The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charles Dickens · a novel in three stages · fifty-nine chapters · weekly in All the Year Round, 1860 to 1861, and in three volumes, 1861 · scored on Dickens’s English as published, with the revised ending, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of education turned novel of disillusion; the fairy tale inverted, with the Newgate novel and the Gothic, in one first-person retrospect
Mythos
The poor boy, the secret godmother and the princess, undone; the jilted bride who stopped time, the hidden father from across the sea, the prodigal forgiven at the forge; the chain and its first link
Phase
From a night in the churchyard on the marshes in Pip’s seventh year to his mid-twenties, with a coda eleven years on
Presentation
Fiction; fifty-nine chapters in three stages of nineteen, twenty and twenty, issued weekly in thirty-six parts and then in three volumes; told by Pip as a man past middle life, who does not correct his younger self
Register
From the child’s comic terror and Joe’s idiolect to Jaggers’s cross-examination, Wemmick’s two manners and the Gothic of Satis House
Scale
A boy, the forge household, Satis House and a lawyer’s office in Little Britain; the law, the hulks and transportation behind them
Governing Proposition
A boy on the marshes feeds an escaped convict, is sent to play in a house where the clocks have stopped, and is told he has great expectations; he becomes a gentleman in London, ashamed of the blacksmith who raised him, until the convict climbs his stairs one night and declares himself the source of the money. The wager of the novel is that the gentleman is made with money, that the money is made by labour and by crime, and that the shame a man feels toward those beneath him is the mark of his debasement, not his rise; and that a life told by the man who lived it, without correction, can make the reader share the error before sharing the shame.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.” The novel begins with a name a child has made for himself, and then puts the child in a churchyard on the marshes at dusk, among the graves of his family. A man starts up from among the stones: “Hold your noise!” (chapter 1). He is a convict escaped from the hulks, with an iron on his leg, and he frightens the boy into bringing him food and a file. The boy steals them from his sister’s house, where he is raised by her hard hand and shielded, as far as he can be, by her husband, Joe the blacksmith. When the soldiers run the convicts down on the marshes, the man takes the theft on himself, and is rowed back to the hulks.
Around that night Dickens builds fifty-nine chapters in three stages. They ran weekly, in thirty-six parts, in his magazine All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861, and came out the same year in three volumes, one stage to each. The First Stage of Pip’s expectations runs to chapter 19, the Second to chapter 39 and the Third to the end, and the three are nearly equal. Dickens had turned the book from a monthly serial into a weekly one to restore the magazine’s sales, and each instalment held about two chapters. The hinge of the book falls in the last chapter of the Second Stage, almost exactly two thirds of the way through.
The voice is Pip’s, writing as a man past middle life about a boy from his seventh year to his mid-twenties, with a coda eleven years on. It tells the younger Pip’s errors as he made them and does not correct them in advance. The comedy of the opening is already guilty: the child feels himself a criminal from the first page, for a theft done in terror and a kindness done to a felon, and the book takes three stages to show him whom he owes. In chapter 9 the narrator stops to ask the reader to think of the first link of the chain that binds a life, forged on a single day. The chain will be iron before the book is done.
Movement II
Through Joe’s uncle Pumblechook the boy is sent to play at Satis House, where Miss Havisham sits in her wedding dress. Every clock in the house was stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and the wedding feast still stands on the table, rotting under its cobwebs (chapters 8 and 11). She keeps a girl, Estella, beautiful and proud, and has the two play at cards. Estella’s first contempt fixes the wound in a line: “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!” (chapter 8). Pip walks home ashamed of his hands and his boots, and of the forge, and of Joe.
The visits go on, and the shame with them. In the pub on the marshes a stranger stirs his drink with the convict’s file (chapter 10), and the boy understands that the past has not let him go. Miss Havisham pays his premium as Joe’s apprentice, and he goes to the work he had once wanted, wanting it no longer. One night his sister is struck down from behind with a convict’s leg-iron (chapter 16) and never recovers; the hand that struck her is Orlick’s, Joe’s journeyman, though Pip will not learn it until Orlick has him at the limekiln.
Then the lawyer Jaggers comes from London with news (chapter 18): Pip has great expectations, from a benefactor whose name he must not ask, and is to be brought up a gentleman. He believes, and the book lets him believe, that Miss Havisham has done it and means Estella for him. The fairy tale is complete: the poor boy, the secret godmother, the princess in the ruined house. Everything the reader has been shown supports it. The Third Stage will take it apart piece by piece, and the man who supplies the money has already appeared, on the first page.
Movement III
He leaves by the morning coach. At the fingerpost at the end of the village he breaks down and weeps, and the older narrator does not mock him: tears are “rain upon the blinding dust of earth” (chapter 19), and he was the better for them. It is the last time for many chapters that he will see what he is leaving. The First Stage ends there, and with the Second the book moves to London.
London is the law and its servants. Jaggers, in Little Britain, cross-examines everyone with his forefinger and washes his hands of his clients. His clerk Wemmick has a mouth like a post office at the office and, at home in Walworth, a little castle with a drawbridge and a cannon and an aged father who nods at everything (chapter 25). Pip shares rooms with Herbert Pocket, who tells him Miss Havisham’s history (chapter 22): the lover who took her money and left her on her wedding day. Pip learns to spend, and runs into debt; Herbert hopes for a place in a countinghouse. The Pockets’ household at Hammersmith is comedy, and so is Wopsle playing Hamlet (chapter 31).
Joe comes to London (chapter 27) in his best clothes, and Pip is ashamed of him. Joe sees it, and goes, saying that “life is made of ever so many partings welded together”, that he is wrong out of the forge, and that Pip will find him there. The young gentleman ashamed of the best man in the book is the book’s disclosure in a single scene. Estella comes to London too, raised to break men’s hearts, and tells Pip she has no heart to give; she marries Bentley Drummle, the worst of his acquaintance.
Movement IV
In the last chapter of the Second Stage, on a night of storm, a man climbs the stairs to Pip’s rooms (chapter 39). He is the convict of the marshes, transported to New South Wales and made rich there by sheep-farming, come back at the risk of his life to see the gentleman he made. The money was his. Miss Havisham had only let the boy believe. The fairy godmother is a felon from the hulks, and Pip, who was ashamed of a blacksmith, finds himself the creature of a convict. He is caught by it exactly as the reader is, because the narrator has kept the older man’s knowledge out of every page before it.
The Third Stage calls in every strand, and Jaggers’s rule, “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence” (chapter 40), becomes the book’s method. The convict, Abel Magwitch, names his enemy: Compeyson, the second convict on the marshes, is the man who jilted Miss Havisham. Jaggers’s housekeeper Molly, with her strong scarred wrists, once tried for murder, is Estella’s mother, and Magwitch is her father. The lady Pip loved is the daughter of the man whose money shamed him, and of a woman from the dock.
Pip goes to Satis House once more. Miss Havisham, seeing at last what she has made of Estella and of him, asks his forgiveness; as he leaves, her dress catches fire from the hearth, and he beats out the flames with his hands (chapter 49). Orlick draws him to the limekiln on the marshes to kill him, boasts of the blow that felled Mrs Joe, and is driven off (chapter 53). Pip, who shrank from Magwitch on the stairs, begins to plan his escape, and comes to love him.
Movement V
The escape is by the river. Pip and Herbert, with a friend, row Magwitch down the Thames on the tide to meet a steamer; a galley carrying Compeyson cuts them off, the two convicts go into the water together, Compeyson drowns, and Magwitch is taken, badly hurt (chapter 54). He is tried and sentenced to death. Pip sits by him in the prison ward and holds his hand, and tells him that his daughter lived, and is a lady, and that he loves her. Magwitch dies before the sentence can be carried out, and the narrator’s prayer stands over him: “O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!” (chapter 56).
Pip falls ill, in debt, and when he comes to himself Joe is nursing him. Joe has paid the debt, and when Pip is well he leaves without a word of reproach (chapters 57 and 58). The prodigal is forgiven before he asks. Pip goes back to the forge meaning to ask Biddy to marry him, and finds it is her wedding day, and Joe’s. He goes abroad as a clerk in Herbert’s firm, Clarriker’s, and works there, paying his way, for eleven years.
The coda (chapter 59) brings him back to the ruins of Satis House, where he finds Estella, widowed, used hard by her marriage and gentler for it, and the two leave the place together. That is the ending the book was published with, and the one scored here. Dickens first wrote another, in which Pip meets Estella once more in a London street, remarried, and they part. He set it aside on Bulwer-Lytton’s advice, and John Forster printed it in his Life of Dickens in 1874. The two endings have been argued side by side ever since, and the published one closes on a sentence that can be read as the promise of a marriage or as none. Joe had already said what the book knows: a life is its partings, welded together.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test goes harder against this book than against any other long Dickens. Every major strand is called in by one secret: the convict on the marshes (chapter 1) is the benefactor; Jaggers, who brings the expectations (chapter 18), is Miss Havisham’s lawyer and keeps Estella’s mother as his housekeeper; Compeyson, the second convict, is the man who jilted Miss Havisham. Orlick, who strikes Mrs Joe down with the convict’s leg-iron (chapter 16), returns at the limekiln (chapter 53). Wemmick’s two lives are the book’s argument about the self that money divides. What could go: Wopsle’s Hamlet (chapter 31) and his stage career, the Pocket household at Hammersmith and some of Pumblechook’s business, perhaps a twentieth of the whole.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the gentleman is made with money, the money is made by labour and by crime, and the shame a man feels toward those beneath him is the mark of his debasement, not his rise. Pip’s gentility is paid for by a transported convict’s sheep-farming in New South Wales; the lady Estella is the daughter of that convict and of a woman tried for murder. Beside it stands the inner disclosure: guilt without a crime, felt from the first page, and the finding that one’s benefactors and one’s victims are the same people. Joe’s visit to London (chapter 27) is the disclosure in one scene. Held off the top because Herbert and Clarriker’s soft rescue of Pip presses the economic argument less fully than the moral one.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Height is reached often and in several keys. The dreadful: the convict starting up among the graves, “Hold your noise!” (chapter 1); Satis House, its clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine and the wedding feast rotting on the table (chapters 8 and 11); Miss Havisham in flames (chapter 49). The tender: the fingerpost, where tears are “rain upon the blinding dust of earth” (chapter 19); Joe’s leave-taking in London (chapter 27); Pip’s prayer at Magwitch’s death (chapter 56). The kinetic: the night river and the drowning of Compeyson (chapter 54). Held below the top because the London middle of the Second Stage, comic and social, rises less, and because the limekiln (chapter 53) is melodrama more than terror.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, and built from a fairy tale turned inside out: the poor boy raised by a secret benefactor and destined for the princess. The book gives the fairy godmother’s part to Miss Havisham, lets Pip believe it, and then hands it to a felon from the hulks. The reversal is load-bearing; the whole Third Stage is the undoing of the tale. The archetypes stay particular: the jilted bride who stopped time, witch and broken woman at once; the cold princess raised to break hearts; the hidden father returning across the sea; the prodigal forgiven at the forge before he asks (chapters 57 and 58). The chain governs, named at its first link (chapter 9) and made iron in the leg-iron. Held a step down because the world of Jaggers and Wemmick works as type, not myth.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the English novel of a young man’s progress, the fairy-tale rise, the Newgate novel’s convict, the fashionable novel’s gentleman, and Dickens’s own David Copperfield (1850), the first-person life of a boy who rises. The turn is against all of them, the author’s success included: the rise is false, the hero is a snob who judges himself, and the benefactor is the convict. Copperfield’s retrospect approves itself; Pip’s is a confession. The stake was real: a narrator whose ingratitude the reader must watch for two stages, offered weekly to a public the magazine needed to win back. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the retrospective first-person life in instalments was Dickens’s proven path, and the turn is made inside that form, not against it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first-person retrospect is the instrument of the book’s justice: the older Pip tells the younger Pip’s misreading without correcting it, so the reader shares the belief that Miss Havisham is the benefactor and is caught by the revelation of chapter 39 exactly as Pip is. Told in the third person, the book would be a story about a snob; told this way, it makes the reader complicit in the snobbery and then in the shame. The three stages are the three acts of expectation: formed, enjoyed, destroyed. The weekly instalment is in the texture: chapters end on turns, the file in the pub, the stranger on the stairs. Held off the top because the river, the trial and the coda are told more quickly than the form had led the reader to expect.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over a century and a half. The ending has been argued since Forster printed the cancelled version in 1874. Humphry House’s The Dickens World (1941) read its money; Dorothy Van Ghent’s The English Novel: Form and Function (1953) its world of things and its guilt; Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1984) made it the type of the plot of repetition and return; Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) read Magwitch and Australia. The text holds its questions open: whether Pip’s guilt is a child’s fear or a true knowledge of complicity; whether Orlick is Pip’s double, doing what Pip half wished on Mrs Joe; whether the last sentence promises a marriage or its absence. Held a step down because the ending is the most worked of its questions, and some others lie near the surface.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, in which Dickens was himself the largest force. The force: the book made the novel of education a novel of disillusion and self-judgement, showed that a first-person narrator could carry an unsparing moral account of himself without the author’s comment, and, in a novelist known for sprawl, set a standard of construction for the serial novel. It perfects and turns the form more than it reorganises it, and the larger reorganisations in Dickens’s work lie in the panoramic novels, Bleak House first; that holds the axis below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: among the most widely taught English novels; rewritten by Kathy Acker (1982), Peter Carey (Jack Maggs, 1997) and Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip, 2006); filmed by David Lean (1946) and Alfonso Cuarón (1998).
Score: 8.7 / 10
One hundred and sixty-five years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The text survives whole, as published, in the serial and the volumes; the cancelled ending survives beside it, an addition to what is read, not a loss. The presence is as wide as a novel’s can be: in print without a break since 1861, a set text in schools across the English-speaking world for generations, translated widely, adapted for film, television and stage again and again, and Miss Havisham passed into the language as a type. It has outlived its conditions: transportation, the hulks, the Newgate of the 1820s and the gentleman’s allowance are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. Nothing in it has been lost or long neglected; at its age, survival can show no more.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between, and here under its strictest control. The opening sets the voice in a sentence, “So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (chapter 1): comic, plain and already guilty. The idiolects are exact and do work: Joe’s “ever the best of friends” and “what larks”, Jaggers’s cross-examining finger and “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence” (chapter 40), Wemmick’s post-office mouth. Estella’s “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!” (chapter 8) fixes the class wound in one line. The convict’s file, the leg-iron and Molly’s wrists are planted long before they are used. Charged: the coincidences that bind the plot, Orlick’s melodrama, and Herbert’s telling of Miss Havisham’s history (chapter 22), exposition in a coat.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Pumblechook’s farce at the Christmas dinner (chapter 4) and Miss Havisham burning in her wedding dress (chapter 49); or Wemmick’s drawbridge and cannon at Walworth (chapter 25) and Magwitch’s death in the prison ward (chapter 56). One law governs them: expectation, the claim one person makes on another’s future, and the prisons it builds. Pumblechook claims Pip’s rise as his own; Miss Havisham makes Estella the instrument of her revenge; Magwitch makes Pip his gentleman; Wemmick keeps his heart behind a moat. Comedy and Gothic obey the same physics. Charged: the web of coincidence, the book’s law of connection, strains it at the revelation of Estella’s parents; and the revised ending’s softened cadence sits a little apart from the book’s hard logic of partings.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness: a mind judging its own past across a lifetime, the child’s terror and the young man’s vanity. The family: Mrs Joe’s hard rearing, the forge household, the Pockets, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, and the hidden fatherhood that binds Pip and Estella to one convict. Labour: the forge, the apprenticeship, Magwitch’s sheep-farming, Herbert’s countinghouse. The state: the law at Little Britain, the hulks, transportation, Newgate, the trial and the sentence. Class and money: the whole book. The sacred, lightly: Pip’s prayer and the language of forgiveness. The natural order: the marshes, the mists, the river and its tides. All of it passes through one narrator and a few households. Held below the top because history is a ground, not an agent, and the sacred is touched rather than held.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, then The Unconcealment at 9.1. A text that survives whole and has been in print, taught and adapted without a break since 1861; and a disclosure that holds without its author’s sentiment: the gentleman made with money, the money made by labour and by crime, and the shame felt toward those beneath as the mark of debasement, not of rise.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 8.4. The turn against the novel of rising, and against David Copperfield, is real and was a wager, but it is made inside the retrospective first-person life in instalments that was Dickens’s proven form, not against it. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.5, held by what could go without loss to the argument: Wopsle’s stage career, the Pocket household and some of Pumblechook’s business, perhaps a twentieth of the whole.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.9, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and it would stand there with the Gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, scored as the novel published in 1861: the weekly serial in All the Year Round, thirty-six parts from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861, and the three-volume book issued by Chapman and Hall the same year, fifty-nine chapters in three stages, with the revised ending. The cancelled first ending, set aside on Bulwer-Lytton’s advice and printed by John Forster in his Life of Dickens (1874), is named as context and is not scored. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain. The share of dialogue, the length of the sentences and the rate of repetition are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s word count, its American serial publication, the circumstances of its writing beyond the turn to weekly parts, and the variations of wording between the serial and the early editions, are not given. Citations are by chapter, numbered through the three stages: the First Stage is chapters 1 to 19, the Second 20 to 39 and the Third 40 to 59.