So, here we are in Doughty Street, which is the house that Charles Dickens moved into
when he was 25 years old and newly married - and it's a distinctly smarter house than
anything he'd known before.
In a way he's a sort of vertical invader into Victorian literary life.
He'd leave school at 15 - his family, although they have aspirations to
be genteel, in fact are constantly getting into financial difficulty, so he'd never really
known the benefits of a stable home until he moved here and it's a sign that he's arrived
- he's not just a fly-by-night. Some critics said that like a rocket, he would go up, but
he would come down like a stick and this was his sign that no, he was here to stay.
People often think of the Victorians as being very stratified in class terms - very fixed
class identities. If you look at Dickens’s novels, it's very different from that. There
is a very mobile society, in which suddenly fortunes can be made and just as suddenly
lost and of course, he knew the suffering that often went with poverty, with a lowly
class position and did so much to try and combat that in his own life and in his fiction.
At the same time, he also knew that people weren't just passive recipients of class identity
or class relationships, but they could transform them too, through their ability to summon
up different identities - to pretend to be different, to move in a society in which sudden
wealth could be made, or just as suddenly lost.
So Dickens writes very few novels in the first person and the first of those, David Copperfield,
tells a rather triumphant story of someone who comes from poverty into success, happiness,
a benevolent patriarch at the end, with all his children around him. Great Expectations
tells a much darker and more haunted version of that story of class mobility. It's one
that the Victorians are fascinated by - the sense that you could make yourself anew.
Pip is haunted by guilt throughout his life, from - almost from the first scene and the
sense that somehow his degrading, impoverished, potentially criminal childhood will carry
through his whole life, is one that he never loses and that often means that he behaves
badly, particularly towards Joe, his stepfather, towards whom he feels very guilty, but also
is unable to be kind or to be generous towards him. And the way that the novel is plotted,
is extraordinary, because about four fifths of the way through, Pip has this astonishing
revelation, that the source of his wealth is not as he thought Miss Havisham, but Magwitch,
the convict, the criminal whom we meet right on the very first pages of the novel. And
it is the most shocking revelation and transformation for him. His whole sense of self is emptied
out - there's nothing there, because he's always built up a fantasy of himself, as someone
who's destined to have wealth and suddenly he knows that everything that has made him
what he is, has been irresistibly tainted with this criminal past.
So, one of the things that people are often quite surprised by, is just how little seems
to happen in the middle of Great Expectations, so that Pip, with enormous hopes, inherits
his wealth, but then what does he do with it? Almost nothing, as far as we can see.
There's very little sense that you can get pleasure from wealth, for example, so Pip
himself doesn't seem to gain any pleasure from coming to London - he lives somewhere
very unpleasant, constantly he feels the taint of the criminal past touching him - but even
though it's also true of Miss Havisham who, you know, is very wealthy, she has enormous
power, but there's nothing of pleasure in that power. It's about having a kind of control
- first of all over Estella and secondly over Pip and that you use your wealth not to fulfil
yourself, but to revenge yourself on others. And it's one of the most disillusioned books
- another title you could almost think would be Lost Illusions. So there are, in the course
of the 19th century, a great number of novels - what are called bildungsroman, which are
novels of culture or novels of development. It's about the psychological progression of,
usually a young man from the provinces and Dickens - in some ways David Copperfield is
like that, but Great Expectations is quite different, in that it's not about a movement
to incite or fulfilment, but in a way it's a novel about a movement to emptiness and
loss of the self. So, there are two possible plots that Dickens could have told. One would
be a romance plot which would have been the coming together with Estella at the end and
the other would be the development plot - psychological fulfilment plot and he gives us neither of
those. In fact, one way of thinking about it is that he takes those two major plots
of the 19th century and ruins them.