CONGRATULATIONS

     Class, you've accomplished a lot.  If you've read all the assigned Dickens for this class, you have read over 1348 pages of his fiction (not counting the non-fiction and the critical material, which was significant).  If you didn't read it all, well, you should feel guiltier than Pip leaving town without visiting the Forge.  Hopefully you can go back to the texts in the next week as write and revise your final papers.
     I'd like to dedicate the last blog to a discussion not of a specific passage, but rather to hear about your likes and dislikes.  What was your favorite reading?  Who was your favorite character?  Is there a particular quote that sticks with you?  If Dickens were alive today and sitting next to you on the subway, what would you ask him?  I'd love to hear any and all feedback you have about the course: did you like focusing on a major author? What drove you crazy about Dickens's writing?  Do you have a least favoriate character?  Why?  Did you like the books more as we went along?  If so, why? If not, why not?  Let the discussion begin!

The Endings

I want to use the blog this week to talk about the "problem" of the two different endings as well as how this ending does/does not offer a satisfying moral to the other stories (not just the Estella/Pip relationship) being told in the novel, such as those about social change, redemption, the affects of poverty and/or violence on the self, justice in our institutions, etc.  As we said in class, thinking about how you responded to this ending and why asks you to reflect on things Dickens is asking us to think about in other contexts: are victims of social suffering (poverty, violence, hunger, homelessness, orphanhood) responsible for their actions and, if so, to what extent?  If we make these excuses for Estella (or Pip or Magwitch), what do we do with Orlick? or Mrs. Joe?  Or how does it square with the endings of the other novels?  We talked about the neat eradication of all the bad people (though Nancy complicates this) and the rewarding of the good people in Oliver Twist.  We also discussed how Louisa was allowed to come half-way back -- to feel loved and valued but not to have a family of her own.  Is Dickens doing a similar thing here or is this different?

So feel free to close read this passage -- there is a lot of meaningful detail in the scene -- or to speculate on some of the broader issues raised above and in class.  OR BOTH: this is the second-to-last blog!

FROM VOLUME III, CHAPTER XX:

     There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the wall of the old garden.  The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough fence, and, looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin.  A gate in the fence standing ajar, I pushed it open and went in.
     A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet up to scatter it.  But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark.  I could trace out where every part of the old house had been, and where the brewery had been, and where the gates, and where the casks.  I had done so, and was looking along the desolate garden-walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it.

*         *      *

     "At last it is. I cam here to take leave of it before its change.  And you," she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer, "you live abroad still?"
     "Still."
     "And do well, I am sure?"
     "I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore -- Yes, I do well."
     "I have often thought of you," said Estella.
     "Have you?"
     "Of late, very often.  There was a long hard time when I kept far from me, the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.  But, since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart."

*     *     *

     I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.

From Volume II, Chapter X

     The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and after we had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out again into the brewery yard.  I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said, with a cold and careless look in that direction, "Did I?" I reminded her where she had come out of the house and given me my meat and drink, and she said, "I don't remember."  "Not remember that you made me cry?" said I.  "No," said she, and shook her head and looked about her.  I verily believe that her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again, inwardly -- and that is the sharpest crying of all.
     "You must know," said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and beautiful woman might, "that I have no heart -- if that has anything to do with my memory."
     I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of doubting that.  That I knew better.  That there could be no such beauty without it.
     "Oh! I heave a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt," said Estella, "and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be.  But you know what I mean.  I have no softness there, no -- sympathy -- sentiment -- nonsense."

From Vol. 1, chapter 3

     "You're not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?"
     "No, sir! No!"
     "Nor giv' no one the office to follow you?"
     "No!"
     "Well," said he, "I believe you.  You'd be but a fierce young hound indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched warmint, hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint is!"
     Something clicked in his throat, as if he had works in him like a clock, and was going to strike.  And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his eyes.
     Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon the pie, I made bold to say, "I am glad you enjoy it."
     "Did you speak?"
     "I said I was glad you enjoyed it."
     "Thankee, my boy. I do."
     I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog's way of eating and the man's.  The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog.  He swallowed or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was a danger in every direction, of somebody's coming to take the pie away.  He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor.  In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.

From Book Two, Chapter IX

Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best influences of old home descend upon her.  The dreams of childhood -- its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when out-grown, for then the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not worldly-wise -- what had she to do with these?  Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself: not a grim Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything, but so many calculated tons of leverage -- what had she to do with these? Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out.  The golden waters were not there.  They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.

From Chapter X "Stephen Blackpool"

     It was a room, not unacquainted with the black ladder under various tenants; but as neat, at present, as such a room could be.  A few books and writings were on an old bureau in a corner, the furniture was decent and sufficient, and, though the atmosphere was tainted, the room was clean.
     Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round three-legged table standing there, he stumbled against something.  As he recoiled, looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a sitting attitude.
     "Heaven's mercy, woman!" he cried, falling father off from the figure. "Hast thou come back again!"
     Such a woman! A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor, while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled hair from her face, that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon it.  A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing even to see her (103).

From Chapter 2, "Murdering the Innocents"

"The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely whitewashed room, irradiated Sissy.  For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end.  But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.  His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form.  His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face.  His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white" (44).