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Miss Havisham Brought to Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin Meisel
Martin Meisel*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

We are lucky to have in Forster's admirable life of Dickens what Forster himself calls the “germ” of Great Expectations. Forster reports that in 1860 Dickens announced in a letter, “For a little piece I have been writing—or am writing; for I hope to finish it to-day—such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.” “This,” Forster adds, “was the germ of Pip and Magwitch,” and a marginal gloss declares, “Germ of new tale.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , June 1966 , pp. 278 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London, 1874), iii, 327–329.

2 HW, xix (26 Feb. 1859), 309–312.

3 J. Hillis Miller discusses the Faulknerian qualities of Miss Havisham in the course of his illuminating treatment of the character and the novel in Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), esp. pp. 255–260.

4 Father of Edmund Yates, the journalist, who brought on the quarrel with Thackeray.

5 All quotations from the “Diapolologue” are from Vol. xlvi, foll. 87–93 (B.M. Add. MS. 42910) of “Plays submitted to the Lord Chamberlain.” “No. 26 and No. 27” is intended simply as a grand display of virtuosity and versatility, but it has notable affinities with the classic theater, in its focus on two houses, their inhabitants, and the space before them, its multiple impersonations as if in masks, and its reliance on farce and comic intrigue.

6 Letters, ed. Walter Dexter (London, 1938), i, 680–681 (June 1845). Though Dickens identifies the period of immersion as “the time when I was at Doctors' Commons” (from Nov. 1828), Forster quotes an account by one of the partners in the firm of Ellis and Blackmore (where Dickens held a clerkship from May 1827) which suggests that a complete chronicle of Dickens' immersion in the theater would begin with the season of 1827–28. It would end in the first quarter of 1832 when he was fully occupied with parliamentary reporting, though here there is some evidence that Dickens was already reporting, perhaps on an emergency basis, early in 1831; see The Letters of Charles Dickens, edd. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford, 1965), i, 2 n. Charles Mathews' influence on characterization in Dickens has recently been discussed in Earle Davis' The Flint and the Flame (Columbia, Mo., 1963)

7 Morning Chronicle, 19 April 1831, p. [4], quoted with minor alterations in Mrs. [Anne] Mathews' Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (London, 1838, 1839), iv, 78. Abraham Newland was chief cashier of the Bank of England until 1807. His signature appeared on the notes of the Bank, and according to the DNB they were long known as “Abraham Newlands.” Other accounts which recognize the living prototypes of Miss Mildew and Mrs. Bankington Bombasin and credit them for the damnation are in the Atlas, 1 May 1831, p. 298; the Globe, 19 April, p. [4]; the Spectator, 23 April, p. 399; and the Sunday Times, 24 April, p. [3]. The Spectator notes that the playlet “called forth hisses and cries of 'Off, off—unwonted sounds to the ears of Mathews,” a report confirmed by the Taller, 19 April, pp. 779–780, in an article signed with Leigh Hunt's . Hunt seems to be the only critic entirely unaware of the cause of the hissing and outcries. He reports, however, that they were “a manifestation of contempt … which the major part instantly drowned with their applause, out of a natural sympathy with old favourites in so unusual a position.” The hisses returning, the performers “wisely took the opportunity of making their obedience, and letting the curtain fall.”

8 Household Words, vi (1 January 1853), 361–363. Three days after his initial review, Hunt printed a letter on “The hapless female … well known at the Bank,” and confessed that he was not aware the first night that a reason for the failure “was an offence strongly and justly taken by some of the audience, at Mr Yates‘s exhibition of a poor woman known in the city as a sufferer under mental alienation.” He mentions “a mistake of a similar kind on the part of Mr Mathews,” but apparently has no information to supply. The letter on the woman at the Bank is not far from Dickens’ account. The writer reports, “Her brother was some years ago a clerk there—committed a forgery—was tried, and executed. This poor creature, then a handsome and interesting girl, became insane; and from that time has haunted the offices and purlieus of the place in a black, shroud-like dress, the spectre of her former self, gibbering of claims and bonds and frauds, and startling some of the ‘gentlemen’ with strange expressions allusive to her brother's fate.” The Tatler. A Daily Journal of Literature and the Stage (22 April 1831), p. 791.

9 Charles Lamb suggests as much (primness apart) in the conclusion of his essay, “A Quaker's Meeting” (1821): “The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.” The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (New York and London, 1903), ii, 48.

10 Like Miss Havisham, Miss Trotwood was driven into an eccentric seclusion by a too handsome man who (as she tells him) “stripped me of the greater part of all I ever had … closed my heart against the whole world, years and years … treated me falsely, ungratefully, and cruelly” (David Copperfield, Ch. xlvii). The relationship with Estella is prefigured in David's account of Janet, Miss Trotwood's blooming maid, “one of a series of protégées whom my aunt had taken into her service expressly to educate in a renouncement of mankind, and who had generally completed their abjuration by marrying the baker” (Ch. xiii).

11 The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens, K.C. (London, 1934), p. 54. Dickens' response to the image of the woman in white is implicit in his letter to Collins before publication: “I have not the slightest doubt that The Woman in White is the name of names, and very title of titles” (16 August 1859, Letters, ed. Walter Dexter, iii, 115). The antecedents of Collins' figure in life and art are discussed by Noel Pharr Davis in The Life of Wilkie Collins (Urbana, Ill., 1956). It is possible that Dickens first had it in mind to make Miss Havisham the center of a more Collins-like murder mystery, anticipated by Pip's clairvoyance, and involving Orlick as gatekeeper. One element in the genealogy of Miss Havisham and Satis was the account of a murdered duchess Dickens sent Forster from Paris in 1856: “The Duchess who is murdered lived alone in a great house which was always shut up, and passed her time entirely in the dark. In a little lodge outside lived a coachman (the murderer) … Between the lodge and the house, is a miserable bit of garden, all overgrown with long rank grass, weeds, and nettles … ” Forster, Life, iii, 127.

12 Like Collins' Anne Catherick (his “Woman in White”) who is pure victim. Miss Havisham has obvious connections with the Gothic where spectral figures garbed in white abound. The union of ambivalent elements in Miss Havisham is quite distinctive, though there are notable analogies with a strain of the Gothic in America. Hawthorne especially is given to fusing the image of the wedding garment and the shroud, as in “The Wedding Knell,” “The Shaker Bridal,” and “The White Old Maid.” The title figure of the last is “known by all the town as the Old Maid in the Winding Sheet,” has acquired a “taint of insanity” from an early loss and betrayal, and appears only at funerals; but in direct contrast to Miss Havisham, she achieves sanctity and a power of absolution through her insulation and unworldliness, and ia the end the garment is revealed as “a long, loose robe of spotless purity.” Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville's chapter on Whiteness, and (belatedly) Frost's “Design” are also of the strain; and the white spider on the white flower in the last, “holding up a moth / Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— / Assorted characters of death and blight,” would be very much at home in Satis.

13 Here is the focus of my difference with Philip Collins, who writes with respect to Magwitch: “Dickens has no consistent or thought-out view on these issues of free-will and determinism and moral responsibility … Doubtless Fagin and Bill Sikes could have told similar hard-luck stories.” Dickens and Crime (London, 1962), p. 92.