With close reference to its critics, how can you expose Dickens’s humorous ‘tragi-comic conception’ in Great Expectations
As ever, G. K. Chesterton resorts too readily to the aphoristic manner, but his central point remains valid: Dickens was attempting something new in Great Expectations and much of that novelty depended on the character and manner of its narrator. Pip’s is the dominant consciousness in the novel, but as a describer, delineator, and analyst, both of himself and of his circumstances, he is essentially flawed and “un-heroic.” This lack of “heroism” may have contributed to what critics have seen as the novel’s “gloom” and to what has been interpreted as estrangement and guilt, but it can also be read as integral to Dickens’s humorous “tragi-comic conception.”
Certainly there is ambiguity in the comedy of Great Expectations. The opening chapters, for example, are recounted with a degree of “double-take.” Pip’s account of the threat presented by Magwitch’s supposed companion (“That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and his liver”) can be read in two ways. From the perspective of a child’s world it remains truly terrifying, but adult perceptions tend to diminish the menace much as adults suppress fear of the imagined dangers and perils of the night. The funny, if slightly melancholy, Christmas dinner scene in chapter 4 can be seen as serving to condition those memorably jolly earlier Dickensian Christmasses at Dingley Dell and at the Cratchits. Nevertheless, the dénouement of Christmas at the forge has a brilliantly contrived ambiguity as Pip runs for the door only to be stopped by the party of soldiers (“one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me saying, ‘Here you are, look sharp, come on!’ ”). As readers were to learn at the opening of the next number, it is not Pip who is to be arrested, but Magwitch for whom Pip has committed the “crime” of stealing the brandy and the pork pie. Other primarily “comic” scenes share something of this ambiguous edge. Most notable is Wopsle’s chilling revelation to Pip that Compeyson has been observed seated behind him in the waterside theater to which Pip had repaired one evening for light entertainment (ch. 47). Nevertheless, what Forster and Victorian critics admired as evidence of Dickens’s return to a predominantly “humorous” mode should surely be acknowledged to be as vital in determining the nature of the novel as the melancholy which has informed so many latter-day readings. One might cite here, as Forster did, the characterization of Herbert Pocket and of Wemmick, and especially the comic delicacy with which Dickens explores Wemmick’s “commuter” mentality, delineates his relationship with the Aged P, and delights in his semi-clandestine marriage (an example, perhaps, of what Forster meant by “the good heartedness of the comic surprises”). A further key to the way Great Expectations was originally read as predominantly comic may lie in the ending Dickens gave to the published version. Not till Forster printed the original last paragraphs of the novel in 1874 did Victorian readers have access to Dickens’s first, bleaker, and far less ambiguous conclusion. The fact that Dickens so readily acceded to Bulwer-Lytton’s suggestion that he change the ending indicates that Dickens himself was never really happy with what he had first written. He was rarely so responsive to friendly criticism and never before had he reacted either so positively or
so radically . His original three hundred odd words were scrapped in favour of a more extended meditation of some thousand words which, as Dickens explained to Bulwer-Lytton, arose from his need to avoid “doing too much.” As he went on to say: “My tendency—when I began to unwind the thread that I thought I had wound for ever—was to labour it, and get out of proportion. So I have done it in as few words as possible; and I hope you will like the alteration that is entirely due to you” (Letters 9: 428–9).
It seems to me that the revised ending serves to move readers on from the earlier resolution of the two other key relationships in Pip’s life: the “exceedingly droll” and “very funny” relationship with Joe and the “grotesque tragi-comic” one with Magwitch. As Dickens noted in his letter to Collins of June 23, 1861, he had only changed concluding matter dealing with events “after Biddy and Joe are done with” (Letters 9: 428). Whether or not Pip might have proposed to Biddy much earlier in the novel, and whether or not Biddy would have accepted him, is not the issue at stake. What matters is Joe’s improved status—a mutually responsive marital relationship and birth of his own child—both of which had been denied him in his marriage to the
first Mrs. Joe. Also made clear before this final chapter is the extent to which Pip and Joe are reconciled. As so often in the latter stages of Great Expectations, the process is built not simply on expressions of love and acceptance, but also of repentance (on Pip’s part) and ready forgiveness (on Joe’s), themes that remain firmly grounded in the novel.
The Christian language here is hardly arbitrary. It echoes the parallel confessions and reconciliations presented in the account of Magwitch’s last hours in Newgate prison and Pip’s final prayer asking for forgiveness for his benefactor (ch. 56). Neither scene comes off as “humorous” or “droll.” Nor is there any suggestion of the “tragi-comic.” But we should surely recognize that Pip’s reconciliation first with Magwitch and then with Joe suggests that he is also reconciled with his past. Such a steady movement toward that end cannot properly be described as “tragic.” It may not offer the neat resolutions of Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit, to which some Victorian critics sought to compare it. But the last chapters of Great Expectations can be seen
as profoundly “comic” in the sense that they allow for a new potential in Pip and for something of a happy and unexpected resolution to his “expectations.” If some critics find Pip as “disillusioned” at the end of his narrative, it seems to me that Dickens’s revised ending allows us to see a man not only chastened by experience but also one reconciled both to the strengths and to the weaknesses of his character.
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