”I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone.” How do you do Miss Havisham? She makes many lists of the twenty greatest characters from Dicken’s novels.I hadn’t ever met Miss Havisham officially, although I knew of her. I have heard of her circumstances, discussed her in English Literature classes, and even referenced her in a paper. She is a tragic figure tinged with true insanity; and yet, someone in complete control of her faculties when it comes to talking about HER money. She was jilted at the altar and like a figure from mythology she is suspended in time. She wears her tattered wedding dress every day and sits among the decaying ruins of her wedding feast. We meet our hero Pip when in an act of charity born more of fear than goodwill he provides assistance to a self-liberated convict named Abel Magwitch. It was a rather imprudent thing to do similar to one of us picking up a hitchhiker in an orange jumpsuit just after passing a sign that says Hitchhikers in this area may be escaped inmates. Little does he know, but this act of kindness will have a long term impact on his life. Pip and the Convict.Pip is being raised by his sister, an unhappy woman who expresses her misery with harsh words and vigorous smacks. ”Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame.” She also browbeats her burly blacksmith husband Joe into submission. Mr Pumblechook, Joe’s Uncle, is always praising the sister for doing her proper duty by Pip. "Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but especially unto them which brought you up by hand!” In other words she didn’t spare the rod or the child. Mr. Pumblechook is one of those annoying people who is always trying to gain credit for anyone’s good fortune. He intimates that he was the puppet master pulling the strings that allowed that good fortune to find a proper home. Later when Pip finds himself elevated to gentleman’s status Pumblechook is quick to try and garner credit for brokering the deal. Things become interesting for Pip when is asked to be a play companion of Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella. The girl is being trained to be the architect of Miss Havisham’s revenge...on all men. She is the brutal combination of spoiled, beautiful, and heartless. She wants Pip to fall in love with her to provide a training ground for exactly how to keep a man in love with her and at the same time treat him with the proper amount of disdain. As Pip becomes more ensnared in Estella’s beauty Miss Havisham is spurring him on. "Love her, love her, love her! If she favors you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces,— and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper,— love her, love her, love her!" Never had I seen such passionate. Estella, the weapon of man’s destruction, walking with Pip.Pip is fully aware of the dangers of falling in love with Estella, but it is almost impossible to control the heart when it begins to beat faster. ”Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.” His hopes, almost completely dashed that he will ever have a legitimate opportunity to woo Estella properly are buoyed by the knowledge of a benefactor willing to finance his rise to gentleman status. No chance suddenly becomes a slim chance. Pip is not to know where these great expectations are coming from, but he assumes it is Miss Havisham as part of her demented plans for exacting revenge by using Estella to break his heart. He is willing to be the patsy for her plans because some part of him believes he can turn the tide of Estella’s heart if he can find one beating in her chest. "You must know," said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and beautiful woman might, "that I have no heart,— if that has anything to do with my memory."The book is of course filled with Dickensonian descriptions of the bleaker side of Victorian society. ”We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses ( in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen.”As I was reading the book it felt like the plot suddenly sped up from a leisurely world building pace that permeates most Dickens novels to the final laps of an Indy 500 race. I was not surprised to discover that Dickens had intended this novel to be twice as long, but due to contractual obligations with the serialization of the novel Dickens found himself in a quandary. He had a much larger story percolating in his head, but simply out of room to print it. Nothing drives a reader crazier than knowing that this larger concept was realized, but never committed to paper. The rest of Great Expectations exists only in the lost dreams of Dickens.Pip is a willing victim; and therefore, not a victim because he fully realized that Miss Havisham was barking mad, and that Estella had been brainwashed into being a sword of vengeance. He was willing to risk having his heart wrenched from his body and dashed into the sea for a chance that Estella would recognize that happiness could be obtained if she would only forsake her training. Pip like most young men of means spent more than his stipend allowed and as debts mount he is more and more anxious to learn of his benefactor’s intentions. It will not be what he expects and provides a nice twist to the novel. There are blackguards, adventures, near death experiences, swindlers, agitations both real and imagined, and descriptions that make the reader savor the immersion in the black soot and blacker hearts of Victorian society. Better late than never, but I now have more than a nodding acquaintance with Miss Havisham, Pip, and the supporting cast. They will continue to live in my imagination for the rest of my life.
Even if you haven't read this or seen any of the many movie or tv adaptations, you would know something of the story. This is the one about Pip, an escaped convict, a beautiful but cruel girl called Estella, and the corpse-like Miss Havisham. It's about a little boy called Pip who was raised by his much older sister, Mrs Joe, and her husband, Joe, the village blacksmith. Joe is a role model and father figure as well as Pip's best friend, while Mrs Joe is sharp-tongued and aggressive - between her and Joe's uncle, Mr Pumblechook, Pip is made to feel worthless and one step away from becoming the most ungrateful wretch on the face of the Earth.A chance encounter as a boy of about 8 with a convict who has escaped from a Hulk (an old un-seaworthy ship used as a prison while Britain dithered over where to send the convicts) sees Pip do an act of kindness - mostly out of fear - and keep his first secret from Joe. The reclusive Miss Havisham - who was jilted at the altar at a quarter to nine and lives in suspended time, still wearing her decaying wedding dress, with one shoe on, the clocks all stopped and her mansion falling down around her - sends for Pip to be a playmate for her adopted daughter Estella, Pip is made to feel ashamed of his rough hands and coarse boots, his ignorance and weakness, by Estella's cruel remarks. Despite her blatant cruelty, Pip falls in love with her and torments himself with wanting her. When, after about four years as an apprentice blacksmith, Pip learns from a London lawyer, Mr Jaggers, that he has a patron who will pay his way into society but who insists on keeping their identity secret, Pip is sure it must be Miss Havisham and that she plans to raise him up so he can have Estella. The truth about the matter is probably quite predictable - I guessed it, though I couldn't figure out the logistics of it - but I don't want to say anything just in case. What I can talk about instead is Dickens' prose, language, diction, style, whatever you want to call it, and the reluctance of people like me to read him. (This is the first Dickens book I've read.) It is true that authors at the time were paid by the word, and it is quite true that Dickens is pretty wordy. Don't let that put you off though. He's no more wordy than a lot of other authors - George Eliot, for example, or Tolstoy or Thackeray. But every word is carefully chosen, and while a few times the diction was alien to me because the language is now disused, you can still get the meaning from the context. The story is in the details, though, so try to avoid the temptation of skimming long passages: a great deal is told and revealed in very few words and you need to read every sentence to fully understand and appreciate the story. Impressions are gained through clever structure, repetition and other stylistic devices - it's a "show", not "tell", kind of book.It's interesting, while reading volume 1, to note that you have an older, wiser Pip narrating the story of a much younger, more naive Pip - at times our perception is coloured by the older Pip's derisiveness; you get the sense that he's shaking his head in bewilderment or rueful amusement. It's quite clever, what he reveals and what he keeps mum about in order for the story to maintain a level of suspense and excitement. You know he's stringing you along but he does such a good job of it, you can't hold it against him. One of the things this book really succeeds at is the positing of a younger Pip and an older Pip, presented at the same time, the same character and yet different, and showing how Pip changes over the years and why, until the two finally merge. It takes talent to manipulate the dual Pips that way, and keep a handle on their emotional maturation.Miss Havisham is one of those larger-than-life characters who becomes famous in their own right: the bizarre, gothic spinster, embittered by her personal tragedy, warping the mind of Estella to make her into a woman who will hurt men the way Miss H was hurt. The frozen-in-time, decaying mansion - the room with the rotting wedding cake on the table, everything covered in cobwebs and bugs, with mice crawling in the walls. It's incredibly vivid and grotesque, and it's these highly exaggerated scenes and characters that make Dickens such a memorable writer.I suppose the moral of the story centres around Pip and how, when he comes into money and a better position in society, he becomes snobbish and unlikeable, looking down on Joe and his childhood friend, Biddy, and becoming class conscious in the worst way. He puts social position and class, etiquette and learning, gentility and leisure, above his friends - such misplaced value, and an inability to appreciate what's really worth appreciating, are fairly common themes but are dealt with with surprising subtlety here - I think because Pip is narrating, and he doesn't really come out and say "I was selfish and unthinking and thought myself better than the man who raised me, but I repent." He doesn't need to - it's quite clear. And, naturally, he learns from his mistakes.
What do You think about Great Expectations (1998)?
“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.” I first read Great Expectations when I was thirteen years old. It was the first of Dickens' works that I'd read on my own volition, the only other being Oliver Twist, which we'd studied parts of in school. You know, I missed out on a lot when I was thirteen; by this, I mean that I didn't always understand the deeper meaning lying beneath the surface of my favourite classics. I favoured fast-paced and gritty stories and didn't understand the love for Austen (later cured). But there was something about Great Expectations that hit me hard on all levels and there was a deeper understanding I took from it even back then.I should say first of all, this book makes me feel sad. Not a Lifetime movie emotionally overwrought pass-me-the-kleenex kind of sad. I have read it several times and have never once cried while reading it. But the book never fails to leave me with this hollow feeling that things could have been so different. When I was a kid, I often wished I could jump inside the TV and warn the good guys not to do something, stop something horrible from happening. This is that kind of book for me. All the not-knowing and mistaken assumptions that float between the characters in this novel is torture.Some readers don't like Dickens. He's been called melodramatic and lacking in style, as well as a bunch of other things. Well, I think he's like the Stephen King of the Victorian era. He loves his drama, his characters are well-drawn but sometimes edging towards caricatures, he has a wonderful talent for painting a vivid picture of a scene in your mind but a bunch of his books are a hundred pages too long. Whatever. I love his stories. And I love his characters, especially in this book.In Great Expectations, you have the orphaned Philip "Pip" Pirrip who has spent his short life being poor and being bullied by his sister who is also his guardian. You have Joe Gargery, a kind man who also allows himself to be bullied by Pip's sister (his wife). Then you have the infamous Miss Havisham who was abandoned at the altar and now spends her days wandering around her mansion in her old wedding dress, hating men and raising the young Estella to be just like her. “You are in every line I have ever read.” At its heart, this is a book about someone who is given an opportunity to have all their dreams come true, to be better than they ever thought they could be, to be loved by someone who they never thought would look at them. We all yearn for something badly at times; imagine having the chance to get exactly what you always wanted. Imagine becoming better and higher than you knew was possible. Imagine having all of that and then realizing that perhaps the most important thing you ever had got left behind.Pip was always my favourite Dickens protagonist because he wants so much and I sympathise with him. I can understand why he does what he does and why he wants what he wants. But the saddest thing is that ambition can make you lose sight of other important things and Pip has a lot of hard lessons to learn along the way. It's a book that was extremely relevant to the times when social class was of utmost importance in Britain. Essentially, the book deconstructs what it means to be a "gentlemen" and makes a not-so-subtle criticism of a class-based society.Who are the real gentlemen? The top hat wearing men of London with all their fine china and ceremony? Pip, who gets a chance to become one of them? Or Joe Gargery, the rough-talking blacksmith who even years later tells Pip: "you and me was ever friends"? There is a powerful lesson in here and I love it. Even after all these years.Blog | Leafmarks | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
—Emily May
Reseña pendiente. No sé si es tanta la fascinación por la trama en sí (Pip es casi una Cenicienta a quien un hada anónima le promete un futuro de grandes esperanzas) como por cada personaje en particular. Desde el herrero Joe Gargery, pasando por el (view spoiler)[lúgubre abogado Jagger (que se lleva "la oficina a su casa") y su asistente Wemmick (que se divide en dos personas para no mezclar la oficina y la casa, un castillo de madera hecho a la medida de sus sueños y de su bolsillo), hasta la ermitaña Miss Havisham (en su eterno vestido de novia) y su discípula Estella (the ice maiden sin corazón), entre muuuchos otros más (incluído PIP, testigo y narrador de sus grandes esperanzas).... (hide spoiler)]
—La Mala *es de la clase baja*
To me Great Expectations was like an iceberg in that I knew, through some osmosis effect of years of cultural references, the plot of the first 20% of this book. It's been referenced and rehashed so many times that Miss Havisham can be visualised by most people and they all know her as a crazy old lady in a wedding dress who owns a big house. Everyone knows that Pip meets a convict out on the marshes also. But what of the latter part of the story? Is it just my exposure but the remaining 80% of the book was full of new plot details and surprise moments. There is a spoiler in here that deserves to be up with "Luke I am Your Father". But either I am ignorant of that being common knowledge of popular culture has not read beyond page 80 of this book.I started reading this by audiobook which lasted about 50% of the way through. I thought I was cunning in choosing a version on audible that had an English rather than american narrator (sorry I am biased). But I soon came to realise that this bias may not be serving me that well. The reader was so very Shakespearean and theatrical that he over-acted even the most mundane of passages. It soon got on my nerves. It wasn't a natural reading at all. So I switched over to good old-fashioned paper.I found that with reading it I was reticent to pick up the book due to it's density. But once I had picked it up I was happy to read for hours. So it took me a couple of months to get through it, but I did enjoy it mostly. And I feel like it is an achievement. I now know the whole story of Pip, rather than the tip of the iceberg. The things that annoyed me about the novel are the "Luke I am Your Father" connections. No spoilers but everything ends up being so tightly wound together that it is too good to be true. So many coincidences must have happened for the events to unfold like stated. But I guess that in the days it was written there was not a lot of other novels to compare it to. I guess things were simpler and our tastes have become more refined and our cynicism has crept in.In my own unrefined and simplistic understanding I think Dickens was trying to get his audience to think about the influence of money on prestige and behaviour and the judgement of people due to this money. And also about being proud. It seems the source of money is more important than the money itself and the judgement upon the source is fickle and skewed. I also took away the be true to yourself lesson, even if Dickens didn't mean in totally. Also the universal: Don't be an asshole.But I did enjoy finding out what happens to the little boy who plays out in the marshes and gave an escaped convict a pie.
—Brendon Schrodinger
