Charles Dickens - Great Expectations: Ignatius Critical Editions

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

CHARLES DICKENS

With an Introduction
and Contemporary Criticism

Edited by JILL KRIEGEL

Ignatius Critical Editions Editor
JOSEPH PEARCE

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover art: Portrait of Julien Boilly ,
c. 1808, oil on canvas by Louis Leopold Boilly.

Photo by R. G. Ojeda.
Collection of Runion des Muses Nationaux, France
Art Resource, N.Y.

Cover design by John Herreid

2010 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-426-2
Library of Congress Control Number 2010922765
Printed in the United States of America

Tradition is the extension of Democracy through time; it is the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn.

Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good mans opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good mans opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition .

G. K. Chesterton

Ignatius Critical EditionsTradition-Oriented Criticism for a new generation

Raimund Borgmeier

Crystal Downing

Anthony Esolen

Michael Hanke

Mitchell Kalpakgian

Robert P. Lewis

Regis Martin

INTRODUCTION

Jill Kriegel
Florida Atlantic University

When we contemplate the Dickensian cityand we must, for each novel is not unlike a city unto itselfwe might envision a two-tier London. In this world, the lower tier is peopled by the Sikeses and the Heeps and the Jonas Chuzzlewits, the upper by the Brownlows and the Wickfields and the Tapleys. If we assign the selfishness and arrogance and irreverence of the lower to the earthly city and the charity and humility and reverence of the upper to the Heavenly City, we recognize the Augustinian model, the only destination of salvation, the City that, while on its pilgrimage home, lives a life of righteousness, based on its faith, having the attainment of [Gods] peace in view in every good action it performs in relation to God, and in relation to a neighbor, since the life of a city is inevitably a social life. This City is open to wayfarers seeking to shed their earthly baggage, to amend their lives, to achieve the upper tier through patient and willing service and self-sacrifice.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812. In his childhood home, religion was not a primary focus. His father, a Protestant, was not particularly devout. Charles and his seven siblings were baptized, but they received no formal religious education. His elder sister, Fanny, was quite religious and eventually married an evangelical minister, and Dickens mother too acquired a certain religious zeal. However, rather than fostering in Charles an increased interest in religion, their fervor for the Church as an institution served only to foster his impatience for what he saw as the hypocritical injustices that resulted from human greed and arrogance. In consequence, as a young man, Dickens shunned nominal Christianity, critical of the moral tepidity that he perceived as its complement.

Pope John Paul I described Dickens books as filled with love for the poor and a sense of social regeneration... warm with imagination and humanity. one accepting of worldly limitations and anticipatory of salvation, is the more fitting.

Dickens deep concerns and social conscience echoed in his earlier novels: in Oliver Twist , his horror at the abuses of orphans at the hands of the law and the local church; in Martin Chuzzlewit , his overwhelming concern about greeds damaging consequences, both personal and professional; in Dombey and Son , the ruinous effects of overvalued commercialism; in David Copperfield , through his autobiographical protagonist, the miseries of his own youthowing to his fathers shortcomings and his own subsequent humiliation and lack of education. In all of these, after numerous, often treacherous tests, the hero finally receives palpable, tangible gifts of love and recognition for his goodness. Not so with Pip. An inner call to righteousness beckons him from his ephemeral, sensible world of great expectations and guides him toward the eternal, intelligible world of Truth. True, there is not in Pip an audible happiness at the close of his lifes confession; there is, however, a marked peace and a gratitude for the understanding of the necessary sacrifices from which that peace sprang.

G. K. Chesterton applauded Dickens thirst for things as humble, as human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God, At the novels close, it is the end of the vacillating and the thankful return to humility that stamp Great Expectations with the Dickensian brand of optimism.

Perhaps one of Chestertons greatest attractions to Dickens was Dickens paradoxical combinations of insistent criticism of the social order and persistent faith in the individual. Interestingly, Dickens father is the initial source of both the chastisement and the hopefulness. It was John Dickens who prompted his sons hope for success when he showed the nine-year-old Charles Gadshill Place and told his smitten son that with hard work he might one day live in such a house. Alongside such blossoms of promise, the seeds of societal concerns were also sown, as Charles endured debtors prison and workhouse drudgery as a result of his fathers financial improvidence. A laissez-faire attitude and a tendency to excess and overgenerosity rendered John Dickens incapable of supporting his family. Yet, despite his failings, he was a faithful, warmhearted, and jovial manqualities that surely become the saving grace of many of his sons role model characters: Samuel Pickwick, Mr. Brownlow, John Jarndyce, Joe Gargery, and even Abel Magwitch, just to name a few. Even in the dismal atmosphere of the Marshalsea prison, John Dickens was known for his optimism, leading a committee to improve conditions for the inmates. His admirable behavior earned him early release, but his continued pecuniary irresponsibility earned him chronic domestic instability. Thus, Charles Dickens youth was a montage of shifting scenesfrom festive gatherings of family and friends to long lonely hours in Warrens Blacking Factory, from bitter-turned-blissful hours reading the beloved books his father gave him to humiliation bred of his familys predicament. In keeping with this ebb and flow of earthly existence, by its very nature susceptible to perpetual change and growth, Dickens creates characters to navigate the worldly channels. To be sure, some characters are better equipped than others, but the joy and value of reading Dickens comes through seeing the motivations and results of their navigation. We look, as Dickens did in his society, for the beacons of hope who can guide the others on a straight path.

Though he was a journalist first and a novelist second, Dickens recognized the great moral potential of fiction, an understanding well elucidated by his works. So many centuries earlier, Augustine also averred the enormous power of literature. While the saint was never a writer of fiction, he employed the plot of his life and its analogues in biblical and classical literature to create from his own particular conversion a timeless lesson in universal truth. Dickens created characters, some of whom would exemplify the path of dark corruption, others who would exemplify the path of light and goodness, and still othersthe group to which Pip belongswho mark a souls journey from one to the other, from dreadful possibility to joyful hope, from the corporeal to the ethereal.