Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  One of the principal reasons for the homogeneous tone of the novel is that it is told us by a narrator who is firmly kept before us as remote from the self who is the subject, a self that is seen in growth from childhood to adult status. Unlike David Copperfield the narrator Pip is not identified in sympathy with that child, boy or youth; far from it, the wry glance he directs at his follies and shortcomings and mistakes warns us off any easy sympathy with the youthful Pip. The frequent humour or amusement in the narrator’s tone – which is not inconsistent with the narration’s being painful, pathetic and at times even terrible – guarantees the narrator’s detachment for us and underplays (very notably if we think of David’s) the exposed self’s sufferings, so that there is no bitterness about others’ treatment of him, only a clear insight into the causes of his mistakes. We thus grasp, without being told, that the narrator is now truly a free man, freed from the compulsion of childhood guilt and from shame imposed by the class distinctions that closed round him in his boyhood, and from the unreal aspirations imposed on him by his society – a society from which when he grasps its true nature he is finally seen to recoil. Yet we have also seen that the guilt and the shame were necessary to produce the complex sensibility of an adult who can free himself by renunciation, contrition and publicly manifested repentance. This is Pip’s history and in this light it is seen to be a novel comparable with apparently more sophisticated novels of the major novelists of our European tradition such as Crime and Punishment and Under Western Eyes. Pip is not apologizing for himself nor, like George Silverman, explaining his conduct in order to assert the truth when he has been maligned, but telling us dispassionately how he became the man who can now write thus about his former self. After all, only half this novel is concerned with the formation of the Pip that Magwitch finds (his ‘brought-up London gentleman’) awaiting him; the other half is devoted to showing Pip’s self-regeneration and how he reverses his life-stream – the second half of the novel is a reversal for Pip of the first half both in direction and in detail of action and impulse.

  The critics who despise Pip as weak don’t apparently notice his strengths, and those who, like H. House, dismiss his history as ‘a snob’s progress’ are unable to appreciate the delicacy, subtlety and intention of Dickens’s searching investigation into Pip’s feelings, successfully presented in all their complexity and psychological truth: unlike such critics, Dickens refuses to simplify, and the marvellous persuasive power with which Dickens establishes the inevitability of Pip’s feelings, given the circumstances in which he finds himself, leads us also to believe in Pip’s better choices when he makes them. Pip is framed as a victim, an unconscious victim deceived by accident and intention, impelled into a position of maximum exposure to destruction and saved only because, as Dickens believed and has intimated in earlier novels in marginal cases, there is reason to have faith in human nature inasmuch as it contains in itself compensatory powers, inherent impulses towards spiritual regeneration, because we cannot but crave health. The novel structurally hinges round the return of the convict patron, the peripeteia, and never was there a more wholly thematic plot-structure; but the novel also, as for a traditional use of the three-decker form, is divided into three stages which are also thematic divisions (comparable to those of George Silverman’s history) and marked as such, with Pip ending the first stage of his expectations by leaving the village for London when the morning mists are rising; the second stage ending with Magwitch’s return towards midnight as Provis; and the third of course ends with Pip’s leaving ‘the ruined place’ hand in hand with Estella, as the evening mists disperse.

  Pip says his ‘first and most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon’ when he found himself crying in the churchyard from fright, misery and cold (George’s cellar experience); he had been looking at his parents’ grave. (David Copperfield’s first consciousness included the churchyard outside his window where his father lay buried.) On the marshes Pip knows also of the existence of the gibbet for hanging malefactors, and it turns out that he is to learn now that a prison hulk is part of his habitat. Dickens like most great novelists was quick to pick up ideas and make them his own (not, in his case, at the conscious level probably) and we may note here substantial evidence for his expressed admiration for the opening scenes of Hawthorne’s allegorical masterpiece The Scarlet Letter6 (1850) where Hawthorne had started by setting out the conditions of human society in the same terms but more forthrightly. However Utopian a new colony may be in intention, he states, ‘the founders have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison’ – that is, death, and sin or crime (offences against the laws of God and man) are the basic facts in any society and; Hawthorne adds, therefore not only is a burial ground needed but the settlement’s soil inevitably bears ‘the black flower of civilized society, a prison’. Whether Dickens adopted Hawthorne’s ironic diagnosis of society or transferred the irony into the ‘great expectations’ which such a society produces, he sets his scene in the same way, to investigate the human condition.

  Pip’s initial sense of guilt was inevitable, the result of the Victorian (or Evangelical) theory of the relation between parent and child: Mrs Joe is supported in her demand for gratitude from Pip by public opinion. Pip is made to feel that he has committed a sin in being born, not because his is a specifically sinful birth like Esther’s, but simply by being a child who has to be reared. Thus he feels, like her, ‘guilty and yet innocent’, and so is morally bewildered from the start. Even if he had never met the convict the guilt would have been there which made him harbour the suppressed wish to be rid of his sister, and therefore feel himself a candidate for the wicked Noah’s Ark on the horizon to which society banished those who broke the law. Hence the convict limping out of the churchyard who had escaped from his lawful punishment looked to Pip’s ‘young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching out of their graves to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in’.

  Thus the churchyard, where his dead relatives are very present to him, and the gibbet, guns firing for escaped convicts, and prison Hulks, are the prominent features of little Pip’s moral consciousness. And through no fault of his own he is now involved with crime, since the terrifying convict faces him with a dilemma in which, having no parents to protect him and not daring to confide even in Joe (whom he loves but knows can’t protect him against Mrs Joe), the lesser evil is to become a criminal himself. The escaped convict, starving and leg-ironed, requires him to steal food from his mother-surrogate and a file from Joe his almost father. The requirements are perfectly chosen for the purpose of setting up the dilemma and riveting the sense of guilt Pip already carries within him. Pip’s feelings of guilt are explored convincingly – everyone recognizes an element in his own childhood – he knows now that the gibbet and the Hulks would be his deserts if all were known, and this makes another link with the convict, projecting Pip on to that side of the social division, the only one he yet knows of. His projected guilt in the next chapter – seeing the natural features running at him, the accusing looks of the clerical-coloured cattle and so on – is all established abundantly with wonderful imaginative sympathy with a child’s state of mind. Pip’s fear of the convict is tempered by a natural human sympathy for a wretched creature, which creates further moral confusion – he knows it is right to feed the starving (a point slyly reinforced by its being Christmas Day) and the minimal expression of this feeling creates a bond between the two. We note that this involvement on Pip’s side arouses gratitude for the feeling, as well as for the food and file, in the convict who has already become for Pip ‘his’ convict. This becomes the unbreakable chain binding Pip to him, through no fault or will of Pip’s. Dickens establishes this paradigm with an unbelievable economy of art and with the minimum of direct explanation:

  Pi
tying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon the pie, I made bold to say, ‘I am glad you enjoy it.’

  ‘Did you speak?’

  ‘I said, I was glad you enjoyed it.’

  ‘Thankee, my boy. I do.’

  The repetition underlines the point, and the convict is not only ‘my’ convict to Pip, Pip has now become ‘his’ boy. And Pip can never again feel the separation from the criminal that is felt by the consciously self-righteous, a fellow-feeling which is kept alive constantly by Dickens throughout the first half of the novel. Part of it is decent human sympathy for the hunted outcast, reinforced by good Joe’s expression of similar feelings when the convict, in order to save Pip from the charge of theft, makes a false confession of having himself robbed the blacksmith’s; and part is Pip’s guilty knowledge that he is himself one who might be sent to the Hulks if all were known, which is kept alive in Pip’s consciousness by a succession of events that he recognizes as a recurrence of ‘this taint of prison and crime … starting out like a stain’7 and which makes him, for instance, see the finger-post as pointing to his destination in the Hulks; when he gets home he runs into the sergeant holding out the handcuffs to him, and much more to the same effect, testimonials to the inexhaustible fertility of the novelist’s imagination.

  Thus there is a great difference between Herbert’s good-citizen’s disgust for the convicts going down on the coach with Pip in chapter XXVIII (the chapter is one of the highlights of the first half of the novel) – ‘What a degraded and vile sight it is!’ Herbert says, and Pip’s own very mixed feelings, so confused that he can’t deal with them and daren’t try to sort them out. Dickens with perfect art brings out the combination of Pip’s conscious distaste with his unwilling and only partly conscious sympathy, in Pip’s own description of how the convicts are treated by the respectable passengers who must share the same coach8 however they may resent being alongside criminals. Having described the convicts with an undercurrent of indignation he winds up that it ‘made them (as Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle’, where the bracket shows Pip’s dissociation from Herbert here. Following this, the excessively violent expressions of the ‘choleric gentleman’ and Pip’s sympathy with the convicts’ coarse reactions (which, he says, he felt he would have had himself ‘if I had been in their place and so despised’) mark him as having too much imagination to be in Herbert’s camp, even though these very convicts’ association with Pip’s secret guilt – one of them had brought the two one-pound notes from Pip’s convict long ago – brings to the surface his helpless state of guilty involvement that Dickens establishes as non-rational:

  I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether undefined and vague, but there was a great fear upon me. … I felt that a dread, much exceeding the mere apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition, made me tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood.

  Pip’s unwilling sympathy with convicts and his inexplicable terrors have been fed by a tug-of-war between conscience and human sympathy from the start, and Dickens takes pains to show that it is precisely because he was ‘morally timid and very sensitive’ that he is alive to the case for both sides. For instance, he senses on Christmas Day, after returning from his rendezvous with his convict, the odiousness of the villagers’ self-righteousness and their gloating over the chase the soldiers are about to undertake – ‘I thought what terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened with the excitement he furnished’; we may note the partiality revealed by the word ‘friend’ here. This unwilling sympathy is kept alive by Pip’s being taken on Joe’s back in the voluntary participation in the chase by which the villagers show their solidarity with the forces of the law. (This is neatly reversed in the second half of the novel when Pip steers the boat rowed by his friends down the river to assist his ‘fugitive friend’ to escape the pursuing officers of the law, the half-way stage being the involuntary journey with convicts on the same coach that I’ve already discussed.)

  Pip’s sympathy remains an inextricable mixture of decent feelings and guilty ones, a remarkably adequate paradigm for the creation of a sense of guilt that, Dickens implies, is at once a source of psychological disorder and yet a condition of moral growth. It is this sense or conviction of shared guilt, guilt by participation even if involuntary or forced, that is the reason why Pip is able, when his patron is revealed to be the convict, to overcome ultimately his natural spontaneous horror of the man and his despair at his own impossible position, and to find his painful way out of his terrible plight. His sensitiveness is shown in the delicacy of feeling that comes natural to him, as in the circumlocution evolved by the child in his desire to spare the convict’s feelings when he has to mention the leg-iron (there are many such incidents, including his sense that Joe gives him extra gravy to comfort him whenever he is scolded); and this basic sensitiveness, a product of his uncomfortable position in Mrs Joe’s household and the cause of his suffering more than a hardened or happy child would, is what makes him peculiarly vulnerable to the influences that he is exposed to in his visits to Satis House. Though the sufferings are minimized by the amusement with which the adult Pip recounts his memories, there is sufficient poignancy in the recollections to make them moving as well as vivid. The chain of cause and effect that binds Pip involuntarily to his convict is riveted link by link before our eyes, but what matters is that we should register the shades of Pip’s changing feelings towards these facts, so finely imagined that, while showing Pip to be a victim, they yet prepare us for his volte-face which would otherwise not be, as it is, plausible and psychologically convincing. The moral confusion inevitably set up by such a society is illustrated when the fugitive is recaptured: Pip, fearful that ‘his’ convict will think he has betrayed the man and is ‘a fierce young hound’ (from which Pip shrinks as naturally as George Silverman does from the charge of being ‘a worldly little devil’), tries to convey in dumb-show that he is ‘innocent’, though knowing that his spontaneous feeling is ‘wrong’ since it reveals a wish to defeat the Law: he is again ‘guilty yet innocent’. Joe’s introduction of the Christian ethic in his refusal to judge others and his ready forgiveness of the wrong done him by a ‘poor miserable fellow-creature’, which ends with a confident appeal to Pip to endorse him, makes the whole thing impossible for the child to cope with, so he tries to bury the memory of it thereafter. Nature had seemed to him to condemn the hunt with ‘the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass’ and the cattle had seemed to reproach the hunters, but this is in contradiction to the social indoctrination he has picked up as to what is right and wrong, and had not the sergeant declared: ‘I am on a chase in the name of the king’?

  II

  At this point Dickens lets this theme rest while in fact the introduction of the new subject, shame as a product of social distinctions, is really a further complication, deepening the guilt and moral confusion by which Pip is already ravaged. Again Dickens refuses to simplify the subject of his inquiry. Pip’s knowledge of false social values – the snobbery produced by deference to social status and property-owning – does not derive from Miss Havisham and Estella, for Mrs Joe and Uncle Pumblechook and the tradesmen of the market town had surrounded the boy with it, but that made no real impact on him because he detested these people. What Satis House does when he is (again involuntarily) precipitated into it by mercenary relatives is to give social status and property an impressive content and an imaginatively overwhelming context for him, apparently only seven or eight at this time.9 We note that Pip is already able to recognize Estella as ‘a young lady’ though she is only his own age. It is because she is so confidently his superior, and is ‘very pretty’, and her beauty is enhanced by the symbolic jewels which Miss Havisham declares are Estella’s property,
that he is impressed by her in spite of her being ‘insulting’ to himself. Together with the tragic figure of Miss Havisham and their extraordinary surroundings, Estella is part of a hitherto undreamt-of alternative to the flat and dull life of the village and the marshes. At Satis House (the name ‘meant more than it said’, Estella tells him) he learns for the first time that his hands are coarse and his boots thick – that there are standards by which he is not ordinary as he’d supposed, but degraded. Estella’s manifestations of class superiority are all unpleasant, from her deployment of the weapon of U-vocabulary (‘“He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain’, suggesting the arbitrariness of such distinctions) to dumping his dinner on the ground ‘as if I were a dog in disgrace’, which completes his humiliation because he had noted that his convict, when he had fed him on the marshes, ate like their dog – the equation, that as the convict was to him, so he was to Estella, is evidently what brought the tears to his eyes – ‘the girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them’ – and he ends with the admission: ‘Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it’. Next time she slaps his face hard to express her enduring contempt, which he has doubted.