Great Expectations

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”

A lot of people hold this to be Dickens’ masterpiece. It tells the story of Pip - a young man from a small village who falls into a great fortune from a mystery benefactor, and grows up wrestling with his (you guessed it) great expectations.

In comparison to the Pickwick Papers, I find ‘serious’ Dickens a little hard to take. The wit is all still there, but it seems further apart than in the former. I think because of that alone I found this a bit less enjoyable. Likewise I found it tough to get started with - I think when Dickens writes about children I’m far less interested than when the writing is about adults. It’s nothing in the writing itself, Dickens captures both a wide-eyed outlook and a frank sort of matter-of-fact-ness that I find very apt in children. Maybe I just find them a bit hard to root for.

As the story moves to Pip’s later life, I began to identify myself in it, as someone who lives a very different lifestyle to that which they grew up in. When Pip realises he’s neglected his relationships back at home - most notably with his once-best-friend Joe - who exemplifies the simplicity of his old life with his turn of phrase - I identified the same feeling of guilt inside me for when I had neglected my own relationships-gone-by.

As usual Dickens’ style is terrific. The novel is sad and nostalgic and even quite tense at times. Nothing is unimportant, and I had one or two moments of reading callbacks to earlier events and experience that “oh yeah, so that’s what that was!” moment. I grew to really root for Pip by the end, as well as for the quieter, perhaps simpler characters in the book, including Joe and Biddy, and Mr Wemmick, all of whom while quirky and charming aren’t close in station to the gentleman Pip aspires to be. Perhaps here is Dickens’ lesson in Great Expectations. We have to suffer paradise before we realise what we’ve left behind. Often the thing we were looking for was right where we started.