Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

soggy torches & surplus vividness

“(I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing unsympathetically over the human countenance.)

My first encounter with Dickens was not so much a reading experience as a… you know those races where people slog through mud for hours, emerging battered and filthy and wondering why in God’s name they ever signed up for this? It was like that. 

I was a teenager, and so could not bear adults who took even a second more than necessary to say whatever it was they thought needed saying. And I especially couldn’t bear it if that adult happened to be speaking between the covers of a doldrum-colored Penguin Classic. The purpose of English class, as I understood it, was to spark in us a love of reading — and my teachers had decided, in keeping with ancient tradition, that fires are best lit by a succession of soggy Victorian torches. Great Expectations, with its mawkish romance and teeming, faceless cast (the words pale young gentleman still give me a shiver), was among the soggiest.

Someone had told me that Dickens was paid by the word (I believed, at the time, that this was a remarkable and extinct practice) and this seemed to me definitive proof of his perfidy. He was writing that way on purpose. With his ornate and interminable throat-clearings he was like a taxi driver circling the block with the meter running. I turned the pages in a state of boredom so intense that it felt like fury.

Imagine my surprise, then, when as an adult I leapt back into Dickens’ coach and found myself transported to my destination in a straight shot. Someone had snuck in and edited him while I was away. He had not possibly always been this funny, this efficient, this alive. Magwitch (the snarling, stinking runaway convict who even as a fifteen year old I had to admit was a compelling character) appears not, as is popularly believed, on the four-thousandth page, but in the fourth paragraph. 

But what most astonished and delighted me, this time through, was Dickens’ virtuosity at depicting the mind of a kid. (This feat may have held less intrigue when I was only a few years removed from being a kid myself.) Great Expectations is, in its first stretch, the story of Pip as a seven-year-old. When anyone younger than fourteen steps toward the microphone in a work of adult fiction, I brace myself. Will this be one of those clear-eyed, precocious, speaker-of-uncorrupted-truth kids (see: Sixth Sense-era Haley Joel Osment)? Or one of those Huck Finn-inspired, straining-for-a-distinctive-and-folsky-voice kids? 

Pip, mercifully, is an actual, perceptive, fearful, intelligent, funny, secretive kid — he might as well be playing his Nintendo Switch in the airplane seat next to yours. Pip is, as all children are, a dual resident: of the adult world (he and his much older brother-in-law, Joe, share an understanding deeper than many married couples) and of the surreal, associative world of early childhood (he imagines, based on the size and position of his five (!) dead baby siblings’ tombstones, that they “had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.”)

But even more than the psychological texture of childhood, what Dickens gets — what Dickens is a genius at depicting — is the physical reality of being young. Children are (and it’s amazing how often this fact is overlooked) smaller than adults. They move through a world in which every faucet, every doorknob, every staircase has been designed with a much larger body in mind. Children are, of necessity, fundamentally objects in the world — yanked around, hoisted up, edged out of the way by hips and knees.

Pip hides from his terrifying sister behind a door: “My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler [a piece of cane with which she beats him] to its further investigation.” 

When the insufferable Mr. Pumblechook comes for dinner, Pip finds himself “squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye.”

George Orwell writes brutally, in “Marrakesh,” about how hard it is to make oneself believe in the humanity of the foreign and desperately poor. “All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?”

Dickens understands that children are, simply by virtue of their smallness, subject to a similar willful disregard. Just to recognize, as Dickens does, that children have nerve endings — that they feel about being poked with table-corners and dragged by the arm approximately as you would feel — is to put oneself in a Mr. Rogers-ish category of kid-whisperer.

Watch how Dickens attunes us to Pip’s sensory experience in the scene in which Pip’s sister is preparing him for his first visit to Miss Havisham’s:

With that she pounced on me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face was squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps of water-butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and toweled, and thumped, and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing unsympathetically over a human countenance.) 

Has the passive voice ever been put to better use than in that first sentence, with its thumping, harrowing barrage of verbs? 

But it’s that second sentence, the one in parentheses, that I truly love. There’s the fact, first, that it is a parentheses — that Pip, and Dickens, are leaning close to deliver what they know to be a bit of surplus vividness, a detail whose only reason for inclusion is its truthfulness. And then there’s the delicious tactile specificity — the ridgy effect! Unsympathetically! And countenance, standing in for face, lending the observation a delightful faux-formality, as if Pip were stepping aside from the narrative to present at a conference (Wedding Ring Ridges and Human Countenances in Early British Childhood).     

I had, by the time I came to this passage, already come to like Dickens, and accepted that it was I, and not he, who had been at fault in our first meeting. But this was when I fell in love with him. My teachers’ patience had, a mere two decades later, paid off. The smoldering torch had lit.