Quote:
Originally Posted by titania7
My advice: If you haven't yet done so, read this book. Immediately.
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If this is advice, Miss, I’d hate to hear any of your commands. But may I be excused, as I’ve already read it twice, and it’s been rosily imprinted on my imagination by David Lean since then anyway?
I had to read this forty years ago for O level, under the avuncular guidance of Booker-winner Stanley Middleton, who’s still churning out books at nearly ninety. Trouble is, Leavis was his hero, and he subjected us all to close reading of the text, giving us a ten-question test every Friday morning, after we’d all read a chapter or two of the book. I’m paraphrasing here, but one of the questions went: ‘How many mice scampered across Miss Havisham’s floor?’ I may have altered the verb to render it a little more exciting than ‘ran across’, but my reaction to that question is still the same: ‘Who give a
shit how many mice scampered across the floor’? (Needless to say, a few clever clogs got the answer right, which I found incomprehensible.)
Why incomprehensible? Because, surely, our attentions should have been on more important things. Stan Middo was and still is a great guy, but I’ll never forgive him for this stupid question
, which is enough to put anyone off English literature for life.
Nevertheless, in spite Leavis’s dominant presence over literature, I loved it and loved
Great Expectations.
Titania mentions a number of things, and I’m again reminded that books are about moments, and there are a couple that spring to mind about the minor character Wemmick and his girlfriend Miss Skiffins. As I recall, Miss Skiffins won’t allow Wemmick to put his arm around her waist – until, I believe, the time when they become engaged. (I’m sure Miss Titania will rap my knuckles with her steel rule if I’ve not got all the details right though.)
Great Expectations is about coming of age, maturing out of petty snobbery and prejudices. It’s painful to see Joe in London and we hate Pip for his embarrassment at the same time as we empathise with him: coming of age is a painful process, especially if you’ve changed class in Victorian England. In Pip’s change he’s forgotten that he too, in London society, was once exactly what Joe is here, and in Dickens’s own phrase from another novel: ‘a dolphin in a sentry box’. This makes me wonder how many other dolphins in sentry boxes I’ve missed in Dickens’s novels, as I believe this is exactly how Dickens himself must have often felt in his journey from the blacking factory to riches and lecture tours in America.
Thanks for the memory, Titania.