Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The professor of English literature tells us about his favourite novels in a golden era for fiction, and the dilemma, still with us today, that led Dickens to write two different endings for Great Expectations
You are something of a Sherlock Holmes when it comes to Victorian fiction.
It always seemed to me that we shouldn’t read these books with closed minds. These works create worlds which I explore. I look at the nooks and crannies and oddities and puzzles. One of the things about great fiction is that we never finish explaining it. For example, it’s the bicentenary of Dickens next year but we have never really worked out whether Great Expectations is a novel about a snob – which is one major critical reading of it – or about how you become a perfect gentleman. These quarrels and uncertainties seem to me the essence of fiction. There is this very enigmatic, but at the same time extremely satisfactory, way of understanding the world around us.
Can you give me an example of one of the inconsistencies you found in your detective work?
I think that the first chapter of Great Expectations is the finest thing of its kind that Dickens ever wrote. Pip goes down to the graveyard, sees the graves of his parents and dead siblings, and while he is coming to terms with their deaths he raises his eyes and sees a gallows in the distance – which is very important because of the father figure, Magwitch, who will face hanging when he comes back from Australia. And Pip suddenly becomes aware of himself for the first time. It is a bleak late afternoon in winter, he is in the graveyard by himself, and he realises that he’s Pip. Then suddenly, from behind the gravestone, leaps this monstrous figure who is a grotesque parody of a father figure – an escaped convict of course. He has a huge iron fetter around his leg. It is a scene which, once you see it in your mind or on screen, stays with you forever – like Oliver and the gruel in Oliver Twist.
But later on, some 40 chapters into the book, Dickens says that Magwitch escaped from one of the prison hulks at anchorage in the Thames estuary, and swam ashore, quite a long way, with a great ball and chain around his leg. As a reader you want to know if this is a huge mistake. But actually it isn’t, because in Victorian times they didn’t know much about swimming. They may have had bathing machines, but they didn’t know that you can’t possibly swim with a great big ball and chain around your leg. This kind of thing is quite interesting, in that it gives you an idea of how people thought in Victorian times, and what seemed possible to them. These questions – which on the face of it seem like bloopers, as they are called by film buffs – actually invite you further into the world of the novel and the time it was written.
Looking through your choices, it feels like the Victorian era was a golden age for British authors.
It was. And it wasn’t just a golden age for British literature – it was more particularly a golden age for fiction. You can sum up why that was the case in one word – Scott. At the beginning of the 19th century, which you might call the prelude to the Victorian era, Walter Scott had demonstrated that you could be a gentleman and write fiction. Up to that point, it was regarded as rather low compared to great literary forms such as satire, epic, tragedy or even lyric. What Scott had done was create a market and also a form – a three-volume novel, which did very well and made a lot of money. (Scott lost a lot of money as well, and then remade a fortune to pay off his debts.) So to some extent the stage was set for a great novelist to come along – the question was, who would it be? It was Dickens, who came along in 1836.
Which leads us to your first choice, Great Expectations, which we have already touched on. Some critics argue it is all about upwards mobility.
It is, yes. In the early paragraphs he refers to the universal struggle of life, a term which he lifted from Darwin. And it is a very Darwinian novel. There is a lot of struggle in it. But it is a novel not just about survival of the fittest and evolution. It is also a novel about the ways in which you make your way in the world, and how it is that you can reach a place in life which is different from where you started.
It is not just like Samuel Smiles’s 1850s “self help” manual on how to be successful. Dickens is particularly good at showing the problems that come when you rise above your station, which he himself did, of course. He was the son of a clerk who was imprisoned for bankruptcy in a debtor’s prison, something which is traumatically recalled in Our Mutual Friend. Charles Dickens could have been a noble, “Sir Charles” – he could have taken a title if he had wanted it. Instead, he ended up one of the most famous British commoners of his time, and one of the most revered.
He bought a house in Rochester in his later life. He had looked at this house through the railings of the garden as a boy, and came back to purchase it. It was triumphant, but at the same time he never threw off among his enemies the sense that he was slightly vulgar. They made comments about the too-colourful waistcoats that he wore. They saw him as jumped-up. There was too much cockney about him.
You could argue that the English upper class was very good at making people feel inferior if they felt threatened by them.
Yes, and I think Dickens had to combat that. In Great Expectations, Pip rises in life by, in a sense, casting off his true friends. Later on, we see him suffering a great fit of remorse after his illness. He rushes back to the village where he was brought up and proposes to his childhood friend Biddy, only to find that she is just about to marry someone else – his old guardian, Jo. So his isolation is the price of his success.
A theme that is still relevant today. Do you think it was also typical of Victorian times?
I do think so. Growing towards the light, they called it. But the further you grow towards the light, the further you grow away from your roots. That was something that Dickens couldn’t make his mind up about – whether it was better to rise in life or to stay in the community you started in. This dilemma is reflected in the two different endings he wrote for Great Expectations. In one of them Pip gets together with Estelle, and in the other he doesn’t.
John Sutherland is an English academic, columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, specialising in Victorian fiction, 20th century literature and the history of publishing. One of his most serious works of scholarship is the 1989 Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, a comprehensive encyclopedia of Victorian fiction. His forthcoming book is Lives of the Novelists. Sutherland was a speaker at Battle of Ideas in London, organised by the Institute of Ideas
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