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| Great expectations |
Charles Dickens named this novel Great Expectations with the kind of irony that only becomes fully visible in retrospect, once Pip's life has demonstrated what the word 'great' actually costs. It is, among many other things, a novel about the violence of aspiration — about how wanting to rise can make a person capable of cruelties toward the people who first loved them.
Pip begins on the Essex marshes, in a life that is cold and cramped and supervised by his terrifying sister, and he is already the kind of child who feels everything too acutely, who carries shame like an article of clothing he cannot remove. Then comes Miss Havisham — frozen in her wedding dress, clocks stopped at the moment of abandonment, presiding over a decaying wedding cake — and Estella, whose beauty Pip falls in love with partly because she is designed to hurt him. He is a sensitive child with an exceptionally poor choice of romantic fixation.
The 'great expectations' arrive suddenly, mysteriously, and Pip uses them to do what he has wanted to do since meeting Estella: become someone else. London swallows him. He acquires tailors, friends of questionable virtue, and a gradually increasing contempt for Joe Gargery, the blacksmith who loved him without reservation. These sequences are Dickens at his most morally precise: he shows us the seduction of snobbery from the inside, so we can feel exactly how reasonable it seems in the moment.
Joe is the novel's moral center, but Wemmick is its cleverest creation — a man who has so perfectly divided his official self from his private self that he can conduct the business of criminality and punishment by day and tend his elderly father in a miniature castle by night. Dickens respects him. The division allows Wemmick to survive a deforming system with his humanity intact, which is more than most characters manage.
The mystery that structures the plot — the true identity of Pip's benefactor, the revelation of who Estella really is — unfolds with the dark satisfaction of all Dickensian plotting. But the real drama is interior: the slow, painful education of someone who had to become dazzled before he could see clearly.
Great Expectations is about what we build our identity on, and what we owe the people who helped form us before we decided they weren't grand enough. That it refuses an entirely happy resolution makes it the more honest book.
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