Book Review: Great Expectations

I’ve written plenty in these here pages of my hate-love relationship with the works of Charles Dickens. To sum: I hated ’em years and years ago in Middle and High School; out of guilt I tried him again, and found I loved them, first on a train in 2002, then on CDs eleven years later.
I don’t intend to do a full-out review of Great Expectations here – or what I attempt to do in a full-out review – but I’d like to share a few personal observations about the experience.
I originally read Expectations, in abridged and abbreviated form, as group reading in eight-grade English. As a painfully shy youth, this entire class was nightmare enough for me. We’d go up and down the rows of desks, each of us reading a two or three pages over five or ten minutes, for a half-hour or forty minutes, with the teacher kinda giving an overview at class’s end. So right there and then I sweatily associated Dickens with the snickers and whispered taunts of other twelve and thirteen year olds at my public school.
Plus I remember being a bit traumatized by the trials and travails of Dicken’s young hero, Pip. Over the years, of course, I forgot the details. But it seemed to me the boy suffered greatly in the novel. Parents dead; forced to live with an evil sister; seized by an escaped convict; pawn in some weird game from the warped mind of an old spinster. It just seemed one thing after another for the poor little lad, who appeared to be about my age, and back in those days the only real reading I did – science fiction and fantasy – was to escape.
Anyway, decades flew by. After two pleasant experiences re-reading and listening to Dickens, I decided to tackle Great Expectations again, with an open mind, and revisit old wounds, so to speak.
I absolutely loved it.
Listening to the book on CD while reading along with it, I was able to conquer Great Expectations in a little over two weeks. Thing is, I looked forward to reading it. Wasn’t a chore, as “classic” literature sometimes is wont to be. The version of the book I read, published by Barnes and Noble, greatly helped, being type easy on the eyes, and including helpful endnotes, essays and timelines I perused at my own leisure.
The characters – their names most strongly – came back to me as a quite powerful testosterone-overdriven form of déjà vu. Joe Gargery, Abel Magwitch and Jaggers especially so. I relived the weird boyhood fight with Herbert, Miss Haversham’s bizarre immolation, Wemmick’s miniature castle home. A lot of what I must not have understood the first time around (like Victorian society, to cite the largest example) suddenly fell into place. The whole point of the novel, how Pip “became a gentleman” in an uncommon and uncharacteristic way, was now clear to me.
The humanity of the characters I experienced for the first time. Indeed, some of the interactions between Pip and his surrogate father, kindly Joe Gargery, brought a lump to my throat. Joe, one of the finest-hearted characters in all of English literature, a perfect example of that childlike simplicity Christ calls us all to. The humor of the Wemmick home, especially the Aged, was quite enjoyable. And a second reading brought home to me how Pip was not quite the noble, suffering lad I first took him to be, bringing a lot of needless suffering onto himself, sometimes due to an inflated sense of ego based on attaining wealth and standing but not through his own effort, and his needless infatuation with Estella.
All in all, a great little seventeen-day vacation for me. I’ve come to the conclusion (at least in my limited experience) that Dickens is the most melodic writer of prose in the English langauge. In a few years time I’ll investigate another one of the great man’s work, though at this point I’m not sure which one it will be.
But I think I will enjoy it.