Developing the “lines”: Politically Significant Landscapes in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

Developing the “lines”: Politically Significant Landscapes in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities Nanako Konoshima (bio) Philip Collins once noted that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, two “remarkably different” novels, are “consecutive” and “close together” (“A Tale” 337). In fact, the consecutiveness of the two works deserves closer and fuller examination than Collins suggests, and the present essay teases out thematic and textual links between them, related to the overall idea of the two novels, that have gone unexplored. These links revolve around Dickens’s creation of politically significant landscape motifs, and I argue that the description of the marshes in Great Expectations is a successful development of the earlier novel’s revolutionary landscapes, both in aesthetic and emblematic terms. The marked linearity of the landscapes in the two works, pictorially presented with bruised figures in the foreground, visually represents egalitarian ideals. Yet, at the same time, they both juxtapose the paradoxical, contradictory symbols of the beacon and the gibbet, exposing Dickens’s contentious class-consciousness. The evocation of the marshes in the opening chapters of Great Expectations has always been praised and has prompted much critical interest.1 Notably, Dickens’s much abridged public reading text of the novel (never performed) retains almost all the original paragraphs describing the marshes in chapter 1, suggesting that they perform an essential role in realizing the story’s main idea. Previous studies have examined the function of the marshy landscapes in Pip’s narrative and revealed the ways in which they embody the experience of the “isolated” and “alienated” Dickensian hero (Miller 250–51).2 Concurrently, however, these landscapes evoke a wider concept [End Page 174] underlying the whole novel, and their structure and details deserve closer examination. They not only symbolize Pip’s state of being but contribute to the representation of the uncertain foundations of Victorian England. As Humphrey House observed, the atmosphere of the story belongs not to the temporal setting of its plot but to the age in which it was published, and its title sums up the collective optimism in 1860s Britain, with the fast expansion of the colonial market and the experience of rapid technological development (159). Pip’s growth and seeming advance in economic and social status is an epitome of the experience of many contemporary Victorians. However, as Robin Gilmour puts it, the novel also displays the inhumanity which persisted at the fringes of Victorian society (124), and other critics have argued that Pip’s prosperity, and by implication the prosperity of an entire class, or generation, or both, derive from and depend on the exploitation and exclusion of the English underclass, personified by Magwitch (Landau 165).3 In this historical context, the novel questions the conditions enabling Victorian England’s prosperity by showing Pip’s progress supported by Magwitch’s labor in the penal colony. It suggests the possibility of the economic and social development of Victorian Britain being reliant on the colonial “Other” (Litvak 35). The structure and details of the marsh landscape are linked to these larger thematic concerns. John P. McWilliams notes that Great Expectations develops the affinity between the beacon and the gibbet juxtaposed in the landscape at the beginning of the book. He argues that the beacon, which at first seems to lead Pip to his longed-for destination, and the gibbet, which reminds him of his connection with the criminality from which he wants to escape, “blend into one another” (265). Estella, and the social status she represents, serves as Pip’s “beacon” from his first visit to Satis House: he is literally guided by Estella, who stands at the top of the dark staircase with the candle in her hand. The “gibbet,” by contrast, symbolizes Pip’s childhood experience of robbery from his sister’s house and his encounter with the convict. Yet by the end of the story, Estella, the beacon of his life, turns out to be the daughter of what the gibbet symbolizes, and Pip’s related craving for status as a gentleman is achieved by the same criminal’s patronage. McWilliams’s argument essentially stops there, but it is important to recognize, further, that this parallel...