Expectations dashed—and surpassed

The greatest expectation to be dashed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. You know, overcoming an adverse childhood and the persecution of evildoers. Maintaining an innocent and rigid integrity. Eventually triumphing. All that.

But this is a unique Dickens novel. Fantastic and realistic by turns, with the realistic part showing how the "hero", young Pip, has his head turned by wealth. While other Dickens protagonists stay fiercely loyal to their family and oldest friends, Pip thinks to rise above his.

The most interesting thing about this is how he brings the reader along with him. Most of us probably guess, long before he does, that there is a problem with Pip's wealth. We even get a little squeamish about the compromises he makes and his condescension toward his lower-class loved ones. But nonetheless we continue to consider the delightful Pip—as no doubt we consider ourselves—to be a basically decent person. We invest in him as he makes his way up in the world.

So when Pip's illusions are finally shattered, we too feel shame for how he has behaved. What we had experienced as slight moral quibbles along the way are now felt with their full force as symptomatic of a life that is a complete sham.

It's remarkable that such a clear-eyed view of human nature should be a book that also features some of Dickens's most fantastic scenes. The young boy's fateful care for the escaped convict Magwitch at the beginning (as you can see in the sample text of the first chapter). His introduction to the bizarre, old Miss Havisham, who in her rundown estate still wears the rags of the wedding dress she'd worn the day she was abandonned at the altar, and her beautiful but cruel ward Estella who bewitches him. The climactic desperate chase on the river.

Dickens is often faulted for having melodramatic plots that conclude weakly, but this one is controlled and intriguing throughout. Finally the loose ends are tied up satisfying without the usual feeling one gets with Dickens that he's had to strain credibility, as well as several laws of both physics and psychology, to make it all fit together.

One's expectations of a typical Dickens novel may be disappointed here, but one ends up being greatly rewarded in other ways by Great Expectations, perhaps more than by any other Dickens novel.

— Eric

© Copyright 2003–2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.