![]() An interesting side note: In Victorian times, if a household was in mourning, the clocks of the house might be stopped at the time the death occurred and, while the body remained in the house, all the curtains drawn. Miss Havisham’s watch and a clock on the wall are both stopped at twenty minutes to nine. ![]() The room he’s brought to that fateful morning is lit by candles. She rarely allows visitors, but she has a fancy to see a child play. More jewels wink on her fingers and at her neck. The wedding dress she wears may be yellowed, but it’s made of “satins, and lace, and silks.” Jewels are spread on her dressing table. An orphan from the village, he lives with his sister and her kindly blacksmith husband. When Pip meets her, he’s only seven years old. In the darkened mansion in the old wedding dress, with one shoe on and one shoe off. Not Margaret or Josephine or Martha or Fanny or Becky or Beatrice or Ginny or Nell. The novel does not give her a first name. She stands, in the Dickens pantheon, alongside Scrooge, the Artful Dodger, and Uriah Heep as one of his most memorable characters. She is, by turns, the novel’s resident corpse, its ghost, its fairy godmother, and “the Witch of the place”-a fury dressed up in a tattered, yellowed wedding dress. She presides over Great Expectations like a great, ill-willed fairy queen. Here seems like a fitting jumping-off point for exploring how Miss Havisham came to be in the world: as a fantastical, impossible creature…clearly based on real-life people.Įarly on, the book’s narrator Pip says of her, “I had heard of Miss Havisham up town-everybody for miles round, had heard of Miss Havisham up town…” And it’s true, everybody for miles round has heard of Miss Havisham. This is floated as a ludicrous proposition, yet within weeks of the book’s publication, another reviewer would observe that “living types have already been pointed out that claim resemblance” to the character. Dickens has committed the indiscretion of providing her with male relatives who are not mad.” She is “such a foolish, senseless, fantastical, impossible humbug,” it continues, as to be “an unworthy subject for such a pen.” (I picture this one as having been written by a human-sized pepper mill decked out in Victorian costume.) It goes on: “Supposing Miss Havisham possible and real, Miss Havisham would very soon have been removed from her deserted brewery to a madhouse, as Mr. One review names her “the prime and chief monstrosity of the story,” an embodiment of all that is absurd in it. She, too, divided the book’s early critics. One of the novel’s chief characters is an eccentric rich lady named Miss Havisham, who sits in her wedding dress, day after day, and year after year, in her dark, cobwebbed old mansion. One reviewer notes that people may have only picked up Great Expectations out of a “curiosity, half painful, half careless, to see what further ravages time might have yet in store for the mental frame of a novelist already past his prime…” The word “decay” crops up a couple times. His more recent novels, like Little Dorrit, Hard Times, and even A Tale of Two Cities, are cited as disappointments. It’s clear from these reviews that people missed that earlier Dickens-the funny Dickens, the meandering Dickens, the youthful effervescent Dickens. Almost twenty-five years had passed since the publication of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist had turned him into a household name. He was 48 when he started writing the book, 49 when it was finished. (That reviewer’s cautious assessment: “Mr Dickens may be reasonably proud of these volumes.”) Here we see Dickens gazed at by his contemporaries-wildly popular and famous of course, but someone who might still earn a headline like “Dickens’s Comeback” with a palpable question mark thrumming at its end. One critic found it “feeble, fatigued, and colourless,” while another noted that the “book resembles its name in one respect – it begins well and then disappoints.” Others recognized it as a masterpiece. Installments began appearing weekly in December of 1860 with the completed novel published the following summer. Great Expectations was Charles Dickens’s thirteenth novel. ![]()
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