Bent and Broken

Abstract

Abstract:

This essay reflects on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and what it has meant, and continues to mean, to me as a reader and scholar of Dickens. Beginning from the observation that students seem invariably to detest Pip, the essay explains how reading the novel hermeneutically, as a lesson for my own life, has helped me to ruminate the complex feelings of shame that I have long felt regarding my own working-class childhood, and my own Estella. What I suggest finally is that, while neither of Great Expectations’s endings is particularly happy, the novel ends with a muted but hopeful message about finding contentment, peace, and even joy despite being bent and broken