Front Matter

Introduction

Great Expectations began its career in All the Year Round,  in December, 1860. When finished it appeared without illustrations, in the three-volume form then usual; in this state it is not a very easy book to procure. In October, 1860, All the Year Round  was failing off in circulation. Its Old Man of the Sea was Charles Lever's A Day's Ride, a Life's Romance,  and the Ride was as endless as that contemplated by the lover in Mr. Browning's poem, while the Romance was not attractive to the public taste. Mr. Forster had been inviting him to "let himself loose upon some single humorous conception, in the vein of his youthful achievements in that way." It is not so easy to find the Fountain of Youth, but Dickens had developed an idea for "a little piece"—"such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You can judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before me that I can now see the whole of a serial revolving in it, in a most singular and comic manner." The idea was Pip and Magwitch, the child and the convict, itself in turn, perhaps, the germ of Mr. Anstey's "Burglar Bill," and of a novel called Editha's Burglar.  The contrast of infantine innocence with the grimy inveterate iniquity of the hulks, and the consequent converesation, is so patent, and so appeals to the popular love of the obvious, that it was a fine theme for Mr. Anstey's banter. But Dickens, by his humour, and by a pathos restrained in this admirable romance, avoided the obvious. He thought of writing the book in the old way, by twenty monthly numbers. Luckily he did not. The scheme of twenty numbers worked woe on The Newcomes  and Pendennis,  as well as on several of Dickens's own works. The field was too large; in one way or another such lengthy tales had to be "padded." The attention was always being diverted from the central interest. Concision and selection became almost impossible.

Fortunately, therefore, the heavy and the weary weight of the Old Man of the Sea, in All the Year Round,  made it necessary for Dickens to bestir himself. He wrote his new tale for his serial, consequently, on a smaller and more manageable scale. He aimed at a novel of the length of the Tale of Two Cities.  "The name is Great Expectations,  I think a good name? . . . By dashing in now, I come when most wanted, and, if Reade and Wilkie [Collins] follow me, our course will be shaped out handsomely and hopefully for between two and three years. A thousand pounds are to be paid for early proofs of the story to America." This was before editions of English novels were given away, in America, as bonuses on the purchase of soap, concerning which, in one case, Miss Kendall sings—

Dickens explained to Mr. Forster, "The book will be written in the first person throughout, and during the first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David [Copperfield]. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to complain of the want of humour, as in the Tale of Two Cities.  I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect extremely droll." He had indeed. If a personal anecdote in proof may be offered, I would say that, as a boy, I heard the opening read aloud, by the master of my house (Professor D'Arcy Thompson now), while we partook, in enourmous quantities, of the refreshment of tea. I do well remember being convulsed almost to hysterics, and positively weeping with laughter, while, I regret to say, the other boys, using a footstool as football, were enjoying a lively scrummage under the table. The ball was kicked out of scrummage, attracted the observation of my kind and learned house-master, and led him to conceive but a poor opinion of the young Scot's capacity for literary enjoyment. But the magic of Great Expectations  has not been altered, for me, by thirty-seven long years. Pip, and the dogs, and the veal-cutlets, and the velvet coach, and the flags; Pip and the pale young gentleman; Pip as a "Bolter"—"I've been a Bolter, myself, as a boy, and I've seen a mony Bolters;" Pip and Mr. Pumblechook; Mr. Pumblechook when they gave him a dozen, and filled his mouth with flowering annuals; Trabb's boy;—a hundred other delightful passages, must be unforgotten while memory endures.

Dickens read David Copperfield,  to avoid repetition. He did not repeat himself. The use of the first person was serviceable to him (as I have remarked before), just because it prevented him from being his own real first person, and digressing into extravagance, and "Carol philosophy." Thus Copperfield  and Great Expectations  are his best novels (Pickwick  being something esle, a modern humorous Odyssey ), and, of the two, Great Expectations  is the better constructed. "The comic contryman who overhears everything" is given a holiday. The story turns on the "pivot" spoken of by Dickens, and does not spin off it, and wander through space, an erratic meteorite. There is a moral, not to be a snob, when the temptation so to be is peculiarly strong, blending, as it does, with the ignorant diffidence of a boy born to be refined in intellect, but born among friends not, in a worldly sense, refined in manners. Not to be ashamed of them is no such light task, and we can sympathise with the erring Pip, if we cannot approve. Then, Joe Gargery is infinitely the most sympathetic of all Dickens's many sketches of humble worth, and moral dignity with a horny hand. Joe is a real friend, and really humorous, as well as gentle. Dickens, writing to Forster, calls Joe "a foolish good-natured man." A foolish man could not have been in such perfect sympathy with a child of genius and humour, the victim of Tickler. "Wot larx!" is a valuable household word.

Dickens, like Thackeray, was excellent in drawing boys. Neither Shakespeare nor Scott took much notice of boys, in play or novel; but the two great contemporaries revelled in their grave absudities, their savage virtues, their love of books (not very common), their queer untaught philosophies and forecasting of things. Thackeray saw, or noted, less of the contemplative boy, for the childhood of Harry Esmond produced none of such reflections as Pip made on the little graves. There were a dozen, in fact, in Cooling churchyard. But Dickens moderated the humorous exhuberance of actual fact. Mr. Forster observes on the accuracy with which Dickens etches in "the desolate church, lying out among the marshes, seven miles from Gadshill," near "the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing" the sea.

The character of Pip chiefly resembles that of little David Copperfield in the elfin kind of fancies which occur to a small boy brought up among his seniors. Pip has not David's library, and knows not Tom Jones,  but his mind is naturally imaginative and distinguished. He is an observor, as Dickens and David Copperfield were from infancy observers. His fancy is vivid almost to hallucination, in Mr. Lewes's phrase. What can be more clearly "seen" than the scurry through the marshes after the convict? What more naturally humorous than Mr. Wopsle, the parish-clerk cabotin,  is worthy of a place in the Crummles company. His ambition, his unwavering belief in the artistic jealousy of the man who acts the Majesty of Denmark, the solemnity of his "reading" of Hamlet, his prodigious swallow for compliments, "massive and concrete," and a kind of childlike harmless innocence about him, endear Mr. Wopsele to the reader, and make him one of Dickens's best minor characters.

We may not be much in love with Estella, but the last scene, when "long love" does not  "end like a word spoken," is infinitely more true and affecting than any in the amours of Nicholas Nickleby or Rose Maylie, or any other of the jeunes premières  and insipid ingénues.  Moreover, Estella's education was so unique, and her fall from her high ideas of her social place so much deeper than even Pip's, that we can understand and partly sympathise with her. Miss Havisham was, I believe, "founded on fact," and I once passed, when in bad health, a far from agreeable night in the room where the original of the character used to sit, in her mouldering, dropping bridal garments. "They say she walks," remarked my host kindly, as he said good-night. She certainly did not walk for my purposes, and perhaps the family story grew out of the novel, not the novel out of the story. Miss Havisham, at all events, is not an inconceivable fantasy. Th strange scene in which Pip sees her hallucinatory from hanging to a beam in the brewery appears to lead to nothing, yet looks as if it had been intended to lead to something. Perhaps it is more "eery" just as it stands, a shadow unrealised, a flicker risen out of an unconscious thought.

The family of Pocket, except the father of Herbert, Herbert himself, and his amusingly maddening mother, rather suggest the circle of relations who haunted old Martin Chuzzlewit. Such repetitions occur in the work of the greatest writers. Mr. Jaggers of the scented soap is perfectly original and interesting, while Wemmick's mannerisms are too kindly to be resented. "Aged P.," too, is friendly—"the old man is friendly," to quote Mr. Richard Swiveller. The convict, on his second avatar,  happily escapes the maudlin, into which a popular writer might so easily have declined. His jack-knife and greasy black Testament are in excellent keeping, and Pip, shrinking from honest Joe, was to shrink again from his awful benefactor, the real founder of his fortunes—not Mr. Pumblechook or another. The muddy massive malignity of Orlick is very powerfully drawn, and there is much subtlety in the animal-like efforts to propitiate him made by Pip's paralyzed sister. Herbert Pocker is quite as good as Tommy Traddles, and he have a foolish liking for the invisible and obstreperous Old Bill Barley, not an eligible father-in-law.

The relatively happy conclusion was an afterthought. Bulwer Lytton, who know the public, insisted on it, and, as a member of the public, one is glad that he carried his point. Dickens made "as pretty a little piece of writing as I could;" and we rejoice that Estella did not marry "a Shropshire doctor," who, perhaps, is to be congratulated. Every one, like the hero of the ballad, would like "to marry his old true love," and, as it seldom occurs in life, let the ceremony be performed in romance.