Unexpectedly Great Expectations

This week has been sort of crazy with school assignments, re-doing in SPSS what my predecessor in my job did in a weird-ass, apparently non-viable way in Excel, and wondering when exactly "mid-February" begins so I can start pouncing on the mail every day waiting to hear back from my favored graduate program that stated they would make their decisions in mid-February. (Not that I'm not jumpy about the mail - and my email inbox - already, but would like to know at what point I can feel justified in being so.) But I have also made a special effort to read a little bit of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations every day also (in the undertaking of which, my blogging has suffered).

As I mentioned before, I read this book in junior high, but I don't have much memory of it aside from remembering the characters Pip (our protagonist/narrator), Mrs. Havisham, and Estella and the cemetary setting from the first couple chapters of the book. (Which, frankly, is more than I remember about a lot of books I read over 20 years ago...or last month, for that matter.) One thing that has surprised me is how funny the book is. Not funny in a bust-a-gut kind of way, but written with a low-key humor, often taking advantage of the fact that it is a story written by an older person talking about himself as a young, naive boy who was easily confused and confounded by his experiences and sometimes clearly describing or re-interpreting events with his current understanding of how the world works. And there is a good, leavening sprinkling of whimsy throughout.

Here are a few characteristically amusing bits:

"As to me, I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an accoucheur policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends."

Mr. Pumblechook describes what he thinks must have happened, "and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove his own chaise-cart--over everybody--it was agreed that it must be so. Mr. Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out "No!" with the feeble malice of a tired man; but as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously set at nought--not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood with his back to the kitchen to draw the damp out: which was not calculated to inspire confidence."

"Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it."

"An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community. I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence were important to their interests. But, the black beetles took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another."

Reading this now, I can understand how it is that so many public school teachers assume that the book would be perfect for junior high students to read: it's funny, it has a wonderfully sympathetic young protagonist, and it speaks to the fears and hopes that all kids have. But it seems to me that as only an adult could have written such a book about a child's growing up, only an adult, with distance from and perspective on childhood, can really appreciate it. Or at least, I find myself responding to the book in a way that I cannot imagine being capable of at the age of 13. Age 13 is a perfect time for reading earnest, angry, angsty books about self-involved adolescents who feel the injustice of the world more deeply than any grown-up can. Or passionate melodrama along the lines of Wuthering Heights. I think the many charms of Great Expectations will be lost on such an immature reader.