Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is one of those books that I read so long ago that rereading it is like reading it for the first time. I remembered the basic outline of the story and most of the main characters, but all the minor characters and the threads of their stories were fresh and interesting and enhanced the overall experience.

As the first-person narrator of the story, it is difficult not to see in Pip elements of Dickens's own story, personality, and personal issues. Like Pip, Dickens's childhood was marked by economic stress, and he was ashamed of the fact that he went to work at a young age in what he felt was a demeaning job. I see in Pip an attempt by Dickens to work through his own experience of feeling ashamed of his roots but also proud of the fact that he was able to be successful through sheer hard work and innate talent. Pip comes across as arrogant and insensitive despite recognizing that he is being unkind and disrespectful of his dear uncle, Joe, and I think it was essential for Dickens to require Pip to lose his fortune and have to work his way back into solvency and respectability.

What's interesting about Pip's great expectations is that he always feels that he is not worthy of them. When he thinks that his benefactor is Miss Havisham, he can come up with no better reason for her generosity than earmarking him for Estella, which he never seems to quite believe. When he discovers that Magwitch is his actual good fairy, he loathes the idea, knowing that he didn't help Magwitch out of love for his fellow man but because he was too scared to do anything but help him. The great good fortune that lands in Pip's lap is never welcome, and the only thing he is really grateful for is that it enables him to help his good friend, Herbert Pocket, get a leg up on his career.

In fact, Pip's generosity towards Herbert reminded me of Dickens's own philanthropic endeavors. He was always trying to find some deserving soul on which he could help along in life. Partly out of guilt, I think, at his own incredibly good fortune (that blossomed due to his incredibly hard work). I know I am guilty of psychoanalyzing without a license, that's where my mind goes when I read anything by Dickens.

Another angle is that in Pip, Herbert Pocket, and Wemmick (the law clerk with whom he becomes friends), Dickens has created different versions of himself or is showing different facets of himself. Both Herbert and Wemmick have really loving and satisfying relationships with their girlfriends and both end up happily married at the end of the story. When he was writing Great Expectations, Dickens had separated from his wife and was even trying to have her institutionalized. I find it interesting that Dickens didn't give Pip a loving wife at the end, but let two alter egos live out their days in that way.

Speaking of Wemmick, I absolutely love this character, expecially his relationship with his "aged parent" and the castle with moat and all the trimmings that he fashions out of their modest home. Again, Wemmick is like Dickens in having a split personality--a driven, even ruthless, person at work but a loving and fun-loving person at home. 

In the end, I really cannot think about this novel without thinking that Dickens was examining his life and soul in the writing of it, and that he found himself wanting.

This is the second big book I have completed for the Big Book Summer Challenge 2023.

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