With no more than the first words of the novel on paper, Dickens wrote to Forster that Great Expectations would “be written in the first person throughout, and…you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David…To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.”¹ In his own mind, the two books, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, were a pair. Comparison reveals not only a number of precise parallels, large and small, between the two books, but much too about the change in perspective that makes the two books so different despite these parallels.

David Copperfield was written in 1849-50, Great Expectations in 1860-61. The crucial years for the hardening or darkening of Dickens’ thinking are the middle fifties. The two autobiographical novels span this time almost symmetrically, and the difference in perspective and tone accurately represents the change in Dickens’ view of himself in his world. Great Expectations is in a sense the mirror image of Copperfield.

The earlier and more explicitly autobiographical novel is a success story, its dominant mood pathetic. Great Expectations describes a movement away from success, and its dominant mood is ironic. When the materials of the two novels are most similar, the change in point of view is often clearest. For example, Australia, which is a Utopia for Mr. Peggotty and the Micawbers, is a place of hard exile for Magwitch. Betsey Trotwood is made eccentric but wise by her disappointments in love, but Miss Havisham is crazed by hers. In David Copperfield, the moral view of crime is simple, uncomplicated; in Great Expectations, the more realistic and complicated view of crime provides much of the richness of the book. The depravity of Steerforth is mitigated; that of Bentley Drummle is undisguised and is given purposeful social context. The incompetence of David’s mother is treated affectionately, but Mrs. Pocket is vicious.

In other cases, however, the parallelism in material indicates little of the difference in quality of the books. Herbert is a foil for Pip much as Traddles is for David. Biddy is the Agnes of the later book. The wedding of Wemmick and Miss Skiffins is clearly reminiscent of the wedding of Barkis and Peggotty. Similarly, the scarring of Estella’s mother recalls the scarring of Rosa Dartle. Pip’s servant is much like David’s page; the butcher boy becomes Trabb’s boy. Pumblechook’s examination of Pip in arithmetic recalls a similar examination of David by Mr. Murdstone.

The number of these parallels (and there are more), both simple and complicated, major and minor, shows how often the two novels are embarked on related pieces of fictional exploration. It affords, too, specific and detailed evidence of the change in Dickens’ view between the time of David Copperfield and that of Great Expectations. Yet the continuity of his imagination, of which the comparison provides at least equal evidence, is more profound than the change in his view or construction of those facts and configurations of experience in which his imagination is founded.

David Copperfield

David Copperfield is a novel about worldly prudence; and conversely, about the dangers of imprudence and trust. Nearly every character in the novel, nearly every event of importance, nearly ever relationship can be regarded as an example or variation on the theme of prudence: in business, in money matters, in friendship, in love. This consideration precedes David’s birth. Miss Trotwood talks of the unworldliness of her dead nephew, David’s father, who “Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!” Miss Trotwood is full of compassionate contempt for her nephew’s “trust,” but she has herself been the victim of trust in love, and is to be a victim of financial trust also. David’s father had shown his imprudence in other and graver ways too. He had married a child wife, a form of imprudence that is to be part of his son’s inheritance; and though when he dies he leaves his wife with an adequate income, a fact that surprises Miss Trotwood, he leaves her, as she herself confesses, totally unprepared for “being quite alone and dependent on myself in this rough world.” The money he has left her in fact only undoes her, bringing the Murdstones to prey on her.

The beginning of the novel suggests a shape for what is to come. Even David’s minor misadventures as a boy are likely to be misadventures of imprudence or unfounded trust: with the waiter at the inn, for example, who eats his dinner, or the carter who runs away with his box. This is a story in which innocence may and does have ultimate rewards, but is first much abused and preyed on. Mr. Mell is betrayed by David, bullied by Steerforth, abused by Creakle. Tommy Traddles, too, is abused for his feeling heart and good nature—by Steerforth, by Creakle, by Micawber. It is Traddles’ trusting unworldliness, not any particular failure of either industry or intelligence, that makes him the foil to that part of Copperfield’s history that is an account of the way to fame and worldly success. Dr. Strong is a trusting innocent too, who is preyed on by his wife’s relatives, and is saved from actual cuckoldry, though not from the onus of it, by little more than Dickens’ inclination to respect propriety. Dora Spenlow and Clara Copperfield represent a kind of extreme of innocence and trust, and each of them, in the scheme of this world, has to die young.

Dickens’ inclination to respect propriety is only this, not a rule, even as Victorian propriety itself is more a convention of public admission than a description of conduct. Sex has its place and force in this novel, even though it is treated guardedly, and is seen equally in terms of prudence and trust—trust in this case being the trust in passion itself, which leads to ruin. In addition to the unfortunate loves of David’s father, and Clara Copperfield, and Betsey Trotwood—all examples of imprudent love and its ravages—there are other examples in which the sexual passion is more openly at issue: Emily’s seduction by Steerforth; the psychotic passion of Rosa Dartle for Steerforth; the ruin of Emily’s friend, Martha; Murdstone’s insane second wife; and Mrs. Strong’s infatuation with her no-good cousin, Jack Maldon. In the last case, the infatuation itself has far more force than does its comfortable resolution.

Imprudence in love brings disaster; and prudence—sensible love, aware of advantage—brings happiness. Tommy Traddles, though he waits many years to earn his marriage, is at last blissfully happy, and Barkis, who marries Peggotty for her cooking and housewifery, is domestically blessed too. Barkis’s caution in love is related to his caution with money. Both are funny, even a little pathetic, but both turn out well.

The history of David’s loves is a history of the mistakes survived in the learning of prudence. His first love, for Emily, is an idyllic child’s love, but without future. Miss Shepherd, “a boarder at the Misses Nettingall’s establishment,” is a less poetic version of the same kind of love. “The eldest Miss Larkins,” who dances with officers, is the Victorian English equivalent for the convention of the young man’s older first mistress. Dora Spenlow, who signifies David’s congenital imprudence in matters of love, is a self-confessed child-wife, unable even to manage her account books or order her house. Her attractiveness is rather pre-sexual, and like Clara she is unfit for adult life, and must die. Finally, of course, David prudently marries Agnes Wickfield and lives happily ever after.

While other characters are more or less permanently committed to their early choices or accidents, David has a succession of chances and choices. Other people are vulnerable, and their humanity lies in good part in their vulnerability, but David becomes increasingly an invulnerable figure, destined for success no matter what happens to him. Though the child David exists as a seen and felt presence in the novel, the older David becomes more and more a seeing eye and recounting voice to whom things do not happen in the same way that they happen to other people, and who tends therefore to recede. This effect is anticipated in the very first sentence of the novel: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

In part, this recession of the central character from the novel—a recession in intensity, if not in importance—can be attributed to the technique of narration employed. The story is told in the first person, from the vantage of the adult David. He can see himself as a boy with some detachment, in the round. When the narrator approaches closer to the time of the telling of the story, however, he can no longer separate himself sufficiently from the hero whose adventures he recounts. But the strategy of the novel, too, affects this progressive paling of David in the story. David Copperfield is really a rags-to-riches story, or, with more convolutions, a series of descents and ascents heading toward a final ascent. As early as the time of his employment at Murdstone and Grinby’s, David says: “I knew from the first, that if I could not do my work as well as any of the rest, I could not hold myself above slight and contempt.” Now though success may capture our interest because of its reference to our own aspirations, it is unlikely to capture our imagination. The real resources of literary art are rather on the side of failure.

But if all this is so, it still remains that David Copperfield has captured the imagination of readers for a century. Dickens himself spoke of it as his “favourite child” among all his books, and specifically of how the book grasped his imagination: “It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever…no one can ever believe this Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.”

This statement in a late preface reflects and even duplicates part of an extraordinary letter Dickens wrote to Forster as he was finishing the writing of David Copperfield: “I am within three pages of the shore; and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.”

That there is a power, as suggested, in this novel, few readers will contest. That this power is not directly related to the overt moral of the novel means quite simply that Dickens is still, in 1849-50, endeavoring to deny the tragic implications of life that he, in fact, sees with great clarity and responds to with greatest imaginative force. On the surface, David Copperfield asserts the need for prudence and the beauty of success. But the power of the novel comes from its vital rendering of the beauty of incaution and the poignancy of limitation and defeat. In its plot, David Copperfield is conventionally Victorian. But essentially and imaginatively, it subverts its own contentions.

The novel is autobiographical to varying extents in its different parts, but most when it recounts the dark London period of David’s childhood. It is this period that informs all the rest of David’s life, and of the novel, even when it is past:

In the fragment of an autobiography that Dickens showed to Forster, there follows after the blacking factory account a strikingly similar passage, ending: “I have never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God.” David shares with Dickens not only certain grim experiences of childhood, but also the will and inability to forget them.

Though the scheme of David Copperfield points to the desirability of social status, the sanctity and authority of status are often under attack. David’s first distinction, or assertion of self, is an abortive revolt against authority, the biting of Mr. Murdstone’s hand. He has come to recite his lessons for his mother, with the two Murdstones as audience. Mr. Murdstone, in the process of bending a “lithe and limber” cane when David comes in, warns the boy that he must do better this time with his lessons. Given this encouragement, David of course forgets everything. When he has failed completely, Murdstone leads him from the room to his own room and beats him cruelly. David first begs him to stop, then catches his hand in his teeth and bites “it through. It sets my teeth on edge to think of it.” Murdstone then beats him “as if he would have beaten me to death,” and locks him in his room alone, feverish and raging.

More striking here than the cruelty and sadism of Murdstone’s authority is the fact that David is corrupted by that authority. Though the reader rejoices in the biting of Murdstone’s hand, David himself is appalled by what he has done, his guilt lies heavier on him than his pain, and he feels “a most atrocious criminal.” George Orwell, a careful reader of Dickens, tells a similar story of his own boyhood: of how, beaten by the master of his school for bedwetting, he felt guilty not only for his weak bladder, but also for the loss of the master’s cane, broken over his back in the course of the beating. The attack in David Copperfield on the sadism of authority continues with Creakle and Tungay, at David’s first school, whose chief victim is Traddles, the best-hearted boy in the school, and who fear and fail to exercise any authority over Steerforth, who genuinely needs it.

There is subversive humor too in David Copperfield, at the expense of institutions and honored professions. The intrusive Chapter 61 is the most blatant example, in which Creakle’s educational genius has finally been properly put to work managing a model prison, among whose prisoners the shining stars of conduct and piety are Uriah Heep and Littimer. The legal profession too, not reserved for derision in Bleak House alone, comes in for the usual treatment. Mr. Spenlow tells David of the “very pretty pickings” likely to come from a disputed will for a “neat little estate of thirty or forty thousand pounds”; but he denies the possibility that there could be a better way of handling such matters. After all, he argues, “when the price of wheat per bushel had been highest, the Commons had been busiest.” Finally, David’s occupation as a Parliamentary reporter provides full opportunity to disparage the House of Commons more directly.

The humor of British institutions is bitter humor, relating as it does to the dire life of the lower class, of which, however, there are really only brief glimpses in David Copperfield once David himself leaves the blacking factory: Mr. Mell’s visit to his mother, for instance, or the view of the house and quarter in which the fallen girl Martha lives in London. The Micawbers’ life provides a similar insight, though refracted by the disproportioning views of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber; and even Uriah Heep and his mother are seen, as, in some part, victims of poverty and the British system of providing for the poor in a degrading way that fosters hypocrisy.

Dickens’ darker vision, though, is founded on more than the existence of bad character and bad institutions. In an unforgettable passage, David thinks of his mother, after her death, as the younger, unworn mother of his infancy, and of himself as the dead and untried baby buried with her, “hushed forever on her bosom.” The sense of aging, of death, and of loss—the passage of the river of life into the sea—pervades the book and gives it weight: David’s loss of Dora, and of a vision of the thoughtless beauty of youth; the loss of Steerforth to David, to Rosa Dartle, to Mrs. Steerforth, and the agony that comes to each when death spells the end of the possibility of reconciliation; the death of Dora’s dog at the instant of his mistress’s death; Martha’s attempt to drown herself in the river, and the deaths of Ham and Steerforth in the sea, in which always the river of life loses its identity; Barkis’s departure with the tide. Against all this, Steerforth’s picture of life as a race to be won is a preposterous affront; and, indeed, any notion of success is an affront, given the pathetic insufficiency of prudence or wisdom to slow or change the current of man’s life into death.

Great Expectations

The end of the first part of Great Expectations suggests a context for the entire novel:

No over-subtlety is required at this point to remember the departure of Adam and Eve from Eden—behind them the cherubim on the ground looking, Milton tells us, like mist risen from the marshes, while the other way, “The World was all before them.”

The usefulness of this suggestion depends on caution. The suggestion is slight, and Great Expectations is no formal allegory. It would not have occurred to Dickens that one book could or should stand upon another. Obviously, however, the departure from Eden belongs in no exclusive way to Milton, but has become one of those great general metaphors by which man explains his reasonably inexplicable condition. The slight verbal parallel between the end of the first part of Great Expectations and the end of Paradise Lost may only be happy chance, but it exercises an imaginative control nonetheless over this perhaps most controlled of Dickens’ novels.

The Eden from which young Philip Pirrip departs does not conform much to our idea of the garden: the marshes extending from the river where the prison ships are perpetually anchored; the warning gibbet on the shore; the mists and fogs and damp, cold weather; the unpromising village with its merchant rulers of the High-Street, its rough inn and pub, its tight provincial society; and the uncomfortable house by the forge where Mrs. Gargery brings up not only her young brother but her husband too, “by hand.” None of this is much to the point except that it has the quality of being a place apart, isolated largely, though not completely, from the world.

What figures most here is not the cosmography of place, but the innocence of Pip’s soul and mind in this place, an innocence which leads him to infer the characters and appearances of his parents and brothers from their tombstones; to love Joe “because the dear fellow let me love him”; to pity the desolation of the escaped convict and be glad that he enjoys his stolen food; to believe that the exhortation of his catechism, “to walk in the same all the days of my life,” binds him to take the same route without variation whenever he leaves his house to walk through the village. This innocence, too, enables him to discriminate justly between good and bad, and wisely among people as to those who are his friends and those who are not. Pip’s innocence is fractured by expectation—planted by his sister and Pumblechook, encouraged by the secret plans of Magwitch and of Miss Havisham. The objects of his expectation are, conventionally enough, property and love, scarcely distinguishable in his thinking, but each considered in detailed variation in this novel.

The evil of property lies in its tendency to use its possessors instead of being used by them. The point is made unambiguously and with force. Pip’s first genuine act in Great Expectations, and an act from which ensue the consequences that in good part make the novel, is to steal food and a file from his home for the starving escaped convict Magwitch. It is notable that the guilt that haunts his mind has nothing to do with the genuinely serious matter of aiding an escaped and dangerous convict. It is his own theft he worries about, and not so much the stolen file as the stolen food, the broken vittles. Joe Gargery, who remains in the Eden of innocence throughout the novel, and is the control or fixed point in relation to which Pip’s wandering is measured, makes overt the moral significance of this theft, when the escaped convict, to protect Pip, says that it was he who stole the food from the Gargerys’ house: “’God knows you’re welcome to it—so far as it was ever mine,’ returned Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. ’We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow creature—Would us, Pip?’”

Joe tries to bolster Pip in his innocence, but Mrs. Joe is another matter. For her, property is sacred and uncomfortable, like some people’s religion. Her preparations for Christmas dinner blight the holiday, and when she walks to town, she carries “a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it was a fine bright day.” Pip was not clear whether “these articles were carried penitentially or ostentatiously,” but he thought they were probably “displayed as articles of property—much as Cleopatra or any other sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or procession.”

Pumblechook (a good example of Dickens’ genius for fitting names) is far worse than Mrs. Gargery, and it is he who pushes Pip into the Havisham connection, bullies and maltreats him, flatters him when his fortunes are risen, and turns on him self-righteously and full of injury when they fall. But the real nightmare of property is provided by Miss Havisham in Satis House. A rough irony of names is used frequently in Great Expectations, starting with the title itself; of the name of the Havisham house, Estella says: “It meant when it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think.” In a ruin of old symbolic goods, Miss Havisham lives a living death, and plots her vicarious vengeance on victims who have only a token culpability for her tragedy. It is her goods, her wealth, that have ruined her in the first place by attracting Compeyson to her, and now she will have the goods work in reverse, by making Estella rich, impregnable, heart-breaking.

To Pip at first she seems, quite accurately, a waxwork or a skeleton amidst her goods, but this perception does not save him from becoming a victim to his expectations of property, and of property as a means of access to love. Miss Havisham encourages his delusion that she is his patroness, the cause and source of his expectations, and that, as she intends him to have fortune, she intends him to have Estella too, and to be prepared for her and made more worthy of her by this money. So he is least prepared for the ultimate revelation of the true source of his expectations. In fact, he thinks his bond of complicity with Magwitch to be reduced, almost written off by his fortune:

But it is the fortune that makes Pip’s bond to Magwitch indissoluble. In the world of this novel, property is harmless only when it is allowed no false aura of dignity or pretense, when it is clearly useful, and bears clear and preferably comic marks of human contrivance and effort. Of such property Wemmick’s little estate at Walworth is the chief example; and in this setting there is a happy, loving society.

Of Pip’s second expectation, love, Dickens draws an equally forbidding and infrequently relieved picture. It is useful to remember Dickens’ own life at this point, though not to elaborate on it tenuously. By 1860, his marriage had ended in a legal separation, but was still a source of unrest and bitterness to him; and his relationship with Ellen Ternan too, now well past its first flush, had settled into some sort of disappointing resolution of its own. At least two critics² have found verbal plays and echoings of Ellen Ternan’s name in the names of a number of Dickens’ late heroines, including the Estella of Great Expectations. These heroines reflect too, they think, Ellen Ternan’s failing in her relationship with Dickens: coldness, frigidity. Be this as it may—and the evidence gives the speculation great weight—it is clear enough that Estella is as cold and distant, as removed, as the stars her name suggests. She warns Pip herself that she has “no heart”; and, unable to manage a normal response to love, she has the decency to reserve herself from anyone capable of better, and gives herself instead to Bentley Drummle, who is as unfeeling as she, but a sensual brute in addition.

In some really frightful way here, anything like normal sexuality always makes for terror and tragedy. Miss Havisham falls passionately in love with Compeyson and is victimized by her love. The love of Magwitch and his wife ends in violence. Orlick, who desires Biddy, kills Mrs. Gargery and tries to kill Pip too. Mr. Pocket is victimized by his early love for Mrs. Pocket, and Joe by his for Pip’s sister. The only relationships between men and women that work out are reasonable, nonpassionate relationships: the middle-aged love of Wemmick and Miss Skiffins; Joe’s fatherly love for Biddy, and her motherly love for him; the patient domestic attachment of Herbert and Clara; and the final rapprochement of Pip and Estella after their misspent youths are well behind them.

It is no wonder, then, that with his great expectations of property and love, Pip comes a cropper. There is no doubt that these bad expectations seem to make inevitable his disappointments. Yet again, here as in David Copperfield, fate is beyond good, or bad choice, beyond prudence or prodigality. Pip’s profoundest fate works by indirection, in which good comes out of bad and bad out of good. The basic first action in the novel is the encounter with Magwitch in the cemetery. Out of a mixture of fear and compassion, Pip helps the escaped convict, bringing him food, and a file with which to remove his fetters. Initially, everything seems to condone Pip’s actions as simple charity toward someone in distress.

But the situation is not this simple. Magwitch is an escaped convict, a man both capable and guilty of great violence. After his escapade, Pip is in fear of the police, and feels guilty for his failure of openness with Joe. But these are comparatively minor matters, only the direct consequences of his complicity with Magwitch. The indirect consequences are more dire. When his sister is struck over the head with a heavy object, that object turns out to be “a convict’s leg-iron…filed asunder.” Pip is certain it is Magwitch’s iron, filed off with the file with which he provided him. Still Pip temporizes and does not disclose what he knows to Joe. He contains it, even as he kept his counsel when the strange man in the pub stirred a drink with a file, and presented him with a shilling wrapped in two one-pound notes, and when he had bad dreams at night, and thought—rather insufficiently to the point—what a “guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts.”

The richest morality and realism of Great Expectations depends on the figure of Magwitch. The convict is a dangerous, violent man, and unregenerate in his violence, as his final murder of Compeyson shows. His wife, Molly, too, with her strong scarred wrists, is a woman whose violence is kept down only by strong restraint, her own and Jaggers’. Yet the violence of these two (and of many others, it is suggested) is not spontaneous, or not always and entirely so. In part at least, they are the victims of poverty and of a class system that fosters and gives protection to weak or evil villains like Miss Havisham’s brother or Compeyson. Official justice, the justice of the courts and prisons, is an unfeeling and corrupt justice whose drunken ministers sell good seats in court for half-a-crown, and buy second-hand clothes cheap from the executioner.

The nature of this justice is made clear in the account of Magwitch’s trial:

In contrast to this justice of mass reprisal and of brutalizing public spectacle, Magwitch’s administration of a personal justice that rewards good and punishes evil and takes the consequences for its own acts has its splendor and dignity, even though it cannot be allowed.

Pip, after visiting Newgate with Wemmick, thinks how strange it is that the taint of prison and crime should pervade his fortune and advancement. He thinks, too, what a contrast all this is to “the beautiful young Estella.” But what he must still learn, of course, is that Estella is in fact the daughter of Magwitch and Molly. Eventually, he not only knows but is also reconciled. He comes not only to be unashamed of the dying Magwitch, but genuinely to love him, and just before Magwitch dies, Pip is able to tell him that his daughter whom he thought dead is alive, that she is a lady and very beautiful, and that he loves her. As Miss Havisham’s foster-daughter and her false heir, Estella and Pip cannot come together. As Magwitch’s true daughter and his deprived heir, they will.

There are no triumphantly happy endings in Dickens’ later novels. Instead, there is the second chance that comes after chastening and acceptance. In David Copperfield still, the happiness that comes after chastening seems almost able to disregard its own past—it is a virtually uninjured, full happiness. But in the later books, life is made more consequential, and people are what they are because of what they have been. Their happiness is a reconciliation to knowledge, and in these later books too, knowledge without reconciliation produces the riven mind, as in the case of Flora Finching. The alternatives Dickens offers, with increasing exclusiveness, are either madness, or the muted happiness that comes after acceptance.

The actual reconciliation of Pip and Estella at the end of Great Expectations was, as everyone knows, not in the original draft of the novel, but was added when Bulwer-Lytton objected to the unrelievedly somber tone of the original ending. But the limited optimism of the resolution of the novel does not depend on, and is not modified by, the changed ending. Pip has lost all his property, and has only such money as he earns by his own labors. Estella too has lost all her property. The Estella whom Pip had loved, and expected, really exists no longer, nor has he won the relatively romantic consolation of Biddy. And he is reconciled to his losses. Both he and Estella, we are told, have paled but grown better with age.

So after many years they meet again on a misty early evening on the grounds of Miss Havisham’s old house—in the ruined garden, in fact, to return to the metaphor of the loss of Eden. Now Estella has a heart, and can confess to Pip’s place in it. She, of course, has her place still in his heart, too. It is reasonable then to suggest that Pip has reentered the ruined Eden in order to leave again, as Adam had left, chastened and with his chastened Eve: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

Great Expectations provides a correction to the conventional optimism of David Copperfield. Pip must learn that fortune is not the way to happiness. Perhaps, too, Dickens is celebrating the losses that accompanied his success and the consequences of his will to forget his past. Certainly, to the modern reader, Great Expectations seems the more adult book—in its view of love, of success, of society; and its tighter structure and allegorical overtones are likely to please the chaste and intellectual modern taste more than the loose structure and folk tale elements of David Copperfield.

Yet though opinions and views may change, the basic vision of the individual imagination is relatively constant, and the greater the work of art, the more it founds the changing appearances dictated in part by view and opinion on the obsessional configurations of the imagination. Both David Copperfield and Great Expectations bear the profound marks of Dickens’ imagination, and despite the many important ways in which one denies the other, essentially they reveal the same vision of life. Each of these books—David Copperfield as well as Great Expectations—is subversive, and the power of each depends on a response to the rendering of loss, of the beauty of hazard, of the horror of social injustice, and of the preposterous comedy of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Source

From The Maturity of Dickens by Monroe Engel, pp. 146-168. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1959 by Monroe Engel. Copyright © renewed 1987 by Monroe Engel. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.