Critical Texts on Dickens' Great Expectations

Someone else asked me about critical texts on Great Expectations. Where does one begin?

The Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz (they hold a summer conference on Dickens) has bibliographies for the novels they have studied over the years. Here's a link to the one for Great Expectations with the critical articles on the first page being the "must read" ones (at least according to the list compiler):

PDF of Dickens' Universe Bibliography for Great Expectations

Also the Victorian Web has several bibliographies of critical material on the novel.

Victorian Web Great Expectations' Bibliographies

 

Chapter Summary Chart for Great Expectations

Somebody asked me to share the very brief chapter summary chart for Great Expectations that I showed the class. Here it is:

Brief Chapter Topics for Dicken's Great Expectations

A Brief But Clear Discussion of Accentual Verse

I was thinking about preparing a handout for class on the difference between syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and accentual verse (Gee, Professor, tell me more!), but I came across this excellent and highly readable discussion of what is, in fact, one of the most important and most misunderstood topics in the study of literature: prosody and scansion.

http://danagioia.com/essays/writing-and-reading/accentual-verse/ 

Dana Gioia is the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts and the current State Poet Laureate of California.

BBC Documentary on G. M. Hopkins

You might enjoy this BBC Documentary on Gerard Manley Hopkins. It includes some very nice readings from his poems and a brief but helpful discussion of "haecceity" (roughly translated as "thisness") and the concept behind Hopkins' own terms: inscape and instress.

Some Quick Notes on Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

So much to discuss with this poem, but so little time.

Here are some notes I sketched out simply by starting with a simple observation and then asking a few questions. (There are probably hundreds of simple observations a reader could begin with and hundreds of questions that could follow.) The simple observation is that the poem cannot possibly be what it appears to be--i.e. a story about two sisters' encounters with goblin men selling fruit. That's what the story the poem tells, but that can't possibly be what the poem's "about." If that's so, then each aspect of the poem (characters, plot, etc.) must represent something else, either as allegory (a one-to-one mapping) or as symbol (a one-to-many mapping). (I prefer symbol to allegory; very few texts are explicitly allegorical.)

1. What do the goblin men represent?
2. Cautionary tale, unruly sexual appetites
3. Religious allegory of sin and redemption
4. Struggle between temptation and desire (Lizzie stops her ears, Laura eats)
1. Victorian angel
2. female (hetero)sexuality
3. homoerotic imagery
4. Jeanie, the “fallen” woman
5. Lizzie as a female hero—who triumphs through submission and renunciation (?); Christ-like self-sacrifice
5. What does the goblins’ fruit represent?
1. sexual desire
2. prostitution
3. economic power
4. imperial capitalism
5. masculinity
6. original sin
7. Eucharistic redemption
8. Or maybe the fruit is just fruit and the poem is about shopping?
6. Who is the poem meant for?
1. the ending attempts to control the poem’s reception
2. Laura relates the story and the moral to her daughters

                                                              i.      tidies up energies released with trite moral

1.      vulnerable young misses must resist the dangers of desire and strange men with tempting fruits

2.      the need for sisterly solidarity

Key Issues

1. Separate Spheres
1. poem supports middle-class Victorian views of ideal women as self-sacrificing and nurturing (Lizzie)
2. but Lizzie’s heroism blurs traditional boundaries between public and private (she moves freely between them, regenerating one through manipulating the other)
2. Marketplace
1. economic language that equates female sexual exchange with mercantile exchange
2. buying and selling fruit in goblin market

                                                              i.      Laura’s “golden lock” = gold coin

                                                            ii.      her hair (sign of female sexuality) is a form of cash

Second Essay Assignment

Here's a link to a PDF of the second essay assignment, which was distributed in class on Tuesday (2/23).

ENGL 468 Second Essay Assignment

The "original" ending to Great Expectations

The Oxford Major Authors, Penguin, and Norton Critical editions of Great Expectations (as well as many others probably) reproduce the original ending to the novel usually in an appendix or sometimes in a note to the text.
If you don't have access to the original ending, here's how you can reconstruct it. Find the dialogue between Pip and Biddy that occurs near the beginning of the final chapter. The dialogue concludes with Pip saying, "My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,-- all gone by!" Substitute the short passage below for all the remaining text in the novel.

     It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness.

     I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.

     I was in England again — in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip — when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

     "I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!" (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

     I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be. 

(The above passage is based on the proof slip reproduced by Edgar Rosenberg in the W. W. Norton (1999) edition of Great Expectations, p. 492, retrieved from the Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/ge/ending.html).

About that phrase "moral economy" . . .

Amongst the topics touched on in Thursday's speed-lecture was that of a text's "moral economy." Some questions that came up in class and later yesterday made me aware that I had used this term inexactly. Here then is an attempt to tease out a couple of different (and related) meanings of this phrase.

First, my use of the phrase "moral economy" was not correct, in a technical sense. The phrase is actually a highly specific one, which I know of from the work of E. P. Thompson, the great Marxist historian of 18th and 19th century England. Thompson uses the idea of a “moral economy” to rewrite the history of peasant revolts and worker uprisings in the 18th and 19th century. Prior to Thompson, these events (and really any “action” done by the poor or the working class) was seen strictly in terms of political economy—wages go down, prices go up, peasants riot because they are angry and hungry. Thompson (and pretty much everyone after him) instead postulates that these uprisings and riots, which appear like spontaneous eruptions of anger and passion, are actually concerted actions that derive from a moral purpose and are in fact the invocation (or demand) for a “moral economy,” which in the case of 18th and 19th century Britain was one that assumed that people (even peasants) had rights, that it was unjust for some to profit while others starved, and so forth. Economy in this sense is not just the workings of a machine (supply goes down, prices go up, i.e. the old-fashioned political economy), but the workings of a machine that are everywhere inflected by the shared values and norms (about moral behavior, justice, fairness, etc.) of those that constitute the machine.

My use of the term is much more casual, though based on Thompson. When I say “moral economy” I’m referring to two ways of thinking simultaneously. First, like Thompson, I am suggesting the way in which moral questions and judgments are attached to traditional ideas of economy. For example, saving and thrift are “good,” while debt and wastefulness are “bad”; working hard is “good,” and being “idle” is bad; and so forth. Second, novels create worlds and universes that have their own logic, which to me means something like the rules that govern how things happen in a novel, or in other words morality. What actions are considered good, responsible, etc. What behaviors are bad, injurious, etc. Usually that logic is very similar to that which we attribute to and believe to be present and operating in our own world (i.e. realism), but sometimes it is not (fantasy and romance). Regardless of whether the logic is something we recognize or not and regardless of whether it is “realism” and therefore (supposedly) closely matches our world, each novel chooses to privilege some aspects of that logic over others. By that I mean, the novel rewards/praises certain kinds of behavior and punishes/criticizes others. (Obviously, no book is consistent in its application even of its own rules, but that’s not a flaw—that’s the pleasure of reading.) What I’ve just described as “logic” is really nothing other than an “economy,” where economy means something like the mechanism that manages resources or distributes goods, services, energies, etc. Thus, every novel has its own “moral economy,” its own mechanism for exchange and distribution at the level of morality and moral judgment.

Some Background on Mid-Victorian Literary Realism

Roots in Romanticism

                          "Thus sanctioned,"

The Pastor said, "I willingly confine

My narratives to subjects that excite

Feelings with these accordant; love, esteem,

And admiration; lifting up a veil,

A sunbeam introducing among hearts

Retired and covert; so that ye shall have

Clear images before your gladdened eyes

Of nature's unambitious underwood,

And flowers that prosper in the shade. And when

I speak of such among my flock as swerved

Or fell, those only shall be singled out

Upon whose lapse, or error, something more

Than brotherly forgiveness may attend;

To such will we restrict our notice, else

Better my tongue were mute.

                             And yet there are,          

I feel, good reasons why we should not leave

Wholly untraced a more forbidding way.

For, strength to persevere and to support,

And energy to conquer and repel--

These elements of virtue, that declare

The native grandeur of the human soul--

Are oft-times not unprofitably shown

In the perverseness of a selfish course:

Truth every day exemplified, no less

In the grey cottage by the murmuring stream

Than in fantastic conqueror's roving camp,

Or 'mid the factious senate, unappalled

Whoe'er may sink, or rise--to sink again,

As merciless proscription ebbs and flows.

Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book VI.645-674

George Eliot: Critic and Realist Novelist

Early Thoughts

Suppose a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms ‘familiar with forgotten years’—a patent deodorized and non-resonant language which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science . . .

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.  All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people.  Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life.  It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversations of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of a true one. 

This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end.  The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him.  We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. (Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life” (July 1856))

I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it—we have then a sign that at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others. (Eliot, Journal Entry, Ilfracombe 8 May-26 June 1856) 

Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic. Both are good and true in their way, but my stories are of the former kind. I undertake to exhibit nothing as it should be; I only try to exhibit some things as they have been or are, seen through such a medium as my own nature gives me. (Eliot, Letter to Blackwood, 1857)

The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism—the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. (Eliot, Review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters)

Eliot's Fiction

From The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton (chapter 5)

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable, - a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favourably many years ago. 'An utterly uninteresting character!' I think I hear a lady reader exclaim - Mrs Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a 'character'. 

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people - many of them - bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance - in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share? 

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.

From Adam Bede (chapter 17)

"This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!" I hear one of my readers exclaim. "How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon."

Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.