Great Expectations in instalments – part 11
It’s interesting that in this critical chapter we begin by visiting Pip in the pub, thoroughly embedded in his community. The tone is markedly different from that of the uncomfortable - even exposed – distinctiveness that Pip has adopted as part of his more confessional mode in the previous chapters. The Pip who is happy to share the group’s ‘cozy state of mind’ is the same Pip who has told us and Biddy that he is ‘disgusted’ with his calling and his life. Of course Dickens is setting up a little theatrical scene which serves a number of purposes. He pokes fun at Mr Wopsle, and through him, at the credulous bar-room philosophy of this group of villagers: he gives Mr Jaggers a wonderful opportunity to display his disconcerting and inescapably forceful lawyer’s manner: and he wants to emphasise the impact of the news, on Pip, and on Joe and Biddy.
Jaggers is a magnificent example of Dickens’s peculiar skill of working with and upon one detail or mannerism that becomes, in his hands, not merely representative of a character, but above that also suggestive and nourishing to the reader’s imagination. Jaggers’ great forefinger is thrown heavily at people like a weapon, but it is also bitten: as though to restrain it? Or restrain himself? By biting Jaggers stops his own mouth but reveals his teeth. He becomes silent but falls back on his ‘suspicious’ manner. As he throws his finger forwards I am reminded of the file in Pip’s dream that comes at him out of a door and frightens him awake.
Poor Joe, looking into a future deprived of the companion and workmate who has grown into a man under his tuition – who now is to be made into quite another man – has to hold on to even his knees as if he feels he is going to lose them as well. These incidental manifestations of grief and love – the wayward knees, the hollow beer mug, the pipe under the window – are the way Dickens sounds the note of sadness through the physical environment of the home. This, of course, is the home with the ‘mean little room’ that Pip longs confusedly to leave, but we are allowed to see into the vacancy that will exist when he has gone.
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[...] was talking about Dickensian names recently, on this page, and ‘Mrs Coiler’ is certainly a great [...]
Watched Faulks on Fiction: The Snob (Saturday 19 February, BBC2). Sebastian Faulks examined how writers including Jane Austen and Muriel Spark have used characters (Emma and Miss Jean Brodie respectively) who are snobs in their novels. He referred to Pip showing film extracts of a young Pip playing cards with Estella (first becoming embarrassed and conscious of his station in life) and an older Pip (John Mills) being such a snob when Joe visits. Faulks also mentioned P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and it struck me that similar to Dickens, Wodehouse has wonderfully descriptively names for his characters such as Gussy Fink-Nottle, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Pongo Twistleton and Marmaduke “Chuffy” Chuffnell. What inventive minds these authors had. Lesley
Thanks Lesley. You’ve started me thinking about names and I have been trying to get round to posting a reply. You are right about Wodehouse – I think (but I might be wrong) that all the names you quote are from the Jeeves and Wooster books, which means that they are all mediated (if that is the right word) by the Wooster mind (if that is the right word). His narrative voice is for me the chief joy of these stories and it means that obvious nicknames – ‘Chuffy’ – shade into nicknames that have become seamlessly normalised – ‘Pongo’? ‘Barmy’? – in a way that adds a kind of thoroughness to the overgrown-public-schoolboy attitude that informs and saturates the world Bertie moves in.
Dickens though, as ever, absorbs the full strength of a tradition – in this case, that of symbolic naming – and then re-issues it in a marvellously energised new form. I guess it goes back (at least – no doubt there are classical examples too) to the personalisation of concepts like the Seven Deadly SIns in mediaeval literature. Dickens uses recognisable words in his names in this kind of way (the ‘Veneerings’ in Our Mutual Friend, ‘Mr Bumble’ in Oliver Twist, ‘Lord Verisopht’ in Nicholas Nickleby) although he sometimes combines the word with an addition that somehow increases its force – as in ‘Mr Gradgrind’ in Hard Times. Most fascinating, however, are his names which do not quote the actual word, but merely suggest meaning with a combination of likely sounds. For instance, I always think of Mr Pickwick as a character who has conquered the burden of his name; he begins as a small-minded pedant, peering narrowly into the absurd details of his pet subjects, but grows into an appreciation of the joy and suffering to be found out in the world. See also ‘Uriah Heep’, ‘Mr Merdle’ – and, closer to home, ‘Pumblechook’ and ‘Jaggers’.