WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID TROTTER
EDITED AND WITH NOTES BY
CHARLOTTE MITCHELL

Guilt and desire, money and the nature of capitalism are pervasive themes in Dickens's magnificent novel, Great Expectations.

'Pip's expectation, before his expectations, is that he will be shown to have already committed a crime,' writes David Trotter in his Introduction to this new edition. The orphan Pip's terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his 'great expectations'. How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients of his struggle for moral redemption.

Great Expectations was published in three volumes in July 1961. According to Swinburne: 'This was the author's last great work, the defects in it are nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadows on a sunlit sea.'

Dickens is one of the world’s best-loved writers, and Great Expectations may be Dickens’ most autobiographical work. Although an earlier novel, David Copperfield, followed the facts of Dickens’ life more closely, the narrator David seems a little too good to be true. The narrator of Great Expectations, Pip, is, in contrast, a man of many faults, who hides none of them from the reader. If Pip is a self-portrait, Dickens must have been a reservoir of inferiority complexes, guilt, and shame.
Many other aspects of Great Expectations are autobiographical, too. The beginning of the novel is set shortly after Dickens’ birthdate (1812) in the country of his childhood- the Kentish countryside by the sea (the nearest large town is Rochester, where Miss Havisham lives). Dickens wasn’t an orphan, as Pip is, but he may well have felt like one. His parents, John and Elizabeth Dickens, were sociable, pleasant people, but Mrs. Dickens was a careless housekeeper and Mr. Dickens, a minor civil servant always spent more money than he made. When Charles, who was the eldest boy, was nine, the Dickenses pulled up roots and moved to London to try to live more cheaply. Charles was appalled by the cramped, grubby house they lived in there, and even more ashamed when his father was arrested and taken to debtors’ prison. The rest of the Dickenses were allowed to move into prison with their father, but twelve-year-old Charles had to live on his own outside.
His mother arranged for him to get a job in a filthy, rat-infested warehouse, pasting labels on bottles of boot blacking (a kind of shoe polish). This time of his life was so miserable that he never told anyone, not even his own wife or children, about it. He was called “the young gentleman” by the other boys at the factory, who resented his air of being better than they were. But he did feel that he’d come down in life, and he developed a bitter sense of ambition and self-reliance:
he vowed never to let himself be poor or in debt again. This situation lasted only a few months; then John Dickens received an inheritance from a rich aunt (a windfall of money also crops up in Great Expectations) and the family moved out of prison. After much pleading, Charles was allowed to quit his job, but he never forgave his parents for making him take it. Yet later, when he grew up and became wealthy, his irresponsible parents blithely sponged off him, until he basically had to disown them. It’s no wonder that his books are full of inadequate parents who have warped their children.
After leaving the warehouse, Charles was allowed to return to school, but the schoolmaster was so cruel and malicious that the boy learned almost nothing (his books are full of terrible schools and teachers, too). He felt cheated because he never did get the classical education of an English gentleman; instead, he had to pick up what he could himself, mostly by reading novels and by going to the theater, which he loved his whole life long. For a while he thought about becoming an actor, but acting wasn’t a respectable career back then, and Charles desperately wanted to be respectable. Instead, he took a job as a law clerk (lawyers and the complex legal system are often satirized in his novels). From there he went on to become a court reporter, then a newspaper reporter assigned to cover Parliament. This brought him his first reputation, as a political commentator. His talent was obvious and, coupled with his amazing capacity for hard work, fueled by fierce ambition, he rose quickly in the world of journalism. Eventually, he was asked to write his first book of fiction, The Pickwick Papers, a loose series of comical sketches which made him an overnight sensation. He was only 25, but from then on everything he did was golden. His novels were always best-sellers, and he was a celebrity, as a movie idol or pop star would be today.
His personal life, however, was not so magical. The first girl he had fallen in love with, Maria Beadnell, teased and flirted with him for a year before she suddenly refused to see him again; on the rebound, desperate to be married, he proposed to Catherine Hogarth, just before his first big success. Catherine was probably a good woman, but she was dull and never understood her brilliant, insecure husband. Although they had ten children, they were never happy together.
Twenty-two years later, they finally separated- scandalous behavior for those times, especially for such a public figure as Dickens had become. To add to the scandal, the middle-aged Dickens had fallen in love with a coy, cold young actress named Ellen Ternan, who apparently strung him along heartlessly.
Perhaps this is why Dickens was so eager to hold onto his reading public; he felt closer to them than to his own family and friends. At least his readers always adored him. In the nineteenth century, before radio or television or movies, nov-
els were the main form of popular entertainment. Families read them together by the fireside at night, and even poor people who couldn’t read would meet regularly on the street corner or in a tavern to listen to someone reading a book, chapter by chapter, out loud. Dickens had a natural instinct satisfying this wide audience. He included all levels of entertainment: political satire, flowery romance, weepy melodrama, spine-tingling mystery, and broad slapstick comedy.
His cast of characters was drawn from all social classes.
Even though he constantly criticized English society, however, Dickens was too much a man of his time to question the fundamental values of the Victorian age. Like his readers, he believed in a happy family life, Christianity, material prosperity, hard work, and human decency. In his books those are the ingredients of a happy ending.
In his life, those ingredients weren’t quite so satisfying- and he couldn’t understand why. At the pinnacle of his achievement, Dickens felt that everything he had worked for had turned into hollow and ashy disappointment. In spite of all his political satire, society hadn’t changed for the better. Although he was a wealthy man now, it only meant he had to sustain a more expensive lifestyle. He couldn’t seem to get close to his children. As a celebrity, he no longer felt he belonged to any social class, or had any real friends. It was in this mood that he commenced writing Great Expectations in 1860. But writing brought no release. For the next few years of his life, Dickens increasingly used hard work to stave off depression, but it only ruined his health, and eventually led to his death of a stroke in 1870.
In spite of his depression, Dickens managed to include in Great Expectations the irrepressible comedy he was known and loved for. His driving need to please his public kept him on balance. The novel’s themes, however, are very serious. He writes about human nature itself, a mixture of misery, joy, hope, and despair.
Dickens did not write such a profound novel because his public demanded something heavy; he wrote it because his vision of life was growing complex, and he was too great a genius to simplify it. Luckily, he was also a great enough genius to write a book that people could enjoy. Though Dickens bared his psychological problems in this novel, he was still trying to reach out to his readers, to make them see their own lives more clearly. Perhaps this is why people love Dickens - because he is so human, so honest, and so much like all of us.