised this transition.
 Indeed, the two symbols that frame Pip’s narrative are fire (as represented by Joe
Gargery’s forge) and stars (as represented by Pip’s great expectations and his desire
to marry Estella; the name Estella means star). If the fire stands for reality and stars
stand for the illusion of fortune and success that Pip seeks after but elude him,
then the central tension in the novel could be said to be between reality and
illusion.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901), at her coronation, 28 June, 1838.
The symbol of the nation’s youth, power and prestige. She was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June, 1837 until her death in 1901. From 1 May, 1876, she
added another title to her reign, i.e. Empress of India. During her reign, England ruled more than a quarter of the globe’s landmass: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Indian
subcontinent and Ceylon, to name a few. By the 1890s, one out of every four people on earth was a “subject” of Queen Victoria.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s
wedding, 10 February, 1840

Queen Victoria and her family, 1846
Even though in her private letters to her daughter, Princess Victoria, who had married Prince Frederick William of Prussia, Queen Victoria expressed her
disdain for marriage and the conventional family, in her public life she portrayed the image of a conventional dutiful mother and wife.

Queen Victoria, 1873
The symbol of the nation’s endurance. As
the longest-serving queen of England,
Queen Victoria enjoyed two Jubilees: the
Golden Jubilee in 1887, and the Diamond
Jubilee in 1897.

Crystal Palace: the great exhibition, 1851
The Crystal Palace, a majestic cast-iron and plate-glass structure, was built in Hyde Park, London, for the exhibition of the world’s nations’ latest technology
developed in the Industrial Revolution. It was also an exhibition of England’s power and progress under Queen Victoria.

Crystal Palace: the great exhibition, 1851
Crystal Palace’s façade.

The reality of poverty in
Victorian England
The picture, taken around
1900, shows a poverty-
stricken East End, London,
family.

Crystal Palace: destroyed by fire, 1936

English Romantic poets’ reactions to the
onset of industrialisation
 Prior to the Victorian Age, in what was called the Romantic period (late 1700s/late
eighteenth century), Romantic poets such as William Blake were decidedly critical
of the onset of industrialization in England, which they saw as marking the end of
innocence. Indeed, in his poem “London”, written in 1794, Blake painted a grim
picture of the city London, as a place where childhood innocence, social morality,
the possibility of family, and freedom were slowly being corrupted.

William Blake: “London”
 I wander thro' each charter'd street,
 Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
 And mark in every face I meet
 Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 In every cry of every Man,
 In every Infants cry of fear,
 In every voice: in every ban,
 The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

William Blake: “London”
 How the Chimney-sweepers cry
 Every blackning Church appalls,
 And the hapless Soldiers sigh
 Runs in blood down Palace walls

 But most thro' midnight streets I hear
 How the youthful Harlots curse
 Blasts the new-born Infants tear
 And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

Industrialisation and the new conception
of selfhood
 Nevertheless, as industrialisation began to take hold of the social and spatial
landscape of nineteenth-century England, its literature also began to shift from the
Romantic poetic rejection of the city to an ambivalent acceptance of its reality.
 “The energy of Victorian literature is its most striking trait, and self-exploration is its
favorite theme. [. . .] Their [Victorians] writing is distinguished by its particularity,
eccentricity, long-windedness, earnestness, ornateness, fantasy, humor,
experimentation, and self consciousness [. . .] a penchant for realism, a love of
closely observed detail” (“The Victorian Age” 1027).
 This literary self-consciousness is evident in the popularity of the Bildungsroman in
the Victorian period, a novel whose distinguishing quality is “self-exploration”.

Lecture 3 – Bildung: Victorian childhood and the
conception of selfhood
 This Lecture covers the first 10 chapters of the novel, beginning with Pip’s
reflections on his childhood at his home, in what he calls the “marsh country”
(1999: 9). This period of his life also involves his encounter with Miss Havisham and
her daughter, Estella, an encounter that affects him in profound ways and alters the
course of his life and self-image. Reflecting on his visit to the Havishams at the end
of Chapter 9, Pip remarks that,
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life.
Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause
you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, or thorns or flowers,
that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
(Great Expectations, 1999, Chapter 1X, p. 60)

Bildung: Victorian childhood and the
 Pip recalls this encounter with the Havishams at least for one important reason: for
the first time in his life, he became aware of his ‘class’, after Estella called him a
“common labouring-boy” (Chapter VIII, p. 51).
 However, let us trace Pip’s ‘education’ from the time that we encounter him in the
first few chapters, at home, which she shares with his sister, Mrs. Gargery, and his
sister’s husband, Joe Gargery. Pip tells us that his sister,
Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation
with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ‘by hand’. Having at that time to
find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and
to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe
Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. (Chapter II, p. 12)

 The real meaning of the phrase “brought up by hand” is bottle-fed, as opposed to
breast-fed, but to Pip’s young mind and experience of her sister’s heavy-handed
approach to discipline – she uses a cane called Tickler to punish him – the phrase
simply means being brought up with strict discipline. Indeed, his sister seems to
believe in the old saying: ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’.
 Besides, there is a clear attitude among his family’s circle of friends and relatives,
that ‘children must be seen and not heard’. For instance, Pip recalls at Christmas
dinner listening to Mr Wopsle’s opinion about ”the young” as like swine:
“Swine,” pursued Mr Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork at my blushes, as if he were
mentioning my christian name: “Swine were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is
put before us, as an example to the young. [. . .] “What is detestable in a pig, is more detestable in a
boy”. (Chapter 1V, 26-27)

 The idea behind Wopsle’s comment is that the young are clumsy, unformed,
gluttonous like pigs and generally detestable. Unsurprisingly, Pip’s sister agrees
with Wopsle, that Pip was born a Squeaker (a pig), about which Pip says she:
entered on a fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts of
sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from, and all the low places I
had tumbled into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my
grave and I had contumaciously refused to go there. (Chapter IV, p. 27)
At this point, it is all too clear to see that Pip is the subject of others’ image of him and
has not yet formed his own image of himself.

 Pip’s invitation and visit to the Havisham’s is significant for a number of reasons,
not least of which is the promise of a change in his fortunes. On leaving to meet Mr
Pumblechook, who will accompany him to the Havishams, he muses in a mixture of
expectation and foreboding:
I had never parted from him [Joe] before, and what with my feelings and what with soap-suds, I
could first see no stars from the chaise-cart. But they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any
light on the questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s, and what on earth I was
expected to play at. (Chapter VII, p. 45)

 His first experience at the Havishams is rich in symbolism: the gate that remains
locked at all times; the “high enclosing wall”; the “cold wind [that] seemed to blow
colder there, than outside the gate”; the names of the house in which the
Havishams live – Manor House and Satis House – which echo with gothic imagery;
inside the house are long, narrow and dark passages lit by candlelight, again
reminiscent of the abandoned mansions of gothic literature; Pip remarks on his
entering the room where Miss Havisham is waiting for him thus:
I knocked, and was told from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty large
room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it. (Chapter VIII, p. 49)

 The recurring image of darkness or of a house bereft of natural light, is significant
for what it says about those who live in it. When Pip eventually meets Miss
Havisham, she is dressed in bridal attire, with “bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair
was white” (Chapter VIII, p. 50).
 When Pip and Estella start to play their card game, Pip remarks that “she [Miss
Havisham] sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards”:
the frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress looking like earthly paper. I knew nothing then, of the
discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the
moment of being distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked as if the
admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust. (Chapter VIII, p. 52)

Victorian womanhood and the figure of
Miss Havisham
 But who or, more to the point, what is this figure that Pip describes as Miss Havisham, a figure that appears to be
more an apparition in a gothic story than a real person?
 Pip later learns from Herbert Pocket, the “pale” young man he meets at the Havishams on his second visit, that Miss
Havisham was to be married, but the bridegroom never showed up for the wedding. This is how Herbert tells the
story:
“There appeared upon the scene [. . .] a certain man, who made love to Miss Havisham. I never saw him, for this happened five-and-twenty
years ago (before you and me were, Handel), but I have heard my father [Matthew Pocket] mention that he was a showy-man, and the kind of
man for the purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman . . .
[. . .]
To return to the man and make an end of him. The marriage was fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was planned out,
the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter – "
“Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?”
“At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that it most
heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the
whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never looked upon the light of day.”
“Is that the whole story?” I asked, after considering it.
“All I know of it; [. . .] But I have forgotten one thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced confidence, acted
throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits” (Chapter XXII, pp. 142-
143).

Miss Havisham
 To return to the question, then: who or what is this figure that Pip describes as Miss Havisham? To
answer this question, I suggest that we must again return to the Victorian context from which this
figure of Miss Havisham is drawn and consider the position of women in Victorian society. In 1858,
Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Princess Victoria, who was then married to Prince Frederick
William of Prussia. In the letter, she advised her daughter thus:
That you should feel shy sometimes I can easily understand. I do so very often to this hour. But being married gives
one one’s position which nothing else can.
[. . .]
Now to reply to your observation that you find a married woman has much more liberty than an unmarried one; in
one sense of the word she has, - but what I meant was – in a physical point of view – and if you have hereafter (as I
had constantly for the first 2 years of my marriage) – aches – and sufferings and miseries and plagues – which you
must struggle against – and enjoyments etc. to give up – constant precautions to take, you feel the yoke of a married
woman! Without that – certainly it is unbounded happiness – if one has a husband one worships! It is a foretaste of
heaven. [. . .] I think our sex a most unenviable one (“Queen Victoria”, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, pp.
1540-1541).
 In another letter to her daughter, Queen Victoria says:

Miss Havisham
All marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy
one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.
When I think of a merry, happy, free young girl – and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife
generally is doomed to – which you can’t deny is the penalty of marriage. (p. 1543)
What is worth noting about Queen Victoria’s remarks about marriage is that it is an
unhappy necessity for a woman, who, through “being married [secures her
‘respectable’ social] position which nothing else can” (p. 1540). The pressure on
Victorian women to marry in order to earn social respectability would have left them
vulnerable to men who, like the man who promises Miss Havisham marriage, had
dishonourable intentions.

 As much as Pip cannot learn and grow as a character in the shadow of her sister, it is quite clear that he
cannot in Miss Havisham’s shadow either. Indeed, for Miss Havisham Pip is a playmate and a plaything for
her daughter, Estella. However, there is one thing that Pip takes away from his visits to the Havishams, and
that is class consciousness. When Estella calls him “a common labouring-boy” (Chapter VIII, p. 51), from
that moment on he resolves to become “uncommon” (Chapter X, p. 61).
 In Chapter 9, on returning home from the Havishams, Pip lies about what he saw there, but later confesses
his lie to Joe, who gives him sound moral advice about the virtues of telling the truth. Joe says to him:
“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they
didn’t ought to come, and they come from the father of lies [devil], and work round the same. Don’t you tell no more of ’em,
Pip. That ain’t the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don’t make it out at all clear. You’re
oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon small. Likewise, you’re a oncommon scholar” (Chapter IX, p. 59).
And:
Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can’t get to be oncommon
through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ‘em, Pip, and live well and die
happy. (Chapter IX, p. 60)

 In Chapter 10, Pip, having felt the sting of Estella’s insults – that he was a “common
labouring-boy” – says,
The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke, that the best step I could
take towards making myself uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance
of this luminous conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s at night,
that I had a particular reason for wishing to get on in life, and that I should feel very much obliged to
her if she would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging of girls, immediately
said she would, and indeed began to carry out her promise within five minutes. (Chapter X, p. 61)

 However, what Pip calls “The Educational scheme or Course” established by Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt is useless at best (Chapter X, p. 61).
 On returning to the Havishams, Pip notices something curious: “There was a clock
in the outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room and like Miss
Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine” (Chapter XI, p. 66).
The symbolic significance of this observation cannot be overemphasized, as are the
large table overhung with cobwebs and on which stands an old wedding cake, Miss
Havisham’s ‘upper-class’ visitors and the pale man (Herbert Pocket) who challenges
him to a fist fight.

Lecture 4: Class Consciousness and the
Ambiguities of Progress
 Lecture 4 covers Chapters XI (11) to XIX (19)
 As our starting point, let us recall the earlier description of the Victorian Age, as a way
to frame the phase of Pip’s life after he makes acquaintance with Miss Havisham, up
until his departure for London (which concludes the first part of the narrative):
Nothing characterizes Victorian society so much as its quest for self-definition. The sixty-three years of
[Queen] Victoria’s reign were marked by momentous and intimidating social changes, startling inventions,
prodigious energies; the rapid succession of events produced wild prosperity and unthinkable poverty,
humane reforms and flagrant exploitation, immense ambitions and devastating doubts. Between 1800 and
1850 the population doubled from nine to eighteen million, and Britain became the richest country on earth,
the first urban industrial society in history. For some, it was a period of great achievement, deep faith,
indisputable progress. For others, it was “an age of destruction,” religious collapse, vicious profiteering. To
almost everyone it was apparent that, as Sir Henry Holland put it in 1858, “we are living in an age of
transition. (“The Victorian Age”, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 2003: 1009)

Class Consciousness and the Ambiguities
of Progress
 What is clear from the description of the Victorian Age is that it was a period
fraught with contradictions. My concern in this lecture is to demonstrate how these
contradictions – or ambiguities/ambivalences – are also evident in Pip’s ambitions,
especially after he learns of his “great expectations” (Chapter XVIII, p. 109) from Mr.
Jaggers. The “great expectations” refer to the “handsome property” (p. 109) that Mr.
Jaggers, who is Miss Havisham’s lawyer, informs Pip an anonymous benefactor has
left for him.
 I noted, also, that Pip’s invitation and visit to the Havishams is significant for a
number of reasons, not least of which is the promise of a change in his fortunes. It
is thus important to draw from the chapters the different ways in which Dickens
plots the contradictions of the Victorian period by means of Pip’s ambiguous
fortunes.

of Progress
 In Chapter XI, Pip returns to the Havishams and there finds that Miss Havisham has visitors: “three ladies
and one gentleman” (p. 66). They are Camilla, Sarah Pocket, Georgiana and Raymond, Camilla’s husband.
About this encounter, Pip informs us that “I stiffened in all my joints with the consciousness that I was
under close inspection” (66). As expected, he says they “all looked at me with the utmost contempt” (p.
67), obviously for his apparent lack of upper-class refinement. Nevertheless, Pip can see through their
upper-class pretensions as well. He says, for instance, “they somehow conveyed to me that they were all
toadies and humbugs” (66). About Camilla, Pip says she was “of a blunter cast of features” and that “so
very blank and high was the dead wall of her face” (67). This indicates that Pip, young as he was at this
point of his life, had a good sense of what was genuine or phony/pretentious about the people he met.
 For her part, Miss Havisham has a low opinion of her visitors, suggesting that they are after her money,
only waiting for her to die; as she puts it, “when I am laid on that table [. . .] you all know where to take
your stations when you come to feast upon me” (p. 72). She expels them from her house with an abrupt
“And now go!” (p. 72).
 It is important to note that Pip would meet these visitors again in London, when he moves there. In this
light, Miss Havisham’s image of her visitors as some kind of ‘vultures’ circling her frail body and waiting to
“feast upon [her]” when she is dead, is significant for what it foreshadows about Pip’s experience of the
city.

of Progress
 Something must be said about the way in which Miss Havisham and Estella relate to Pip,
which is a mixture of condescending affection and disdain. For instance, even though
Miss Havisham does not think much of him, she nevertheless invites Pip to her house on
several occasions to play cards with Estella, “direct[ing] [his] attention to Estella’s
beauty” (73). Miss Havisham also depends on Pip to walk her around the house or push
her in a wheelchair or sing a song taught to him by Joe with them, so that a relationship
of mutual dependence could be said to exist between Pip and the Havishams, whatever
other motives Miss Havisham has for inviting him to her house.
 As for Estella, the more time she spends with Pip, the more she warms to him. For
instance, as Pip leaves after his second visit, Estella is less disdainful of him. Pip recalls:
When I got to the court-yard, I found Estella waiting with the keys. But, she neither asked me where I had
been, nor why I had kept her waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something had
happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too, she stepped back into the passage, and
beckoned me.
“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.” (p. 75)

of Progress
 All the same, Pip is unsure about his place with Estella. As he remarks in Chapter XII
(12),
Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told me I might kiss her again.
Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me; sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she
would be quite familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she hated me.
(p.77)
About Miss Havisham, Pip says:
Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we were alone, “Does she grow prettier and
prettier, Pip?” And when I said yes (for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when
we played at cards miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of Estella’s moods, whatever
they were. And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that
I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring
something in her ear that sounded like “Break their hearts, my pride and hope, break their hearts
and have no mercy!” (p.77)

of Progress
 Thus Pip asks himself, after one of his visits,
What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by
them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the
natural light from the misty yellow rooms? (p. 77)
It is also not surprising that Miss Havisham asks Pip to invite Joe on his next visit –
“Would Gargery come here with you . . .? [. . .] Let him come soon, and come alone
with you (79) – much to Mrs. Gargery’s annoyance.
Pip also sees how Joe changes into his “Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss
Havisham’s” (Chapter XIII, p. 80):
[A]s he thought his court-suit necessary to the occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked
far better in his working dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully
uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled up his shirt-collar so very
high behind, that it made the hair on the crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers. (p. 80)

of Progress
 Joe’s visit to the Havishams again brings up the issue of class, as he suddenly becomes conscious of his working-
class status, particularly his ‘unrefined’ speech. The conversation between him and Miss Havisham is awkward at
best and Joe directs his answers to Miss Havisham’s questions to Pip instead (see Chapter XIII). Pip remarks about
this thus:
It was quite in vain for me to endeavour to make him [Joe] sensible that he ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and
gestures to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he persisted in being to Me (p. 82).
The visit ends with Miss Havisham giving Pip ”five-and-twenty guineas [pounds]”, which she says he “has earned” (p. 82).
Money, as Pip recalls at this point in his life, had a particular effect on those of his class, beginning with the “bright new
shilling” rolled inside “Two One-Pound notes” given to him by “the strange man” at the bar at the Three Jolly Bargemen
(Chapter X, p. 65). The strange man, who stirs his drink “with a file” (p. 64), looks suspiciously like the convict (Magwitch)
that Pip helps at the beginning of the narrative. Joe unsuccessfully tries to return the money to the strange man, and to
Pip the unreturned money “remained . . . a nightmare . . . many and many a night and day” (p. 65). However, Pip also
remarks on how the money given to him by Miss Havisham transforms her sister into a generous dinner host at a
famous restaurant: “my sister became so excited by the twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve her but we must
have dinner out of the windfall, at the Blue Boar, and that Pumblechook must go over in his chaise-cart, and bring the
Hubbles and Mr. Wopsle” (Chapter XIII, p. 85).
To Pip, then, money has the potential to change those who do not have it, and for the worse. From his perspective,
money does not equal class. He recalls the dinner as “a most melancholy day I passed” (p. 85).

of Progress
 However, Pip is also aware of the change that he has undergone and agonises over
it:
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing,
and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can
testify.
Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had
sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the
Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in
the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing
road to manhood and independence. Within a single year, all this was changed. Now, it was all
coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account. [. . .]
The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was
done. (Chapter IV, p. 87)

of Progress
 Two events happen, which change the course of Pip’s life: the attack on his sister
and Estella’s departure from the village to go “Abroad,” said Miss Havisham;
“educating for a lady; far out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who see
her” (Chapter XV, p. 93). The first, i.e. the attack on Mrs. Joe Gargery, ends her terror
and the second, i.e. Estella’s departure, fires Pip with the desire to become a
gentleman. He says:
I was at a loss what to say. [. . .] When the gate was closed upon me by Sarah [Pocket] . . . I felt more
than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with everything . . .
As I was loitering along the High-street, looking in disconsolately at the shop-windows, and
thinking what I should buy if I were a gentleman, who should come out of the bookshop but Mr.
Wopsle. (p. 93)
Pip confesses his desire “to be a gentleman” to Biddy, admitting to his misery, “unless I can
lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now” (Chapter XVII, p. 101).

of Progress
 At this point in the narrative, Pip does not yet understand what to be a gentleman
entails, except, as he says, that it is “a very different sort of life from the life I lead now”
(p. 101). Nevertheless, his desire to be a gentleman introduces a crisis in the narrative
and shifts its focus. Also, his inability to forget Estella and “to fall in love with [Biddy]” (p.
103) instead, deepens his crisis. In the end, Pip realises that,
And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its confusion fifty thousand-fold,
by having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the
plain honest working life to which I was born, had nothing in it to be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient
means of self-respect and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that my disaffection to dear
old Joe and the forge was gone, and that I was growing up in a fair way to be partners with Joe and to keep
company with Biddy – when all in a moment some confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would
fall upon me, like a destructive missile, and scatter my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up;
and often, before I got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one stray thought,
that perhaps after all Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune when my time was out. (Chapter XVII, p.
105)

of Progress
 Faced with these ambiguous and contending moods, Dickens introduces another departure to resolve Pip’s
present crisis, which would henceforth remove him from the village and relocate him to London. This
departure comes in the form of Mr. Jaggers, who informs Pip of his change of fortune - of his “great
expectations”. Pip assumes, incorrectly as it turns out, that Miss Havisham is the benefactor; as he says to
himself, “My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss Havisham was going to
make my fortune on a grand scale” (Chapter XVIII, p. 109). This is despite Mr. Jaggers informing him that
“the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret, until the person
chooses to reveal it” (p. 109).
 What is significant about this moment in Pip’s life is that it not only makes a profound impact on him but
also shifts the narrative of his emergence as a character, i.e. his bildung. No longer tied to the ‘small
expectations’ of village life at the forge – “the plain honest working life to which I was born” – Pip is lost
for words. But Joe’s reaction to the news of Pip’s fortune and possible departure to London is revealing.
When Mr. Jaggers offers to compensate him for taking Pip away from his apprenticeship at the forge, Joe is
offended. His reply is significant for what it says about his integrity; he says: “Pip is that hearty welcome . . .
to go free with his services to honour and fortune’, as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money can
make compensation to me for the loss of the child – what come to the forge – and ever the best of friends!
–”(p. 111). As always, Joe puts friendship above money. In retrospect, Pip realises how foolhardy it was for
him to have “encouraged Joe” (p. 111) to accept the money.

of Progress
 Pip’s reflections on his ambiguous fortune never leave him, as he again reflects on his imminent departure from the village.
Preparing to sleep, before the day on which he would go to town to buy new clothes, he muses about his “little room”:
When I got into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean little room that I should soon be parted from
and raised above, for ever. It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at the same moment I fell into much
the same confused division of mind between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in so often between
the forge and Miss Havisham’s, and Biddy and Estella. [. . .] I put my light out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy bed now,
and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any more. (Chapter XVIII, p. 114)
Chapter XIX (19), which is about Pip’s preparations for his departure for London, is also replete with these ambiguities – what Pip
above calls the “confused division of mind” – between expectation and foreboding. Here we see Pip in what Bakhtin calls “the
border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other”, where “[h]e is forced to become a new, unprecedented
type of human being [. . .] the emergence of a new man” (Speech Genres and Other Essays, p. 23). As Bakhtin further remarks
about the character of the Bildungsroman, “The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is
not, of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future” (23). Indeed, as I have noted previously, Pip’s dilemmas are
those of his times, rather than private ones of an individual. They are, as it were, dilemmas of England’s transition from a peasant
economy, through a mercantile economy, to a capitalist economy. In Great Expectations, the peasant economy has disappeared
and replaced by the mercantile economy of small factories (Joe’s forge) and small town trade stores (The Jolly Bargemen). For
instance, Miss Havisham’s crumbling Manor House is a metaphor for the grand old estate gone to seed. In London (and other
cities), the peasant and mercantile economies have been replaced by the capitalist economy of symbolic exchange and the
nouveau riche.

of Progress
 Pip’s last days at the village carry for him the feelings of “free[dom]” and, as he puts it, “the novelty
of my emancipation” (Chapter XIX, p. 115). As he muses about leaving village life:
No more low wet grounds, no more dykes and sluices, no more of these grazing cattle – though they seemed, in their
dull manner, to wear a more respectful air now, and to face round, in order that they might stare as long as possible at
the possessor of such great expectations – farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood, henceforth I was for
London and greatness: not for smith’s work in general and for you! (p. 115)
At Miss Havisham’s, where he goes “to say good-by to Miss Havisham” (p. 122), he receives her
blessings, and on the last day says his sad good-byes to Joe and Biddy.
There is, of course, something ominous about Pip’s sudden change of fortune and his departure for the
city. Pip’s last thoughts as he leaves are suggestive of his and the novel’s sense of the inevitability of his
transition from childhood to adulthood and innocence to experience. He notes: “it was now too late
and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay
spread before me” (p. 125).
As to whether this transition would lead him from ignorance to knowledge is as yet unclear at this point
of his reflections.

Lecture 5: Between the Country and the
City
 This lecture covers Chapters XX (20) to XXX (30)
 Let us recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the protagonist of the Bildungsroman, as a way of framing our discussion of Pip’s
transition from country life to city life:
In the Bildungsroman, human emergence is of a different nature. It is no longer man’s own private affair. He emerges along with
the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border
between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is
forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new
man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the private
biographical future, but the historical future. (Speech Genres and Other Essays, 23)
What is important about Bakhtin’s description of the type of protagonist found in the Bildungsroman is that s/he is not a private
individual and that, as such, her/his actions are those of her/his time. In this light, the protagonist of the Bildungsroman is like a
mirror held up to the world in which s/he finds her/himself, which, in the case of Great Expectations, is nineteenth-century
(Victorian) England. And since Great Expectations is about a protagonist who is caught in England’s transition from a rural to an
industrial economy, his experiences are as personal as they are broadly historical. Indeed, when Pip arrives in London, his first
thought is: “We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of
everything” (Chapter XX, p. 129).
What, then, is the nature of the novel’s characterisation of Victorian England’s transition, which it accomplishes in and through
Pip? There is no doubt that in drawing the picture of this transition, Dickens presents certain contrasts and similarities between
the city and the countryside, such as honesty and dishonesty; community/family and individualism; integrity and duplicity;
morality and immorality; truthfulness and deception; authenticity and phoniness, among others.

Between the Country and the City
 In The Country and the City (1975 [1973]), a study of representations of the countryside
and the city in nineteenth-century British literature, Raymond Williams says the
following:
On the actual settlements, which in the real history have been astonishingly varied, powerful feelings have
gathered and have been generalized. On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace,
innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning,
communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise,
worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast
between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times. (p. 9)
Williams continues to note that “The Industrial Revolution not only transformed both city
and country; it was based on a highly developed agrarian capitalism, with a very early
disappearance of the traditional peasantry” (p. 10). Yet, as he further notes, British
“literature, for a generation, was still predominantly rural; and even in the twentieth century,
in an urban and industrial land, forms of the older ideas and experiences still remarkably
persist” (pp. 10-11).

 One of the first things that Pip remarks on, on his arrival in London, is its
“immensity”, but also recalls that he “might have had some faint doubts whether it
was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty” (p. 129).
 All the same, what I wish to consider in this lecture is what Pip makes of London; in
particular how he draws “[a] contrast between country and city, as fundamental
ways of life” (p. 9; my emphasis), to use Williams’s phrase. We have read about the
lessons that Pip has drawn from his experiences in the village: from his friendship
with Joe and Biddy, especially the value of truth, hard work, humility, humanity,
family and love, and from his visits to the Havishams, especially his development of
a class consciousness.

 Pip’s first experience in the city comes very early, when he visits Mr. Jaggers’s Law offices. Here, he is
attended by Mr. Jaggers’s clerk, who ushers him into an office where he is to wait for him to return
from court. In the office is “a gentleman with one eye” (p. 130). The clerk orders the man, whose
name is Mike, out of the office. However, it is the inhumane way he does so that alarms Pip, as he
recalls:
“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.
I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting – when the clerk shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony
as I ever saw used, and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone. (p. 130)
Pip describes Mr. Jaggers’s room as “a most dismal place”, and “lighted by a skylight only” (p. 130). The
whole place is full of clutter, with “dust and grit that lay thick on everything” (p. 130). So, too, are the
surrounding areas, such as Smithfield, “all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam [which] seemed
to stick to me” (p. 131). The large “quantity of people standing about, smelling strongly of spirits and
beer” (p. 131), completes the dismal picture of Pip’s first impression of the city.
Mr. Jaggers treats his clients with utter contempt, only caring about whether they have paid Wemmick,
his clerk.

 Another impression of London that Pip gets from the gatekeeper of the Newgate court, where the
Newgate prison is located, is of the yard “where the gallows were kept, and also where people were
publicly whipped, and then . . . the Debtors’ Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged” (p. 131). About
this, Pip remarks: “This was horrible, and gave me a sickening idea of London” (p. 131).
 When Mr. Wemmick takes him to what is to become his lodging at Barnard’s Inn, Pip asks him about his
experience of London, to which Mr. Wemmick replies: “You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered, in
London. [. . .] They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by it” (p. 136).
 About Barnard’s Inn, Pip observes that,
I had supposed that establishment to be an hotel kept by one Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our own town was a mere
public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby
buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats.
We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square
that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the
most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses . . . That I had ever seen. [. . .] thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot
and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar – rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand
besides – addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard’s Mixture.”
So imperfect was this realisation of the first of my great expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he,
mistaking me; “the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.” (Chapter XXI, p. 137)

 Pip also remarks on the interior of Barnard’s Inn: “the flight of stairs – which appeared to
me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of these days the upper lodgers
would look out at their doors and find themselves without the means of coming down”
(p. 137).
 When he extends his hand to shake Mr. Wemmick’s as he leaves, Mr. Wemmick appears
confused, but says finally, “Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?” I was rather
confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion, but said yes” (p. 137).
 On walking into the Inn, Pip says:
When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window and had nearly beheaded
myself, for the lines had rotted away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had
not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the window’s
encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated. (p.
137)

 Taken together, then, Pip’s first impressions of London and its people are, to use his word, “dismal”.
In fact, wherever he looks, Pip sees decay: on the buildings, eating and drinking houses, people’s
appearance, etc., and there is not sense in him that London is a bright new place. But what is more
important is what Dickens conveys by these impressions, in terms of Pip’s assessment of London as
the antithesis of the village where he has grown up. We shall recall Pip’s ambivalence about London
on his arrival: “We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our
having and our being the best of everything” (Chapter XX, p. 129). And: “I might have had some
faint doubts whether it [London] was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty” (p. 129), which, as
he soon discovers, it is.
 What is Dickens telling us about Victorian England through Pip’s experience; in particular, about the
narrative of England’s industrialisation and progress at this historical time? Clearly, from what Pip
sees when he arrives in London, we can conclude that it is a time of “momentous and intimidating
social changes”, “flagrant exploitation”, “immense ambitions and devastating doubts”, “vicious
profiteering”; in short, “an age of transition” (“The Victorian Age”, The Longman Anthology of
British Literature, 2003: 1009).

 Thus, when Pip says, after seeing Barnard’s Inn and a little of London, “So imperfect was this realisation of the first
of my great expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick” and Mr. Wemmick mistakenly thinks that “the
retirement [Barnard’s Inn] reminds [Pip] of the country” (Chapter XXI, p. 137), Dickens brings up the issue of the city
as the antithesis of the countryside.
 Besides Pip’s impressions of the city, he also reflects on the people that he encounters in London and their way of
life. The first person that he makes an acquaintance of is Herbert Pocket, the son of Sarah (whom he saw at the
Havishams) and Matthew Pocket. He is the same “pale young gentleman” that he had met at the Havishams on his
second visit, who challenged him to a fist fight. He tells Pip that his father, Matthew, “is Miss Havisham’s cousin” and
that Mr. Jaggers, who “is Miss Havisham’s man of business and solicitor”, has “suggest[ed] my father as your tutor”
(Chapter XXII, p. 140). Herbert is also the first person who gives him his first lessons on being a gentleman, at
dinner: how he should use the knife and fork, and how to dispose of the napkin after eating. He also tells him
about Miss Havisham’s disappointment by a man who had promised to marry her, but never showed up on the day
of the wedding, which I have mentioned previously..
 Pip thinks that Herbert, who gives Pip the name Handel, “had a frank and easy way with him that was taking. As Pip
remarks about him:
I had never seen any one then, and I have never seen any one since, who more strongly expressed to me, in every look and tone, a natural
incapacity to do anything secret or mean. There was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the same
time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich. (p. 140)
Herbert also tells Pip that he is “A capitalist – an Insurer of Ships . . . In the City” (p. 144).

 Herbert’s ambitions, as he further informs Pip, are to do with making money; as he says:
I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and
cut into the Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these things will interfere with my chartering a few
thousand tons on my own account. I think I shall trade, said he, leaning back in his chair, to the East Indies, for silks, shawls,
spices, dyes, drugs, and precious woods. It’s an interesting trade.
And the profits are large? said I.
Tremendous, said he.
I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations than my own. (p. 144)
Herbert also plans to trade, “to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum. Also to Ceylon, specially for
elephants’ tusks” (p.145). The West Indies and Ceylon were Britain’s colonies at this time, among other
colonies. He believes that when “the time comes . . . when you see your opening [. . .] And you go in and you
swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made your capital, you
have nothing to do but employ it” (145). However, despite this single-minded obsession with money, Pip also
remarks in Herbert an “unassuming” person, with “naturally pleasant ways” and says, “we got on famously” (p.
145). Herbert, then, embodies all the ambitions of his times, but without the means and, to Pip, the personality
to carry them out. His ambitions remain, as Pip’s, just ‘great expectations’, well-nigh illusionary.

 Pip’s next experience of the city people and their way of life comes with his visit to Herbert Pocket’s
home in Hammersmith, west of London, where he is to meet with his tutor, Herbert’s father
Matthew Pocket. There he meets Mrs. Pocket and remarks on their seven children and two
nursemaids, Flopson and Millers. Pip notices how the Pocket’s household seems totally without
order: the nursemaids do not respect Mrs. Pocket; in fact, they run the household, and the “nurture
of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down” (p. 148). And when
Matthew Pocket comes out of the house, Pip remarks that he “was a gentleman with a rather
perplexed expression of face . . . And didn’t quite see his way to putting anything straight” (p. 148).
 Pip also learns that Mrs. Pocket had been raised by her father to “marry a title”, but without her
father’s knowledge had married Mr. Pocket, a man without a title. Educated at Harrow and
Cambridge, Mr. Pocket had nevertheless become a “Grinder . . . of dull blades” and “wearied of that
poor work . . . had come to London” (p. 50) to end up working as a literary compiler and editor. All
the same, Pip joins two other students of Mr. Pocket’s, Bentley Drummle (from a rich family) and
Startop (“spoiled by a weak mother” , p. 158), to train as a gentleman and takes up residence at the
Pocket’s.

Illusion and Reality in Great Expectations
 Perhaps more than anything, Pip’s training for no profession but to become a
gentleman is the consummate metaphor for the illusion of progress and success that
Dickens suggests is at the heart of industrial capitalism and the existence of the city as
its embodiment. As I have pointed out previously, money and the appearance of having
made it are at the heart of the life of the city: Mr. Jaggers, as Pip soon discovers, lives by
his wits, making money out of the desperation of others. His business is, as Wemmick
tells Pip, “Ca-pi-tal!” (Chapter XXIV, p. 155).
 It is not surprising that, with his newfound fortune, Pip falls into the same trap of, as he
says, “expensive habits, and beg[ins] to spend an amount of money that within a few
short months I should have thought almost fabulous” (Chapter XXV, p. 159). He also
remarks on a visit to the Pocket’s by “Mr. and Mrs. Camilla . . . Mr Pocket’s sister”, and
Georgiana, whom I had seen at Miss Havisham’s”, and how “they fawned upon me in my
prosperity with the basest meanness” (p. 159). These are the same people who had
”looked at [him] with utmost contempt” (Chapter XI, p. 67), when he had seen them at
Miss Havisham’s.

 In Chapter XXV, Pip learns another lesson about the city when he visits Mr. Wemmick’s house:
Wemmick tells him that Mr. Jaggers, his employer, has never been to his house, as “the office is one
thing, and private life is another. When I go to the office, I leave the Castle [his house] behind me,
and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it’s not in any way disagreeable to
you, you’ll oblige me by doing the same. I don’t wish it professionally spoken about” (p. 162).
Having come from the village, where the idea of community is taken as given, Pip says he ”felt [his]
good faith involved in the observance of his [Mr. Wemmick’s] request” (p. 162). As for Mr. Jaggers,
Pip says during his visit to Mr. Jaggers’s apartment, “he seemed to bring the office home with him . .
. and to wheel it out of an evening and fall to work” (p. 164).
 When Pip receives a letter from Biddy, informing him of Joe’s impending trip to London and his
wish to see him, Pip is not pleased by the prospect of seeing Joe. He says:
Let me confess exactly, with what feelings I looked forward to Joe’s coming.
Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no; with considerable disturbance, some mortification,
and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.
(Chapter XXVII, pp. 168-169)
By this time, Pip has developed expensive habits; he informs us that,

I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite unnecessary and
inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those wrestles with Barnard proved to be. By
this time, the rooms were vastly different from what I had found them, and I enjoyed the
honour of occupying a few prominent pages in the books of a neighbouring upholsterer. (p.
169)
When Joe arrives, he tells Pip that Mr. Wopsle has stopped preaching at the Church
and is now an actor. He invites Pip to come and watch Mr. Wopsle performing in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet with him. At breakfast, Pip is embarrassed by Joe’s village
manners:
he fell into such uncontrollable fits of meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and
his mouth; had his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such
remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much more than he ate, and
pretended that he hadn’t dropped it; that I was heartily glad when Herbert left us for the
City. (p. 172)

 Joe has also brought a message from Miss Havisham, who says “Estella has come
home and would be glad to see him” (p. 172). Joe can also sense Pip’s unease at his
presence in London and abruptly gets up to leave, but not before he delivers his
parting speech about how Pip has changed:
Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one
man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith.
Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been any fault at all to-
day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but
what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I’m proud, but that I want
to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m
wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you
think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so
much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at
the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking
to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And
so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity in him. The fashion of his dress
could no more come in its way when he spoke these words, than it could come in its way in Heaven.
He touched me gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover myself sufficiently, I
hurried out after him and looked for him in the neighbouring streets, but he was gone. (pp. 173-174)
In Chapter XXVIII, Pip travels to the village to keep his appointment with Miss
Havisham. The coach he will be riding on will also carry three convicts, one of whom
he recognises as the man who gave him a shilling wrapped in two One-Pound notes at
the Jolly Three Bargemen back home. Back in the village, he stays at the Blue Boar,
instead of at his home.
On the next morning, as it was still “too early yet to go to Miss Havisham’s, . . . I
loitered into the country on Miss Havisham’s side of town – which was not Joe’s side”
(Chapter XXIX, pp. 178-179).

 At this point in his life, Pip is still under the illusion that Miss Havisham is his benefactor and that he
is predestined to marry Estella one day. As he muses, with both a sense of romantic illusion and
reality,
She [Miss Havisham] had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not fail to be her intention to
bring us together. She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set
the clocks a going and the cold hearths a blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin – in short, do all the
shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed;
and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its
twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella
was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such a strong possession of me,
though my fancy and my hope were so set upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any attributes save those she possessed. I mention
this in this place, of a fixed purpose, because it is the clue by which I am to be followed into my poor labyrinth.
According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot always be true. The unqualified truth is, that
even when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew
to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against
hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I
knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
(Chapter XX1X, p. 179)

 On this visit, Pip is let in through the gate by Orlick, who now works for Miss Havisham. Orlick is the boy
with whom he apprenticed at Joe’s forge and did not quite like. Orlick tells Pip that he was hired by Miss
Havisham to provide security to the premises, given the danger posed by escaped convicts and vagrants
“going up and down” (p. 180). Sarah Pocket is also visiting. Pip finds Miss Havisham with “an elegant lady
whom I had never seen” (181), who turns out to be Estella, “so much changed, . . . so much more beautiful,
so much more womanly” (p. 181), so that he “fancied, as [he] looked at her, that [he] slipped hopelessly
back into the coarse and common boy again” (p. 181). But Estella is now embarrassed by the past and how
she used to treat Pip as coarse and a “common labouring-boy”.
 Pip is still unable to
dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood – from all
those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe – from all those visions that had raised her face
in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window
of the forge and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost
life of my life. (Chapter XXIX, p. 182)
Nevertheless, Estella can see the change that Pip has undergone and opines that “what was fit company
for you once, would be quite unfit company for you now” (182), to which Pip says to himself: “In my
conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering intention left, of going to see Joe but if I had,
this observation [by Estella] put it to flight” (p. 182).

 In the conversation between the two of them, however, it is clear that Pip has not exactly come into his own, while Estella has
acquired an identity quite apart from Miss Havisham’s. as Pip observes,
What was it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and looked attentively at me? Anything that I had seen in Miss
Havisham? No. in some of her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance to Miss Havisham which may often be
noticed to have been much associated and secluded, and which, when childhood is past, will produce a remarkable occasional
likeness of expression between faces that are otherwise quite different. And yet I could not trace this to Miss Havisham. I looked
again, and though she was still looking at me, the suggestion was gone. (p. 183)
Even though Pip has sought to cultivate his own identity by moving away from the forge, and thus from Joe’s influence, it is at this point in
his life just an illusion of independence, driven more by “the air of youthfulness and submission” that he remarks about himself as he walks
alongside Estella. In this sense, he remains a prisoner of the past, and not yet the “new, unprecedented type of human being” that Bakhtin
says is the protagonist of a Bildungsroman (Speech Genres, 23). Indeed, as he says, “The air of completeness and superiority with which she
walked at my side, and the air of youthfulness and submission with which I walked at hers, made a contrast that I strongly felt” (p. 182). He
further notices that being in Miss Havisham’s presence after a long absence and pushing her again in her wheelchair, “was like pushing the
chair itself back into the past, when we began the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal feast” (p. 184). So, when Miss Havisham
implores Pip to love Estella unconditionally, no matter Estella’s moods, because, as she says, “I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and
educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!” (p. 184), Pip is ready to give himself over to
such commands. Back at the Blue Boar that night, as he prepares to sleep, he repeats, “I love her, I love her, I love her!” (p. 187) and “a burst
of gratitude came upon me, that she [Estella] should be destined for me, once a blacksmith’s boy” (p. 187). However, there is also another
contending emotion alongside his blind love for Estella, i.e. his betrayal of his own first principles. As he says at the conclusion of Chapter
XXIX,
Ah me! I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never thought there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe,
because I knew she would be contemptuous of him. It was but a day gone, and Joe had brought the tears into my eyes; they had soon dried,
God forgive me! soon dried. (p. 187)

The Age of Transition
 Before he leaves for London, Pip decides to walk around the old town of his youth and is humiliated by Trabb’s boy,
who affects a London air in imitation of what he thinks Pip has now become, i.e., a London gentleman who “Don’t
know yah, don’t know yah, pon my soul don’t know yah!” (Chapter XXX, p. 188). Stung by this humiliating mimicry
of his estrangement from his roots, Pip remarks that,
The disgrace attendant on his [Trabb’s boy’s] immediately afterwards taking to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows as
from an exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith, culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was,
so to speak, ejected by it into the open country. (p. 188)
The idea behind Trabb’s boy’s imitation of a London gentleman reminds Pip of what he might have become – neither a
blacksmith nor a gentleman; as it were, neither fish nor fowl – an uprooted blacksmith pretending to be a gentleman.
What Dickens illustrates here is a man in transition, like his times, grappling with the dilemmas of two epochs that co-
exist uneasily with each other. As soon as Pip arrives back in London, “safe – but not sound” (p. 189), he says: “I sent a
penitential codfish and barrel of oysters to Joe (as reparation for not having gone myself), and then went on to
Barnard’s Inn” (p. 189). Thus, caught between the past and the present, Pip evinces the qualities of the character of the
Bildungsroman, who “emerges along with the world and . . . reflects the historical emergence of the world itself”
(Bakhtin, p. 23) – in his case, Victorian England as a transitional time and place. This is the view of Herbert’s, when Pip
returns to London and confesses his love for Estella to him.
“You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a blacksmith’s boy but yesterday; I am – what shall I say I am – to-day?”
“Say, a good fellow, if you want a phrase,” returned Herbert, smiling, and clapping his hand on the back of mine, “a good fellow, with
impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action and dreaming, curiously mixed in him.” (p. 190)

The Age of Transition
 Perhaps what Herbert says is what best describes Pip’s condition in this time of his
transition from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to experience; that is, a
man caught between contradictory states of being: impetuosity and hesitation,
boldness and diffidence, action and dreaming, curiously mixed in him.
 Another important point that Herbert makes to Pip is that he must “detach [himself]
from [Estella]”, because his continued attachment to her “may lead to miserable things”
(p. 191). Indeed, Estella remains the last link to Pip’s past and the severing of his ties to
her has the potential to open a different avenue for his bildung. However, Pip is not yet
ready to take this step. As he says to Herbert in reply: “I know it, Herbert,” . . . “but I can’t
help it” (p. 191).
 Herbert’s own secret is that he wishes to marry a woman, Clara, who is below his
“mother’s nonsensical family notions” (p. 192) about class.

Conclusion
 What I have attempted to demonstrate in this discussion of the first thirty chapters
of the novel is the way in which Dickens portrays a character in the process of
development – from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to experience –
and how this development mirrors the age of transition in which he finds himself.
Against this background, I have tried to show that Pip’s hopes and predicaments –
his loves and doubts – cannot be seen apart from those of the characters around
him and from his times.

References
 Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Eds: Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: Texas University Press
 Dickens, Charles.1999. Great Expectations. London & New York: W.W. Norton
 Henderson, Heather and William Sharpe (eds.). 2003. “The Victorian Age”. The
Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2B, Second Edition. New York:
Longman, pp. 1009-1031.
 Lucaks, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. United States: MIT Press
 Williams, Raymond. 1975. The Country and the City. St Albans: Paladin

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