Catherine

Havisham

Considered by many critics to be Charles Dickens's most psychologically acute self-portrait, Great Expectations is without a doubt one of Dickens's most fully-realized literary creations. Work on Great Expectations commenced in late September of 1860 at what proved to be a peak of emotional intensity for its author. Two years before, Dickens had separated from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years; and several weeks prior to the beginning of this novel, Dickens had burned all his papers and correspondence of the past twenty years at his Gad's Hill estate. This action, in retrospect, can be viewed as the sort of spiritual purge (think of Pip's burnt hands/Miss Havisham on fire)—an attempt to break decisively from the past in order (paradoxically) to fully embrace it, as he does so resonantly in this work. The writing of Great Expectations, and by extension the creation of its protagonist, Pip, therefore, can be viewed as the kind of excavation for its author, the cathartic attempt to address the painful facts of his childhood—particularly the family's chronic economic instability, that culminated in his father's imprisonment due to financial bankruptcy. Also paramount in his psychological make-up were Dickens's consignment at the age of twelve to work as the child laborer at Warren's Blacking factory (a secret no one but his closest friend, John Forster, knew) and his subsequent separation from his family as the result—all of which took place over the course of two months. This period in the young boy's life, then, represents both the literal and meta-phorical "orphaning" and was certainly the crucible in which his personality was formed. This sense of primal loss, and fear of impending economic ruin manifested itself later in Dickens's own Herculean and obsessive efforts to busy himself (often simultaneously) as the writer, editor, and public speaker— as if this were the only way he could ensure himself of financial solvency.