SECOND READING 32

Great Expectations By Charles Dickens(1860/61)

THE LOCAL churchyard seems an unlikely sanctuary for a young boy but when your tyrannical sister, some twenty years your elder, has grudgingly reared you "by hand", there is some comfort to be had from looking at the tombstones that confirm your father and mother did indeed once walk among men. Pip Pirrip has a wonderfully, bewildering story to tell and no one could tell it as vividly and as excitingly as the master storyteller, Charles Dickens. A chance encounter with a dangerous and desperate convict named Magwitch in that very churchyard changes Pip's life for ever. The grown Pip, a candid, thoughtful narrator alert to his errors of judgement and snobbery, looks back and evokes his younger self, reliving the terror.

Once the convict realises that the boy's sister is married to a blacksmith, he knows the problem of his ball and chain is about to be solved. "You get me a file," he demands, "And you get me wittles . . . Or I'll have your heart and liver out." Pip flees, back to his home where he does enjoy the kindness of Joe Gargery, a gentle individual always endeavouring to offset the harshness of his wife, Pip's sister. Young Pip supplies the convict's needs. The law eventually steps in and he is recaptured but not before Pip sees him again, albeit from the safety of Joe's shoulder.

Some time later, the boy is summoned by the local rich lady, an eccentric recluse who is "done with men and women" and wants to watch him play. So Pip arrives at Satis House and having been greeted by the beautiful if cold Estella, meets Miss Havisham.

"She was dressed in rich materials - satins, and lace, and silks - all of white. Her shoes were white . . . But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. 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 should have cried out, if I could." By the time Dickens began writing Great Expectations he was famous and beloved. He was also sufficiently shrewd to have re-read his earlier, autobiographical masterwork, David Copperfield (1846-50), for fear of replicating himself. Great Expectations has a similar theme, that of a young boy overcoming early hardship, but it is a darker, more mature work with less of the familiar dazzling comedy but with all the perception, sensitivity, moral outrage and narrative twists that makes a Dickens novel a living, breathing and unforgettable experience.

Elevated in social rank thanks to an anonymous benefactor whose identity he assumes he knows, Pip believes he is being groomed to wed Estella who in fact has been shaped into an icy breaker of hearts, intended to avenge Miss Havisham's ruined life. Once settled into London life, our narrator finds himself in the company of Jaggers, Miss Havisham's dour lawyer - while becoming increasingly friendly with Wemmick, whose law office persona contrasts with the loving son he becomes at home with "Aged Parent". Somewhere in the back of Pip's mind lingers an awareness of how deeply he has hurt his former protector Joe Gargery to whom he had been apprenticed before fortune beckoned.

Pip comes to know himself, particularly when he begins to unravel the several knots that bind the major characters. He also discovers the unlikely source of his wealth and ultimately his hard won happiness. It is sustained drama. Dickens's prose is visual, rich, physical; his characters real, their aspirations understandable.

Whether in the marshes or in a dank London street or in flight down the Thames to read Dickens is to share his frenetic, singular imagination, his playfulness, his grief, his humanity.

This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon