Themes in 'Great Expectations': Speaking and Writing

·         Education novel = bildungsroman and Pip’s story begins with his attempt to read himself into an identity from family inscriptions on a tombstone.

·         The narrator is primarily concerned with Pip’s efforts to ‘read’ and understand his situation, his evolving place in a strange and hostile world. The novel is a retrospective, confessional narrative by a now literate man who once called himself Pip, ‘and came to be called pip’.

·         Speaking and writing are the means by which we create and sustain our identities/

·         In the modern world literacy is an essential skill for self-development and in Victorian England it was the path to social progress and individual advancement.

·         Mrs Joe knows this well and keeps Joe illiterate for she ‘is given government,’ Joe explains, and is ‘not over partial to my being a scholar, for fear I might rise’. Pip suffers social shame through ‘calling the knaves, jacks’ quite as much as by his coarse hand and thick boots.

·         Mastery of language is the key to the social mobility so essential to Pup in his ambition to become a gentleman, and literacy is the skill that separates him from his two foster fathers, Joe and Magwitch. Both show parental pride in Pip’s attainments in language.

o   Chapter 7: there is comedy in Joe’s admiration for Pip’s rudimentary ability with the chalk and slate

o   Chapter 40, Magwitch is happy to hear Pip read foreign languages he cannot understand.

·         This regard of the unlettered for culture contrasts with the well-born but loutish gentleman, Bentley Drummle, ‘who took up a book as if its writer had done him an injury’

·         However, there are losses as well as gains in the standardization of language that literacy entails. Rich moral traditions and local dialects fade away before the power of the centralising nation state. Dickens, looking back to his childhood from the vantage point of the 1860s is celebrating a past that is gone for ever.

·         Pip first feels a superiority to Joe when he discovers that he cannot read and there is much comedy to be had when Joe struggles to express himself in complex, unfamiliar social situations.

·         But Joe’s moral instinct is never wrong and he can express himself well enough when it matters: “and bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,” “ I said to your sister, “there’s room for him at the forge””

·         The paradox is, of course, that it needs a literate Pip to remember such sayings and to write them down.

·         Joe and Biddy are the conservative centre of this novel, content to fill their place at the forge with honour and dignity. Joe has capacity enough to learn what he needs to learn and, unlike Mrs Joe, Biddy is a good teacher. On his first visit to London, Joe can barely decipher the name on Pip’s door; by the time he comes again to rescue Pip from his debtors he can write, comically and laboriously maybe, a parting note of simple dignity that finally matches the best of his speech.