Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’: A Cultural Life, 1860–2012 by Mary Hammond (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’: A Cultural Life, 1860–2012 by Mary Hammond Neil Forsyth Mary Hammond, Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’: A Cultural Life, 1860–2012. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $119.95 £70.00 W. S. Gilbert was a lifelong Dickens fan but when he adapted Great Expectations for the stage in 1871, he found his deep familiarity with the book stood in the way of his writing a coherent version. Only if you knew the novel already, in the eyes of one contemporary reviewer at least (72), would you understand the role of Miss Havisham or Pumblechook, both of whom remain offstage: Compeyson and Wemmick Gilbert excises entirely. Estella has not yet appeared when Pip and Biddy discuss his desire to be a gentleman. How far to expect prior knowledge in the audience is likely to be a perennial problem for an adaptor. Dickens himself had boldly written Estella out of the public reading version. Indeed the extended afterlife of this novel has depended greatly on its being co-opted for a range of uses and ideological purposes over time, many of which have had scant respect or need for faithful rendition. Adaptors struggled as had Gilbert, and though there were a few earlier films, the key event in this reception history came only in 1946, when David Lean, encouraged by his wife and Alec Guinness’s stage version (103), filmed the novel for a population tired of war, and turned it into “an international icon.” One of the best moments in this absorbing book comes near the end. Mary Hammond tells us about her exploration of the archives of Southampton, the city in whose university she teaches. Records of the rich nineteenth century printing trade have been largely lost to decay or to the heavy bombing the town endured from November 1940 to May 1941. But some fragments survive, especially a series of Day Books containing orders for the period 1858 to 1921. Dickens’s novels were treasured enough for people to spend money preserving them in durable bindings both for the books and the periodicals. This kind of research, supplemented of course by library records and by many other such sources, underpins Hammond’s book. She claims that it makes for a more reliable analysis than subjective or partial lists of publishers’ statistics, and the claim is eminently justified. One result that emerges is that this now iconic novel was more misunderstood, [End Page 338] and for longer, than almost any other Dickens novel. The Sunday-night Dickens, first on radio and then on an “ostentatious new colour TV set” (194) had a key role to play after World War II in making of Dickens a secular saint. Yet the emphasis in Britain on Dickens as an integral part of “why it’s ok for us to be going where we’re going” may now be on the wane. The BBC’s simplistic 2003 “The Big Read” poll put Great Expectations at number 17 out of a quarter of a million votes collected, and yet the Mail Online survey recently (2013) showed that a third of the British people “have no idea who wrote Great Expectations.” On the other hand readers of the Guardian in 2011 voted it their favorite Dickens novel. The results of these polls are not particularly significant, any more than the occurrence of the Penguin edition as the only book in a CIA agent’s home in an episode of Homeland (2012). Much more important is the measured conclusion to which Mary Hammond’s remarkable book leads, that its “innate responsiveness to historical needs may be Great Expectations’s most lasting legacy.” Dramatizations on South African radio, for example, occurred in the 1970s and 1980s during some of the worst years of apartheid. And the Dickens centenary in 2012 was marked by no fewer than three major stage and screen versions at a period of global economic crisis. A sign of the immensely detailed research that has gone into the writing of this book is that the author interviewed many of those involved in these latest versions. Elizabeth Karlsen, producer of the Mike Newell film, told her that...