Characterization in 'Great Expectations'

·         Miss Havisham has become a type for the embittered woman, disappointed in love and withdrawn from the world

·         Pumblechook is another type for the pompous, hypocritical braggart.

·         Many of Dickens’ characters seem to be ‘flat’ who are immediately recognisable by their visual presentations and habits of speech, and ‘round’ characters who are capable of development, and can surprise us (no these aren’t in dickens)

·         Dickens was a serial novelist and needed to make his characters instantly recognisable and memorable for readers taking up his stories after the break of a week or a month.

·         There are many characters in great Expectations who announce themselves by their distinctive use of language or external appearance.

o   Examples

§  Joe’s ‘what larks’, ‘ever the best of friends’ and ‘meantersay’

§  Drummle’s sneering ‘Oh Lord!’

§  Jaggers’  ‘Now’ and ‘Very Well’

·         Such verbal mannerisms are through their own distinctive vocabulary and syntax.

·         Visual display is also important and serves the same purpose.

·         Jaggers’ habit of biting his thumb or compulsive hand-washing, Wemmick’s ‘post office’ mouth or the distracted Matthew Pocket attempting to life himself up by his own hair are the signs by which we know these characters but also suggest an inner life to which we have no access.

·         Dickens’ external treatment of character in this way was a great gift. It is sometimes called caricature by that is not to imply that it is crude or unsubtle. It is often used to make a point about a particular weakness or obsession, or to suggest how people learn to function in an aggressive, competitive society.

·         Not all of Dickens’ characters are constructed in this way. For example, Herbert and Biddy are less emphatic or eccentric in their presentation. Biddy is a skilful study in understatement, shrewd and morally tough in everything she says, while Herbert convinces as a good man who only needs his chance to make his way in life, the extremes in the human condition. Orlick is a black villain with no redeeming feature, and Joe is the innocent man-child, part saint and part unconscious comedian.

·         Because of his strength in depicting human excess and eccentricity from an external point of view, Dickens is sometimes criticised for an inability to make characters develop or change convincingly. He is weak in creating ‘round’ characters with a convincing inner life.

·         An example often cited is Estella’s discovery of a heart in the final chapter which seems driven more by the demands of plot than inner necessity, but Magwitch’s ‘softening’ and stoical dignity in the final phase of this novel is very persuasive.

·         The most complex character in the book is Pip himself. In a sense, he is the book: everything we know is filtered through his consciousness. He is the narrator of his own ‘great expectations’. And shows Dickens’ talent as a psychologist to the full. Writing his own life in an attempt to master and understand it, Pip demonstrates a wide range of human emotions from repressed rage through baffled desire to saddened acceptance. His frustrated attempt to deny his own past, his guilt, insecurity and bad faith, are all confessed unsparingly.

·         Pip gains his authority to become one with his creator in some of the more exuberant, comic set-pieces like Mrs Joe’s funeral, come to terms with himself by learning to accept Magwitch, it seems likely that Dickens is using Pip as a persona through which he can explore his own sense of guilt for past misdeeds and express his hopes of becoming a better man.

·         It is sometimes helpful to view Dickens’ characterisation strategically across a book, rather than simply view characters as individuals. He will often use characterisation to develop a theme, or as variations on an idea.

·         For example: Wopsle and Orlick shadow Pip throughout his career as a gentleman and act as cruder examples of the notion of ‘bettering oneself’.

·         Orlick, Drummle, trabb’s boy and ‘Pepper’, Pip’s servant in London, all seem to exaggerate and parody certain undesirable elements in his character.

·         Orlick and Drummle, in particular, are dark doubles at opposite ends of the social scale who seem to act out Pip’s potential for evil.

·         They punish those who have caused Pip pain. Drummle mistreats Estella. Orlick humiliates Pumblechook and returns Mrs Joe’s violence with a weapon that Pip has, however inadvertently, provided.