A typical trajectory for a young servant girl from a rural village would begin with a low-paid position in a nearby village. She would stay at that job until she had gained experience, and perhaps savings to buy better clothes, to make her suitable for a town job. Eventually she might be promoted from housemaid to nursemaid to lady’s maid. (Victorian employers preferred to hire country girls: they not only considered them healthier but also less apt to gossip because they knew no one in the community. Servants, of course, were privy to much that went on in the house.) An unlikely trajectory is that of the character Sam Weller, the manservant of Mr. Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel. Sam advances from “boots” (boot-cleaning) to valet.
Dickens held solidly middle-class attitudes toward the servant-master relationship that were shared by even the most liberal, reform-minded Victorian middle-class people, all of whom would have employed servants. Dickens’s views regarding the loyalty of the servant class to its employers find their way into several of his novels. Sam’s loyalty to Mr. Pickwick is rewarded at the end of the novel; he marries and retires from service but still lives near enough to Pickwick to look after him. Florence Dombey, in Dombey and Son, has a faithful servant, Susan Nipper, who also ends up comfortably married. Readers from all strata of the society enjoyed Dickens’s servant characters. Besides Sam Weller’s huge hit, the humorous Mrs. Sarah (Sairey) Gamp, the slovenly drunken nurse from Martin Chuzzlewit, who is given to philosophizing on life and death and constantly quoting an imaginary friend named Mrs. Harris, later became one of the most popular of Dickens’s public readings. In A Tale of Two Cities, Miss Pross is the loyal servant character. The narrator describes her bond to Lucie as making her a “willing slave.” Indeed, fidelity partly defines the Englishness of many of Dickens’s servant characters.
In Great Expectations, the representation of the relations between master and servant are more complicated, and, hence, much less idealized, than in many of Dickens’s earlier fictions. This complexity arises, first, as a result of Pip’s education and upward mobility, and second, due to the air of secrecy in the novel. Had Pip stayed in his old life of blacksmithing, he might well have married good-natured Biddy, who comes to work as live-in help for Joe and Mrs. Gargary after the latter’s assault and consequent paralysis. But, symbolic of his status as a gentleman, Pip requires a manservant. So, he says with a degree of self-irony, he “started a boy in boots—top boots—in bondage and slavery to whom it might have been said I passed my days.” Pip suggests that, because he’s young and inexperienced in the role of master, he creates a bit of “a monster” in Pepper (whom he dubs the “Avenger”), his servant at Barnard’s Inn. After the expense of purchasing the boy’s livery, Pip confides to the reader that he “had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.” On another occasion, he puts the irony of the power reversal in ever starker terms: “A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster [the Avenger] could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment.”
In addition to the ways class mobility complicates the master-servant relationship in Great Expectations, the numerous secrets that characters in the novel are keeping also give rise to complex depictions of those uneasy power relations. The grown-up Estella, returning to visit Miss Havisham, is told to come without her maid because the reclusive old woman has a “sensitive horror of being talked of by such people,” as Estella explains to Pip. Similarly, Mr. Jagger, the lawyer, also is extremely cautious in his hiring of servants. (Recall that he keeps a bust of an infamous criminal—hanged for killing his master.) When Pip and his friends are invited to dinner at the lawyer’s house, he lets them in, and throughout dinner, Pip notices, “he kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself,” using a dumbwaiter near his seat at table, that is, he employs no butler. In fact, Jagger’s housekeeper is the only servant who appears. Wemmick describes her as resembling “a wild beast tamed,” which, as the novel eventually discloses, has to do with Jagger’s knowledge of her secret history.
Though Dickens’s late fictions do not abandon entirely the faithful servant figure, (the Boffins in Our Mutual Friend come immediately to mind), in Great Expectations, and through Pip’s first-person narration, Dickens unfailingly treats servants with disdain and even aversion. Pip’s attitude, alongside his acknowledged guilt for deserting Joe and his revulsion of Magwich, forms the novel’s complexly realized exploration of class antagonism as well as its critique of class snobbery.
Dickens Sites to Visit in England
Dickens’s Birthplace
393 Old Commercial Road
Portsmouth PO1 4QL
Hampshire
England
The house in which Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812 is preserved as a museum furnished in the style of 1809, appropriate to the year when John and Elizabeth Dickens set up their first home. (John Dickens was transferred to Portsmouth from London when his job in the Navy Pay Office changed locations. The Dickens family stayed there until 1815, when they returned to London.)
According to the museum Web site, the furniture, ceramics, glass, household objects, and decorations are faithful to the Regency style. The museum includes three furnished rooms: the parlor, the dining room, and the bedroom where Charles was born. The exhibition room features a display on Charles Dickens and Portsmouth, as well as a small collection of memorabilia: the couch on which he died at his house in Kent, and personal effects, such as his snuff box, inkwell, and paper knife.
Dickens’s Childhood Home
No. 2 (now 11) Ordnance Terrace
Chatham, Kent
Dickens lived in this three-story Georgian house overlooking the river from 1817 to 1821. It was a favorite place for Dickens, where he learned to read and discovered his father’s collection of romantic fiction and adventure tales in the attic.
Dickens House Museum
48 Doughty Street
London WC1N 2LX
When Dickens began to have some success with his Pickwick Papers and as editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, he required a home that would reflect his rising social position. He moved in March of 1837 to a twelve-room house at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, on a gated residential street, with his wife, Catherine, and his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died there at the tragically young age of seventeen. He lived there until 1839.
Among the museum’s collection are Dickens’s desk from his Gad’s Hill Place study, a carefully restored drawing room, the Dickens family Bible, and the Dickens Reference Library, which includes rare editions and manuscripts. Original furniture and paintings are also on display.
Web site: www.dickensmuseum.com.
Dickens Residence, 1839–51
1 Devonshire Terrace
Marylebone Road
London
This home of Dickens’s, in which he completed five novels, was demolished in 1959. In its place is a bas-relief frieze depicting the author and the main characters from the novels he wrote while he lived there.
Dickens Residence, 1851–60
Tavistock House
London
A larger home than his Devonshire Terrace residence, Tavistock House had eighteen rooms and private grounds. Dickens had a large room that served as a study. His daughter recalled that its length gave Dickens plenty of space for pacing. During his tenure at this residence in fashionable west London, Dickens wrote some of his greatest novels, including Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities. It is also where he and his friend Wilkie Collins first staged The Frozen Deep in 1857, which gave him the idea for the substitution scene in A Tale of Two Cities. The original Dickens home is no longer there.
Dickens Holiday Resort
Bleak House
Broadstair
s
Kent
Broadstairs was Dickens’s favorite holiday retreat, and he returned there most summers until 1851. He stayed in various hotels and houses there, until 1850, when he took the house most closely associated with him; once called Fort House, its name changed to Bleak House after he used it as the setting for his novel. Dickens completed David Copperfield there, and another house suggested Betsy Trotwood’s residence. Both residences now house museums, whose holdings include period furniture, letters, illustrations, and other commemorative items.
Dickens Residence, 1860–70
Gad’s Hill Place
Rochester
Kent
Dickens admired this estate as a child, when he and his father would walk in the countryside. Reputedly his father once told Dickens to work hard and one day he might own such a home (a tale retold in The Uncommercial Traveller). He bought the late 1770s-era brick home in 1856, and spent years converting rooms and building a conservatory. In his study he painted dummy books on a door and some of the walls with amusing titles, such as History of a Short Chancery Suit in nineteen volumes. It was here that he set his personal correspondence—“the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years”—ablaze in a bonfire in his garden. His daughter tried to convince him to save some of them, but he refused. He lived there until his death in 1870.
Dickens’s Grave Site
Poet’s Corner
Westminster Abbey
London SW1P 3PA
Dickens is buried alongside many other great poets and writers (either buried or commemorated) in this corner of Westminster Abbey, which holds a treasure of paintings, stained glass, textiles, sculpture, and other artifacts. Its tombs and memorials comprise the most important collection of monumental sculpture in the United Kingdom.
Web site: www.westminster-abbey.org.
Suggested Further Reading: Victorian Fiction
If you enjoyed Dickens’s Great Expectations, you might also like to read other Victorian novels, many of which have successfully been adapted into films or series for television.
Dickens’s best-selling rival was William Makepeace Thackeray, whose most famous novel is Vanity Fair (1848). Like Dickens, Thackeray also wrote a “novel of education” titled Pendennis (1848–50). Wilkie Collins was Dickens’s close friend and fellow collaborator. He is best known for the sensation fiction The Woman in White (1860), and he was also an early practitioner of the detective novel, as in The Moonstone (1868). Another Victorian sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific writer and successful magazine editor, scandalized Victorian critics with her sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862); her Eleanor’s Victory (1863) is another early example of the detective genre.
Charlotte Brontë's novels, like Dickens’s, often portrayed the lives of orphans struggling to adulthood. Jane Eyre (1847) is a classic novel of the Victorian period. Like Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Villette (1853) are written as first-person narratives. Perhaps the most respected of the Victorian novelists, George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans; she took a male pen name in order to be taken seriously by critics and publishers) wrote novels intended as serious art. Her Middlemarch (1871–72) is a masterpiece of English realism and psychological insight, and the heroine of The Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie Tulliver, is still a favorite among readers. A less familiar realist writer is Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Mary Barton (1848), like many of Dickens’s fictions, chronicles the lives of the working-class poor; Cranford (1851), serialized in Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, sensitively chronicled the capricious effects of the economic market on middle-class women.
Another novel about a cash-conscious society, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), often is found on lists of the “100 best novels.” The Warden (1855) is the first (of six) of Trollope’s well-loved Barsetshire chronicles, set in the fictional county of Barchester. Unlike the socially conservative Trollope, Thomas Hardy’s novels took up themes, such as sexual mores, that challenged Victorian society, and they were consequently abused and misunderstood. Like Trollope, he also invented a fictional though realistic county, called Wessex, for the setting of many of his fictions. His novels, such as The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), or the better-known Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), masterfully document a disappearing rural English culture. One more writer who famously scandalized Victorian society is Oscar Wilde. His novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), includes a manifesto for the late-Victorian decadent art movement. But Wilde is best known for his witty dramas, comedies that satirized Victorian morality, as in The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed 1895; published 1898). At the end of the century, the novella Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad, is widely considered a classic text on the British imperial project, while The Secret Agent (1907) takes up the world of spies in late 1880s London and includes themes of anarchism and terrorism.
In broad terms, Victorian fiction tells the story of modernity in the West and the values it developed: of the emergence of representative democracy, universal education, the influence of capitalism and commercial culture, as well as Britain’s place in a globally interconnected world. For this reason, as much as for its narrative artistry and compelling accounts of individuals caught in moments of moral decision, Victorian fiction continues to captivate contemporary audiences.
A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) Page 99
