Great Expectations

I have watched many films of Great Expectations and disliked them intensely while all around me enjoyed them and think Pip wonderful, Miss Havisham an icon, Dickens simply marvellous etc. In order to write on my blog about why Great Expectations does not actually merit all this praise I thought I'd better read the book. Oh DEAR. WHAT a struggle.

At first I thought "Damn! This is good stuff! I won't be able to get a blog post out of this." My change of heart lasted about 20 pages before all my prejudices were happily restored to me. And here is why.

Now, I like Victorian prose. I like to read books made up of proper sentences, like Thomas Hardy books are. On this front Dickens is fairly sound - credit where due. 

BUT :

i) Pip! Oh SPARE me do. For a start Pip is a silly unmanly name. Mistake, Charles, take it from me. We women like a manly hero. I took against Pip in a big way early on in the book and subsequent events did nothing to bring me round. He is a total WEED in all respects.

We (the readers) are I think expected to like him for being fond of Joe, Herbert, Wemmick, and for feeling ashamed for being unkind to Joe; however it is easy to be nice about fine people like those and ashamed of behaviour like that; he is ungrateful and spiteful about Pumblechook, his sister, the bad Pockets, unaware that without them he would be grovelling the streets for his living and keeps on and on about their faults. He was jolly lucky to be fed and housed and does he not realise that ALL children are subject to being constantly asked to name the pluperfect of moneo and what 13 times 13 is. He seemed to believe that Mr Pumblechook was not normal in asking these things and that it was unfair and malicious. In my experience this is part of being a child and you just put up with it unremarkingly. [This is for you, infants: monueram; 169]

ii) Miss Havisham! What an unlikely character. No-one could have the will-power to carry on like that for years. What good did it do her? None. What harm did it do her traitorous intended? None. And she would have noticed after a while and realised it would be better to sue the cad for breach of promise instead of sitting around moping and sulking.

iii) Estella! Estella makes me ashamed to be of the same sex. Even a twerp like Pip would not have loved her in real life. She was, in the Minehead parlance, "a right cow".

iv) Coincidence Overload. The plot of this book is preposterous.

Finally,

iv) The last sentence of the book is incomprehensible which is unfair on readers who have ploughed through 443 pages of Pip's whining. Though if it made it clear the uncongenial pair were going to marry and live out their days happily I would be jolly cross - so perhaps it is for the best that you can't tell whether that's what happened or not. Either way, they are welcome to each other.

Below are some draft questions for G-AHLK Examining Board Great Expectations exam.

1. Pumblechook is a ridiculous name and most unrealistic. Why did Dickens give his characters such daft names?  Was it because

      a) he had a personality disorder that made him want to insult his readers by using names that would be more at home in books for pre-schoolers

      b) he suffered from a neurological condition that caused him to imagine that these names were perfectly normal

      c) he was lazy

      d) he thought he was being humorous

      e) people really had those sort of names in those days 

2.  List the ways in which Miss Havisham’s situation is unfeasible. 

3.  Explain why Great Expectations lends itself ill to film treatment.

Answers:

1.  a) is the correct answer because it is clear from all the attributes of his books – plot, characterisation, style, names – that Dickens wished to insult and offend his readers. 

     b) is wrong. There is no such neurological condition recorded in the history of neuropathology.

     c) Certainly Dickens was lazy and could not be bothered to think up realistic names. However a) gives a fuller explanation and candidates will be awarded only 1 mark for choosing c).

     d) is not the explanation. The names are not in the least bit amusing.

     e) is incorrect. No-one ever had or will ever have such silly names.

2.   Miss Havisham’s situation involved her sitting permanently among her years-old wedding feast wearing her wedding finery, bemoaning her miserable fate. There are a number of reasons why this would not have worked in real life :

     i) the food would have begun to smell very smelly quite early on in the proceedings

    ii) rats would have come and Miss Havisham would have been screeching her head off at the first sight of one

    iii) she would have been bored to tears after a few weeks of this

    iv) once she got middle-aged her dress would not have fitted any more

     v) she must have gone to bed every night and she would soon have started to feel pretty silly putting the wedding dress back on in the mornings

    vi) what did she wear while the wedding dress was in the wash? Doing the Laundry in the 19th Century took all day and there weren't any tumble driers to speed things along 

   vii) whoever was paying for all this nonsense would have demanded it had to stop

  viii) she would have got the worst pressure sores ever seen in the history of nursing, and many other medical complications associated with inactivity.

3. Great Expectations should not be filmed because:

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 a) The protagonists are each given a single attribute, which then defines them and they show no other subtleties  - eg. Pip - a weed; Estella - a right cow; Miss Havisham - an old misery; Joe - can do no wrong; Pip's sister - horrible. This is rigid and unadorned. These simple, unnuanced characterisations cause actors to over-act in a most irritating way. For example, the Christmas meal early in the story is treated in all films as an opportunity for absurdly exaggerated behaviour by the cast and it annoys me. You might expect at least ONE of the directors to exercise a little restraint but no! They are unable to resist trying to make it funny, and yet they all fail, and fail catastrophically. Look, lads, it ISN'T funny and there's nothing you can do to make it so, so don't try.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

    b) Apart from this, the book has descriptive passages that are not demonstrable by any acting; they have to be read. They are the best bits. The book is just NOT SUITABLE to make a film out of.

Well, there you have it. I have spake. I apologise to you all.