Where Does Pip Migrate to? Unexpected Parallels in Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip and Adamson’s Mr. Pip

Abstract

This article explores the neo-Victorian novel Mister Pip (2006), written by Lloyd Jones, and Andrew Adamson’s adaptation for the cinema, Mr. Pip, which was released in 2012. We trace connections between these works and the Victorian novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861). Indeed, the novel and the film can be regarded as ways of (re)discovering and (re)recreating the Victorian novel. More specifically, we look into the parallelisms that can be established between Dickens’s character Pip and the different characters in Jones’s novel and Adamson’s film as we explore the intertextual ties that allow the reader to make journeys between contexts which are geographically, temporarily, and culturally distant. We also analyze the metafictional elements in Mister Pip and Mr. Pip in order to account for the self-reflexive aspects of these works. We show the ways by which the metafictional strategies employed by the narrative voice reveal the writing process. Jones’s novel and Adamson’s film tell stories of migration of different sorts (migrating into the past, migrating geographically, migrating socially, and migrating culturally among others). In the following pages we reflect on these migrations in the hope that we can answer the question “Where does Pip migrate to?”.