Variations on Dickens’s Great Expectations: Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip

Abstract

Dickens’s Great Expectations has inspired creative reactions by English, American, Australian and New Zealand novelists. One of the latest, Jones’s Mr. Pip, transfers the Victorian text to a completely different time and culture, to the South Sea island of Bougainville in 1991 where it is used to teach a group of young children. The analysis of the novel shows that though Jones is ‘writing back to the canon,’ he confirms the values of Dickens’s text. With his first-person narrator, the black girl Matilda, he illustrates what the function of literature, even in an alien environment and under unfavourable conditions, can be.