Small Expectations, and our conversation resumed

As I suspected, my criticisms of the BBC's 'Great Expectations' drew more comment than anything else I said on Sunday. 

Given that the prosperous world trembles on the lip of a great precipice, with a real prospect of permanent and irreversible economic decline, is this reasonable?

Actually, yes.  Books such as 'Great Expectations' were part of the great moral revolution which made this country prosperous, ordered and civilised.  They are crucial to our civilisation.  Like all great moral books, it makes the reader envy the good characters their goodness, and want to emulate them . It made us recognise the good and the bad in ourselves  - in fact Dickens ceaselessly did this,  probably because he was himself struggling all the time against his own cruelty and selfishness, and loathed these things in others. I can never make up my mind as to whether 'Great Expectations' or 'David Copperfield' is Dickens's finest book. Literary types have always rather despised Dickens because he was 'sentimental' , which of course he was. But so are most of us.

A good modern example of the influence of books for good is  Patrick O'Brian's fine series of historical novels set in the Napoleonic Wars. Having read them, almost any thoughtful person will be a better human being, thanks to his or her encounter with Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin. Both men have great virtues (both also have terrible weaknesses, Aubrey – a genius at sea or in battle - becomes a hopeless fool on land and in time of peace).   Like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, the two together make one first-rate human being, a little like a marriage but without the sexual element. The reader, consciously or unconsciously, longs to meet with their approval.

I am just about to embark on reading 'Great Expectations' again because, while furiously checking the text to see if there is any justification for the BBC travesty, I realised how much of the book I had forgotten since I last read it, and how much the David Lean film now overlays the text in my mind.  Lean, for instance, completely omits the nasty character of Dolge Orlick, while making much of the wise and delightful Biddy.

Lean is, I think, truer to the spirit of the book than the BBC, who played up Orlick (He's a much more 21st-century type, whereas there are not many Biddys around today. But it's not as if there are not plenty of other horrible people in the book) and, as far as I could see, completely got rid of Biddy. 

But both versions are unwilling to reach Dickens's original bleak conclusion, in which there is no hope of Pip and Estella marrying. Public reaction persuaded Dickens to write a second, alternative ending in which the reader can, if he wishes, believe that the two will eventually wed. The closing words are plangent and haunting 'the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil  light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her'.  But they are directly preceded by Estella's flat declaration that the two 'will continue friends apart'.  I think there's no avoiding the fact that Dickens saw the story as a tragedy with no comforting ending, in which people destroy themselves through vengeance, snobbery and dishonesty.

And yes, why on earth did the BBC change a perfectly good pork pie, which makes sense in the plot, and is lovingly described before its disappearance is noticed, into a mutton pie, an entirely different comestible? I can't imagine that Mrs Joe would have served a mutton pie cold (ugh) and one gropes for any reason for meddling. You might think it is meant to show that the writers were cleverer than Dickens. But as they aren't, it doesn't. 

For instance, the opening of the book, in the churchyard cannot really be altered, because much of the dialogue between Pip and Magwitch doesn't make sense anywhere else. So why shift the encounter to a bridge over a stream, where the gravestones cannot be seen?

As for the character of Joe Gargery, the whole point about Joe is that he is full of humour, forgiveness and gentleness . Everyone should read his description of his own awful childhood, crammed as it is with deep, gentle forgiveness of his own appalling father,  combined with a determination not to repeat the evil done to him, which explains his otherwise inexplicable tolerance of his wife's shrewish behaviour. Then (this is very early in the book) there is the description of the game he and Pip make over eating the meagre bread-and-butter ration allowed them by the ever-furious Mrs Joe. It is just the way a patient and light-hearted person would deal with such a difficulty, and it is very funny. 

And the day when Joe comes to London to find Pip transformed into a an awful little snob is as a result one of mingled pain and hilarity – not the rather boring and obvious scene of sullen reproach portrayed in the BBC version. As I asked so often in my complaints about the new version of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', why take so much trouble to change things of this kind, when it would have been easier to leave them alone?

Increasingly, I think it is a justified fear on the part of the writers that, as they cannot do better than the previous version, and may well do worse, they will alter the story so that they are never actually put to the test, and cannot be directly measured against those who have gone before.

But look at what is lost here – perhaps one of the best, most sympathetic yet devastating denunciations of foolish class division that has ever been written or (in the Lean film) performed.

In fact it is really the evisceration and transformation of Joe Gargery which is much the worst thing about the new version, especially if you combine it with the crude agitprop alteration of Herbert Pocket into a Marxist-Leninist's idea of a snob, so much less subtle, and so much easier to ignore, and so much less interesting, than Dickens's  funny, clever approach to the same subject . In the end, the messing about with Miss Havisham  is, by comparison, trivial. You might have expected them to get the accents wrong, to get Jaggers wholly wrong (though what a loss that is) , to make Wemmick far grimmer than he is, to introduce a non-existent brothel and who knows what other silly changes.

I suppose that really such people don't like Dickens because he isn't an ideologue and he won't be dull. For many years the literary critics simply ruled him out of their 'Great Tradition'.  It has recently been fashionable to make much of 'Bleak House', not in my view an especially fine novel, though the opening is a joy, because it is as close as Dickens got to writing a 'literary' novel, that is to say one which it is a bit of an effort to read, and in which not very much happens for quite a lot of the time. I speak as someone who has repeatedly tried, under ideal conditions, to get past page 20 of 'Pride and Prejudice' and has found himself completely unable to do so. My eye starts wandering round the room, reading the conditions of carriage on the railway ticket I'm using as a bookmark, or the corner of the sports page of an old newspaper on a nearby armchair – yet I never read the sports page.

In fact, one of my last conversations with my brother involved him urging me to try 'Pride and Prejudice' again, (and also to make another attempt on 'Middlemarch', another of my failures, though oddly enough I stormed enthusiastically through  'Silas Marner' after finding it in a fading but beautifully-printed old edition in a secondhand bookshop in Norwich one winter afternoon).

Anyway, I suppose it's more or less true to say , while the pre-1914 generation who shaped this country's customs, morals and attitudes until very recently were formed by Dickens, (with the Bible and by John Bunyan's now-forgotten 'Pilgrim's Progress' in the backs of their minds) , modern Britain is formed by TV and soap opera. Apparently the New Britain cannot tolerate the continued existence of the old one, and , since it cannot wholly forget Dickens, has resolved to remake him to suit the world of Big Brother and the gap yah. 

This is greatly important. The furniture of your mind, especially the stories and poems that are there, makes you incapable of some actions and thoughts, and capable of others.  I think anyone who has *read* 'Great Expectations', and has allowed its characters to come to life in his mind, will be kinder, more forbearing and less vengeful – as well as less inclined to classify people by their external appearance – than anyone who hasn't.

I also think that characters encountered  in print live much more fully in our minds than characters who have been largely created for us by TV or films. Also, the more we get used to having the work done for us, the less we are prepared to do for ourselves. I don't think anyone in this generation, that is, born since colour TV invaded children's bedrooms, let alone since the arrival of computer games, is likely to make the effort needed to read their way into old-fashioned children's books such as the Conan Doyle historical romances that I have always loved so much.

As to why the older Pip could not have looked like a 21st-century male model , there are several answers. One, the TV version of the older Pip bore not the faintest resemblance to the younger one and seems to me to have been chosen by the casting executives precisely because of his extraordinary physical beauty, even though this was  in defiance of any justification for this in the text or in the younger Pip's appearance. This sort of thing, extreme and rather chilly physical beauty,  seems to be good for audience figures, as in the recent bizarre and excruciatingly dull film of 'Alice' ( also little to do with the original books)  which appears to have been a box-office success.   But the face of this actor also seems to me to be quite unmarked by the earthy experience that would have given shape and mobility to the face of a man who had worked for years in a village forge. I know nothing of the actor involved, but I would be surprised if his personal background turns out to contradict my belief.