Putting an End toGreat Expectations^

Nothing in Great Expectations has generated more heat than Dickens'sdecision to rewrite the conclusion of the novel, with the result that he leftcritics with two endings to fight over. As an editorial crux and a problem in"sincerity," the two endings of Great Expectations are crudely comparablewith things like the moral rehabilitation of Walter Gay, the slick, time-servingyoung fellow in Dombey and Son, who was intended to perish at sea but wasthen kept in reserve to marry the young Miss Dombey; or the insertion ofthe American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit, a quick fix to boost the flaggingmonthly sales of the novel; or Dickens's decision to kill Little Nell, the ad-olescent heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop, who, in Ruskin's famous phrase,"was simply killed for the market, as a butcher kills a lamb."' The questionwhether Pip and Estella were in effect mated for the market has exercisedDickens scholars in the 125 years since the original ending first came to lightin the third volume of Forster's biography. Blasphemous as the suggestionmay sound, just maybe those of us who have written on the subject haverather inflated its importance: had Dickens written one ending only—eitherone—it wouldn't have occurred to us to take issue with it. Had he stuck tothe unhappy ending, we should all have bought the unhappy ending andthought no more about it; and had he all along gone for the happy ending,we might have been equally happy. But now that this double monster hasaffronted a hundred operatives, clairvoyants after the fact, prophets of hind-sight, it would be cowardice to run from it.

The chronology leading up to the composition of the second ending maybe briefly summarized here. To judge from his note to his old friend, theactor Charles Macready, Dickens finished the novel on Wednesday, June 11,1861—possibly the day before. He arranged to spend part of the followingweek with his fellow artist Bulwer-Lytton on Bulwer's estate Knebworth, inHertfordshire, to submit the proofs of the final chapters of Great Expectationsto Bulwer, whose opinion he greatly valued, and to discuss Bulwer's serial AStrange Story, which had been scheduled to succeed Great Expectations onthe front pages of All the Year Round on August 10. Dickens had written tosolicit a full-length contribution from Bulwer as early as August 1860;throughout autumn and winter the format of the story and the business detailswere settled, and by January 1861 Dickens was able to express his delight "in

t A more frugal version of this pieec appeared as "Last Words on Great Expectations: A Textual Briefon the Six Endings," Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 87-115. Grateful acknowledgment is made toAMS Press, Inc.

1. "Fiction, Fair and Foul" [1880]; in E. T. Cook and A. Wcddcrbnrn, eds., The Works of John Ruskin,37 vols. (London: George Allen, 1908) 34, 275 n. But the change in Walter Gay had been precededby serious second thoughts; see letter to Forster, [July 5, 184'6] (PL 4, 593).

491

From the Norton Critical Edition ofGREAT EXPECTATIONS(New York, London 1999)

edited by Edgar Rosenberg

[by Edgar Rosenberg]

[pp 492-93 contain photographs of originalproofs showing two different endings]

. . .

Excerpt: TWO TEXTUAL BRIEFS

(Pp. 500-508)

500 PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The procedure at least saves Bulwer the trouble of writing his own sentences.But the blame for this and related maneuvers falls in fact on Bulwer's

editor, who could not have known what he was in for. "Where you can avoidnotes . . . and get their substance into the text," Dickens had advised him,"it is highly desirable in the case of so large an audience, simply because, asso large an audience necessarily reads the story in small portions, it is of thegreatest importance that they should retain as much of its argument as pos-sible. Whereas the difficulty of getting numbers of people to read notesis wonderful." Dickens obviously failed to anticipate that in avoiding foot-notes, Bulwer, instead of translating their substance into the text, got the notesthemselves into it by lifting them from the foot of the page. Similar advicebackfired when Dickens urged Bulwer to scotch the idea of spelling out themeaning of his hero's metaphysical disputes with old Dr. Faber in so manywords in a hefty explanatory aside: "I urge you most strongly . . . NOT toenter upon any explanation beyond the title-page and the motto. . . . Let thebook explain itself." And (whether he meant it or not): "It speaks for itselfwith a noble eloquence."9 But if Bulwer is temperamentally prosy, few writersexcel him in brevity where brevity is the object. "At length—at length—lifewas rescued, was assured! Life came back, but Mind was gone."

By chapter 62 readers who couldn't wait to find out when Mind wouldreturn were sadly outnumbered by those who had long ceased to care aboutsuch trifles. Bulwer had shown a much keener sense of the "suitability of thestory" to All the Year Round than the Chief had shown. As early as Octo-ber 12, a mere two months after the hero's arrival on page 1 and the start ofthe intrigues he set in motion, the installment carried the ominous Mene,Mene ("numbered, numbered"), "To be completed next March." This in thetenth installment, with twenty to go. In February, readers were repeatedlyassured of the story's liquidation, with Wilkie Collins about to come to therescue with his new shocker, No Name. Bulwer, the old wizard, who hadbeen right all along, was very bitter. The entire debacle ended in his virtuallyblaming Dickens for accepting and running a self-defeating romance whenhe should have known better. "Even with my long authorship," he wrote tohis son, "if I had my time over again, I would not have published A StrangeStory, nor do I think if I had shown it, on the whole, to an anxious friend,that he would have counselled me to publish it."1 Evidently Dickens's anxietythreshold, though high, had been lower than Bulwer's.

Textual Brief: The Happy Ending

In briefly retracing and updating the history of the two endings that thetextual record reveals, it is convenient to reverse the chronology—beginning,that is, with the received text of the second ending and working back to theearliest available record of the original. Some of the admittedly minor verbalchanges that crept into the later version, especially those that affect the finalsentence of the novel, have occasionally been noted before, but without ref-erence to the manuscript. The textualist has, in fact, to consider not twoendings but six.

(1) In all modern texts, the final clause of the novel reads

9. December 18, 1861 (PL 9, 543); November 20, 1861 (PL 9, 510).1. Life 2, 351.

PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

501

The reading dates from the Library Edition of 1862; it is fair to assume thatDickens introduced it deliberately; it was allowed to stand in the CharlesDickens Edition six years later, and it has been the familiar exit line ever since.

(2) The sentence as we know it reflects a slight modification of the phrase asit appears in all texts earlier than 1862 (the serial versions, first edition, and earlyAmerican editions based on All the Year Round), in which the book concludes

I saw the shadow of no parting from her.

As far as I know, the first to point this out was Charles Dickens Jr., who notedit, without comment, in his introduction to the novel in the Macmillan Editionof 1904.2 The discrepancy has been briefly vented in print a number of times,the commentators assigning a greater degree of clarity or else ambiguity to onesentence or the other, though the critical brouhaha merely leads to the furtherquestion whether Dickens really intended to end on a note of ambiguity or sim-ply wrote himself into one. More than one reader (who finds the original phras-ing hopelessly muddled) argues that Dickens rephrased the sentence preciselyin order to preclude any misreading and to leave no shadow of another doubtabout his intentions to marry off the principals; others read the sentences in theopposite light. Thus Angus Calder submits that "in revision, Dickens deliber-ately made the last phrase less definite, and even ambiguous. For the later ver-sion carries the buried meaning: '. . . at this happy moment, I did not see theshadow of our subsequent parting looming over us.' Perhaps Pip did not marryEstella; the reader may believe what he likes." A more sophisticated if slightlystrained argument has been advanced by an interpreter (Albert A. Dunn) whospeculates that Dickens may have wanted to balance out Pip's failure to foreseethe "shadow of another parting" from Estella with his failure to anticipate theshadow "of another meeting" with her; and he goes on to suggest (more plau-sibly) that Dickens may have been animated by the canny desire to propitiateBulwer without quite caving in to him and so engaged in the sort of double-talkthat didn't entirely rule out the original ending. That is, where Calder paradesDickens as merely lukewarm, Dunn at least dignifies him with the capacity forsabotage, or subterfuge, or trimming. The most persuasive as well as concise in-terpretation is also one of the most recent: looking at the three options (all othercommentators, by ignoring the MS reading—on which see below—confinedthemselves to the two printed versions) Robin Gilmour notes that "each [of thethree] envisages the future in negative rather than positive terms—as a partingnot seen rather than a union looked forward to. A 'shadow' is invoked evenin the act of denying it."'

2. Charles Dickens Jr., "Introduction, Biographical and Bibliographical/' Great Expectations (London:Macmillan & Co., 1904), xii. Charley died in 1896, eight years before the volume containing bothGreat Expectations and Hard Times (vol. 16) appeared, so that I have been unable to date the com-position of his introductory essay. But since the first eleven volumes of the twenty-one-volume Mac-millan Edition were published as early as 1892, we may plausibly assign the composition to the early1890s.

3. Great Expectations, ed. Robin Gilmour (London: Everyman, 1994), 447; see a.o. "The End of GreatExpectations" Dickensitm 34 (1938): 82; Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1965), 496 (but Calder errs in dating the change from 1868); A. A. Dunn, "The AlteredEndings of Great Expectations: A Note on Bibliography and First-Person Narrative," OSN 9 (June1978): 40-42.

502 PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

(3) The Ur-ending of the altered version, in the MS reading, first ap-peared in print in my own essay some fifteen years ago. It reveals a small andexquisite difference by the addition of two words. Last words on GreatExpectations:

I saw the shadow of no parting from her, but one.

This, certainly, is explicit enough to disinfect any possibility of misreading.Why, then, did Dickens strike the last phrase? (The cancellation is clearlyindicated in proof.) On the face of it, the cancellation of the two operativewords strengthens Calder's argument—that Dickens entertained secondthoughts about too definitely committing Pip to Estella and therefore decidedto introduce the shadow of a doubt after all, a shadow that had sufficientlydeepened by 1862 to urge his final revision. One might even take the positiontaken by Dunn, that if Dickens at bottom disliked the ending foisted on himby Bulwer, he found the deepening shadow as good a way to scuttle Bulwer'sfriendly advice as any. Against this, it can be argued that of the two publishedreadings, the reading introduced in '62 is in effect much the less equivocaland more nearly resolves the ambiguity than the earlier one. Besides (thoughthis begs the question), the whole notion that Dickens went out of his wayto skirt the issue in the final sentence of his novel ignores, I think, his creativeprocedures.

Though one can only guess at his intention here, it seems very unlikelythat in blotting the last phrase Dickens endeavored to obscure a plain text.He may simply have disliked the phrase on artistic grounds: in playing theseshapely sentences by ear, he may well have discovered that last chord to bea needless, needlessly distracting obtrusion on an already long and movingsentence, which reaches its appropriate climax in the parting words to whichthe cadences lead up. Possibly, too, he objected to the mawkishness of thephrase or, more emphatically, refused to end the novel on a quasi-religiousnote as being out of harmony with the scene—the note, precisely, that thephrase "but one" conveys. Death may have its dominion over Pip and Estella,but it has no place in a novel that ends on a note of muted recognition andself-recognition. Some such possibility can't be discounted, and it gains pi-quancy by a curious echo: for if Dickens had stuck to the original coda, "tildeath do us part," the ending of Pip's story and Estella's would have carrieda resonance uncomfortably redolent of the pious flourish on which DavidCopperfield ends, with its vocative "O Agnes, O my soul," and concludingwith the words "when I close my life indeed, so may I ... still find thee nearme, pointing upward!" But what was all right for Agnes would hardly do forEstella: in whatever light Pip may see her, she hardly presents herself to hismind's eye as a figure fit to be glazed into a stained-glass window or to qualifyas the Angel in the House. Leaving aside the biblical "thees" and "thous"with which David cheers himself up (and which, one is made to feel, Dickensescaped narrowly in the closing paragraphs of Hard Times), simply imaginewhat the final sentence of Great Expectations would sound like had Dickensbanged it out, as David bangs out his story, with an exclamation mark: "I sawthe shadow of no parting from her, but one!"

Having struck the phrase, Dickens was left with the vexed sentence thatappears in the early texts and in '62 reshaped it once more—very likely to

PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS 503

minimize, or obviate, confusion, perhaps also again on "musical" grounds:certainly, as we have it, the sentence beckons to us more rhythmically thanthe gaunt string of monosyllables it supplanted, the nine low words that creepin one dull line. But surely any explanation by which Dickens is made toinvite the reader, all cavalierly, to "believe what he likes," smacks of a des-perate pococurantism. After all, we lose sight of the lovers holding hands asthey leave the ruined garden; and after all, Marcus Stone's last plate for thenovel bears the caption "With Estella, After all." Some readers, in fact, inresolving the marriage question, use identical arguments to arrive at oppositeconclusions. A. L. French, for example, is sure that Pip must have remainedan aging celibate, or he would have told us in so many words that he marriedEstella, French assuming that Pip wrote his autobiography about the timeDickens fictionalized it. And in 1861 Pip, with about a six-year headstart onDickens, would have been at least in his mid-fifties. More recently JeromeMeckier, who shares French's dating of Pip's manuscript as the work of aseasoned elder, concludes by pretty much the same reasoning that Pip musthave been married, or he would have told us in so many words that he wasn't.At the same time, precisely because the composition of Pip's story coincideswith Dickens's, Meckier would have you believe that Estella must have beendead by 1861 or she would have collapsed of shock at reading her shamingstory in the pages of All the Year Round. I can't be the only biped in creationwho finds the very notion of Estella's reading any issue of All the Year Rounddeeply distressing—there is nothing in Meckier's plaidoyer against her livingjust long enough to enjoy A Tale of Two Cities in the same journal or dipinto the opening number of Lever's serial, which might have killed her byacting as a literary overdose of laudanum.4 Meckier, a militant votary of thehappy ending, bases his death sentence on Pip's promise to Jaggers in chap-ter 51 that he would never, never reveal Estella's origins—a promise Pipmakes weeks before Dickens dreamt of keeping the lovers together. Naturallyit would have been easy for Pip to deliver a gentlemanly promise of secrecyabout a woman he'll never lay eyes on again, but that he should have kepthis mouth shut during twenty years of married intimacy opens out startlingpossibilities in the construction of relationships. Very likely, like Lohengrin'sElsa, he would have talked out of turn during their honeymoon. If nothingelse, he'd probably talk in his sleep.

Aside from the reconstruction of the final sentence, the manuscript andproof of the altered ending elsewhere shed oblique light (by negative refer-ence) on Dickens's intentions and thus on any scrupulous reading of theconclusion. For neither MS nor proof contains a brief passage of dialoguethat Dickens evidently introduced at a very late stage in proofing, presumablyjust before he dispatched the last chapters to Harper's. The interpolation—almost certainly the very last touches Dickens added to the novel—followsEstella's question about Pip's professional success and his answer, "Yes, I dowell." MS and proof omit:

4. Jerome Meckier, "Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: A Defense of the Second Ending," Studiesin the Novel 25 (1993): 28-58; A. L. French, "Old Pip: The Ending of Great Expectations," Essaysin Criticism 209 (1979): 357-60. Meckier's argument, of course, has precedent in Cervantes, post-modernists, and lesser writers who like to get their people to talk about the book by virtue of whichthey exist; but that is another story. Dickens himself, in fact, has one such self-referential joke inSomebody's Luggage, the Christinas bonus for 1862, in which the MS on which the story turns isrevealed in the final segment to be a submission to All the Year Round.

504 PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

"I have often thought of you," said Estella."Have you?""Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from

me, the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quiteignorant of its worth. But, since my duty has not been incompatible withthe admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart."

"You have always held your place in my heart," I answered. And wewere silent again, until she spoke.

MS and proof then pick up again with Estella's line "I little thought," etc.Within the general scheme of the second ending, the four brief paragraphsare certainly defensible and artistically appropriate: Estella's confession, in itsinsistence on remembrance, on heart, on the changes wrought in her duringthe long intermittence, foreshadows the paragraphs that follow and reinforcesthem by anticipation. Dickens, in other words, wants to establish as unmis-takably as possible the genuine efficacy of Estella's reformation and is at painsto remind the reader of this. "At pains"—for it must be admitted that takenby itself the passage sounds oddly bromidic, the quality of afterthought (nowthat we know it to be one, without Bulwer's spectral dictation at issue) toostrained: "since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission ofthat remembrance" is fagged out Emma Woodhouse, not ripened Estella, asif, really, Dickens himself, having finished the novel twice over, found himselfhamstrung by the performance of a boring duty incompatible with his art.5

On the other hand, Dickens may really have felt that he owed Estella theextra booster shot to make her quite safe for Pip, even if his needle had beenrather blunted by the end of June.

That Dickens may have felt some such debt to Estella and sensed that hemay have short-changed her role in the final chapters is apparent elsewherein the MS corrections. Necessarily, a good deal has been made of the impli-cation, for Pip and Estella, of their meeting in the Satis House garden and,related to this, the propriety of extending Pip's humbling and rehabilitationto Estella. Where few people question the legitimacy of Pip's conversion (evenwhere they question the legitimacy of the reward), can the same allowancesbe made for Estella, whose change of heart takes place offstage and is sup-ported merely by her own say-so (the old song about "showing" versus "tell-ing")? As I have noted earlier in discussing the textual changes, Dickens, inworking over the altered ending, clearly decided to make the most of Estella'slegitimate claims on Pip's susceptibility and, within the decent limits set bytheir middle-aged reunion, to apply his varnish more lavishly in revision.

In this matter of puffing Estella as well as accounting for the compressedcharacter of even the altered ending, something else should be noted here.In the revised ending Estella does practically all the talking and Pip is oddlyreticent—again, as if either Pip or Dickens or both were less than enthusiasticabout reactivating the conversation. Pip is all gab in Joe's and Biddy's com-

5. One may even take the uncharitable view that Dickens, in discharging this, his final debt to Pip,wasn't thinking of art at all but of word count. A good many critics, as we shall see, have faulted bothendings, the "unhappy" and less emphatically the "happy" one, as unconvincingly abrupt—after all,the second ending is only two pages longer than the first. The brevity even of the second, somewhatelaborated conclusion can't be argued out of the world, and on the evidence of suppressions andadditions in proof throughout Dickens's writings, we know that he liked to keep his installments tidy—the monthly numbers, of course, required uniform length. Since the interpolated four paragraphsadd very little to the story, their insertion at the last moment may suggest more of editorial expediencythan artistic intention.

PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS 505

pany in the pages preceding, before the two endings go their separate ways.Pip, in a passage in which the word old appears a dozen times, makes hisway to the ruined garden; Estella rises out of the mist, and Pip, having con-quered his surprise at her appearance and his amazement at the coincidenceof their meeting, falls into the silent mood—a silence that reminds us a littleof the shyness he displayed in the days when he used to be a coarse andcommon laboring boy nearly thirty years ago. Now they confront each otherfor the last time. She: had he been wondering why the poor old place hadbeen left such a dreary wreck? He: "Yes, Estella." She: that this would be herfinal visit before the place was to be restored, and by the way did he still liveabroad? He: "Still." She expects that he is doing well in his job. He: "I workpretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore—Yes, I do well." She allowsthat she has often thought of him. He: "Have you?" Then her four-line speechquoted earlier, that after having tried to put him out of her mind, she foundthat she couldn't after all. He: '"You have always held your place in my heart."She (in the longest speech in the scene): that since he forgave her long agoand she has learned her lesson in the school of hard knocks she hopes thatthey can be friends again. He: "We are friends." Not only does Estella get inabout four times as many lines as he does—the only two sustained questionsor repartees are hers—but it is she who picks up the thread whenever it slipsfrom them in what must be both an awkward and an overpowering encounter.So Dickens spares no pains in giving Estella her due.

Taken together, the textual changes of the "happy" ending and the care—or labor—Dickens bestowed on them really leave very little room for theview that the final sentence of the book "may presage anything" and thatthe ending is therefore an impatient cop-out. That the ending represents, asthe same critic goes on to say, "a final lack of conviction [by Dickens] in hisown scheme, a reluctance to face, close-up, the implications of his hero'sbehavior," is really a separate charge, which doesn't necessarily follow fromthe first.6

Textual Brief: The Unhappy Ending

(4) The original ending of the novel was first published in the last volumeof Forster's Life, Forster printing the conclusion as a footnote to his com-mentary on the novel. Forster prefaced the footnote with the comment that

There was no Chapter XX as now [Forster refers to the three-volumeedition of 1861, in which the chapters were separately numbered foreach volume]; ("For eleven years" in the original, altered to "eightyears") followed the paragraph about his business partnership with Her-bert, and led to Biddy's question whether he is sure he does not fret forEstella ("I am sure and certain, Biddy" as originally written, altered to"O no—I think not, Biddy"): from which point here was the close.7

Volume 3 of the Life appeared in 1874, thirteen years after Dickens com-posed the ending, and Forster's footnote has been the sole authority for allsubsequent transmissions and necessarily the source of all critical comment.Until 1937, when Bernard Shaw famously claimed to be the first to restore

6. Milton Millhauser, "Great Expectations: The Three Endings," DSA 2 (1972): 267-77; quoted matter,270.

7. Forster, book 9, chapter 3; Hoppe 2, 441.

506 PUTTING AN END TO CREAT EXPECTATIONS

the original ending to the text for the Limited Editions Club, editors habit-ually ignored the first ending, at most acknowledging the fact of the twoendings in the prefatory matter; since the late 1940s it has been customaryto print both endings, editors unexceptionally concluding the text with therevised ending and running the original as a trailer.8 The comment withwhich Forster ushers in the original ending contains one obvious blunder;and the footnote that comprises the ending, as we shall see, has been imper-fectly transcribed. As Forster has it, in the earlier version Pip remains abroadfor eleven years; in rewriting the ending, Dickens reduced his absence toeight. But this, on the face of it, makes no sense. For whereas the first endingproper begins with Pip's comment that "it was two years [after his return],before I saw herself," the second ending unites the lovers the day he returns.Assuming that Dickens intended Pip and Estella to be roughly the same agein both endings (an assumption borne out by the memoranda of "Dates" [seep. 484] in which both Pip and Estella are said to be "about 23" "in the laststage of Pip's Expectations"), elementary arithmetic suggests that in rewritingthe ending, Dickens extended Pip's sojourn abroad to bring it temporally intoline with the garden scene. Presumably Dickens thought thirty-three—thirty-four in the original ending—to be more suited to their mellowed conditionthan thirty-one, and once he advanced the meeting with Estella he had toadjust the length of Pip's Egyptian phase accordingly. Evidently, Forster'sfigures need to be read upside down: For "eight years" in the original, alteredto "eleven years" in revision.

(5) We are left with the question whether a source for the unhappy endingearlier than Forster's note can be discovered; and here I make free to jumblethe inverted chronology by introducing MS evidence before concluding withthe evidence of the corrected proof. We know that Shaw, in trying to trackdown his prey to the MS, affirmed that the MS contained the altered endingonly, without a trace of the original.9 But the scout who had been commis-sioned to copy the whole of the Wisbech MS at a time when Limited Editionsintended to publish the entire text verbatim from the MS, pardonably over-looked Dickens's cancellations. For, in fact, roughly one fourth of the Ur-ending is preserved in the MS. Following the words "Biddy, all gone by!" theMS continues after a paragraph break for seventy-three words to the bottomof the slip—a mere four lines in Dickens's cramped hand—the text beginningwhere Forster begins and going as far as "of her being married to a." Theomission of anything more than a simple paragraph break—two lines of spaceor the insertion of a rule—suggests that the ending was to follow quite organ-ically. Dickens canceled the passage not by ballooning out the words but bydrawing broad diagonal strokes across it—the practice he generally followedin canceling entire passages in his manuscripts—so that the canceled matter

8. "Preface," Great Expectations (Edinburgh: Limited Editions, 1937), xii i . Minor corruptions of Forster'snote have been introduced into nearly all editions that print the first ending—in accidentals of punc-tuation and in introducing a paragraph break preceding Estella's "I am greatly changed," where Forsterprints the entire ending as a single paragraph. Where these corruptions occur, the editors almostcertainly based their text on Shaw's 1937 edition rather than on Forster's note, Shaw himself apparentlyfollowing not Forster but a flawed transcription of Forster by Hugh Mann, which appeared in RobertBlatchford's column "In the Library" in The Clarion for May 16, 1902. On Shaw's editorial mystifi-cations, see my "Last Words on Great Expectations," 111-12.

9. The Mystery of the Unhappy Ending (New York: n.p., 1937), which gives the correspondence (August28, 1935, to December 24, 1936) among Shaw's secretary Blanche Patch, the Edinburgh editor Wil-liam Maxwell, and the publisher of Limited Editions, George Macy.

PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS 507

is entirely legible. It ends where it does only because the slip ends there, andwe may regret that this, our only preserve of the original in Dickens's hand,did not begin farther up the slip and uncover correspondingly more attrac-tions. The altered ending, "Nevertheless, 1 knew while I said those words,"begins at the top of the slip following; its position leaves uncertain whetherDickens meant to indicate a break here.

The MS tallies with Forster's note except in two small points. WhereasForster begins "It was two years more, before I saw herself," the MS has "Itwas four years more," and where Forster starts the second sentence "I hadheard of her as leading a most unhappy life," the MS leads off "Then I hadheard of her. . . ." Again, Dickens struck "four" and substituted "two" inproof, and the adverbial "Then"— that is, "at that time"— disappears: perhapsbecause Dickens, beyond his general unwillingness to tie himself down to toospecific a calendar, felt that since Estella had "at that time" already beenseparated from Drummle, as the clause following makes clear, and as nothingcould be worse than Bentley's beastly conduct, she had weathered the worstof her unhappiness at the point at which Pip learns about this. And we mayreasonably assume that Dickens decided to reduce the interval of Pip's returnfrom Egypt and the Piccadilly meeting by two years in order to bring theevents of Estella's separation, Drummle's death, and her remarriage closer tothe time of action. In the second paragraph of the revised ending (the para-graph taken over almost verbatim from the original except for the Shropshiredoctor), Dickens spells this out: "This release [Bentley's death] had befallenher some two years before."1

(6) As an editorial guideline the corrected proof necessarily supersedes theauthority of the manuscript where the corrections are demonstrably inten-tional, and our only check on Forster remains the proof. Two things aboutForster's transcription need to be kept in mind here: that it appeared thirteenyears after composition, and that Forster ran it as a footnote. The proofs ofthe original ending are preserved with the bound proofs in the Pierpont Mor-gan Library, where, following a lead by Professor K. J. Fielding, I unearthedthem sometime in the seventies. They incorporate Dickens's final correctionsand reveal precisely how Dickens intended the first ending to be printed.2

1. Dickens introduces at least two more minor emendations to which Robert Grecnherg has drawnattention. In the first ending, Drummle is desciibed "as a compound of pride, brutality, and mean-ness"; in the second, his offenses are compounded by the vice of "avarice." Greenberg sensibly con-cludes that "by the addition of 'avarice' Dickens is able to eliminate reference to [ Estella's jimpoverished second husband . . . and, more important, to retain from his original version the factof her reduced circumstances." (Against this, Q. D. Leavis: "We don't, I think, ask how it is thatEstella is now poor . . . and since Drummle himself was by definition rich, avaricious, and mean,why should he lose his fortune?") Where the two endings very nearly correspond in their wording,Greenberg records another variant: the first ending concludes with the narrator's comment on Estellathat "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching"; the second ending, with Estella'sconfession that "suffering has been stronger than all other teaching." Evidently Bentley has contributedhis mite. Robert A. Greenberg, "On Ending Great Expectations," Papers on Language and Literature6 (1970): 159; Q. D. Leavis, "How We Must Read Great Expectations," in F. R. and Q. D. Leavis,Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 425.

2. The credit for this goes entirely to Fielding, who, as long ago as 1968 or '69, conveyed to me hishunch that the original ending was preserved in the Morgan proof book, which he had himselfexamined briefly some years earlier. The Morgan proof, too. at first sight seemed to have only thealtered ending; but in going over the (suspiciously bulk)') proofs for the final chapter, I found, asanyone might have, that these were pasted over other galleys; moreover, since some of the marginalcorrections could refer only to the concealed, not the overlaid, sheets, it was clear that ProfessorFielding's hunch was within inches of being verified. Mr. Douglas G. Ewing, Curator of Manuscriptsand Modern Books, agreed that the unhappy ending in its most nearly impeccable text deserved tobe uncovered and proceeded to have the overlaid galleys steamed open— a half-hour operation ofastounding interest and suspense.

508 PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The set of corrected proof at the Victoria and Albert Museum is quite un-availing here: it abruptly ends midway through the first sentence of the pen-ultimate paragraph of chapter 58, "I sold all I had, and I put aside as muchas I." The possibility that the V & A proofs gave the original ending and thatthis was either destroyed or found its way into a collection to which I havebeen unable to track it down cannot, of course, be dismissed; but this wouldin any case have been superseded by the corrected Morgan proof.

The Morgan text is close enough to Forster to defeat any great expectationsof a brand-new discovery and just distinct enough to yield "a sufficient living"and modest profits. Materially it differs in nothing from Forster's note andcorroborates the accuracy of his transcription: in substance Creat Expectationsends as he ends it. The difference lies not in what Dickens reveals but inquite how he reveals it. Anybody who has studied Dickens's galleys is struckby the pains he takes in altering paragraph breaks at proof stage, either string-ing separate paragraphs together or breaking a single paragraph into two orthree or more. One is struck, in other words, by the importance he attachesto the nuances and modulations, as well as the appearance—the purely opticaleffect—of his text. The importance of the Morgan proof lies in nothing morethan this: in conveying a quite different sense of tempo, of rhythm, to thefirst ending, and hence a different sense of poetic closure to the novel. WhereForster, restricting himself to a footnote, jams the ending into a single para-graph, Dickens lays out the conclusion in four paragraphs; and this necessarilyaffects the way in which we ultimately read the ending. Factually, to repeat,this alters nothing. At most it confutes (and, at that, perhaps by a narrowliteralism) those commentators who object that "the original ending, amount-ing to but a long paragraph, could hardly have been more concise."3 Yetexactly this objection, as I have indicated, has been lodged against the endings(both endings, but more damnably against the first) too often and too righ-teously to be quite passed over; and it is but to do justice to Dickens toassuage—or bribe—the opposition by presenting it with four quietly modu-lated paragraphs instead of a single hurried one.

Options

So much for the textual-housekeeping details. To soak up the immenseamount of ink that has been spilled on the two endings does not, in theoccupational jargon, lie within the scope of this commentary. Each of thecritics may be said to fit roughly into one of three slots: (1) the supporters ofthe first ending; (2) the supporters of the second ending; and (3) the neither/nors, who argue that Dickens botched both endings about equally and whoseviews boil down to the argument that Dickens should have discharged Pipon his return to Lower Higham and kept Estella out of it entirely. As for (1)and (2), the spectrum of opinion ranges from those who put down the alteredending as "preposterous," "outrageous," "pointless," "a falsification of all that

3. Greenberg, "On Ending Great Expectations," 155. Though the abruptness of the ending has oftenbeen noted, critics respond to this in different ways. Thus, of three commentators picked at random,all of whom agree that the ending betrays signs of haste, Humphry House prefers the first ending (TheDickens World [London: Oxford University- Press, 1941], 28, 156-57); R. George Thomas prefers thesecond (Charles Dickens: Great Expectations [London: Arnold, 1964], 55-56); and Martin Meisclfinds both equally irrelevant ("The Ending of Great Expectations," Essays in Criticism 15 (1965): 326;on the increasing acceptance of Meisel's position, see below.

PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS 509

has taken place," to those who, like Mrs. Leavis, find the preference for theoriginal ending "incomprehensible." Caught in this crossfire of critical grape-shot, the editor is confronted by the raw question which of two veteran con-testants more nearly deserves to be rescued. The argument raised by theneither/nors is of course textually irrelevant: an editor can't very well rip outthe last four or five pages and keep Estella married to Drummle or separatedfrom him to gratify clever narratologists. As I have said, editors have habituallyprinted the second ending, variously alleging their genuine preference for itor arguing that "it was, after all, the one Dickens published," and the practicehas by now turned into a self-perpetuating tic. And there is no blinking thefact that the weight of critical comment has not only been increasingly infavor of the ruined garden, but that its sponsors have argued their case onthe whole more eloquently and more convincingly than the sponsors ofPiccadilly.

In following the precedent set by earlier editors and printing the secondending, I myself am guided not so much by protocol and usage, nor by thesteadily mounting critical bias (which may count for very little in the longrun). From any strictly textual point of view, the argument that it was "theone Dickens published" remains, 1 suppose, the single overriding argumentin favor of its maintenance. Editors who set aside the author's publishedproduct always do so at their peril. In this, too, the example of Shaw remainsan instructive if unavailing one: Shaw, while trying to dig up the first ending,cast a rather cold eye on the publisher's plan to print the novel from manu-script. In keeping his errand boys from intruding on Dickens's privacy, Shawspeaks for a great many writers who feel that their final printed words are theonly ones that matter, and who thus look on textualists as a breed of PeepingToms or resurrectionists. In editing anything, one has, naturally, to keep theauthor's knowable, or guessable, wishes steadily in mind by establishing thetext that most nearly tallies with the book the author wrote—that is, by mi-croscopic attention to the alternatives. The double ending, to be sure, presentsa special problem—divorced as it is from Dickens's known intention both bythe intervention of time and by the interference of a well-meaning confrere.And, indeed, there seem to me cogent reasons for printing the ending Dickenswrote before Bulwer talked him out of it and assigning the second ending abackseat in the appendix; and future editors may well restore it in its course.This commentary therefore cannot be complete without my playing devil'sadvocate for those who may wish to flout both editorial practice and thecritical consensus, and, on grounds of editorial propriety alone, restore priorityto Piccadilly.

(1) What of Dickens's own preference? Though critics can afford to mootanything smacking of the intentional fallacy, editors have no such license;and if Dickens's own response to the altered ending can be at all gauged, itdeserves a hearing. To say that the second ending was, after all, the oneDickens published is one thing; to say that it was the one Dickens preferredis another; and I am not really impressed with the argument that if Dickenshad not liked Bulwer's suggestion he would have lumped it. Certainly thelanguage of what little correspondence there is sounds guarded enough onthis point, singularly guarded for a novelist who, in speaking of his compo-