One of the cruelest stories I know. Dickens is so cruel we cannot imagine he is a man, what's more a humane human being.
A poor orphan, Pip, is raised by a poor blacksmith. A life of rough and tough luck. Take it or leave it, but there is no way out, except the radical one. And he dreams of being a gentleman one day. An aberration of course, morally wrong and bad taste.
He is selected and invited by Miss Havisham, a deranged rich woman who is mourning in total decay and sorrow after the failure of her wedding when the bridegroom did not come, twenty years before. Her objective is to provide a male companion and eventually husband to her adopted daughter, Estella.
But one night on the moor Pip is "accosted" by an prison escapee of some kind who asks for food and the boy of six or seven, maybe eight provides in the night, including a file for him to get rid of his manacles. He will turn up as his benefactor.
Luck, luck and luck. But then systematically Dickens shatters every single opportunity and hope on the side of the boy, Pip, who ends up in prison for unpaid debts, on the side of his benefactor, Abel, who will die in prison holding Pip's hand after his final arrest, on the side of Miss Havisham who will achieve none of her plans, on the side of Estella who will marry the rich and noble young man, will be brutalized and will end up alone in Miss Havisham's house, on the side of Biddy who will marry Joe the Blacksmith when Pip finally realizes she had been his closest ever friend, and even on the side of Estella who will refuse to requite Pip's love, though she will accept to make him her platonic companion in Miss Havisham's.redecorated house.
That cruelty is so extreme that we just wonder if Dickens then is not going through a phase of complete social rejection, rejection of the upper classes, rejection of the lower classes, rejection of justice, rejection of any discourse about the possible improvement of individuals and society. Absolute resignation and pessimistic submission to a totally inhumane world that only has some small pockets of satisfaction, but never for yourself, always for some rare others. He did not even salvage the exiled criminal who became Pip's benefactor, as Victor Hugo did in Les Misérables, and makes him die a solitary, nearly solitary death in prison with the sole company of the young man he tried and failed to help, and unaware of his daughter's fate, which does not seem to be particularly brilliant anyway, since she is Estella, daughter of a female assassin and a male exiled criminal condemned to absolute reclusion for life.
I just wonder if here Dickens does not reach Zola's pessimism who considered that anyone born in a criminal circle could only be that and drag everyone around him down into that criminal circle. No salvation for those who are badly born. The belief in an elected people turned into a savage and wild social Darwinism: some have been elected to be crushed and powdered by life as slowly as possible for them to regret ever being born but absolutely unable to shorten the ordeal.
Sad and sad and sad.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
