After reading several books with Greek Tragedy endings, tucking into a Dickens novel the past two weeks felt as comforting as a warm cup of tea. Again, how did I reach the age of 33 with barely a Dickens novel or two under my belt? I finally read A Tale of Two Cities a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it for the historical bits. But Great Expectations seems more typical of his style: a straightforward story of a British boy determined to make a better life for himself. Although he encounters a lot of problems along the way, and makes an ass out of himself a lot of the time, Pip learns his lessons by the end. Even better than that is how all the good guys get their happily ever afters, and the bad guys drown in the Thames. Dickens is big on justice and redemption, and even if he is a bit melodramatic, his stories leave me feeling satisfied.
Yes, it’s satisfying to read about a guy like Pip. He starts off poor, comes into an unlikely fortune, and then loses all his cash. In the process he figures out that money can’t buy you love, as the Beatles tell us, and it certainly can’t buy you class, as the Real Housewives of New York tell us. It’s far more meaningful to surround yourself with people who love you and to work for whatever you’ve got.
But it’s a long and winding road Pip takes before finding this out. As a kid, he falls for the cold-hearted but beautiful Estella, who is humbled by the end by her own crappy choices. Instead of appreciating Pip’s devotion to her, she marries a d-bag for money and ends up an abused wife. At least at the end she treats Pip with respect and redeems herself for acting like a total snob for a couple of decades. Like Daisy B. from Gatsby, she’s not a very likable female lead. But at least we as readers understand why she’s so cold. Miss Havisham, her guardian, brought her up to treat men like dirt. But in Dickens Land, even a misguided soul like Estella straightens out her priorities by the end of the story.
Before now, I didn’t realize that Dickens wrote two endings for GE. I really enjoyed the inclusion of both in the edition I read. He originally wrote the more true to life, and to me more moving, one where Pip runs into Estella years down the road and she admits that she made a mistake by treating him badly and marrying the rich oaf. She remarries and has a daughter that she loves in a way that shows Pip she’s learned to open her heart, despite Miss H’s attempts to make her a cold-hearted snake. Pip realizes that he could never have had a happy life with her and that he was better off moving on to other things. But then some friend of Dickens convinced him to write a crowd pleaser ending where Pip and Estella meet up at the site of Miss H’s house and they realize they’ve belonged together all along. Estella still apologizes to Pip about treating him like dirt, so at least she redeems herself in both versions. But I think the original is far more effective and in better keeping with the whole tone of the book. As much as I’m a romantic fool, there’s no way Pip and Estella were ever going to settle into a happy marriage and decorate their home with cute stuff from Crate and Barrel, ya know? The romantic in me loves seeing Pip and Estella walk off in the moonlight together, but it seems more realistic that they would give each other the nod of respect and that Pip would have finally outgrown his adolescent obsession with this undeserving chick.
All the same, sometimes it’s nice to live in an alternate universe where everyone reforms their characters in the end. Miss Havisham spends her life wallowing in her bitterness that she got jilted on her wedding day and seeks revenge by turning Estella into her man-eater instrument to torture men. But even she begs Pip’s forgiveness at the end of the book and gets torched a little bit by a fire just to drive the message home! And the criminal with the heart of gold, Magwitch (whose name sounds like a sloppy joe sandwich to me: It’s a Magwitch night!) redeems himself by bestowing his fortune upon Pip. To Dickens’ credit, he does acknowledge that some people are just plain evil for no particular reason. But they get theirs, too. The really bad criminal, Compeyson, ends up drowning, but not before Magwitch gets to beat the crud out of him. What a fun book!
Even more fun than seeing the bad guys pay for their deeds is reading about the colorful minor characters. This is what Dickens does best. Herbert, Pip’s happy-go-lucky BFF, who’s always there to make Pip laugh or to rescue him from a dangerous situation, is a real gem. We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Herbert. Another stand-up guy is Joe, Pip’s sort-of stepfather who always takes care of him, loves him, and accepts him for who he is even when Pip’s acting like an a-hole. Nothing made me happier in this book then when Joe marries Biddy, the no-nonsense, honest, caring girl from Pip’s childhood. Biddy is the exact opposite of Estella, and by the end Pip finally realizes that if he had any sense in his head he would have told Estella to stuff it and he would have married Biddy. But at least Biddy ended up with a good and deserving dude.
These are people who everyone knows in real life. Maybe these folks aren’t the smartest or the richest in the world, but they have good hearts and they live honorably and they don’t expect anyone to give them a trophy for it. Even a guy like Wemmick, the law clerk who seems like a tough bastard on the job, is at heart a big softie who spends his off time joking around and taking care of his Aged Parent. And he even he has a sweetheart that he loves and marries. And isn’t it so true to life that Pip as a young guy foolishly falls for the pretty but stuck up Estella, and hence overlooks the somewhat plain but totally awesome Biddy? He doesn’t realize his mistake until much later in life. A lot of men never catch on to this and their priorities remain out of whack. Girls do this too, to be fair. But anyone who watches The Bachelor can tell you that guys are more prone than gals to fall for a pretty face, even if the person has a lump of coal in their chest instead of a heart. Of course in Dickens Land, the guy acknowledges his mistake and learns to love someone for the right reasons. I like this world!
In Dickens’ world, all the loose threads get tied together. All of these characters are connected somehow. Molly the maid turns out to be Estella’s mom, and Magwitch turns out to be her dad. And hence all the rich people, lawyers, poor people and criminals have a part in each other’s life stories somehow. I can’t think of a better plot on any night-time soap opera right now. I wish I was clever enough to write such things. Nothing is a coincidence. Every character has a purpose.
Overall, it’s just refreshing to read something where the main character isn’t punished in the end for aspiring to something better than his humble origins. After rereading Gatsby, where he ends up face down in his pool and never gets his girl, and Jude, where his whole life falls apart and his kids get killed, it’s nice to see Pip end up in a good place in his life. Whether or not he gets the girl, he realizes how lucky he is to have good folks in his life. And he had some fun along the way too. Now the only question is, why hasn’t someone opened a theme park called Dickens Land?
A Modern Librarian Reads the Classics 