After reading The Pickwick Papers, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1839: “Charles Dickens is no ordinary man, and his writings must unquestionably live. We think it somewhat surprising that his serious pieces have elicited so little attention; but, possibly, they have been lost in the blaze of his comic reputation” (Poe, Burton’s Dec 1839). A man equally known for writing comic episodes and creating woefully tragic scenes of the poverty of England during the nineteenth century, Dickens is today mostly remembered at Christmas time and recalled when modern television wants to recreate the Victorian era. February 9, 2019 marked his 207th birthday and he is arguably still as popular an author than he was at his death in 1870. What is it about Dickens that resonates more with us than other popular writers of his era? We see something in his works that perhaps is not as highlighted in other authors of his time (such as George Eliot and William Thackeray). I would name this quality as the call for empathy and brotherly love. Yes, Dickens sought to bring attention to many evils of his time including the ragged schools, the legal system and the poverty in which many Londoners lived during his time, but what makes Dickens such a successful author, one who people still love to read today, is the way in which he brings attention to these deficits. He does so by using his court reporter training to create a detailed picture of the people and places he wishes to describe, but then presents a question to the reader: “what will YOU do about it?” Above all things, Dickens strove to stir empathy within his fellow Englishman’s heart, to create a call to action within his readership in order to change England for the better.
2012 marked Dickens’s 200th birthday and Archbishop Rowan Williams spoke at the Wreath-laying Ceremony at Dickens’s grave in Westminster Abbey on the subject of Dickens and compassion. Williams said Dickens wrote about a type of compassion that was “an utterly unreasonable [one], which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.” It is unreasonable because Dickens repeatedly creates situations where his characters are faced with the brutal harshness of reality, but then the author allows for these transgressed figures to forgive those who enact horrors upon them. Williams cites Sir Leicester Dedlock of Bleak House as a prime example of a Dickensian character whose ability to forgive is practically Christ-like. Those of us who are familiar with the story of Bleak House, will remember the scene at the end of the novel where a dying Sir Leicester Dedlock visits the grave of his lost wife, who fled their country estate, Chesney Wold, overcome with guilt and shame as the news of her past affair out of wedlock was made public. Sir Dedlock says of his late wife, “‘I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour.’” Williams uses Sir Dedlock’s forgiveness to highlight Dickens’s particular form of spirituality. He said, “Perhaps for us grown-ups…that image of the hope of God’s forgiveness is shockingly, startlingly expressed in that lonely figure stubbornly holding the door open, revoking no dispositions made in our favour. Powerless to enforce love or justice, and yet indestructibly…offering the only kind of love that is appropriate to the extravagant and excessive nature of human beings…which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.”
When the young Dickens was around 8 or 9, he was taken into the city to see the sights, specifically Saint Giles’ Church. While admiring the lion outside Northumberland House on the Strand, the young Dickens lost his adult chaperone. The way in which he dealt with his having “gone astray,” as the piece he writes is titled, paints a perfect picture of what Dickens was like. Firstly, he “could not have been more horrified.” He cries and paces the courtyard, but then he decides it is only he who can take care of himself, and he must consider how to make his way in life here on out. He realizes that he is alone and is now therefore in charge of himself. He counts his money, “one and fourpence” and makes up his mind to “seek [his] fortune” in the city and finally decides upon finding an opening in the army as a drummer. Young Dickens meets and befriends a dog, buys a penny worth of sausage and milk and chooses to take charge of himself, Ben Franklin style. He wanders throughout London for the whole of a day making chance acquaintances, seeing a show, being persecuted by a gang of young boys, until in the dark, he recalls the faces of his family and his warm, cosy bed. This prompts him to find a night watchman who then takes him to the authorities. Dickens says, “They used to say I was an odd child, and I suppose I was. I am an odd man perhaps…I have gone astray since, many times, and farther afield.” Dickens’s life was not altogether normal, but then whose life is? He writes of his youthful experience with an understanding that it is reflective of his approach to life as an older man.
Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth to a family which Dickens biographers have unanimously described as having been poor handlers of money. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy Pay office and earning good money for the time, (approximately £441 a year which is almost $69,000 in today’s money). However, Dickens’s father was convivial and continued to live outside of his means, which eventually caused him to end up in debtor’s prison. The Marshalsea Prison, open from 1373 until 1842 was famous at the turn of the century for housing the debtors of London, and for three months in 1824, that included John Dickens. While the rest of the Dickenses joined their father in prison (families were permitted to live with the incarcerated spouse), young Charles was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory.
Until this point, Charles had been in school and was doing very well. His family’s financial lack caused them to need to send out Charles so that he could earn a living for the family. He recounted later to his closest friend John Forster how he, “‘a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally,’ had been consigned by his parents to what he saw as degrading menial work in a ‘crazy, tumble-down old house…literally overrun with rats’” (Dickens qtd. in Slater). In the blacking factory, Charles worked 10 hour days, 6 days a week and was paid 6 or 7 shillings a week, which was a decent wage for a boy of his age in 1824. He described this time as being the “secret agony of his soul.” This was because he was removed from school to this place of business where he spent his days pasting labels onto the bottles of shoe polish just off the Strand, while his sister Fanny was allowed to continue her schooling at the Music Academy. Banished from living with his family in the Marshalsea (which included his parents and three younger siblings), he lodged with a family friend in Camden Town and was essentially a self-sufficient working man during this period of 1824; he was 12 years old. Charles eventually returned to school and was released from his time as a workingman at the Blacking Factory, but it made a permanent mark on his psyche. He never told anyone about this time of his life, not even his wife Catherine, and was only forced into confessing it when the line-manager of The Daily News told his close friend and peer John Forster in 1847 that he had SEEN the young Dickens working in the window of the Blacking Factory back in 1824. Forster brought this up to Dickens, and the author quietly confessed to his friend the details of the low time of his life. Three years later after confessing his secret early life to Forster, Dickens instilled these hard childhood memories into the creation of his most famous protagonist, David Copperfield; he did this with many other aspects of Copperfield’s biography. Just like Dickens, Copperfield is “quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt.” In the preface to the 1867 edition, Dickens stated about David, “like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield." Copperfield’s initials, DC are a reverse of Dickens’s own, and indeed David is a mirror self of Dickens. Dickens of course did not endure having his mother remarry a cruel man who was abusive, but David does live through Dickens’s adolescence in many ways: he is taken out of school to work at the wine merchant’s, which does extreme damage to his psyche, he meets and subsequently lodges with the Micwaber family who are based upon Dickens’s own parents, and falls in love with a completely unsuitable match, Dora Spenlow, his boss’s daughter. True to life, Dickens also fell in love with his boss’s daughter, Maria Beadnell, but the match was ill fated.
Most of us are familiar with this aspect of Dickens’s biography: he came from a middle class family that had high class roots, was plunged into poverty, but then rose back again and finally made his fortune, buying shortly before his separation from Catherine, the symbol of having arrived: the country house, Gad’s Hill in Rochester. During childhood walks with his father, John Dickens, told the young boy: “‘If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it.’” And it is true; Dickens was extremely persevering in everything he did. He trained as a court reporter at an early age which allowed for him to hone his observational skills of people. He wrote Sketches by Boz anonymously for publication and was able to make a career out of creative writing at the mere age of 25. His book Nicholas Nickleby showed the horrifying conditions of the Yorkshire schools (for which he and a friend went to Yorkshire in order to research the depths of depravity there), and after the publication of Nickleby, Yorkshire schools were all but shut down. His claims about the plight of the impoverished were clear in Oliver Twist and Bleak House, and these novels brought much attention to the states in which these people lived, including the much-hated New Poor Law. This Law, passed in 1834, banned public health except for if the person joined a work house, which were deplorable institutions. Largely, Oliver Twist sought to awaken the public to the atrocities committed in such places. Later in A Christmas Carol, when asked to make a donation to the needy, Scrooge would reply, “are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?” This was meant as a reminder that ten years later, the New Poor Law was still condemning the impoverished to suffer through hunger and want under the guise of being “helped” in the workhouses.
Dickens travelled to America twice, once in 1842 and later in 1867. Originally, he wanted to travel into the south and had booked time to be in Charleston, South Carolina, but due to both his fear of seeing slavery first-hand (he was not sure how he would deal with viewing it), and the fact that his traveller’s insurance did not cover the Southern states, he only ventured as far south as Virginia. He spent quite a bit of time touring Philadelphia and New York City. He eventually became homesick (his first trip lasted 6 months!) and he ventured into Canada to see both countries’ reception of Niagara Falls. He so badly wanted to love Americans, but felt overwhelmed, out of place and violated throughout his first tour. At one point, he had people clawing at his clothes, he had to stand all evening at a reception and shook over 200 people’s hands who merely came to gawk at him, and had a barber try to sell the remnants of his hair cut. There were positive aspects of his tour: he was fascinated by the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, and visited it during both trips. He later made a special arrangement for 250 copies of The Old Curiosity Shop to be printed in braille and disseminated throughout schools for the blind in America. He was as well received by American authors such as Washington
Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. His visits with these authors, and others, demonstrated to him that poetry was alive and well in the United States. He was so impressed with Poe’s writings, that he promised to try to find him a publisher in England upon his return. When he visited the United States the second time, Dickens donated a substantial sum of money to Poe’s destitute mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, who after the mysterious death of Poe, was left penniless and was not receiving any royalties from subsequent publications of Poe’s work. Dickens’s first reception does seem akin to Beatle-mania, and the young man was not psychologically equipped to deal with being such an idol. His later visit found him giving public readings of abridged versions of his works, and he was much more comfortable with this type of exhibition, as he was in control of how and when he was seen. Perhaps the most disturbing part of his American visit was the introduction he had to chewing tobacco. It seemed to him that everyone everywhere was spitting. The floor of the Capitol in Washington D.C. was covered in spit. Tobacco was very popular in England during Dickens’s time, but it was smoked in pipes. Chewing tobacco was exceedingly popular with Americans throughout the nineteenth century and before, and had been introduced to the new settlers of the seventeenth century by Native North and South Americans. It stuck with nineteenth century Americans as an easy way in which to take tobacco due to the lack of portable matches and cigarette rolling machines, which didn’t become wide-spread in America until the turn of the twentieth century. This cultural shock was at times, too much for the young Dickens, who always tended towards dandyism, cleanliness, and felt the need for privacy. He wrote, “In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his...In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’...into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns” (Dickens American Notes ch. VIII).
While many of us know about how Dickens worked to bring light to people suffering in want and ignorance, most of us don’t know about his work with Urania Cottage alongside the aristocratic socialite, Angela Burnett Coutts.
Urania Cottage was intended to be an “‘asylum’ for homeless women, including those just released from prison but with nowhere to go.” It would operate on a points based system and would “function as a rehabilitation centre, training such women in ‘order, punctuality, cleanliness, the whole routine of household duties…before sending them to British colonies overseas as potential wives and mothers’” (Slater 251). It opened in 1847 and Dickens himself took down a “Case Book” of each woman’s account of themselves, their positive and negative traits, and what caused them to turn to the low state of prostitution. While marketed as a redemption house for women prisoners, it was chiefly for “fallen women” or thieves. Readers familiar to Dickens’s works will know that he often broached the subject of “fallen women” in his texts: Nancy of Oliver Twist, Little Em’ly and Martha of David Copperfield, and Lilian in The Chimes all were characters who allowed for Dickens to bring the very real exploitation of women to the light of his readership. He continued his work with Urania Cottage for ten years in Shepherd’s Bush, an area of west London. In 1853, he wrote an article for his then journal, Household Words, that spoke of the good Urania Cottage was doing for these women. He writes, “of the fifty-six cases…nearly all have been extremely ignorant…seven went away by their own desire during their probation; ten were sent away for misconduct in the Home; seven ran away; three emigrated and relapsed on the passage out; thirty (of whom seven are now married) on their arrival to Australia or elsewhere, entered into good service, acquired a good character, and have done so well ever since…” (Dickens Household Words 14).
It’s unknown to me whether or not the 30 out of 53 women was Dickens’s math, or if it would hold up against another roster, but for the most part, for at least the first 5 years, Urania Cottage was successful in helping some women escape prostitution. By modern-day standards, escaping prostitution only to be married off in a far-away colony would not be considered to be an escape, but merely another type of punishment, however, we must remember the ideals of the time, that redefining oneself culminated in relocation. Authorities on such matters believed that the dangers of falling back into old ways and habits was too great, and such distractors needed to be removed entirely from the realm of possibility. There is also of course an underlying factor that once one was known in England as a prostitute, one could never escape this title, and must seek a husband elsewhere on foreign shores (with those people who aligned themselves as British colonists). From his work with Urania Cottage, attempts to bring attention to the ineffectual New Poor Law, Ragged Schools and Yorkshire Schools, we can see that Dickens was clearly a person who wanted to make an impact with his life and work.
Dickens uses ghosts as prominent characters in his supernatural Christmas tales, and from this more well-known character type, examples of which include Marley and the Ghosts of Christmases, we can see how their ghostly aspects are transferred to physical characters in other texts, people he means to present as what I refer to as the "living dead." These individuals, exhibited using the same descriptors as Dickensian phantoms, have undergone a metaphorical death of the soul due to their respective losses of love, marriage, and family; in short, everything that is associated with the normal course of human life. Dickens’s purpose in aligning the living with the dead was to show how characters whom society has repudiated must be redeemed and brought back into that society in order for there to be real redemption. John O. Jordan argues in his book Supposing Bleak House that Dickens’s two narrators in Bleak House are both ghosts, each of whom tells a “different spectral story…one a story of psychological ghosts, the other a story of social and political haunting” (137). Esther Summerson tells us her story while already knowing the end and thus she spends her narration mentally haunting her own past of deeply troubled neurosis, an aftereffect of the trauma of being abandoned and made to feel unwanted. The second narrator is unnamed and is solely a voice, remaining physically invisible for the duration of the novel and thus speaks as a ghost as well. Jordan argues of the unknown narrator that “Nowhere is its demand for justice clearer than in the famous passage on the death of Jo” (137). Although Bleak House is considered a predominately realist text, and all of the characters are physically living, it is a novel haunted by doubles, mirror images and the search for identity. It incorporates elements of the gothic in order to explore deeply complex social and psychological problems. Two characters who specifically both function as figures who are in need of redemption (albeit different aspects of the idea) are Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson.
Lady Dedlock lives in Chesney Wold, and this country estate, is presented to us as an isolated domain, “wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton…and [which] cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds” (Dickens, Bleak 55). Although it is a world which is envied by those on the outside, a world that is “In Fashion,” it is in actuality, a sphere that is decaying from the inside (Dickens, Bleak 55). Because Lady Dedlock operates from this world in decay, she herself is a figure of death that haunts the novel. We see later that Lady Dedlock has agreed to marry Sir Leicester because she thinks she has lost the lover of her youth with whom she has had a child out of wedlock, Esther Summerson. By marrying Sir Leicester, the Lady has effectively chosen a life that she would not have envisioned for herself under better circumstances. The condition of being haunted by a life not lived echoes Scrooge’s unfulfilled life, however, he learns from his spectral encounters that while the past cannot be changed, his future can be. Although she does not learn this for herself, Lady Dedlock functions as the entity who imparts this knowledge to Esther, the other narrator of the novel, and is partly responsible for Esther’s redemption and for her learning self-love.
Just as the anonymous narrator and Esther are connected by their ambiguous accounts of the plot, so too are Lady Dedlock and Esther connected by more than mere familial relations. Trapped in the memory of happiness cut short, Lady Dedlock functions as a ghost of herself, doomed by her own thoughts to haunt her current life in a disconnected ennui. Esther also operates on this level, because she is told she is a penniless orphan, without history. She bought into what her god-mother told her when she is a small child, that “it would have been better and happier…if indeed [she] had never breathed” (Dickens, Bleak 570; 569). But, she manages to overcome this psychological stagnation at the close of the novel. Esther’s fragmented self is made whole when Lady Dedlock finally confronts her with the long-hidden secret, that she is her real mother.
In Esther’s knowledge of the truth, she is absorbed into this connected relationship and suffers a death of her past self: “I looked at her; but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath” (Dickens, Bleak 565). Until this point, Esther has functioned alone and “set apart” in the world (Dickens, Bleak 65). However, when she hears her own story from Lady Dedlock, the part of Esther’s psyche that has functioned as a fragmented zombie is the aspect of herself that dies. The profound connection that she now shares with her mother ultimately enables her to become the sole character in the novel who is able to escape the living nightmare of the broken soul. With the recognition of Lady Dedlock, Esther changes. She knows that the Lady is different from anyone else in her existence, and seeing her face initiates an entrance to the sublime. Esther states that she is stunned by “something in [Lady Dedlock’s] face” (Dickens, Bleak 563). She proclaims further that this something was what she “had pined for and dreamed of when [she] was a little child; something [she] had never seen in any face” (Dickens, Bleak 563). At the close of Bleak House, Esther perceives herself and a forgiving God as being in charge of her own destiny; through self-actualisation, she is “recalled to life,” to borrow the well-known phrase from the later 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens, Two Cities 44). “I knew I was as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers; and that before my Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth, nor a queen rewarded for it…I renewed my resolutions, and prayed to be strengthened in them” (Dickens, Bleak 571).
Great Expectations is one of Dickens’s most popular novels and it tells of the tumultuous life of Pip, the orphaned child living in the Kentish marshes with his sister and her husband, a blacksmith. His brother-in-law/surrogate father is Joe, and is arguably the only character who genuinely cares for Pip during his adolescence. When Pip meets Miss Havisham and Estella, he feels his status as a member of the laboring class for the first time in his life, and this sparks a desire in him to seek a higher ranking. He dreams of an escape from his homely life on the marshes with Joe and his abusive sister, where Pip feels a deadening sense of normalcy, largely because he feels different from his community. Confessing his inner turmoil, Pip declares, “‘I never shall or can be comfortable --- or anything but miserable --- …unless I can lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now…what would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so!’” (Dickens 149-150). Pip’s desire to be a gentleman and his desire for Estella become melded into one driving force, this coupled with his repressed trauma of meeting the escaped convict Magwitch, causes him to abandon his life on the marshes as an apprentice blacksmith to his father-figure Joe. When Pip finally does achieve a way out of his old life, he finds that those he left behind were the ones who truly loved him. He comes to this realization after rejecting them for a fantasized version of a family of which he dreamt. Pip leaves his life on the marshes and is transplanted to London as a gentleman.
Trauma theory is utilized in this chapter to describe the psyche of Pip. This theory incorporates an initial traumatic event that is repressed, and the victim of the trauma is either haunted by flashes of memories of the event, or has repressed the event altogether. It is only when a second traumatic event occurs to the victim that the first one can be understood. Pip’s traumatic events: his meeting with the escaped convict Magwtich at the start of the novel as a young boy, and his abuse at the hands of his sister are not understood fully, and it takes his time with Miss Havisham (and her horrifying death which Pip witnesses) to enable him to conceptualize the traumas of his youth and incorporate them into his understanding of self. Through this understanding and self-actualization, Pip is able to meld his two selves: the gentleman and the boy from the marshes. Pip’s sensitivity and empathy isolate him from the others in his country community and make him long for recognition and acceptance elsewhere. This is how he comes to build his strong and affectionate friendship with Herbert Pocket upon his relocation to London and indeed is also why Estella’s taunts hurt him so deeply: the extent to which Pip feels is his redeeming trait, but is also that which leads his life astray. Had he not felt the insults of Miss Havisham, Estella, and his sister so strongly, he would not have been so pushed towards choosing a life outside of his childhood town. Indeed, he would not have been compelled to try to save Magwitch at the end of the novel, but through Pip’s learning of who Magwitch truly is (which is that he is Pip’s secret benefactor and Estella’s father), Pip cannot help but to feel connected to him and consequently, to love him.
Pip’s primary agent of corruption is money and this comes about because he lacks a clear patron to help him navigate the pitfalls of adolescence. Pip must constantly contend with poverty, as even when he lives the gentleman’s life in London, it looms over him with daily reminders that he is donning the guise of a gentleman but is not truly one at heart. Pip’s actions towards those of lower statuses are not those of a gentleman, and as he tells his narrative to the reader, Pip must relive the story of his misguided youth, remembering those he repudiated and admitting his faults.
Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography of Dickens that there are well fed children in Dickens’s works, but these “are merely players. His children are somehow separated from the world, forced to keep their distance” (99, author’s emphasis). Dickens’s children characters endure the trauma of isolation, and many critics have pointed to Dickens’s own felt isolation as a child for the source of this conception. The film The Man Who Invented Christmas, released in November 2017, focused on the biographical links between Dickens’s life and his works. Many film critics disparaged this link, but his biographers have long noted it. Ackroyd writes “that everything in [Dickens’s] mature life became a kind of flight from his childhood,” but that if looked at in a positive light, the perils which he ran from also created in him a “huge appetite for success” (98). Further, the trials Dickens underwent as a youth brought out in him an understanding of the feeling of being without sustenance. He includes Dickens’s own statement regarding his childhood that he had to “win” his food, and relates this prize trial with an “equation of food with protection…To be fed and to be loved” (98-99).
Pip lives in a world of “have nots,” and as mentioned, is psychologically and physically abused by his sister. Jerome Buckley writes, “The chief agent of [Pip’s] corruption is money…Money seems to be the central objective of most of the Londoners Pip meets” (50). The reason that money holds so much power for Pip is because of the extent to which his home life oppressed him; money became the escape. And this is where we see additional mirroring with Dickens’s own life and perhaps why the trauma is described so well, is because Dickens had lived it himself. The reader is introduced to Pip’s home life when his sister comes looking for him “on a Ram-page [with] Tickler,” an incongruously named piece of cane used for physical abuse by Mrs Joe (Dickens Expectations 10). As mentioned, Joe is Pip’s only source of comfort in his early life, and is just as abused by Mrs Joe as Pip is: she “knock[s] his head…against the wall” and refers to him as a “‘staring great stuck pig’” when Joe doesn’t answer her fast enough (Dickens Expectations 13). From the mutual abuse, the two form a bond (also because of Joe’s kind-hearted nature) and during Christmas dinner whilst Pip is being tormented by his extended family, Joe attempts to demonstrate to Pip that there is a camaraderie between them: “Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when there was company, than when there was none. But he always aided and comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any” (Dickens Expectations 30). Again, we should recall what Peter Ackroyd said of Dickens’s characters: that there was a relationship between having food and having love. Joe and Pip form a bond through which, at this stage of Pip’s life, he feels a sense of belonging in a world which tells him uniformly that he is not wanted.
Another orphan, Biddy, joins the Gargery household when Mrs. Joe falls ill and needs a nurse; she is both a confidant and maternal figure to Pip and Joe during this time. Pip aligns with a group that is made up of outsiders of the community; they are not from the collected mass of socially “normal” and conformist people like Mrs. Joe, Mr. Pumblechook or the Hubbles. Like Joe, Biddy is an outsider in her appearance, in her kind nature, and because she accepts Pip, demonstrating a “deep concern in everything [he] told her” about his early experiences with Miss Havisham and Estella (Dickens Expectations 111). Biddy is also so appealing to Pip during this time because Estella is her Jungian shadow-self, and Pip feels subconsciously that if he is close to Biddy, he is close to Estella. Estella is an orphaned girl with financial advantages, whereas Biddy has none, and she lacks the empathy which Biddy has developed through taking care of others.
As mentioned, Biddy comes to live with Pip and Joe to help care for Mrs Joe during her illness (which thankfully results in the loss of her violent personality but also her ability to speak). Pip tells Biddy, when the two go out on a walk, that he secretly wishes to be a gentleman, and she empathetically understands this desire is caused by his need to measure up somehow to Estella. Pip tries to convince himself of the value of his blue-collar life with Joe and Biddy, but it had already been tarnished by comparison to the life of a gentleman he could have if Miss Havisham were his benefactor:
…I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the plain honest working life to which I was born and had nothing in it to be ashamed of…offered me sufficient means of self-respect and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that my disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge was gone, and that I was growing…to keep company with Biddy, --- when all in a moment some confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon me like a destructive missile, and scatter my wits again (Dickens Expectations 154-155).
When the lawyer Jaggers comes to remove Pip from the country to London in order to be educated “‘in accordance with [his] altered position,’” Pip, eager to leave his life as a blacksmith apprentice, jumps at the chance (Dickens Expectations 163). Jaggers repeats himself that he is “‘paid for undertaking’” Pip’s affairs, with the clear purpose that Pip is not to confuse Jaggers’s help with affection (Dickens Expectations 166). Dickens underscores this statement to emphasize by comparison that Jaggers is paid to care for Pip whereas Pip has unconditional and free love from Joe and Biddy, who have truly accepted Pip despite his reservations about them. Buckley points out that when Pip later meets Herbert Pocket, he tries to teach Pip that “‘a true gentleman in manner’ must be ‘a true gentleman at heart’”[…] Herbert himself, with his nonchalance and charm…provides an immediate gentlemanly example Pip might well emulate” (51-52). However, as Buckley discusses, the need for money has made too deep an emotional impression upon Pip as a child, and as such, he paves the way in his adulthood to learn the lesson of choosing money over love. This lesson does lead him to a better state of self-awareness in the end. However, the emotional trauma of a negative relationship with money as a youth, created this psychological hurdle which Pip must overcome.
It is this sense of reconciliation with the self which Dickens’s protagonists seek; they do not wish for normalcy, but for a sense of belonging and acceptance as who they truly are. Reading Dickens in this light, it becomes evident that he was striving to discuss how it is part of the human story to feel isolation. Further, the isolation which his characters experience creates in them a more full understanding of what it means to be loved and to give love. The experiences that initially isolate these protagonists serve as bridges of connection later in their stories. Dickens eloquently demonstrates that these types of trauma can be utilized to gain a greater understanding of the self and can be used to unite instead of to separate. The idea that all humanity is able to gain redemption is a central theme of Dickens’s works, as Vincent Newey argues in The Scriptures of Charles Dickens. Newey notes that Dickens utilizes a “liberal humanism” in his works, which displaces the older, dogmatic rhetoric of Puritanical Christianity (3, 19). The key idea about this form of humanism is that although Dickens was Christian, “Duty to God…[has] been succeeded by an insistent interest in healthy feelings and fruitful relationships with the outer world,” and that these interactions with one’s community are in fact what brings salvation (18).
These “fruitful relationships” are the crucial food for the soul which the Dickensian characters who live on the outskirts of society, such as Lady Dedlock and Pip, lack. In choosing to live lives in isolating those who truly loved them, these characters have shunned what Dickens felt was of the utmost importance to the human existence: the interconnection between human beings.
These characters gain this love despite their pasts, and to Dickens, all of humanity is capable of achieving the same. Dickens firmly believed that Jesus’s purpose as a human man on this Earth was to demonstrate that all people are equal in the eyes of God, and therefore, how one treats others in his or her community, is of the utmost importance. Dickens additionally reiterates to his children in The Life of Our Lord that above all, it is their priority in life “TO DO GOOD always --- even to those who do evil to us…If we do this…we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace” (Our Lord 124-127, author’s capitalization). Despite the ghosts of their pasts, Lady Dedlock, Pip and even Miss Havisham find the light of Christ and attain salvation, sharing that redemption with the societies which had rejected them.