George Eliot criticised Dickens for 'encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want'. Is this a fair criticism?

Joe and Biddy give an awful lot too, and could in many ways be considered the angelic characters of the work, and fit into Eliot’s critique of a presentation of the ‘working-classes [as] in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no-one for himself’. In their Edenic rural world they offer a continuous safe haven, at least after Mrs Joe has passed away. They maintain constant warmth at the back of the novel, in which your heart can easily invest without any reservations. Joe, the angelic blacksmith, a ‘mild, good natured, sweet tempered, easy going, foolish dear fellow’ even fights with the devil when he and Orlick argue. It ends with the defeat of ‘Orlick…very soon among the coal dust, and in no hurry to come out of it’. Kingsley wrote in his Sermons of the Times (1855) that ‘I can say that I have seen among plain sailors and labouring men as perfect gentleman (of God’s sort) as man need see…For recollect all, both rich and poor, what that word gentle-man means, it is simply a man who is gentle…’. 

Joe is certainly one ‘of God’s sort’, in fact a ‘gentle Christian man’, and his ‘industrious good heartedness stands out so boldly’. His capacity for forgiveness is immense, especially for his father, who despite having ‘hammered away at [his] mother’, Joe creates a poem: ‘what sume’er the failings on his part/Remember reader he were that good in his heart’. This is intensely touching, but one wonders how, following his tragic childhood he could emerge with such a poetic heart. As Eliot suggests, Dickens ‘scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming…transcendent in his unreality’. Joe is poised between the extremes of a comic child character and a wise adult, yet this does not make him any less real. It may even show that he has been trapped in the scars of his childhood. Although Joe has witnessed his mother ‘drudging and slaving and breaking her honest heart and never getting no peace in her mortal days’, and has clearly been emotionally responsive to her wrongs, he nobly wants to break the cycle.

However in the same breath Joe is trapped in that cycle. Despite all his good heartedness he is ultimately powerless, especially against the tyrannical Mrs Joe. Although his lappings of gravy on Pip’s plate are comic and endearing they ultimately do not protect Pip from the sermonizing guests. Although his heart is in the right place, it does not produce much action. A similar episode is during the chase of the convicts, where Joe would have given ‘a shilling if they had cut and run’, but ironically he helped in their recapture, by fixing the manacles and ultimately by chasing them. Dickens may well idealise Joe but he could never really be Pip’s, once he has his social pretensions, guardian angel. In marrying Mrs Joe the blacksmith he has sacrificed his position of authority. He can only ease Pip’s upbringing, not prevent the bullying and the beating. Pip comments that he had ‘always treated him as a larger than species of child, and as no more than my equal’, and a larger child does not compensate for Pip’s, his mother’s or the convicts brutal treatment.    

The organic innocence of Joe is starkly contrasted in the remains of the character called Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham is a woman who has not emerged from her want of love, her need to be a bride. She has disturbingly emerged as a bitter, twisted ghoul, an almost ‘monstrous double of the man who once trespassed against her and whom she never forgave’. She has learnt the power of hate, and the need to wreak revenge. Far from emerging a higher moral character Miss Havisham internalising her devastating experiences, and so pollutes all that is around her. Her wants are destructive desires that have ‘gnawed away’ at her. However, this so-called fairy godmother when making Estella could be seen in a different light. Her past harsh treatment, and her future moulding of the young girl could be seen to contain some morals and good intentions, as she is only trying to prevent Estella’s heart from being broken by dangerous love. High morality and refined sentiment are thus made difficult to define.  

The same is true of Pip’s predicament. He too has been ‘made [with his] benefactors miseries, as well as with [his] good intentions’. He is in many ways, however the romanticised convict. His upbringing, or rather his having ‘grow’d up took up’ parallels that of Pip who was ‘brought up by hand’. The violence here is painstakingly clear. Magwitch tells of being ‘carted here, and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town…whipped and worried and drove’. He has been neglected, treated unjustly and with contempt, and it clear that such harshness has moulded the adult, despite being softened by the kindness of Pip. His revelation of being Pip’s benefactor can been seen in many lights. In many ways he is considerably noble, working hard for the benefit of the young boy, sacrificing his safety in New South Wales to return, and ultimately giving Pip what he most longed for – expectations. However Pip never expected it to be Magwitch, and in many ways the extreme rewards he offers Pip are misguided. This fairy godfather, apart from being a convict, is a reversal of a benevolent hand that helps Dickens earlier novels, namely because he uses Pip. He expects the boy to remember him, ‘holding out his hands’, which have sadly worked to both cradle Pip and metaphorically to hold him in his grave. He also expects him to be grateful for taking him out of the forge and keeping him ignorant of his identity for the first part of his life. He is however able to recognise in Pip nobility that will later help Pip to recognise it in himself. Yet this ‘second father’ has, in many ways, survived his harsh background only to become a man who destructively cares for everybody else. He is the male Miss Havisham who abuses Pip so as to wreak his revenge on a society that has misused him: ‘If I ain’t a gentleman…I’m the owner of such’.    

This is clearly not a fairy-tale novel, and it must be remembered that Pip is also far from being an angelic creation. In fact Great Expectations is Dickens’ first real attempt to concentrate intensely on the psychological make-up of his characters. Once Pip is informed of his great expectations he attaches false hopes to a fairy-tale dream embodied in Satis House, the so-called ‘Enough House’, and thus hankers continually after the station of gentleman, a clear result of the want, an almost disease caught as a child. Miss Havisham’s false love and allowance of the vulnerable child’s placement of his fantasies upon her is one of the most disturbing evils throughout the entire novel. The hope he invests in Miss Havisham gives Pip the confidence to create for himself a protective bubble, which will one day magically make his shame of the forge and the convict on ‘the mesh’s’ disappear and almost instil in him ‘high morality’ and ‘refined sentiment’, as if they are commodities that go hand in hand with the classes that are higher up the social scale. When the truth emerges Pip’s whole world is devastated. The passage to a greater inner awareness and ultimate goodness is considerably more complicated that a fairytale godmother and godfather, or even a grass roots, inherited moral conscious. First Pip has to realise, the hard way, that he is not living in a fairytale vacuum, and then to recognise the good qualities within others and then to appreciate them.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens wrote that when you ‘crush humanity out of shape…it will twist itself into the same tortured forms’. As Pip is scared by the past, so too is Estella. She has been crushed out of shape by the hammer of Miss Havisham’s destructive need for revenge on the male race. Consequently her growth is twisted away from the sunlight and made to ‘blossom’ in the shadows of Miss Havisham’s ‘broken heart’. Far from acquiring high morality and refined sentiment, Estella becomes a beautiful fairy-tale princess with one fault – she has ‘no heart’. ‘There is no sentiment’ in the stone cold star, implied by her name, that is ‘far out of reach…[but] admired by all who see her’. Certainly her character evokes pity, as we see a woman who has been denied her childhood, her femininity and has ultimately been moulded away form her ‘right nature’, a movement that could never have occurred in inherently good characters such as Oliver Twist. Though Jaggers professes to have saved her from ‘growing up to be hanged’ (ironically would this have been her ‘right nature’?) Estella is subjected to an almost greater barrage of ‘harsh social relations, ignorance and want’. Her adoptive ‘family’ are parasites, she is kept ignorant of her own parentage and also of her own heart and is not allowed any role in deciding her own desires, needs and wants. She cynically recognises that she and Pip are ‘mere puppets’, particularly as she near on prostituted by Miss Havisham. However, despite her harsh upbringing, Estella’s only way of breaking the vicious cycle is by defying her puppeteer. In one of the most honourable acts of the novel Estella sacrifices herself to the violent Bentley Drummel. In many ways this could be seen as a rebellious rebuke of Miss Havisham, but also an ability to protect others, such as Pip from ever being attached to her in a way that she cannot return. Her marriage allows Estella, like Pip to have the final say in the battle with her maker, and in doing so hints at her capacity to transcend to higher morality, quite considerable considering she has been trained as a moral void and bred in ignorance all her life.  

        As his name implies, Pip’s progress through Great Expectations is also one of growth, especially in regards to morality. Yet he too does not evolve without attaining scars. His burns, for instance, after ‘saving Miss Havisham from the fire that engulfs her dress can at once seen as a consequence of a noble action, but also a result of a desire to punish a world that has mistreated him. He professes to Miss Havisham from a newly acquired self-knowing level that he could never be bitter with her, and we could easily believe that he has learnt how to perceive others with an understanding eye. However, one must not forget that the ignorance his life has been clouded in may also have embittered him, and rightly so. As a result the fire could at once be seen as Pip’s repressed want or desire for revenge – for vengeance. As he struggles with her on the floor we perceive that these are not the actions of a man who has a refined heart, but a man who has repressed disappointment and pain. He holds her down ‘like a prisoner, who might escape’ and even looses consciousness of who she is or what he is doing. Throughout the novel Pip has to work through this suppressed unconscious, and is never magically delivered to a higher state of morality or refined sentiment. As a child he laments that he had had ‘no intercourse with the world’ and was ‘quite [the] untaught genius’ that had to make ‘the discovery of the line of action for himself’. High morality and refined sentiment are not flat character traits held only by perfect people. They are difficult to attain, and more importantly to abide by, and what makes Pip an exceptional character is that he is not infallible.  

        As a result one must pay attention to the narrator, described as Dickens’ most ‘complex and subtle’, who is still very much haunted by his past that has helped mould and destroy him. He almost attempts to see himself in a better light that he probably was when he was younger. In fact the ‘profoundest irony of the novel is not reached until the reader realises he must see Pip in a much harsher moral perspective than Pip ever saw himself’. As one must remember the episode when Magwitch took the blame for stealing the food - Pip avoids telling the truth. The narrator hopes that this avoidance ‘had some dregs of good at the bottom of it’, thus the child’s motivations are clouded by the older, wiser, almost shamed narrator’s desires to fill the younger Pip’s moral lapses. The latter is certainly not innocent, and is always battling with that ‘inner self [that] was not easily composed’, and such a battle that signifies that he was not born with goodness, is difficult for the narrator to acknowledge. The reader feels pity for Pip but in the same breath Pip abandons the reader as quickly as he abandons Joe. When removing your own sentimental romantising of the youngster, the reading of his character shifts. The narrator is guilty of, if only to a minor degree, manipulating his harsh social relations, ignorance and want to make him look the greater victim.

In fact the idea that the older Mr Pip has anymore quietened that inner self, are continually thrown into dispute. He still complains, even when Herbert and Clara had actually opened their arms to him, and allowed him to live with them, that it ‘must not [be left] to be supposed that we were ever a great house, or that we made mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well’. He still cannot recognise and respond to the good grace of others. He suggests that what his life has become is a mere second best to what it could have been. That he still secretly hankers for those ‘mints of money’ is regrettably clear. What he appears to be saying is that he merely exists, not living. In many ways Pip is the antithesis of a hero - an anti-hero. He never really reaches high morality or refined sentiment, despite his progress towards them. As a result Great Expectations tears the reader away from the optimism, and that ‘miserable fallacy’ of Dickens’ earlier novels, particularly as the hero can still agonizingly be ignorant of the true value of things.  

        This pull away from optimism however produces realism in Pip. He embodies all the taboo complications of a true person, and as Chesterton argues this includes the, albeit natural human desire to do what is wrong. He causes Trabb’s boy to loose his job, and Orlick, and hurts, however unintentionally Biddy and Joe. He is constantly repressing emotions, which ultimately re-emerge as haunting images, such Miss Havisham hanging in the barn, leaving him ‘shuddering from head to foot’. However, in many ways Dickens avoids confronting Pip’s darker side by projecting it onto an outside character- Orlick. The repressed anger within Pip is allowed an outlet in the actions of this stock-villain. For instance he is responsible for the injuring and eventual death of Mrs Joe, which is after-all no great loss to Pip who has more than once suffered under the ‘Tickler’. As a result Orlick plays out the moral lessons or moral consequences that Pip never has to undergo. Orlick suffers the rebuke of Biddy, one wonders whether it should not have been Pip, and he suffers in a fight with Joe, and again should this have not been with Pip? When lured to the limekiln, Orlick poignantly blames Pip for the felling of Mrs Joe. ‘You done it; now you pays for it’, he exclaims, almost as if he realises that he is playing the part of scapegoat, carrying out the many actions that Pip more than likely has fantasised about himself. Pip can at least play the role of victim, as long as there are characters such as Orlick who are willing to take his mirror image role as avenger.      

        Great Expectations is one of the most colourful and at the same time painful novels ever written, ultimately a ‘grotesque tragic-comic experience’. It draws of a wealth of characters, yet the considerable thing about the novel is that unlike his earlier work, Dickens does not admit any miraculous transformations at the end. There is no suggestion that anyone has survived their past completely unscathed, from Pip’s burns, to the washing of Mr Jagger’s hands, and no-one is given the privileged place of being magically delivered into the heaven of ‘high morality’ and ‘refined sentiment’. The defining of goodness, ultimately high morality and refined sentiment, has come a long way since Dickens earlier novels. It is a novel in which he is no longer ‘willing or able to make the straight satiric indictment which governs…morality’. As a result many of his characters are a tragic mixture, and as Sadrin suggested it is the ‘Dickens myth’ raised to the surface, laid upon the table, dissected and criticised’. Despite the Oliver Twist beginning, we meet numerous characters who engage in a series of ontological struggles – Wemmick being the only character to have avoided such by adopting ‘Walworth sentiments’ that exist in an entirely personal world where the self can never forget who they really are. For the reader nevertheless, as well as many for many of the characters, of  ‘all [Dickens’] books [that] might be called Great Expectations [and where that ‘miserable fallacy’ was mostly likely to lurk]…the only book…he gave the name…was the only book in which the expectation was never realised’ 

                                                                           Word Count: 3,737

Bibliography

Set Text

Dickens, C. [1994] 1996. Great Expectations, ed. by R. Gilmour, London: Everyman Edition

Secondary Sources

Bell, V. 1968. ‘Parents and Children in Great Expectations’, Victorian Newsletter, 27, 21-24

Eliot, G. [1856] ‘The Natural History of German Life’ in George Eliot’s Essays, ed. by

Frank, L. 1984. Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self, USA

Hardy, B. 1970. The Moral Art of Dickens, London

Morgentaler, G. 2000. Dickens and Heredity, London

Page, N. 1979. Dickens: Hard Times, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, A Casebook, London

Paulin, T. 1993. Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, London          

Sadrin, A. 1988. Great Expectations, London

Schlicke, P., ed, 2000. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, Oxford

Thurley, G. 1976. The Dickens Myth, Its Genesis and Structure, London

Trednall, N.,ed. 1998. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Cambridge

Van Ghent, D. 1953. On Great Expectations: The English Novel: Form and Fiction, New York

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