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oxford world’s classics GREAT EXPECTATIONS Charles Dickens was born in 1812 at Landport near Portsmouth, where his father was a clerk in a navy pay office. The family removed to London in 1816, and in 1817 to Chatham. It was here that the happiest years of Dickens’s childhood were spent. They returned to London in 1822, but their fortunes were severely impaired. Dickens was withdrawn from school, and in 1824, sent to work in a blacking warehouse managed by a relative when his father was imprisoned for debt. Both experiences deeply affected the future novelist. Once his father’s financial position improved, however, Dickens returned to school, leaving at the age of 15 to become in turn a solicitor’s clerk, a shorthand reporter in the law courts, and a parliamentary reporter. In 1833 he began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines, later reprinted as Sketches by Boz, and in 1836 started the serial publication of Pickwick Papers. Before Pickwick had completed its run, Dickens, as editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, had also begun the serialization of Oliver Twist (1837–8). In April 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who bore him ten children between 1837 and 1852. Finding serial publication both congenial and profitable, Dickens published Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) in monthly parts, and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) in weekly instalments. He visited America in 1842, publishing his observations asAmerican Notes on his return and including an extensive American episode in Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–4). The first of the five Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol, appeared in 1843 and the travel-book, Pictures from Italy, in 1846. The carefully planned Dombey and Son was serialized in 1846–8, to be followed in 1849–50 by Dickens’s ‘favourite child’, the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. Then came Bleak House (1852–3), Hard Times (1854), andLittle Dorrit (1855–7). Dickens edited and regularly contributed to the journals Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1859–70). A number of essays from the journals were later collected as Reprinted Pieces (1858) and The Uncommercial Traveller (1861). Dickens had acquired a country house, Gad’s Hill near Rochester, in 1855 and he was separated from his wife in 1858. He returned to historical fiction in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and to the use of a first-person narrator in Great Expectations (1860–1), both of which were serialized in All the Year Round. The last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, was published in 1864–5.Edwin Drood was left unfinished at Dickens’s death on 9 June 1870. Margaret Cardwell was, until retirement, Reader in English at the Queen’s University, Belfast. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He is the editor of A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books for Oxford World’s Classics. oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles––from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS CHARLES DICKENS Great Expectations Edited by MARGARET CARDWELL With an Introduction and Notes by ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in OxfordNew York AucklandCape TownDar es SalaamHong Kong Karachi Kuala LumpurMadrid MelbourneMexico CityNairobi New DelhiShanghaiTaipeiToronto With offices in ArgentinaAustriaBrazilChileCzech RepublicFranceGreece GuatemalaHungaryItalyJapanPolandPortugalSingapore South KoreaSwitzerland ThailandTurkey UkraineVietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Text © Oxford University Press 1993 Introduction, Select Bibliography, Explanatory Notes © Robert Douglas-Fairhurst 2008 Note on the Text © Margaret Cardwell 1994 Chronology © Elizabeth M. Brennan 1999 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1994 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classic paperback 1998 New edition 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870. Great Expectations / Charles Dickens ; edited by Margaret Cardwell ; with an introduction and notes by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.––New ed. p. cm.––(Oxford world’s classics) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN–13: 978–0–19–921976–6 1. Man-woman relationships––Fiction. 2. Ex-convicts––Fiction. 3. Benefactors––Fiction. 4. Young men––Fiction. 5. England––Fiction. 6. Revenge––Fiction. 7. Orphans––Fiction. I. Cardwell, Margaret. II. Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. III. Title. PR4560.A2C37 2008 823′.8––dc22 2007051451 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–921976–6 135 79108642 CONTENTS Introduction vii Note on the Text xxxviii Select Bibliography xl A Chronology of Charles Dickens xliv GREAT EXPECTATIONS Volume I 1 Volume II 147 Volume III 297 Appendix A: The Original Ending 443 Appendix B: Dickens’s Working Notes 445 Appendix C: All the Year Round Instalments and Chapter-numbering in Different Editions 449 Appendix D: The1861 Theatrical Adaptation 452 Explanatory Notes 458 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION [The plot of Great Expectations turns upon a surprise revelation; readers new to the novel who would rather not have this information revealed in advance may wish to treat this introduction as an afterword.] On24 October 1860, soon after moving into his new house in Gad’s Hill, Dickens wrote to Wilkie Collins describing how he had dealt with rumours that a ghost was haunting the neighbourhood: Time, 9 o’Clock. Village talk and credulity, amazing. I armed the two boys with a stout stick apiece, and shouldered my double-barrelled gun, well loaded with shot. ‘Now observe,’ says I to the domestics, ‘if anybody is playing tricks, and has got a head, I’ll blow it off.’ Immense impression. New groom evidently convinced that he has entered the service of a blood thirsty demon. We ascend to the Monument. Stop at the gate. Moon is rising. Heavy shadows. ‘Now, look out!’ (from the bloody thirsty demon in a loud distinct voice). ‘If the ghost is here and I see him, so help me God I’llfire at him!’ Suddenly, as we enter the field, a most extraordinary noise responds––human noise––and yet super-human noise. B. T. D. brings piece to shoulder. ... Noise repeated––portentous, derisive, dull, dismal, damnable. We advance towards the sound. Something white comes lum- bering through the darkness.––An asthmatic sheep!––dead, as I judge, by this time.... Drama ends with Discovery of No One, and Triumphant return to Rum and Water.1 It is a good story, and Dickens tells it with gusto, but just as the comic episodes in his fiction tend to offer themselves as capering parodies of his most urgent concerns, so this ghostly shape ‘lumber- ing through the darkness’ reflects a far more serious sense of threat in Dickens’s mind at the time of writing. The past was on the prowl. In one dream, he reported, ‘I was bent upon getting over a perspec- tive of barriers, with my hands and feet bound. Pretty much what we are all about, waking, I think?’ If life was an obstacle course, his progress was not being helped by family ties that were starting to feel more like fetters: children who seemed reluctant to ‘do anything for 1 The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens,12 vols. (Oxford, 1965–2002), ix.330–1. viii Introduction themselves’; a mother ‘got up in sables like a female Hamlet’ as she slowly slipped into senile decay; a brother, Alfred, who had died leaving behind a widow and five children (‘you may suppose to whom’). ‘I am quite weighed down and loaded and chained in life’, he told W. H. Wills; ‘I declare to you that what with my mother–– and Alfred’s family––and my Angel Wife ... I seem to stop some- times like a steamer in a storm, and deliberate whether I shall go on whirling, or go down.’2 Friends who had not seen him for a while were shocked to dis- cover how much older he suddenly looked, ‘his face lined by deep furrows, hair grizzled and thinned, his expression care-worn and clouded’.3 But if he was going down it was not without a fight, and the literary world buzzed with gossip about his attempts to break with the past. Following a painfully public separation from his ‘Angel Wife’ (an ironically ethereal description for a woman who had grown stout and querulous in her husband’s eyes), he spent an after- noon burning ‘basket after basket’ of his correspondence and papers, his sons later recalling how they stood in the field behind Gad’s Hill watching the past twenty years go up in flames, and then ‘roasted onions in the ashes of the great’––an awkward pun perfectly in tune with an occasion that uneasily tangled together the solemn and the ludicrous.4 But still Dickens felt trapped by the past, and it was becoming increasingly clear that these were not the sort of ghosts that could be laid to rest by the ritual sacrifice of a few letters. In one of his stories for ‘The Haunted House’, he wrote of ‘the ghosts of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief’.5 These were the ghosts that had always haunted his fiction, but now, having moved back to within a few miles of the streets in Chatham where he had grown up, they were starting to cluster more thickly: ‘heavy shadows’ which move through his writing with a weightier tread than the living. Soon after finishingA Tale of Two Cities, with its powerful narra- tive rhythms of disappearance and return, Dickens embarked upon a new series of essays for his periodical All the Year Round under the general heading of The Uncommercial Traveller. Over the course of 2 Pilgrim Edition ... Letter of Charles Dickens,287,391. 3 Eleanor Christian, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London, 1990),832. 4 Letters, ix. 304; Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939),107. 5 Ackroyd, Dickens,871. Introduction ix these sixteen pieces, written between April and October 1860, he ranged widely in the guise of a professional wanderer, describing lonely night walks through the streets of London, visits to the Paris Morgue, the shrunken lives of Wapping paupers; but what his pen circles back to on page after page is an anxiety that the past might be just as restless as himself. He lingers outside Newgate, where so many criminals and ‘many quite innocent’ had been publicly exe- cuted (ch. 13); he muses upon the ‘enormous hosts of dead’ in the city, concluding that ‘if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets’ (ch. 23); in a visit to a London church, he sneezes and coughs as he takes in ‘a strong kind of invisible snuff’ created by decaying corpses in the vaults below (ch. 9). In ‘Dullborough Town’ (originally entitled ‘Recollections of Childhood’) he returns to a thinly disguised Chatham, and though he stumbles across a childhood friend called Joe, who ‘linked its present to its past, with a highly agreeable chain’, he mourns that much has changed, including himself: ‘All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!’ (ch. 12). Strangest of all, in ‘Travelling Abroad’, Dickens describes an encounter with ‘a very queer small boy’ who explains that if he works hard he may end up living in the large house on Gad’s Hill––precisely the childhood dream which Dickens himself had just realized (ch. 7). All three subjects––the reluctance of the dead to stay dead, the binding chains of remembrance, and the wide-eyed ambitions of children––soon came together in another piece of writing: the open- ing scene of Great Expectations, as young Pip witnesses the shackled convict Magwitch rise up from behind a gravestone and then pick his way through the churchyard brambles, ‘as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in’ (p. 6). Originally intended as another essay for The Uncommercial Traveller, the writing soon took on a momentum of its own, and by September 1860 Dickens was explaining to Forster that ‘For a little piece I have been writing––or am writing; for I hope to finish it today––such a very fine, new, grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the