Great Expectations The Secret Life of Books

"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 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 no shadow of another parting from her."

These are the final words of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations,

in which the hero, Pip, is reunited with the love of his life, Estella.

It's a moving ending to what is arguably his greatest work.

But it almost never existed.

This wasn't quite how Dickens had planned it.

He originally wrote another finale,

a bleak scene that saw his two characters part ways for ever.

But he had second thoughts, scrapping the final pages

and rewriting them, leaving the couple walking off,

hand in hand, in the evening light.

Some say that was a cop out, that Dickens was letting himself

and the book down by simply dashing off a happy ending.

But I think there's more to it than that.

I'm a writer myself and I know that changing the end of a book is

one of the most radical things any author can do.

It's peculiar that Dickens would want to alter something

so integral to the story.

So, why did he make that decision? What inspired it?

And what could it tell us about Dickens himself?

To find out, I need to learn more about Dickens as a writer,

who he wrote for and why.

And I also need to understand how his own life fed into his work,

how his difficult upbringing

and troubled relationships both haunted and motivated him.

Far from being just a few hurried scribblings at the end of a novel,

I think this new ending gives a real insight into Dickens,

both as an author and as a man.

In the 15 years I spent as an EastEnders scriptwriter,

my colleagues always told me that

if Charles Dickens was alive today, he'd be doing exactly what I was -

writing soaps. Maybe that's just how soap writers of today would like to

think of themselves.

After all, who wouldn't want to be mentioned in the same breath

as Charles Dickens? There's some truth to it, though.

Dickens serialised his novels weekly and monthly, and just

like soap writers of today, he was a populist through and through.

He wrote for a mass audience and they adored him for it.

I'm not quite sure that I could have been the Dickens of his day.

His output was prolific.

He came up with 20 novels, hundreds of articles,

and 989 named characters during his lifetime.

But I've been fascinated with him since my EastEnders days.

So much so that I'm writing a new series

based on some of his characters.

Kind of a soap opera set in Dickens' imaginary world.

I think you can begin to understand something of Dickens

just by reading his books.

He gives us a glimpse of himself in all his work.

But none are more revealing than this,

in my opinion his best book, Great Expectations.

Written in 1860 and 1861, a decade before Dickens' death,

Great Expectations is widely regarded as one of the great

novels in the English language.

It boasts some of Dickens' most memorable scenes,

not least the opening, set in a graveyard on the North Kent marshes.

Here, a young orphan, Pip, is visiting his family's graves,

a typically Dickensian scene setter,

when he is accosted by an escaped convict, Magwitch.

"A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud,

"and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles,

"and torn by briars, who limped and shivered and glared and growled,

"and whose teeth chattered in his head, as he seized me by the chin."

It's a terrifying opening in some ways,

with Magwitch threatening to kill Pip,

but Dickens fills it with brilliant visual humour throughout,

giving the scenes an offbeat, absurd quality.

Dickens actually wanted Great Expectations to be a comedy

and he called its opening pages "exceedingly droll".

In chapter three, Pip, fresh from stealing a blacksmith's file for

Magwitch to cut his shackles, runs into a herd of judgmental cattle.

"One black ox with a white cravat on,

"who even had, to my awakened conscience,

"something of a clerical air, fixed me

"so obstinately with his eyes

"and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as

"I moved round, that I blubbered out to him,

" 'I couldn't help it, sir. It wasn't for myself I took it.' "

Dickens always had an acute sense of the tragicomic.

In Oliver Twist, he wrote that all good murderous melodramas

were constructed like streaky bacon.

The red and the white representing comedy and tragedy,

fried up together, complementing each other,

and this is precisely what he does here.

For me, this is perfect writing. The ability to swerve between comedy

and drama without it ever feeling unnatural.

It's exactly what I've been trying to do for much of my life.

It's the secret to good popular drama, but here it feels effortless.

The Pip in the graveyard grows up

and is gifted a huge amount of money by a mysterious benefactor.

Ashamed of his family and humble upbringing, Pip moves here,

to Central London, to become a gentleman, taking up

a dandy-ish lifestyle of partying, drinking and spending money.

He believes that his patron is the infamous Miss Havisham,

the wealthy unhinged spinster,

jilted at the altar many years ago and adopted mother of Estella.

He's infatuated with the beautiful, aloof Estella

and convinces himself that Miss Havisham is funding him,

grooming him even, so that he and Estella will one day marry.

But then comes Dickens' big plot twist, as he put it, "the very

"fine, new and grotesque idea", upon which the whole story hinges.

Pip's benefactor isn't Miss Havisham.

It's Magwitch, the convict he helped as a youngster.

Pip is devastated, realising that he left his home,

the people he loves, on a false hope.

Even worse, he knows that he was never meant for Estella.

As a plot device, this works brilliantly.

As the hero struggles to deal with the dashing

of his great expectations, the book steps up a gear.

More set pieces, more drama, as Dickens hikes up the tension,

page after page.

At the same time, there is a dramatic shift in tone.

The book becomes darker and more melancholy.

Pip berates himself for his decisions, his snobbery and pride.

"I thought how miserable I was,

"but hardly knew why or how long I had been so, or on what day

"of the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it."

He learns that Estella has married a violent, brutal man.

Humbled, he leaves the country to become a lowly clerk.

It's on his return, over a decade later, when he meets Estella

again by chance, and we arrive at the ending that almost never was.

This change in tone in the novel, this...darkening,

really tells us a lot about Dickens.

This was a man who set out to write a comedy,

but ended up writing a moral drama that somehow veered into tragedy.

To me, Great Expectations suggests an author caught between those

two things,

trying to tread a delicate path between the light and the shade.

Here at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum in Cambridgeshire,

we can get an even better glimpse into Dickens' mind.

And into his struggles with the ending of the novel.

-So, this is the original manuscript of Great Expectations.

-Yes.

Isn't it fantastic to work with the original like this?

And we can see all of the changes that Dickens makes.

And first thoughts and second thoughts.

So you can actually see where he struggled,

I guess, during the writing process.

One of the surprising things we can see in this manuscript is that

a couple of the comic scenes that we'd imagined just flowing

out of Dickens so naturally, that's really what he's known for,

that brilliant kind of fluid comic writing,

he's actually worked those a bit.

So if we have a look at this scene where Pip goes to school,

it's this fantastic scene with Mr Wopsle's great aunt throwing

-things at the naughty schoolchildren.

-Oh, wow! He's really struggled here!

Yeah, we've got quite a lot of amendment there.

There's also a very interesting bit at the end.

This is the manuscript that Dickens changes the most, at the very end.

And we've got these two competing endings.

So you see here, this cancelled out section.

We get this start of an original ending which Dickens wrote

that was very bleak.

It features Pip and Estella meeting by accident,

as Dickens puts it, in Piccadilly.

Dickens's great friend, John Forster,

kept a copy of the first ending, which he then produced

with his biography of Dickens some years after Dickens died.

And it says here, "The lady and I

"looked sadly enough on one another," which would be Estella.

And he goes on, "She gave me the assurance that suffering had

"been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her

"a heart to understand what MY heart used to be."

That's quite grim.

Yeah, Estella's also remarried, so in practical terms,

there's no romantic future for her and Pip,

it's a very definite closing of that possibility.

Why do you think he changed it?

Well, he went to a friend of his that weekend, and he didn't like it.

He says to Dickens, we think,

"This is too bleak, or this is too uncomfortable for your readers,"

something along those lines, and Dickens agrees to rethink it.

So the ending that we then have, Pip meets Estella in the garden

of Satis House - the home that she's grown up in with Miss Havisham,

and this very important location for him and her through their lives.

It's a moonlight scene, the fogs are rising

and then there's just the possibility

that maybe there's a Pip/Estella future.

"I took her hand in mine, we went out of the ruined place.

"And in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me,

"I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

So that's a happy ending.

Do you feel it's...?

It feels more satisfying

than going from the grimness of this chance meeting in Piccadilly

to them actually reaching a conclusion.

Yes.

The "no shadow" still reads slightly ambiguously to me,

and maybe more so if we look at the changes Dickens makes to get there.

So in the manuscript here, it's slightly differently phrased,

"The shadow of no parting from her but one."

-Meaning death, I guess?

-Yes.

And there, instead of "no shadow of another parting",

we've got this different wording - the shadow of NO parting.

Dickens immediately decides to cut "but one",

so we never get this "only in death".

So he was really struggling with this ending, to get it right.

Yeah, it's going through a number of quite substantial changes,

I think, that he really changed the tone

and perhaps the way we're invited to read these lines.

I think it shows that it's something that he himself is...

uncomfortable about, unsure about.

It continues to bother him, even after the book is closed.

Dickens' revised finale may not be a simple, happy ending,

but it does offer some hope - a possible future for Pip and Estella.

But why did Dickens, who was usually so decisive and forthright,

decide to make such a massive change?

I'm not sure I buy Dickens changing the end of this book simply

because a friend suggested he do so.

As writers, we agonise over things like this,

and it's clear that's what Dickens is doing here.

He keeps going back to it, changing the odd word,

playing with the nuance of the language, trying to make it perfect,

trying to get the balance right, tonally, between light and shade.

But for a writer of Dickens' calibre to be this indecisive,

something must be eating away at him.

What is it?

You can always discover something of an author by looking

at their audience, by working out who they're writing for.

The literary establishment at the time

actually looked down on Dickens,

but he was always more interested in what his readership,

drawn from the middle and working classes, had to say.

Any writer worth his salt will tell you,

you need to understand your audience.

When I'm writing, I feel the whole audience behind me,

looking over my shoulder at the page.

What I love about Dickens is he clearly understands that

better than anyone else.

He talks about his audience in personal terms,

as if they were all sitting around a fire together,

like they were friends.

In 1853,

a few years before the publication of Great Expectations, Dickens

began to tour the country, reading his novels to packed audiences.

This was a chance to get closer to his audience than ever before.

There were tears, laughter, people fainted.

He sold out huge venues, where people queued overnight,

and tickets were touted at five times their face value.

And remember, this isn't the Rolling Stones I'm talking about -

this was Charles Dickens, the novelist.

The audience who worshipped him on the stage

were the same audience who bought his novels.

Instead of publishing these novels in one volume,

Dickens divided them into chunks and serialised them,

weekly or monthly, in popular journals.

It was a style pioneered by Dickens himself.

By serialising the stories, he kept his audience waiting

with bated breath for the next instalment.

As his friend Wilkie Collins said, "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry,

"make 'em wait."

In 1859, Dickens set up his own journal,

based in this building in Covent Garden.

These books contain all the original journals from 1860 and 1861,

including Great Expectations as it was first serialised.

This is the very first instalment, published in December 1860.

Dickens actually had to rush publication of the novel

because his journal all the year round was haemorrhaging readers,

and he knew that a new novel from him would help boost sales.

Dickens' plan worked.

The first instalments were wildly successful,

selling 100,000 copies a week.

And the audience kept coming back for more,

not least because of something very close to my heart, the cliff-hanger.

You can't tell me what to do - you ain't my mother!

Yes, I am!

Back in the day, when I was trying to write three cliff-hangers a week

on EastEnders, sometimes I had no idea where I was going to go next.

Dickens tended to plan things a little bit better,

he generally knew where he was going.

And he was a genius at writing them too.

This is one of my favourites, at the end of chapter 42.

Pip's about to go through his door, when someone hands him a note.

"I opened it, the watchman holding up his light,

"and read inside, in Wemmick's writing, 'DON'T GO HOME.' "

EASTENDERS DRUMBEAT

This is clearly a man who knows

how to keep an audience on the edge of their seat,

to keep them reading, to keep them buying his magazine.

And he must have realised that his audience would clamour

for some kind of happy ending

for the characters they'd spent the last year with,

week in, week out.

But I'm not convinced this is the whole story.

Dickens was aware of his audience, but he didn't pander to them.

So I don't believe he would change the ending

just to keep his audience happy, any more than I believe

he would change the ending because a friend told him to.

So what else is behind his decision, or rather his indecision?

I think that the answer may lie in Dickens' own story,

in his intimate connection to the people and places

of Great Expectations.

For me there's something very personal at the heart of this novel.

So in order to understand this ending a little better,

we need to go back to the beginning,

to the opening scenes of both the novel and Dickens' own childhood.

He grew up here, close to the North Kent Marshes.

For Dickens as a child, these marshes must have seemed

like a particularly foreboding landscape,

but he describes them beautifully in his book.

"The dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,

"intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, was the marshes.

"And that the distant savage lair

"from which the wind was rushing was the sea;

"and that the small bundle of shivers

"growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip."

You can just imagine Dickens as a child,

staring out at the hulks - these huge prison ships docked

in the Medway - thinking what would happen if the prisoners escaped.

40 years later, he turns this into the opening of Great Expectations.

Dickens' early memories of this landscape helped inspire

the setting, the feel of the story,

but how much more of his life can we see in his work?

Was it Dickens' own childhood that led him

to write characters like Pip?

He was obsessed with childhood, and it's partly because of his own.

And he's brilliant at not just... the pleasures of childhood,

you know, the imagination,

the sense of wonder, but also the terrors of childhood.

Pip talks about this in Great Expectations,

he talks about terror a lot, and Dickens had

a kind of photographic memory for those sorts of feelings.

What about his relationship with his father

cos obviously he's fatherless, if you like, in Great Expectations,

so how did that play in, do you think?

Well, so John Dickens was a spendthrift.

And he was imprisoned for debt when Dickens was a young boy.

Because of that, Dickens then had to go out to earn money,

just a few pennies a day, and he was sent to work

in this blacking warehouse,

which is a word for... basically a shoe-polish factory.

And that really bit into Dickens, those feelings of shame,

those feelings that all his own expectations had been frustrated.

And he never forgot it,

and he never forgave his parents for making him do it.

So Dickens as a child always felt that he deserved better

or should have better, so, in a way,

it's almost as though he had his own great expectations?

He did. Full of ambition, but also full of the fear of failure.

Great Expectations is a novel

about how you become the person that you are,

but also there's that nagging feeling that it might be taken away

from you at any moment, which is, of course, exactly what happens to Pip.

So do you think Dickens really identified with Pip?

I think Dickens identifies with ALL his characters.

He saw them all as strange distorted reflections of himself.

But Pip was closer to him

because Pip reflected the side of him that he'd never quite managed

to get out of his system, and that's the hurt, lonely, abused boy

that he felt he had been, and was like a bruise that would never heal.

Dickens' obsession with his childhood was so strong

that, in 1857, he moved back to Rochester,

a stone's throw from where he'd grown up.

It was here that he would write most of Great Expectations.

This return to Rochester must have made his childhood memories

all the more vivid.

And as he sat down to write the novel, he filled it with people

and places pulled directly from these streets.

Dickens had often walked past Restoration House as a boy,

struggling to imagine what went on inside.

Now, seeing this palatial mansion again,

he could re-imagine its story for Great Expectations.

So in the book, Dickens gives Pip privileged access to the very

same house, renames it Satis House, and imagines it to be

Miss Havisham's lair, crumbling to pieces.

This Satis House is at the heart of Pip and Estella's relationship

throughout the novel.

And Dickens has them return to the same spot for his revised ending.

The end of this book is about Pip returning

by going back to the place where the story started.

I think this is Dickens saying, "I've come home."

But when Pip returns to Satis House at the end of the novel,

he has failed entirely to live up to his great expectations.

Having spent most of the book

believing he is destined for something,

he ends up sinking into mediocrity.

Could Charles Dickens have felt the same about himself,

upon his own return?

This is Gad's Hill Place in Rochester,

where Dickens wrote most of Great Expectations.

When Dickens was a boy, his father used to walk him past this house,

telling his son that

if ever one day he was successful enough, he should buy it.

In 1856, when the house came on the market, Dickens by now was

hugely successful, and that's exactly what he did.

I think that gives us a real insight into how, even 40 years on,

Dickens was still affected by his childhood.

Most of the book was written here, in the study.

As a writer, it's quite humbling to be in Charles Dickens' study.

I feel like a bit of a fraud,

a little bit like a Sunday league player trying on Pele's boots.

Dickens tended to write here from ten to two every day.

He was a quick worker, but could spend whole mornings sitting,

staring into space, dreaming up stories.

He loved mirrors. His daughter once caught him

while he was writing, staring into a mirror, making strange faces

and noises, creating characters and chiselling them in his mind.

And when he wanted to escape his hectic household,

he would simply stroll across his garden

and into this tunnel which he had specially built, leading through

to his own private wilderness on the other side of the road.

He had a gargoyle installed at either end, bought from Italy -

one representing comedy, the other tragedy.

Kind of says it all.

Comedy and tragedy, the twin pillars of Dickens's streaky-bacon genius,

the dark and the light that played such a big role in his life.

So here is Dickens in 1860.

He's the rich, successful writer, a celebrity even,

and living in the house he dreamt of owning when he was a child.

You would think he would be content. Happy maybe?

But Great Expectations doesn't really feel like a book

written by a happy person.

So I'm trying to get a sense of where Charles Dickens was

when he was writing Great Expectations.

What was going on in his life?

The easiest way to sum it up is he's a little bit all over the place.

In his life, he was going through

probably the most major disruption,

emotionally and psychologically, that he'd ever been through.

In 1858, he publicly separated from his wife. At the same time

he was almost definitely having an affair with a much younger actress,

which he worked very, very hard to keep quiet.

And he would actually rent houses under false names,

a little bit like Dickens characters' names, to keep her there.

He would take her back and forth to France.

There were rumours that she had a termination of a pregnancy.

All of this was done without the public's knowledge.

And can you see any of this domestic turmoil in the book?

Oh, absolutely.

Pip has this absolute lifelong infatuation with Estella,

whose name echoes the sounds of his real-life lover, Ellen Ternan.

You have the Es, the Ls.

Estella, as her name suggests, it means "star",

it's kind of ice maiden.

Ellen also was rumoured to be not quite as passionate

about Dickens as he was about her.

For him, she was the be all and end all, for her, we don't know.

So I think a lot of this is written into Great Expectations.

There are certain passages when I feel that,

although it's Pip talking about Estella,

there's times when I feel,

is this Charles Dickens talking about Ellen Ternan?

Love generally isn't Dickens's strong point.

He usually makes love humorous or he writes it badly,

and in Great Expectations we have these incredibly powerful

convincing outpourings of love from Pip to Estella.

But what we do see is a very different tone in this later novel

from the cheerful earlier Dickens.

It's quite bleak, quite tortured,

and I think what's coming through is Dickens still was not happy,

even though he may have been in an affair. But lots of feelings

in the novel of frustration, pain, isolation and difficulty.

Almost everything I have written has been personal at some level.

I suppose I use writing as a kind of therapy

to work out problems in my own life through my characters.

And I think this is exactly what Dickens is doing here.

It's clear that he invested something of himself,

but not just in Pip -

in BOTH these characters, in the very idea of Pip and Estella.

What's remarkable about Great Expectations is that

despite these difficult years - the most difficult of his life -

Dickens responded with one of his great novels,

one of THE great novels.

As he lost control of events in his life,

he tried to wrestle it back with his fiction, and with great success.

All this wrangling and worry over the ending reflects both

the novel as a whole and Dickens' state of mind.

He was struggling, with the tone of his books,

with audience expectations,

with his past and with the way his life had turned out.

An unhappy man, Dickens at first picked the bleaker ending,

settling down in the shade.

He was right to reject the idea of a simple happy ending.

But he realised that these characters

that he'd spent so long with

deserved something better than a gloomy last goodbye.

So he came up with something more ambiguous -

Pip seeing no shadow of another parting from Estella.

This new ending doesn't offer a definitive answer.

He was too good a writer for that.

But it offers some hope, a chink of light.

In offering the possibility that these two imperfect characters could

have a future together, he isn't simply giving in to other people.

He wants it too.

To me, it's kind of an exercise in wish fulfilment.

In hinting at a happy ending for Pip,

Charles Dickens is imagining one for himself.

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