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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).

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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]

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.

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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.

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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-

From The Norton Critical Edition of GREAT EXPECTATIONS

edited by Edgar Rosenberg

Excerpt from

"Putting an End to Great Expectations"by Edgar Rosenberg

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(Pp. 508-518)

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sitions, assaults his friends with a steady drumfire of self-applause, and whoseautocritical reports hardly ever record anything less than an A+. In his pithyessay on the novel, Martin Meisel notes that in justifying the revised endingto Forster "Dickens seems to have done his best to hang himself" by the "coyand philistine smugness with which he promotes the new conclusion ('I haveput in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could and I have no doubt thestory will be more acceptable for the alteration')."4 It may be cold comfort toProfessor Meisel to be reminded that this is strictly par for the course andthat the other comments on the novel are hardly more modest: "such a veryfine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me"; "I have made the open-ing, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll"—and the rest are littlemore than the self-satisfied noises of the buoyant merchandiser: "Pray readGreat Expectations. . . . It is a very great success and seems universally liked";"I am glad to find you so faithfully following Great Expectations, which storyis an immense success"; "the journal is doing gloriously, and Great Expec-tations is a great success." Apart from these rather tiresome Odes to a BalanceSheet, Dickens's hosannas to the merits of his productions seemed to behabitual to him and persisted throughout his career. Pick up any volume ofthe Pilgrim Letters and you will find that the comments on Great Expectationsdiffer barely from the self-approving notices twenty years earlier: "Behold No.XII which I think a good 'un. No. XIII will finish the part at rather a goodpoint, I expect"; "Number 15, which I began to-day, I anticipate great thingsfrom. There is a description . . . with which, if I had read it as anybody else'swriting, I think I should have been very much struck"—if Dickens hangshimself once with his pretty complacencies, he hangs as often as Pangloss;and, like Pangloss, he escapes with his skin intact. This needs to be stressedon two counts: that the purely monetary rewards and the elation they occa-sioned reflect the success of the novel not primarily after its publication butduring its serial run; and that if Dickens pulls all the stops elsewhere, herather pulls his punches in talking of the second ending. "Upon the whole, 1think it is for the better" suggests acquiescence, not enthusiasm; "I think thestory more acceptable for the alteration"—the operative term skirts merit infavor of market; the note to Bulwer—"I hope you will like the alteration thatis entirely due to you"—is at best a worldly compliment and at worst (to thosewho care to stretch the issue further than I should) a nice invitation to supplythe unwritten "certainly not to me" and to turn an overt compliment into animplied reproof, a gesture of abdication, as if Dickens really wanted to washhis hands of the whole business. Perhaps even more revealing is Dickens'scomment expressed in his covering note to Forster of April—at the time hedispatched the first installments of stage three—in which he registers his regretthat "the third portion cannot be read all at once": regrettable "because thegeneral turn and tone of the working out or winding up will be away fromall such things as they conventionally go." Evidently Dickens took a certainpride and pleasure in the "unconventionality" of the original ending as hehimself perceived it.5

Can we infer anything about Dickens's preference from the earliest ap-pearance of these final pages? In my comments on the manuscript I tried to

4. Meisel, "The Ending of Great Expectations," 326-51, quoting from letter of ju lv 1 1861 (PL 9 433)5. PL 9, 403.


show that Dickens's "difficult" passages are often his most successful, and Imentioned that the final MS leaves— those that contain the revised ending-are in especially poor condition. Moreover, they teem with cancellations thatare more difficult to unriddle than almost any others in the manuscript. Thevery plethora of revision would suggest that Dickens went over them with thesame painstaking care he lavished on what were to be some of the mostwonderful things in the book. I think not. Though this is manifestly beyondall proof, I can't escape the impression that the revisions are less a productof the conscientious craftsman happy in his sense that all his labor will payoff than they are a product of fatigue. I have implied as much in my com-ments on the uncharacteristically stilted language in which Estella beckonsto Pip in the brewery yard. In no other parts of the MS has Dickens soconsistently canceled words or phrases, substituted, and gone back to theoriginal — a procedure, as has also been noted, evident throughout the man-uscript, conspicuously in the heavily marked opening paragraph. But unlessI willfully misread, the procedure here reflects less of sanguine effort, thewriter at his happiest, than of futility; less of the snappy thought "hullo: myfirst instinct paid off!" than the resigned "let's face it: this is the best that Ican do." As I say, this can be no more than speculation — an affair com-pounded of inference, sympathy, and impure guesswork. But here and there,between this cancellation and the next, I keep detecting the (quite un-Dickensian) sound of the scrivener, who would prefer not to.

(2) Then Forster came. Allowing for the usual amount of twaddle by con-temporary reviewers, whose judgments often strike us as deplorably vulgarand astigmatic (and who could not have known about the first ending any-way), we may refrain from belittling the tributes of the well-informed andsensible readers of a generation closer to Dickens than our own. J. HillisMiller and Peter Brooks are certainly better critics than Charles Dickens Jr.and, as novel-critics, quite as good as Shaw; but the perspective that distanceconfers is often more warped than the shorter view, and one may even arguethat the testimony of the immediate post-Dickensians is the more reliable fortheir being closer to the Spirit in Which the Author Writ. Certainly theirunanimity in favor of the first ending, once it was brought to their attention,is difficult to shrug off, and it would be asinine to assume that these peoplewere actuated by nothing more ennobling than professional spite against Bul-wer. Forster's preference for the pre-Bulwer ending— the only recorded verdictby a strict contemporary— is all the more telling in view of Forster's lifelongesteem for Bulwer, unless we uncharitably impute his judgment to his privatepique at not having been consulted.6 After Forster came Charley Jr., who,pilfering the words out of his father's mouth, allowed the story to be "moreacceptable" for the alteration, but went on to docket his own opinion "thatthe only really natural as well as artistic conclusion to the story was that whichwas originally intended"; and by the time Charley wrote this, his disdain forthe second ending already reflected, in his words, "the soundness of the gen-eral judgment."7 In the thirty years or so following Dickens's death, critics as

6. No reason to, considering the amicable correspondence between the two at this time about Bulwer'snge S

friends for years.

ring the amiA Strange Story. See Wolff, Strange Stories, 291, and Life 2, 341 ff. But Bulwer and Forster had been

r years.7. "Introduction," Great Expectations, xi-xii.


far apart as Gissing and Chesterton, though they agreed on nothing else aboutDickens, concurred in their preference for the Piccadilly ending; ditto Wil-liam Dean Howells and Shaw's early socialist friends on The Clarion. If muchof the early criticism errs on the side of the shrill and peremptory, it has themerit of being cleanly forthright and assured and is entirely untainted by thesort of special pleading that spoils so much of the later academic criticismthat has rallied round the reunited lovers in the moonlight.

(3) Gissing, Shaw, Chesterton, and Howells, of course, were themselvesnovelists as well as critics; so were Orwell, Robert Liddell, Edmund Wilson,and Angus Wilson. Good (or middling) novelists may be notoriously un-reliable as critics, if only because they have their own axes to grind orbecause their literary tastes are more crotchety than those of theaverage-educated critic. A writer's estimate of another writer always invites acertain wariness. But in judging the local problem of the two endings, thesenovelists may, I think, be absolved of ulterior motives: indeed, I should liketo think that they respond to this with the special sensitivity and imaginativesympathy and an intuitive sense for the real right thing that their craft confers.And if all these people, in varying degrees of heat and voltage, are united infavoring the earlier ending, perhaps the significance of their vote ought to betaken at its proper valuation. This is not merely a question of name-dropping(in that case, one should have to add, among the academic critics, nearlyall the leading Dickens scholars of the past decades) but a matter of re-cognizing, for what it may be worth, the substantial size of the creative-writinglobby.

(4) The raw question of artistic merit is more complex than any of theforegoing and forces us to ponder the character of the criticism. Forster'sopinion of the first ending as "more consistent with the drift, as well as thenatural working out, of the tale" has to all intents been echoed by all sub-sequent partisans of the first ending, who, whatever they may think of Dick-ens's motives, object to the altered ending as (minimally) out of line with therest of the book or (at worst) an artistically indefensible as well as morallyshoddy about-face, Dickens torpedoing in the last three pages of the noveleverything he has set adrift in the four hundred pages leading up to the end.In this view, Pip ultimately gets more than his deserts and Dickens not onlymuddles the narrative integrity of the book and explodes the reader's justexpectations but also muddles the socio-moral lesson he has all along beenpreaching and so nullifies the very theme of Great Expectations. I deliberatelyoverstate the case here, but some such line has been taken by nearly all theapostles of the first ending. Estella's conversion has unsurprisingly occasionedmuch talk among them and been viewed as a decisive issue in all this. TheFirst Endians generally object to her change of heart as colliding with thevery logic of the narrative and the whole of Estella's education: "the logicalconsequence of such an upbringing . . . [would] unfit her for any sort ofmarriage"; "everything that we know of Miss Havisham and her bringing upof Estella is made hollow by this softening of Estella, since we find, not thatwe must forgive the tragic Miss Havisham, but that there was not really any-thing to forgive"; "the shaping of a lifetime in Estella [is] miraculously un-done." As a result, Pip "is as much prepared to live on unearned income inhis emotional life as in his life as a gentleman"; the modest profits he earns,and deserves to earn, are morally of no use to him; and Pip's own education


into disillusionment is made hollow, "miraculously undone" by the discoverythat the disillusionment has itself been illusory.8

Against this view, we have a crowd of writers who defend the altered endingas ratifying much more harmoniously than the first the recurrent patterns andimages of the novel, the interwoven motifs of union and separation and rec-onciliation, who stress the deep linkage of the past and present and makemuch of the "atmospheric" propriety that informs the garden scene—it's arare writer who forgets to quote Milton at this point. Moreover, at least a fewof the Second Endians claim as much coherence for the second ending asthe First Endians claim for the first, arguing that the lovers have been suffi-ciently humanized by their griefs to deserve whatever morsel of happinessDickens hands them. The Happy Endgamers by and large condone Estella'sredemption as an artistically fitting function of Pip's own amendment and amoving result of her personal harrowing. Their case rests on the convictionthat Pip's growth suggests the possibility of a similar process in Estella,that Estella's change of heart is supported by Pip's conduct and BentleyDrummle's and that anyhow, as Harvey Sucksmith argues, as long as "theregeneration of Estella is improbable in the new ending, then it is improbablein the rejected ending too." In anticipating "the valid objection [that] thethemes of regeneration and reconciliation violate the tone of pessimistic ironywhich pervades and helps to unify the novel," Sucksmith remarks that "thisobjection may be levelled equally against both endings; perhaps critics do notobject to the rejected ending because the break in tone is much weaker andtherefore overlooked." In any event, "it is a satisfying conclusion that, asMagwitch's daughter, [Estella] should find happiness with Pip.'"' To oversim-plify a complex issue: whereas the First Endians argue their case on thegrounds of plot-logic and moral authority, the Second Endians argue theirson the grounds of symbolic recurrence and the redemptive relativism of ex-perience; and insofar as these are the points at issue, the scales seem to meto tip in favor of the First Endians. If the first ending supports the logic ofthe book and the second doesn't, no amount of atmospheric pressure willrelieve the garden scene; and Justice, nervously poised between Forster andLytton, lifts her blindfold just long enough to tip a nod toward Forster.

(5) The argument raised by the neither/nors, the people who veto both abrief encounter with Estella and a lifelong one, assumes that Dickens rushedthe novel to its conclusion with indecent haste and that both endings reflecthardly more "than a cursory gesture of compliance with the fictional propri-eties." The phrase appears in what has become one of the staple works onthe subject, Milton Millhauser's "Great Expectations: The Three Endings,"in which Millhauser browbeats Dickens for racing to the finish line, or ratherfor overshooting his mark when he should have known where to stop. The

8. T. A. Jackson, Charles Dickens: Progress of a Radical (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), 194;Christopher Ricks, "Creat Expectations," below, p. 668; Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedyand Triumph, 2 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952) 2, 992-93; H. M. Daleski, Dickens andthe Art of Analogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), 254.

9. Sucksmith, The Narrative Art of Charles Dickens, 112. Of tbe numerous pieces along similar lines,see esp. Barbara Hardy, "The Change of Heart in Dickens' Novels," Victorian Studies 5 (1961): 49-67, esp. 61-63, and Hardy's The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 73-75;James Reed, "The Fulfilment of Pip's Expectations," Dickensian 55 (1959): 16; Kurt Tetzeli vonRosador, "Great Expectations: Das Ende eines Ich-Romans," Neuere Sprachen NF 18 (1969):esp. 407-08; John Kucich, "Action in the Dickens Endings: Bleak House and Great Expectations."Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1978): 102-07; Douglas Brooks-Davies, Great Expectations (Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1989); and the "Closure" se'ction of the bibliography, below, p. 742.

514 PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS PUTTING AN END TO GREAT EXPECTATIONS 515

three endings Millhauser presents as alternatives are (1) Pip's return to theforge and reunion with Joe, (2) his second visit, after he "has found his metierand carried forward his moral education," and (3) what Millhauser regardsas no more than a postscript to either one of the actualized endings—it doesn'tfinally matter which. Either way, "one is left with the impression that thebook is hurried to a conclusion, through scenes about which the author doesnot greatly care."' Millhauser was probably one of the earliest advocates ofthis amputation theory, one that has found a respectable number of acces-sories, not least among Freudians and deconstructionists. In defending theirobjections to what they regard as an artificially inflated conclusion, a numberof commentators point out that, after all, the working memoranda, in whichDickens charted the course of the later chapters, stop short of the meetingwith Estella in Piccadilly—though, as has also been suggested, the omissionof the final scenes of the Mems. in itself is less likely to suggest the last-minuteimprovisation of a writer in search of an ending than the opposite: a conclu-sion too firmly planted in Dickens's mind to require a written reminder.2

The problem whether Estella's reappearance (either ending) is really asdysfunctional as these champions of retrenchment (or body snatchers) accuseit of being really straddles aesthetic and affective grounds. In dumping Estella(never mind that Dickens, for better or for worse, enlarged her role) one isat least entitled, it seems to me, to anticipate and empathize with the readers'expectations, not just those of Dickens's contemporaries but also our own.We have had our last glimpse of Estella all of fourteen chapters earlier, someone hundred pages before the terminal reconciliation. We last saw her, thatis, in the scene in which Pip confronts Miss Havisham with her duplicity andEstella informs him that she is going to marry Drummle; and our last directnews of her comes five chapters later, some seventy pages before the end,when, in answer to Pip's "needless question," Havisham confirms that Estellahas indeed married the brute. One can surely forgive readers who feel theyare being not overpaid by being brought up to date at the last minute but alittle short-changed at being so thoroughly left in the dark about the futureof the person who has been all in all to Pip. Ought Dickens really to ditchher so cavalierly some three-fourths through the novel? Naturally, the verylast thing we should want is the kind of last-chapter summary, "A LastRetrospect"—as often as not "A Final Prospect"—in which the reader is toldwhat happened, or what will happen, to everybody, the sort of Copperfield-Biedermaier tableau — or "pantomime" — in which each character takes a half-minute curtain call—Aunt Betsey; Rosa Dartle; old Mrs. Steerforth; TommyTraddles; the good, feeble Dr. Strong; Jack Maldon; Agnes—to be applaudedor whistled at. Besides, in Great Expectations we know what happened toeverybody—except, unless Dickens revives her, Estella.5 The idea of her beingpermanently trapped by the Spider is a little distasteful, though Dickens iscertainly spunky enough to face up to this; I am not sure—given her flashes

1. Millhauser, "Great Expectations: The Three Endings," 268, 270.2. Sec Peter Brooks, "Repetition, Repression and Return," below, p. 679; D. A. Miller, "Afterword,"

Narrative and its Discontents (Princeton: Prineeton UP, 1970), 222-23; Meiscl, "The Ending of GreatExpectations," 326; Moshc Ron, ''Autobiographical Narration and Formal Closure in Great Expec-tations," Hebrew University Studies in Literature 5 (1977): 37-66; Grecnbcrg, "On Ending GreatExpectations," 156; Millhauser, "The Three Endings," 274; Thomas M. Leitcn, "Closure and Tele-ology in Dickens." Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 143-56.

3. Ditto Startop and Orlick; see "Writing Great Expectations," above, p. 462.

of fury and contempt along with her frigidity—that she would choose to stickit out with him, a contingency anyhow obviated by what we are told aboutDrummlc's death and Estella's modest transfiguration in the first ending. Butin the absence of more recent information—and with all the deference in theworld to her vanishing advocated by literary Houdinis like Brooks, Miller,Meisel, Sadrin, Robin Gilmour4—I shouldn't blame the reader for feeling alittle cheated at being left to wonder. A diplomatic acquiescence in the "fic-tional proprieties"—if that is what we are talking about—seems to me pref-erable to an obtrusive iconoclasm. Dickens showed a good deal of acumen,I think, in (for example) reminding us of Edith Dombey's emotional muti-latedness long after she has played any active part in the novel, or leaving nodoubt of Louisa Gradgrind's solitary destiny in Hard Times, and in neithercase does he recoil from the desolate future these people face. Even if Pip'sstory is (arguably) complete by the time he returns to the forge, either beforehe joins Clarriker's or eleven years later, when he is home on holiday, isn'tthe closure as we know it not only more gratifying but narratologically ap-propriate, whether the lovers fade out—just the two of them—in the romanticmoonshine of the ruined garden or the sexless daylight of Piccadilly, withlittle Pip gazing up at the strange lady in the pony carriage, suffering her tolift him up to kiss her (a wonderfully droll replay of her earliest humiliatinginvitation to the young Pip, "You may kiss me, if you like"), and probablytugging at the sleeves of his middle-aged would-have-been godfather?

(6) One final argument in favor of the unhappy ending ought to be takenunder advisement. It all has to do with what Sucksmith, in the passage I cited,calls the "the break in tone" that is so much more noticeable in the secondthan the first ending. Sucksmith's intuitive insight apart, I have never heard thepoint raised except by undergraduates and graduate students, and they respondto this with refreshing vigor. What jars on them has to do with the languageof the penultimate paragraph of the revised ending, the radical "break in tone."The difference between reported and direct speech could scarcely be moresharply felt than it is at this point, and it is in this that (for my students) thedifference between the two endings is so revealing and Dickens's weakness somuch "exposed." I cite two paragraphs everyone knows by heart.

(1) I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in herface and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, thatsuffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and hadgiven her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

(2) "But you said to me," returned Estella, very earnestly, " 'God blessyou, God forgive you!' And if you could say that to me then, you willnot hesitate to say that to me now—now, when suffering has beenstronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand whatyour heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—intoa better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tellme we are friends."

Why should the students object to this sort of talk when they have weath-ered the most melodramatic, declamatory ballyhoo at Miss Havisham's? What

'Far Far Better Things:4. Great Expectations, ed. Robin Gilmour, 447; Sadrin, chDickens' Later Endings," DSA 7 (1978): 21-36; and n.

:h. 12; Richard J. Dunn,2 above.


is happening—and this again may reflect the novelist's weariness—is thatDickens simply deputizes Estella to speak for the narrator; what would soundat least inoffensive in the mouth of the observer sounds (to my students)unpleasantly intrusive in the speaker's. In back of this stylized lingo we have,I think, rather different conceptions of Estella, which have also gone beggingfor attention. In the original ending she remains very much the lady, thegrande dame, who seems to be more at home in Piccadilly than in Shropshire,who maintains a certain agreeably lofty distance and acts even a trifle con-descending. However much she has aged, however much her suffering excelsMiss Havisham's teaching, the resemblance is close enough so that we rec-ognize the Estella whom we loved to hate—and who hasn't, for all her griefs,gotten Richmond quite out of her system. The altered ending involves (formy students) a face-lift—but then the sight of the face-lift in turn is obscuredby the sight of Estella's picking her moral scabs. As a result, instead of feelingat least a little sorry for her, the students, when they aren't up in arms, laughat Estella's penitential prattle.

(7) The meeting in Piccadilly is always called an "accident."' On empiricalgrounds alone (to be a pigsticker about this) the Piccadilly meeting is, ofcourse, no such thing: if anything, the meeting in Satis House is an accident.You are much more likely, after an eight-year absence, to run into an oldchum at a time and in a place entirely disconnected from local associationsin the past than to collide with him or her, as Pip collides with Estella—ofall places and of all nights—in the very spot from which, after years of child-hood togetherness, they both have been separated for years, in the very nickof time, on the eve of Estella's last visit. Naturally, the novel can absorb suchcoincidences, which are perhaps hardly felt to be coincidences by the reader.Still, one ought not to miscall the thing in the name of artistic seemlinessand to foist on the West End the sins of the brewery garden.6

Without our torturing the vocabulary, insofar as "coincidence" plays a rolein the final passage at all, we have to admit that the meeting in Piccadilly isfar more nearly in line with Dickens's very notion of chance—and in back ofthis his fascination with the whole weirdly chancy way in which people hap-pen to meet. The passage in which Forster describes Dickens's view of co-incidence has often been cited; it is worth quoting again:

On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickensliked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly.The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought; wewere all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to befar apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore soclose a resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday.7

5. By R. George Thomas, Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, 54; Greenberg, "On Ending GreatExpectations," 156; Millhauser, "Great Expectations: The Three Endings," 274; Leavis, "How WeMust Read Great Expectations" 425; Meckier, "A Defense of the Second Ending," 36-37.

6. An advocate of the ruined garden seems to me to hit the nail on the head in a wonderful parentheticalqualifier—italics mine: "Accepting without question the appropriateness of the meeting—the convinc-ing atmosphere and medium of the narrative cleverly discourage our calculating the probability of theircoming across each other that particular evening in December—we are moved in our hearts by Pip'sobvious happiness and by the inference we draw from his final words." See David Paroissien, ed..Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985), 290-91.

7. Forster, book 1, chapter 5; Hoppe 2, 59. On Dickens's defense of the use of "the interposition ofaccident * * " where it is strictly consistent with the whole design," see his very important letter toBulwer of June 5, 1860 (PL 9, 259-60).


The last clause might well invite you to interpret the final scene in thegarden as a conscious echo of earlier meetings—the tomorrow (or today) thatrecalls yesterday. But the whole drift of the passage, when taken together withstrikingly similar passages throughout Dickens's novels, favors the notion thatin the Dickens universe the "coincidence" of Piccadilly is so much the rulethat to all intents it cancels out its coincidentality—or that this kind of coin-cidentality turns into its epistemological opposite, that is, the norm. "Whatconnection can there be," Dickens asks in a well-known passage in chapter15 of Bleak House, "between many people in the innumerable histories ofthis world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have nevertheless beenvery curiously brought together!" Dickens uses very nearly the same languagein chapter 2 of Little Dorrit, when in answer to one of her fellow passengers'parting "Good-bye! We may never meet again," the one unsociable, inde-pendent soul on board ("a handsome young Englishwoman who had . . .either withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest") tells him:"In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meetus, from many strange places and by many strange roads . . . and what it isset to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all bedone"; and she goes on to compound the well-meaning gent's discomfitureby informing his daughter that "you may be sure that there are men andwomen already on their road, who have their business to do with you. . . .They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; theymay be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know, oranything you can do to prevent them." To be sure, Miss Wade's words suggestthat coincidence is finally tantamount or akin to something like fate, and thuspredestined. But they are as much Dickens's as Miss Wade's, and similarpassages can be found in A Tale of Two Cities. And what is common to allof them is the unpredictability and ineluctability of the event (che sara sara)as well as the underlying notion of spatial remoteness. These characters aregoing to meet somewhere, but who is to say where? Probably anywhere: thisis the nature of Dickensian coincidence. Estella happens to be in town fromShropshire, Pip from Cairo: "people who are supposed to be far apart"; Pipand Estella are brought together "from opposite sides of great gulfs"; "people. . . are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strangeroads." If my reading of this is correct, then the chance meeting in Piccadillyis the genuine Dickens article, and the carefully staged encounter in theruined garden isn't. Part of the trouble with the garden scene is just that—itspure staginess—which may be one reason why Shaw, pioneering championof the first ending, or Why She Would Not (whose stage directions are almostas much fun to read as the smart talk they prepare you for is), turned tailsand made common cause with the Second Endians by notarizing the gardenscene as "atmospherically perfect."

(8) All this raises a more fundamental question. In resting their claims soemphatically on the seamless interdependence of the machinery in the sec-ond ending and the devices and themes that punctuate the novel earlier on—in relating, that is, the emblematic and thematic components of the secondending to analogical materials throughout the novel and thus investing thesecond ending with a retrospective weight that the original ending allegedlylacks—even the very best of these critics leave the disturbing impression thatDickens did not really know what he was doing before he talked to Bulwer


and that the real meaning of Great Expectations, which is essentially com-prehended in the revised final pages, flashed on him only during or after theKnebworth conference. It is of course possible, though undemonstrated andeven unlikely, that Dickens reread the novel after his chat with Bulwer orthat Bulwer alerted him to specific clues and motifs that had been anticipatedearlier in the book and could be usefully reapplied.s But the larger implica-tions in back of this assume a greater degree of ignorance or sloppiness inDickens than one may care to contemplate. Indeed, the best evidence againstthis is the memo to Forster already alluded to: "It is a pity that the thirdportion cannot be read all at once, because its purpose would be much moreapparent"—more apparent, it would seem, than a good many of the SecondEndians are willing to credit. And perhaps, when all is said and done, Bulwer'sremains a hauntingly intrusive and embarrassing presence. If, therefore, thetraditional second ending concludes my own edition of Great Expectations(with the first duly annexed in its finally rehabilitated form) as the only endingthat Dickens authorized and allowed to appear in print, its priority is beingrecognized grudgingly, with a certain bad conscience and bad grace, and asneaky desire to revert to the status quo that prevailed on June 11, 1861. Thatat least the proverbial one editor unconditionally prefers the original endingshould by now be obvious. It is also beside the point.

A Note on Bulwer's Meddling

A word needs to be said here about Bulwer's role in persuading Dickensto alter the ending of Great Expectations. Precisely what grounds he allegedfor tampering with the original can only be guessed at. All we know is thathe "stated his reasons so well" and "supported his views with such goodreasons" that Dickens chose to take his advice. Nor do we know just how farhe instructed Dickens in guiding him toward, the ruined garden: did hemerely suggest the bare-bones fact of a permanent union between Pip andEstella; did he volunteer details? One needs to raise these questions in fairnessto Bulwer; for whereas the result of his persuasiveness has in turn persuadeda lot of sophisticated readers, the instrument of persuasion has until recentlybeen steadily damned as a money-minded cosmetician, the Max Factor offiction, whose "imbecile suggestion" (in Gissing's phrase) Dickens shouldhave ignored. The reader has a choice of epithets: for "Lytton's imbecilesuggestion" read "the vulgar opinion of a tawdry novelist," "the opinion of afacile writer . . . devoid of genius," that of a "romantic humbug" and writerof "adventurous schoolboy romances"—"Lytton's most wrong headed inter-vention" is about the mildest you get.9 Else, if you happen to like the revisedend but object to Bulwer's interference and wish Dickens had thought of itall by himself, without Bulwer in the prompter's box, you take the line sug-

8. Greenberg, "On Ending Creat Expectations," 152-53.9. G. C. Rosser, ed., Great Expectations (London: University of London Press, 1964), 45. George Gissing,

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London: Blackie and Son, 1897), 179, and below, p. 629; HeskethPearson, Dickens: His Character, Comedy and Career (London: Mcthuen & Co., 1949), 296; SylvcreMonod, Dickens the Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 476; Bernard Shaw,"From Dickens to Ibsen," British Museum Additional MS 506 90 [1897] as quoted in B. G. Kncpper,"Shaw's Debt to The Coming Race," journal of Modem Literature 1 (1971), 341, the entire essayreprinted in Dan H. Laurence and Martin Quinn, eds., Shaw in Dickens (New York: Frederick Ungar,1985), 5-21, in which the essay is dated as begun in 1889 and Bulwer is teamed up with Disraeli as"a pair of romantic humbugs" (p. 10).


gested by critics like Dunn, that Dickens, while ostensibly buying Bulwer'sadvice, craftily sabotaged it by supplying a conclusion just murky enough todefuse Bulwer's fog-bomb. Of two leading Dickens scholars, one asks rhetor-ically whether Dickens "would . . . really have acceded to Mrs. Grundy inthe mask of Bulwer Lytton"; another urges us to "forget that Lytton originatedthe change and remember that Dickens wholeheartedly accepted it."1 Thefact that nobody could have taped the Knebworth conversation and that wehave no record of it has hardly prevented a nearly unanimous jury fromimputing Bulwer's advice to his fair-weather commercialism or his glib pref-erence for a conventionally comfy ending or both. Bernard Shaw's "Lyttonmoidered him [i.e., scared the devil out of him] for fear of the sales" sumsup the view of those who see the whole deal in terms of the cash nexus; butmost commentators relate the profit motive to the prevailing literary trendi-ness: one talks about Bulwer's "deference to Victorian sentimentality," an-other boos Dickens's "evident willingness to accommodate an importunatefriend and a weak-minded public."2

Of the hundred-odd commentators (hyphen optional) who have dealt withthe double ending, an increasing number have come to Bulwer's rescue inthe past twenty-five years or so, but only three readers, to my knowledge, haveoffered anything like a reasonable and sustained defense of his motives. Ofthe three (their pieces all appeared as early as 1970), one, Robert Greenberg,is in fact less interested in Bulwer's reasons for selling the second ending onDickens than in Dickens's reasons for buying it; the others, Edwin M. Eignerand Harvey Sucksmith, speculate sympathetically and plausibly on Bulwer'smotives in the light of his known literary theories.3 Greenberg predicates hiscase largely on Dickens's genuine belief in the soundness of Bulwer's judg-ment, as this is reflected not only in his reports to Forster and Wilkie Collinsbut in his going out of the way to take Bulwer's advice — unique in a writerwho, in Greenberg's arguable reading, "never seems to have had secondthoughts." In support of Bulwer's own integrity, Greenberg cites a frequentlyquoted memo by Dickens, written in answer to one of Bulwer's own torturedqueries about the propriety of killing the heroine of A Strange Story, Dickensgiving Bulwer the green light to go ahead and kill her by all means "so longas that, beyond question, whatever the meaning of the story tends to, is theproper end." Surely Bulwer, "having won this ready concession from his ed-itor for his own work," wouldn't then urge Dickens a month later to "violatethe 'meaning . . . the story tends to' by altering 'its proper end.' " (Whatever

1. Monod, Dickens the Novelist, 477; J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 278. Both cited in this context by Edwin Eigner; seen. 5 below. It has even been suggested that the second ending had been Dickens's idea all along, thatthe thing had been written before the meeting with Bulwer, of whom Dickens wanted no more thana friendly go-ahead. But why should Dickens nave lied so brazenly to Forster and so sanctimoniouslyflattered Bulwer? Are we to read his acknowledgment of Bulwer's godfatherly role to mean that Bulwermerely rubber-stamped a fait accompli? Thus Meckier, "A Defense of the Second Ending," 39-40.

2. Meisel, "The Ending of Great Expectations, 326; G. C. Rosser, Great Expectations, 45. In both DickensRomancier (Paris: Hachette, 1953), 446, and its translation, Dickens the Novelist, 476, Monod submitsthat Dickens's and Forster's suggestibility can be explained only by their sense of class inferiority towardsomeone of Bulwer's credentials. With respect to Forster, this ignores three obtrusive details: that hepreferred the original ending, that he wasn't consulted about the chwere on the best of terms; see n. 6, p. 51 1, above.

" "

ange, nd that he and Bulwe

3. Greenberg, "On Ending Great Expectations"; Edwin M. Eigner, "Bulwer-Lytton and the ChangedEnding of Great Expectations," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970), 104-08; Sucksmith, The Nar-rative Art of Charles Dickens, 110-65.

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