Charles Dickens and the Upside-Down Kingdom
Author’s note: Great Expectations is a plot-driven novel, initially published in installments ending in cliffhangers to keep its audience wanting more. I have avoided major spoilers here. I hope that you come away from this piece wanting to read this beautiful book for the first or fifteenth time.
Great Expectations opens with its main character, Pip, dangling upside-down in a graveyard in the hands of an escaped convict. Charles Dickens uses Pip’s precarious physical position to foreshadow the precarious moral position that he will assume when he learns of his great expectations. In doing so, he calls readers to question their own perceived sources of satisfaction.
Not long after the graveyard encounter, Pip is called to Satis House at the whim of Miss Havisham. There he meets her adopted daughter Estella, who treats him with scorn. Yet Pip is drawn to her and to the entitlement that Miss Havisham and the house represent. He soon learns that a mysterious benefactor will pave his pathway to high society, and his perspective on what is good and right and true is flipped upside down. The working-class blacksmith Joe has been Pip’s lifelong provider, protector, and moral guide, but Pip, in grasping for position and prestige, begins to see him as embarrassing and unworthy of his society. He disdains the society of the honest and integrous Joe in favor of that of those whom he knows he should neither respect nor admire.
Rather than heeding Joe’s example, represented by the beacon that is the forge, Pip follows Estella’s candle through the ruin that is Satis House. The name of the house is Latin for enough, and it calls our attention to what really satisfies and what does not. Dickens cleverly crafts two versions of Pip to reveal what he sees as the fruit of maturity. Pip, as narrator, sees the house and Estella for what they are: dark, lonely, and misery-inducing. Yet Pip, the character, with his upside-down perspective, sees them as the ultimate sources of satisfaction. He embodies the warning in James to those who favor the powerful and wealthy, ignorant to the truth that God has “chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him” (James 2:5).
Pip is sent from the countryside to the city to advance his pursuit of gentility. His much-anticipated arrival in London, the rightful domain of one with expectations such as his, is met with the acknowledgment that, if he didn’t know better, he would be tempted to view the city as “ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty” (163). His perception is skewed. When our ends are self-serving, our very apprehension of reality is compromised.
So Pip, “an untaught genius” in the ways of original sin, longs for selfish gain over good. He panders to the wealthy and well-positioned and recoils from those with whom he could have a truly mutually beneficial relationship. He is condescending and bred to no calling. Pip is upside down, devoid of the empathy and selflessness epitomized by Joe. He illustrates the truth that materialistic obsession and inflated self-importance cause us to view ourselves and others wrongly.
Throughout the story, Dickens subtly weaves in allusions to the Bible’s rich young ruler, who was unwilling to give up all he had to follow Jesus. After Pip’s expectations are revealed, Joe burns the indentures binding Pip to him as an apprentice. They go to church together, and Pip muses that “perhaps the clergyman wouldn’t have read that about the rich man and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had known all” (146-7). His elevated station has inflated his ego, and he fails to see his need for the biblical warning about the idolatry of wealth.
When an older and matured Pip has nearly completed his 180° rotation to a right-side-up perspective, he prepares to leave London without the material trappings that once defined him. As he pursues a self-sacrificial course, Pip says, “Of all my worldly possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that filled the bag” (434). Shortly after, he forfeits the fortune that once separated him from home and friends and self. Now, though, he is changed. Pip lets go of his claim to it without struggle, noting that he has “finally resolved, and ever afterwards abided by the resolution, that [his] heart should never be sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish one” (448). Grasping at the material is a heart-sickening proposition, and Pip has discovered that it does not satisfy.
Dickens alludes to Jesus’ instruction to the rich young ruler one last time, near the very end of the novel. Pip says that he “sold all [he] had” before leaving to work with his humble, industrious, and genuine friend Herbert. Pip was once guided only by selfish interests, but he has learned that true satisfaction is to be found in faithful community and investment in others.
Thankfully for Pip, and for us by extension, he is not left hanging upside down in the graveyard. Dickens’ Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, is not just a story detailing Pip’s maturation. It is a story about Pip becoming his true self. Dickens clearly sees sin as a corrupting force, which keeps us from being fully ourselves. Pip’s attainment of a right-side-up perspective is gradual. Dickens peppers his narrative with the phrase “I came to myself,” (seven times, by my count) to show that as Pip grows in moral clarity, he is becoming true.
Through Pip’s journey to wholeness, Dickens reminds us of that graveyard where the story began. Materialism and conceit deaden our spirits. Power and position bring us neither satisfaction nor security. We need the light of friendship and sacrifice and love if we are to become our true selves.
Page numbers reference: Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Penguin Books, 1996.
Kari lives in Southern California and enjoys time spent with family, conversation with good friends, travel, and watching her beloved Los Angeles Dodgers.
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