Great Expectations

"He also talks about making it funny, because the novel before that had been A Tale of Two Cities . Forster must have said to him something along the lines of, ‘It’s absolutely wonderful of course, but not many jokes.’ So Dickens starts this complete masterpiece. I feel bad that I’ve chosen his two first person novels: none of the other ones were. In a way, it’s revisiting David Copperfield , but it is very different in tone: sadder, more complex. But he does say to Forster, “I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny” — about Pip and Joe, who is his stepfather. The opening of Great Expectations —with the convict, Magwitch—is striking. There have been brilliant film versions of it. “It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel.” It’s a shorter book because it was a weekly. Dickens was running a magazine for the last 20 years of his life and the sales were not doing very well. He had planned Great Expectations as another big novel with monthly instalments. Then he realised he would have to do something to prop up sales of his magazine, so he said, ‘Right! I’ll change it, I’ll do it like this.’ He was really thinking on his feet—he always did—and maybe the conciseness of it suits it. It is one of the most perfect novels ever written. It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant. I’m thinking about Miss Havisham, who’s been jilted at the altar. She is one of the most famous images we have of a damaged person, completely stuck at that moment when she was about to be married in her wedding dress. She’s completely iconic, everybody knows who she is. That’s what characters in Charles Dickens books do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world. We can recognise quite a lot of them. There aren’t that many writers whose characters do that. I would say maybe Shakespeare is the only other one I can think of. But Dickens is the one with the most characters who can survive outside their pages. It certainly could be. Of course class is a huge part of that novel. It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel. Great Expectations is all about working your way up, as Dickens himself did. And, then, when you get there, was it worth it? What have I done on the way up? Pip is always checking himself and when the blacksmith, Joe, comes to visit him in London he says, “I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow.” Then he checks himself and says, “I know I was ashamed of him.” It is that honesty, that blurring of ‘I think, no, I know,’ that checking into your feelings, which I think makes the book so powerful. It has six different endings. Dickens wrote, originally, a not-happy ending for it, which seems, to me, right. I don’t want to give too much away, but it doesn’t read like a book written by someone who’s had all success showered upon him. It reads like a man who has made peace with his life. But when he showed the ending to his friend Bulwer-Lytton, who was a much less good novelist than Dickens was—I don’t know why Dickens listened to him, but he did do that, he always listened to his readers—Bulwer-Lytton said, ‘It’s too sad, you must change it.’ So the ending that we have is deliberately ambiguous. You can read it how you like. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Some of the great 19th century novels do that. Villette by Charlotte Bronte does that as well. I find that interesting because people always think that they have to have happy endings. Actually some of the most interesting ones don’t fit into that box."

"It’s not a ghost story, but there are hints of the ghostly—the dead not wanting to stay dead. We have glimpses of that when Pip is walking through the churchyard, and he imagines the dead reaching up out of their graves and trying to get a hold of his ankles to pull him down. Only when we get the right to the end of the novel—spoiler alert—do we realize it’s because Magwitch, the person he meets in the graveyard, is in fact dead. He’s been dead all the way through the novel. So in some ways it is a ghost story, because Pip is still haunted as an adult by that vision that he saw as a child. It’s also a strange parody of the more optimistic stories in which people exercise generosity and benevolence, even upon strangers. Because what Pip does is go to his home and steal some food to bring it to the churchyard to give to the escaped convict. It’s a little bit like leaving a mince pie out for Santa: it’s that strange sense that by giving a little something to someone, there’s the possibility that you might get repaid later. Indeed, Pip is repaid many, many times over. It just so happens that rather than getting Christmas presents, Magwitch turns out to be the kind of Santa Claus who gives presents all the way through the rest of Pip’s life, in terms of money and influence. What the rest of Great Expectations shows is that having Christmas last all the way through your life might not be a good thing. Having a Santa Claus who keeps throwing gifts and money at you when they’re not necessarily wanted or deserved might be a handicap. That’s right. Pip’s own family life is deeply miserable. For him, it’s not as if Christmas is a holiday from the grind of domestic misery. It’s more like an intensification of it. That’s why Magwitch provides, ironically, a kind of escape for Pip, as well. It’s an opportunity to meet someone who’s part of a very different world. The point of the novel is to bring those worlds together and make you realize they’re not two different coins; they’re two sides of the same coin."

"And lastly, I wanted to choose Dickens because every few years I read one and then I get completely into it and become so moved. It is hard work in a way because Dickens is so intricate, and there is nothing contemporary about his novels really. There are contemporary themes but you have to put yourself back in that world. I read Little Dorrit last year and by the end of it, which took about three months, I had put a lot of work into the characters, who are completely unlike any of the people that you might meet. Not just because they are living in 19th-century London but also because their eccentricities are so way out – people like us just don’t hang out with people that weird. Yet one becomes so attached to these odd people that he creates, not just his main characters but his supporting cast, who are some of his best creations and those that stay with you. I read Great Expectations at school and it was hard for me to admit that I liked a ‘proper book’ but I did. Afterwards, I also loved the David Lean film, and I read it to my sons at night when they were young. When we started I thought, ‘Well, this is a big endeavour’, but they stuck with it. The younger one fell asleep but could still pick up what was going on afterwards. So I’m proud of reading it when I was young and finding that serious literature can be good even if you are a 14-year-old, and I’m also proud that I read it to my sons. I think I will probably do David Copperfield next. I’m quite an instrumental person and a show-off too, so this exercise is good for me: you can’t show off about reading Dickens because everyone says, ‘Well yes, of course, I read that years ago’. So it’s a discipline for me."

"I think the most engaging aspect for me is how it works as a psychoanalytic novel. It is written by the mature Pip looking back on his life, so it is, if you like, a kind of extended version of what might happen in a very lengthy and very in-depth, honest psychoanalysis session. So you get this process that you can never have in life except in psychoanalysis. And one of the reasons I’m so interested in psychoanalysis is that it is about story-telling, about clarifying the story about oneself—we all have a story about ourselves, and with luck psychoanalysis will clarify and purify that in a way that is creative and potentially healing. “Pip comes to see where he has been blind, where his moral values have gone wonky” But what’s interesting in Great Expectations is the double framework that is set up by the mature Pip writing, but, as he writes, you also have the young naïve, gullible, ignorant Pip emerging as well. So that’s a real technical skill that Dickens pulls off—that double perspective is impossible to have in real life except in psychoanalysis, or perhaps, to a degree, it’s possible in the confessional, too. But it’s a prime example of a good analysis because Pip comes to see where he has been blind, where his moral values have gone wonky. Yes, and I think the great psychological lesson that I learnt from reading the novel is that even if you don’t choose certain aspects of your personal fate, you’re still responsible for them. So Pip meets Magwitch the convict entirely against his own will—he neither wills, wishes nor chooses it; he is encountered by the escaping Magwitch, and the consequences of that haunt and dog Pip for the rest of his life. And what he learns is that you can’t undo that, you have to play the cards you are dealt. That’s one of life’s great lessons. It’s something that, when I was working with people, I would be endeavouring to help them to come to terms with. We may not like the cards we’re dealt, but they are the cards we are dealt: we’re dealt these parents, these conditions, and so on. So, in that sense, Great Expectations is a very successful piece of realistic psychology. None of these novels work unless you are drawn into them. You have to be galled into imagining that you are the young Pip and that you’re seeing his mistakes at the same time as being him as he commits them. You get caught up in his desire that his fortune has come from Miss Havisham but, of course, it hasn’t, and you feel for him and really want it to be true, too. As a naïve reader you’re taken along with it, you don’t know where the money has come from either, I mean you might guess that it’s not from Miss Havisham, but he puts in plenty of signs that it has, and she herself colludes in that. When that revelation comes, that moment of discovery that Pip has been duped and has duped himself, it definitely makes a demand on the reader: you have to forgo your own expectations and hopes for him."

"It is, yes. In the early paragraphs he refers to the universal struggle of life, a term which he lifted from Darwin. And it is a very Darwinian novel. There is a lot of struggle in it. But it is a novel not just about survival of the fittest and evolution . It is also a novel about the ways in which you make your way in the world, and how it is that you can reach a place in life which is different from where you started. It is not just like Samuel Smiles’s 1850s “self help” manual on how to be successful. Dickens is particularly good at showing the problems that come when you rise above your station, which he himself did, of course. He was the son of a clerk who was imprisoned for bankruptcy in a debtor’s prison, something which is traumatically recalled in Our Mutual Friend . Charles Dickens could have been a noble, “Sir Charles” – he could have taken a title if he had wanted it. Instead, he ended up one of the most famous British commoners of his time, and one of the most revered. He bought a house in Rochester in his later life. He had looked at this house through the railings of the garden as a boy, and came back to purchase it. It was triumphant, but at the same time he never threw off among his enemies the sense that he was slightly vulgar. They made comments about the too-colourful waistcoats that he wore. They saw him as jumped-up. There was too much cockney about him. Yes, and I think Dickens had to combat that. In Great Expectations , Pip rises in life by, in a sense, casting off his true friends. Later on, we see him suffering a great fit of remorse after his illness. He rushes back to the village where he was brought up and proposes to his childhood friend Biddy, only to find that she is just about to marry someone else – his old guardian, Jo. So his isolation is the price of his success. I do think so. Growing towards the light, they called it. But the further you grow towards the light, the further you grow away from your roots. That was something that Dickens couldn’t make his mind up about – whether it was better to rise in life or to stay in the community you started in. This dilemma is reflected in the two different endings he wrote for Great Expectations . In one of them Pip gets together with Estelle, and in the other he doesn’t. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"