by F. R. Leavis
But this is not the whole truth about Class by any means, nor does Dickens intend that the reader should suppose he himself thinks so. We learn in due course that Estella is an upstart and is being trained to be proud and disdainful to revenge Miss Havisham on the opposite sex. Miss Havisham herself, apart from her obsession, is to be respected: though a lady she is not offensively so, and her cousin Matthew Pocket and his son are unequivocally admirable, while Mrs Pocket, who is a snob because she is a fool, and Drummle who is a country squire and a mean boor, are both despised or deplored by the more intelligent members of their class. Herbert inducts Pip at their first meeting in London into a true code of manners with grace and right feeling; he is invaluable as a civilizing influence on the young ex-blacksmith. Dickens undoubtedly believed that there was a respectable content in the idea of a gentleman, and that Pip did well to leave behind him the limitations of the village and the vulgar little world of the market town, as Dickens saw them. Dickens didn’t share the lip-service now given to the idea of equality, which he detested when he saw it operating in America and satirized in Martin Chuzzlewit; and the reluctance in our day of critics to belive this, or to believe sincerely in the existence of any distinctions except those based on money, must not prevent us from recognizing that for Dickens class distinctions were valid since ideally they represented an aspiration towards distinction and fineness. Herbert has grace and style: ‘he had a frank and easy way with him which was very taking’ and expressed ‘in every look and tone, a natural incapacity to do anything secret and mean’; ‘he carried off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit’ Pip noted; and Herbert is contemptuous of snobbery. The convict’s money did not make Pip a gentleman, it only gave him the opportunity of making himself one by study and the society of such as Herbert, and this point is wittily made by Provis’s innocently assuring Herbert that Pip shall make a gentleman of him (Herbert) by money. Dickens distinguishes between a Pumblechook’s or Trabb’s sense of money as the measure of position and achievement, and Pip’s ability to feel the real superiority of Matthew and Herbert Pocket who are not at all well off, which again is a quite different thing from Pip’s appreciation of Wemmick as essentially a good fellow. Pip takes Matthew Pocket’s point that a gentleman is from the feelings outwards; he can appreciate these things because he is not a snob but has real delicacy of feeling himself – a quality not now thought well of, I gather, but Dickens valued it so highly that he considered it indispensable and constantly indicates its presence or absence in his characters in all novels. When Joe has laboriously explained to little Pip why he never protects the child (or himself) from Mrs Joe, Pip notes: ‘I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart.’ Dickens is tracing the growth of a moral sensibility in Great Expectations, in which a capacity for such appreciation plays a major part.
The real influence of the experience of Satis House, which includes Miss Havisham’s being a living witness to the reality of passion, Estella’s aloofness, the poetic impact of the candle-lit house (outside time and the commonplace life of the forge kitchen) with its ‘extinct’ brewery and ‘ruined garden’ – is that Pip is awakened to the knowledge that there is a life of the imagination, feelings different from the mean self-interest of the Pumblechook ambience or Joe’s amiable ignorance. Of course he is more bewildered than ever, and cannot reconcile the two worlds he now inhabits separately; he can only feel that ‘there would be something coarse and treacherous in dragging’ Miss Havisham and Estella and their life ‘before the contemplation of Mrs Joe’. The immediate effect of his acceptance of Estella’s view of himself is to start being worthier of her by self-education and self-improvement, at which he works long and hard before he has any ‘expectations’ and without which goal he would have had no desire to accept the offer brought him subsequently by Mr Jaggers, or would have been unable to profit by it. There is also another proof of the enrichment of living that the entry into Satis House had brought to Pip:
Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea with their white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and Estella; and whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud or a sail or green hill-side or water-line, it was just the same. – Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.
– That is, he saw for the first time that these things were ‘picturesque’. He had previously said, describing his visits to Miss Havisham:
What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them?
Dickens is showing, as he did in Bleak House through the incarnation of the values of ‘Passion and pride’ in Lady Dedlock and Chesney Wold, his conviction that we need something besides ‘real’ life. Pip expresses his difficulty by his dissatisfaction with himself and his daily round: ‘What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew?’ But Satis House and its inmates provided him with forms that fed his imagination, without which there is no true growth; he feels now that there is an alternative to the life of ‘dull endurance’ and ‘flat colour’, and sees his surroundings through other eyes. But that the boy who had admired Joe and believed in the sanctity of his parlour and honoured the forge should be unable to relegate the Estella who showed such odious characteristics is proof that his world had collapsed in the face of the evidence of Satis House that ‘whoever had this house, could want nothing else’ and that what this represented was irresistible to him. Estella represents it, and though he later admits her to be what she is (‘“I know it, Herbert”, said I, with my head turned away, “but I can’t help it”’) he must ‘adore’ her. When Herbert sensibly advises Pip to try to ‘detach himself from her’ therefore, Pip can only express his knowledge that this is impossible by a metaphor: ‘I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued me on the morning when I left the forge, when the mists were solemnly rising, and when I laid my head upon the village finger-post, smote upon my heart again.’
Pip’s relation with Estella is a constant throughout the book, till the finale, and is symbolically represented for us in repetitive forms at their first meeting, to make the point clear, with Dickens’s endless resources of creative representation. They are first set to play cards, the suitably named ‘Beggar my neighbour’ (which is a game of pure chance), the only game Pip knows:
I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she despised them for having been won of me.
– the situation between them could not have been exemplified more concisely and yet naturally. The relation is reenacted to enforce the conclusion, which we have no excuse therefore for not arriving at, that there can be no profit for Pip from his adoration of Estella and that we are not to expect a love affair or a love-interest in this novel (a remarkable sacrifice for a novelist and a risk for one writing for a Victorian public). It is a guarantee that Dickens has a serious object more consistently in view than anywhere else but in Hard Times. Then follows the scene already mentioned, of Pip’s being treated by Estella as a dog and her enjoyment of his humiliation. Next, when he walks in the ruined garden, he finds ‘Estella was walking away from me even then.’ When he begins to walk, boylike, on the row of casks that smelt sour, ‘I saw her walking on them. She had her back towards me, and never looked round, and passed out of my view directly.’ The final version winds up the subject forever:
So, in the brewery itself. When I first went into it, and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky.
Her name of course means a Star, and she was first seen by Pip as a star, carrying a candle in the darkness and going off with
it, leaving him in the dark alone.
There is here an illustration of the technique Dickens invented for presenting the extraordinary class of experiences that are needed to embody his theme. I don’t mean only the truly poetic and frequently haunting use of language (‘I saw her pass among the extinguished fires’) but the gradual and often imperceptible movement from everyday experience to an implicitly symbolic but plausibly real experience which then shades into one overtly unrealistic, as this one becomes immediately after Pip has seen Estella go out ‘high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky’ when he thinks he sees Miss Havisham hanging by the neck on the beam, though his eyes are admittedly ‘a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light’ from following Estella’s disappearance into the sky. Thus Estella is always, as predicted here, ahead of, above, and indifferent to Pip, out of his reach, even when he has become a gentleman for her sake. We should also have gathered that Pip’s attachment is unrealistic as well as hopeless, for he doesn’t love her, she is unlovable and unloving, he only loves what she represents for him.10 He repeatedly recognizes indeed that he is never happy when with her, as well as in his final speech to her when he learns she is to marry Drummle (in chapter XLIV). This rhetorical outpouring is generally held against Dickens as though he endorsed it, whereas in fact it is in keeping with his keen exposure of Pip’s case: Estella embodies Pip’s aspirations (‘You are part of my existence, part of myself’, etc.) and it is made clear that he is not so much wretched at losing her (he never expected to win her) as humiliated that she should degrade his dream by marrying a stupid brute like Drummle. (The speech seems to me to be reminiscent of Catherine’s similar rhetorical speech about her feelings for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights [‘I am Heathcliff. If all else perished and he remained’, etc.] and if so shows Dickens’s intelligent use of a passage that had lodged in his memory once.) Pip in fact makes the suitable comment on his speech himself: ‘The rhapsody welled up within me like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out’, he says. The idealization has been exposed as an illusion even to Pip’s reluctant mind.
It is nevertheless his idealization of Estella and his involvement imaginatively and emotionally with the poetic influences of Satis House that made him strive to educate himself for years and that makes him jump at Jaggers’s offer, for if he had not known Miss Havisham and Estella the manly life of the forge and affection for Joe and Biddy would have held him back. Dickens holds no brief for village life. He takes pains here to show only its deprivations culturally, socially and morally. The best of it is to be found in Joe who has a good heart but is illiterate,11 and who is lost outside the forge and the village inn – Dickens admits none of the compensations of the village community such as George Eliot brings to life for us in Adam Bede and Silas Marner. Once Pip has grown up he can visit Joe and Biddy at the cottage but Joe can never be comfortable out of it, and this is not Pip’s fault, though Pip, very much to his credit, feels that it must be when the fiasco of Joe’s visit to the young men in London has occurred; after all, that is only a repetition of Joe’s impossible behaviour at Miss Havisham’s in the early days which is nothing to do with any conceivable snobbery on Pip’s part, and the anguish Pip suffered then is what anyone in the circumstances at his age must have felt. Dickens indeed makes us feel it with him. That Estella is a living symbol for Pip is shown by his inability to fall in love with Biddy, whom he recognizes as kinder, and more suitable for his future life as a village blacksmith, at the time when no alternative ‘real’ life seems possible: he confides in Biddy but he can’t take advice from her, Mr Wopsle’s great-aunt’s grand-daughter who was down-at-heel and is not much more literate than Joe. In fact, her advising him not to want to be a gentleman because she ‘don’t think it would answer’ is irrelevant to his problems, and as regards Estella, she can tell him only what he has always told himself ‘in the singular kind of quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on’. Just as he had felt that though Joe’s intellectual superior he had to look up to him for other reasons, so he knows that Biddy is better than Estella but alas! ‘How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?’ Pip’s real difficulty is in deciding which is ‘real’ life. Critics of the novel who pick on the story to despise Pip and condemn his creator fail to grasp the complexity provided for us, and the reasons for inhibiting easy conclusions or for passing judgement at all.
Again, when Jaggers comes to make Pip (not yet out of his apprenticeship) the offer of a patron – who must be Miss Havisham on circumstantial evidence – Pip can’t help seeing that Jaggers despises Joe, despises him for his not knowing his own interests as well as for his manners. Jaggers being a brilliant and successful professional man from London, Pip is inevitably affected by this and so is insensibly inclined to patronize Joe, at first only by ‘encouraging’ him. Pip now openly produces Estella’s ‘coarse and common’ formula with confidence as appropriate for village ways, and confesses to resenting the clergyman’s reading the parable about the rich man and the Kingdom of Heaven in church as inappropriate to Pip – all this is surely very natural in a village boy (neither the village circle nor the town tradesmen nor the relatives of Miss Havisham he met in Satis House were any help here, on the contrary). He does not mean, at any time, to drop Joe, and at first he plans to help Joe to fit himself for ‘a higher sphere’ though he has already tried for a long time without success to teach Joe to read, and feels aggrieved because Biddy points out that Joe wouldn’t acquiesce: everything is made hard for him. We must realize both how formidable his difficulties are and that his feelings are by no means those of a snob. Pip himself, the mature recorder of his own exemplary history, does not deal tenderly with himself, recording mercilessly every least attractive impulse, but we should notice that these are mitigated always by generous misgivings, permeated by uneasy self-criticism, and contrary movements of feeling of a self-corrective kind. How, in his circumstances, should he know which of his voices to listen to? Dickens is really showing the evolution of a self from the contradictory influences of the various social, moral, religious and psychological forces present in his age, and the daunting problems of an adolescence like Pip’s. We must recollect – Dickens can assume its knowledge in his readers – that Victorian theory held it right and indeed obligatory to rise socially and culturally if possible, and Pip is only trying to act in accordance with this ethic, even if we ignore his desire to rise into Estella’s orbit. In fact, Pip’s divided feelings make him ‘more and more appreciative of the society of Joe and Biddy’ as time runs out, and the night before he leaves he notes that he ‘had an impulse to go down again and entreat Joe to walk with me in the morning. I did not.’ The desire not to be seen off is surely known to us all in adolescence, but Pip shows grace in being ‘aware of my own ingratitude’ (not such a common virtue), constantly thinking of getting off the coach and walking home for another evening with them, until it is too late. None of this is ‘a snob’s progress’ and few in the circumstances could be confident of showing up better.
Once in London, settled with Herbert Pocket and exposed to Mrs Pocket and the emanations of class consciousness from his fellow-students, as well as to the cynical materialism of Wemmick and Jaggers, the regrets and softer feelings haven’t much chance, though it is important to note that he never loses them. And Herbert’s conversation and company are undoubtedly preferable to that of the forge kitchen and The Jolly Bargeman. But in assimilating himself to Herbert and Mr Pocket, Pip necessarily increases his difficulties in relation to Joe whose coming on a visit distresses Pip because of ‘a keen sense of incongruity’ – Biddy has foreseen this, so it undoubtedly existed as a fact, but says in her letter that she trusts to Pip’s ‘good heart’ to solve the problem. Pip’s analysis of his feelings when the visit is about to take place show them to be not those of a snob or a brute but wholly natural:
I had little objection to his being seen by Herbert or his father, for both of whom I had a respect; but I
had the sharpest sensitiveness as to his being seen by Drummle, whom I held in contempt.
This seems the sensitiveness to social contempt common to adolescents. Joe’s insistence on having his message ‘What larks!’ sent to Pip is a sign of Pip’s real difficulty, the normal one in growing up, the need to assert a new personality in the face of the determination of kin and neighbourhood to keep the child or boy they knew unchanged, to force a now uncongenial role on the person they can’t admit to have the right to have changed. Trabb’s boy’s jeering at Pip’s better clothes and manners is a humorous presentation of this subject. Pip can’t still be ‘the little child what come to the forge’ and Joe’s playmate, though Joe demands he should. Joe himself explains that he is ‘wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’meshes’. This is evident, and that Pip, who could use more of the world than this, should have forgone that extension of experience is unthinkable. The alternative to being the grown-up child, Joe, would have been for Pip to be like Trabb’s boy, who must grow up into a Trabb if he is to get a living there. Pip could only meet Joe on home ground, but here Estella had blocked the road: the first time Pip sees her after going to London she remarks that his old company ‘“would be quite unfit for you now”’: how can he then go from Satis House on to Joe’s, as he’d intended?
Thus Dickens shows the effects on the poor lad of these influences, hopes, fears, desires, and false and true idealisms, making it impossible to pass judgement on him at this stage. Dickens is interested, as I’ve shown in examining previous novels, in the question of freewill. He sees that it is complicated by heredity and nurture, noting of Estella that her innate likeness to her mother, by which Pip recognizes Estella’s parentage eventually, is a different thing from her acquired likenesses to Miss Havisham which came from being in Miss Havisham’s company and sharing her thoughts, which, Dickens says, is the kind of likeness to each other visible in married couples.12 Allowing for all these things, Dickens sees that there is still some margin for freedom of choice and therefore for a moral judgement,13 though the margin is narrowed by the pressures of environment and by all previous experience, especially that of childhood, as Pip’s case is designed to illustrate. But it is at the point of the greatest pressures on Pip that Dickens shows him able to make true decisions, to decide action of the greatest moment by free spiritual choice: Pip could have abandoned his convict at several different points after Magwitch’s return, even as late as the trial, but Pip makes each decision not to do so freely in the light of his whole previous experience of what he has felt to be his mistakes and what he now feels to be rightful demands on the self he has become. By now he is twenty-three and by Dickens’s reckoning should be a man.
