Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations we meet Pip who is to be transformed into a gentleman as a result of a generous benefactor. Throughout, the characters are well formed and consistent in their actions and the decisions they make. Pip, with his dissatisfaction with home and desire to become something greater, is something of an everyman’s archetypal hero. He strongly drives the events of the novel, acting perfectly consistent with his personality. After the events of the novel end, it is possible to imagine Pip continuing on much as we left him, a sensitive, morally fraught person, who finds happiness in hard work and cultivating friendships, and who is grateful not to be living the life of a fraud.

Aside from the character of Pip, Dickens uses foreshadowing heavily to drive the action of the plot. Although many events were foreshadowed throughout the work, the longest, and perhaps most poignant series of foreshadowed episodes (poignant because it informs what Pip’s ‘great expectations’ are to be) is that between Pip and the prisoner. To show how spread out Dickens placed the foreshadowing throughout the novel, I will recount some of the events between the two of them giving the chapters in which the events are described.

Pip meets the prisoner in the first chapter of the novel while lingering in the graveyard where his parents are buried. In Chapter 5, Pip noticed that he took a supreme interest in him:

It was not at all expressed to me that he [the prisoner] even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having been more attentive.

Also in that chapter, the prisoner says he stole a meat pie from Pip's household, saving Pip from being suspected and giving the reader the first true indication that something unique is happening between the two characters. In Chapter 10, Pip encounters a strange man in a tavern stirring his rum with a file that Pip gave the prisoner. The reader wonders what this development augers: What happened to the prisoner after he was captured? How did this man get the prisoner’s file? What surprise next? Similarly, Chapter 28 recounts the story of Pip riding back to his hometown with that same stranger from the bar. Meaning: the prisoner continues to interact strangely with Pip's life.

Finally, in Chapter 29, the result of all this foreshadowing and speculation about the relationship between Pip and the prisoner are revealed: the prisoner is Pip’s benefactor. Of course, there is more: Chapter 51, the prisoner is Estella’s (Pip’s beloved) father and in Chapter 54, while helping the prisoner escape, Pip lets slip the pocketbook with their money and looses his inheritance.

In this, the most dramatic series of foreshadowing used in the novel, Dickens stretches out the events of Pip’s and the prisoner’s relationship from the very beginning of the work to nearly to the end. The use of foreshadowing makes it more believable that the prisoner would be his benefactor by developing a special connection with Pip in the early chapters of the novel and his continuing to have strange doings in Pip’s life, not the least through his lawyer Jaggers. The foreshadowing also heightened the tension between Pip’s relationships to other characters in the novel, making the story overall more interesting. And the foreshadowing leads the reader to sympathize more with the prisoner, making the ending of the novel, and Pip’s changing character, that much more satisfying.

Dickens does make long digressions to criticize aspects of British society, jails, capital punishment, the justice system in general, the disparity between poverty and wealth, titular aspirations, etc. Apparently, this was one of the first novels to pointedly (and with some success) criticize the class system in Britain. Nevertheless, his writing is very descriptive and seems to be as economical as it ever was in this work with most of it furthering the plot. Here are a few selections of his writing from this novel and reasons for their reproduction here.

This selection is interesting for the way the text accelerates toward a sort of climax at the end of the quote:

As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge, enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in lively anticipation of "the two villains" being taken, and when the bellows seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to hammer and clink for them, and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the blaze rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to have turned pale on their account, poor wretches. Chapter 5

This selection is a good example of Dickens’ use of a character’s actions describe him or her. It harkens to modern writing in which this method of characterization is used more often:

His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down; but he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made me believe he really was going to do for me at last. He got heavily bruised, for I am sorry to record that the more I hit him, the harder I hit him; but he came up again and again and again, until at last he got a bad fall with the back of his head against the wall. Even after that crisis in our affairs, he got up and turned round and round confusedly a few times, not knowing where I was; but finally went on his knees to his sponge and threw it up: at the same time panting out, "That means you have won." Chapter XI

Finally, here is a good example of Dickens’ skill in writing descriptively:

We entered this haven [Barnard’s Inn] through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,-- rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides--addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, "Try Barnard's Mixture." Chapter XXI