Backlisted - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

Charles Dickens's late masterpiece Great Expectations is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss the book (and its celebrated author) are journalist and editor William Atkins and returning guest, novelist Lissa Evans. Also in this episode, Andy has been reading Spring by Ali Smith while John has been enjoying Max Porter's new novel Lanny.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)3'43 - Lanny by Max Porter07'23 - Spring by Ali Smith13'25 - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment, and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale at Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See

Home Club for details. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation.

And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted. Today you find us huddled together on the east coast of England, staring out across the marshes, beyond the sluices, dikes and mounds, towards the

low leaden line of the river. The evening mist is beginning to gather around our feet and a raw wind is blowing in from the sea. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. I was hoping for a chop house. Frankly, we didn't get a chop house, never mind. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today are the writer Will Atkins. Hello. Hello. Whose first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright Prize and whose second, The Immeasurable World, Journeys in Desert Places, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year this year.

And both books were published by Faber. William is a former editorial director of Macmillan, and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian and Granter. He is joined by, in fact, listed regular, Lisa Evans. Turn you up like a bug, Penny. Here she is. She's a writer. She's a producer.

She's a director. She's the author of three children's books and five novels, including most recently The Wonderful Old Baggage, published by Doubleday, and a book we can now happily call a Times number one bestseller. How is it? Do you come here in a limo? Everything's different now. Everything. She previously appeared on episodes one, Jail Car, 36, Patrick Hamilton, and 78, Edith Wharton.

So it's very nice of you to come back for episode 90. John, who are we talking about today? Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. His 13th and penultimate finished novel. It was first published in serial form in Dickens' own periodical all the year round, from December 1st, 1860 to the 3rd of August, 1861, in 35 weekly installments. And would you like to say to any listeners why we are doing a book so well known as Great Expectations and an author so celebrated as Charles Dickens? A very simple reason.

Before I'd had really the idea for the podcast, I reread Great Expectations in my 50th year. I decided it was a book I'd not read for years and just wanted to give it a go, give it a whirl. And I literally couldn't put it down. I was just completely glued to the thing until I got to the end. It made me think so much more about rereading. And also it made me think much more about Dickens and much more about how great literature is wasted on 18-year-olds at university. Because this is a book, as we we will discuss i think you have to have a few miles on the clock to really get the point of what this i would also i feel dickens

is a fascinating case study in how an extremely famous and well-known writer can still be neglected and we'll talk a bit about the ways in which dickens is constantly put in a box or opinions about him are revised or he's marginalised or people would like to marginalise him. We are here to not do that. We are here to try and account for why Charles Dickens won't go away, even if some people would like him to. So that's where we are today. But first of all, before we do that, John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading one of the, certainly one of the best books I've read, if not the best book I've read this year, leaving aside, of course, the great towering masterpiece that is Great Expectations. It's Lanny by Max Porter. Max Porter, formerly

publisher, now a full-time writer. He had huge success with his first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers. And this book bears certain similarities in that it is playing with the form. It is a novel, but it is a very formally ambitious and interesting novel. It's kind of a portrait of a family living in a commuter village, sort of an hour from London. The major plot point is that the eponymous character, Lanny, in the story is a boy of about 10 years old, who is very open-hearted, has obviously a very close and happy relationship with nature, wanders the streets freely. He makes great friends with an old, slightly cynical painter called Pete in the Village, which is a great pleasure to him and to Pete and to indeed Lanny's mum. So the book is in three sections. It begins with each of the characters having

their own monologue, including a very funny portrait of Lanny's dad, who is a commuter going into the train every day to work in the office and kind of dealing with uh dealing with the fact that he feels deracinated from his family life he's a bit of a dickhead but he's also quite an amusing and anyway what happens is that lanny disappears and the full weight of of horror of a child disappearing is visited upon this tiny village and without giving away any of the plot it's brilliantly handled the middle section of the book, you have to find out who the characters are through basically reading the narrative,

that you don't get Lanny's mum, Lanny. Lanny's never got his own voice in the book. He's always talked about. He doesn't have his own voice as a character. And eventually, the final section of the book is really, the resolution of the book is I think extraordinary in that he sets himself up to do something that is incredibly difficult to write a novel that is to some degree experimental I should say that throughout the book there is a

character at the beginning called dead papa toothwort who is dead papa toothwort is a kind of protean spirit of nature of place of pagan green man type figure that that literally is able to morph into every shape into every life now that might sound like it can't possibly hang together and you can't possibly have an emotionally and intellectually satisfying ending incredibly somehow he does it sometimes it's a bit like Lincoln and the Bardot with all the different voices, which I know you love, Lissa. Sometimes it's very like, for me, the book I would warmly compare it to is a book I hope we will do on Backlisted one day,

which is Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban. I do love that. And I think it's got a similar... Yeah, I mean, it ticks all my boxes. And it's warm. It's really smart. It's saying something so, I think, profound about the state of England now, the battle over the soul of rural life.

There's elements of Nick Rogue, you know, all the stuff. But if you love all that kind of stuff, you will absolutely love Lanny. It's annoyingly good. Okay, yeah. We love Max. We had him on the stuff. But if you love all that kind of stuff, you will absolutely love Lanny. It's annoyingly good. Okay, yeah. We love Max. We had him on the podcast. He's a fucking genius. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry too. But look at it. Publishing dream. It's short, ladies and gentlemen. Really short. Unlike Great Expectations. Andy, what have you been reading? Well, we're very on trend, aren't we, this week?

I've been reading Spring by Ali Smith, which is the third of her projected four seasonal books following the previous two, Autumn and Winter. And I talked, I think, about Autumn on a previous podcast when that was first published. Most of the things that I said about that book which I loved apply to this perhaps this one is darker than the previous two there are patterns emerging now which one wouldn't have been able to see reading just the first book and I also am full of admiration for the project as a publishing and writing project. Listeners might recall that I hosted an event with Ali a few weeks ago where she read from

Spring and one of the questions I asked her were how are your nerves because this seems to me to be increasingly a feat of daring to try and capture in the moment how people are feeling while you know increasing numbers of people are waiting and watching and have ideas about what you should and shouldn't do. All I can say is she's holding her nerve brilliantly in this book. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the beginning of the book and there's two reasons why I'm going to read it. I saw Ali read this part of the book a few weeks ago. She was amazing. I will try and do justice to how she read it. If you're listening to this podcast in the future and you want to know what it was like living in the UK in early 2019 or just for the previous three years, I think this

captures those feelings of frustration and rage better than anything that I've read to date. The other reason is the very first line of this book, Now What We Don't Want Is Facts, is of course the opposite of the very first line of Hard Times by Charles Dickens about what we want is facts. All right. Now what we don't want is facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition. What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth. What we want is elected members of parliament saying knife getting heated, stuck in her front and twisted. Things like bring your own noose. We want governing members of parliament in the House of Commons shouting, kill yourself, opposition members of parliament. We want

powerful people saying they want other powerful people chopped up in bags in my freezer. We want Muslim women a joke in newspaper column. We want the laugh, we want the sound of that laugh behind them everywhere they go. We want the people we call foreign to feel foreign. We need to make it clear they can't have rights unless we say so. What we want is outrage, offence, distraction.

What we need is to say thinking is elite, knowledge is elite. What we need is people feeling left behind, disenfranchised. What we need is people feeling. What we need is to say thinking is elite, knowledge is elite. What we need is people feeling left behind, disenfranchised. What we need is people feeling. What we need is panic. We want subconscious panic. We want conscious panic too. We need emotion.

We want righteousness. We want anger. We need all of that patriotic stuff. What we want is same old scandal of the alcoholic mother's danger of the daily aspirin, but with more emergency 999. We need a hashtag, hashtag hashtag line drawn we want give us what we want or we'll walk we want fury we want outrage we want words at their most emotive anti-semite is good nazi is great pedo will really do it perverted foreign are illegal we want gut reaction we want age tests for child migrants 98 demand ban new migrants gunships to stop migrants

how many more can we take bolt your doors doors, hide your wives. We want zero tolerance. We need news to be phone size. We need to bypass mainstream media. We need to look past the interviewer, talk straight to camera. We need to send a very clear, strong, unmistakable message. We need newsfeed shock. We need more newsfeed shock. Come on, quick, next newsfeed shock. Pull the finger out. We want torture images. We need to get them. We need them to think. We can get to them. Get the word lynching to anyone not white. We want rape threats, death threats, 24-7 to black female members of parliament. No, just women doing anything. Public anyone doing anything. Public we don't like. We need how dare she, how dare he, how dare they. We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people. We want their judges called enemies of the people. We want their journalists called enemies of the people.

We want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people. We want to say loudly over and over again on as many TV and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean. We need a good old slogan. Britain, no. England, America, Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Brazil. Insert name of country first. We need the dark web, money, algorithms, social media. We need to say we're doing it for freedom of speech. We need bots. We need cliche. We need to offer hope. We need to say it's a new era. The old era's dead. Their time's over. It's our time

now. We need to smile a lot while we say it. We need to laugh on camera. Ha ha ha thump. Man laughing his head off. Hear that factory whistle at the end of the day. That factory's dead. We're the new factory whistle. We're what this country's needed all along. We're what you need. We're not what you want. What we want is need. What we need is want. Wow. Well done, Andy. Well done, Ali. That's terrific.

That's interesting, that kind of litany. Weirdly, that's very similar to the long lists of that kind of fragmentary stuff in Lanny as well, fragments of things kind of turning into other things. I understand why people say are we going to be reading these in five years time and although i understand it my answer is i don't care she's doing something that most people can't do and don't do and won't do and that is attempting to as i said earlier capture the moment as it's happening and i think i said this about autumn and i feel i want to say it again about this book.

If you're minded to read this book, read it now. Read it in the spring. Read it now. Read it in this spring. Right now. It was written to be read immediately, and she's on to the next one. And she's getting ready for summer to be published next summer.

And gosh alone knows where we'll all be then. We'll be back in just a sec. Now look at here. Do you know what a file is? Yes, sir. Do you know what Whittles is? Yes, sir. Food, sir. Then you get me a file and you get me Whittles

or I'll have your heart and liver out. If you kindly let me keep up, right, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick and perhaps I could attend more. Now, you bring that file and them Whittoles to me in this churchyard tomorrow morning early. Yes, sir. And never dare to say a word about having seen such a person as me. No, sir. If you do, your heart and liver will be tore out and roasted.

Annette, there's a young man hid with me, and in comparison with him, I'm an angel. That young man has a secret way of getting at a boy and at his liver. The boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, but that young man will softly creep his way to him and tear him open. Say, heaven strike you dead if you don't. Heaven strike me dead if I don't. Now you know what you promised, young man.

Get off home. Good night, sir. That's awful. That's terrible. Honestly, are there any novels that have a stronger opening? Any films. I mean, the film is genius as well. Let's ask William.

Can you remember where you were or how old you were when you first read Greater Expectations? No. My experience of Greater Expectations is of kind of rediscovery rather than discovery, weirdly enough. Actually hearing those introductory lines from David Lean's film, I find incredibly moving. And I have a weird relationship with Greater Expectations, weirdly kind of sort of bone deep blood deep relationship with with the story with the with the novel and I went through this period in my in my 30s where having as most of us do gone through that phase of discovering the way that a novel or actually

any work of art but particularly novel, can act to transform you in the process of reading page by page, and the shock and excitement of that. And then I had this weird sort of crisis in my, I guess it was my 30s, where I ceased to find that excitement in novels. And I think I went back to Great Expectations, and particularly to its iterations outside the covers of the book.

So particularly David Lean's extraordinary film and the landscapes, the places of Great Expectations. And it was a way of kind of, I think, for me to sort of rediscover that excitement of my youth that I associated with with with fiction um and so that kind of question about when I first read it I don't know probably I guess in my I wasn't a sort of voracious child reader but I guess it was probably sometime in my my mid-teens or something like that but the reading that was most meaningful to me was was that rereading in in adulthood The reading that was most meaningful to me was that re-reading in adulthood.

And, Lissa, can you remember when you first became aware of Charles Dickens? It was Great Expectations. I was given a copy of it when I was about eight for a birthday. It was a bit beyond me then. I remember struggling through the early chapter. The word files totally bound up with me for the fact that my dad had a filing cabinet. And therefore the idea of being brought files in order to... It was confusing and hulks and whittles. But I went back to it at about 11 and for me it's totally,

totally infused with being a child, totally bound up with my discovery of the book at the age that Pip was. And it is the most vivid book. It is the most extraordinary book. And the central plot, I think we forget how great that central plot is. And just before we move on, I've got one anecdote from the film. I remember seeing my little nieces, aged about eight and six, sitting watching the David Lean film, totally, totally engrossed.

And Pip becomes, you know, a gentleman, as we know in it. And I remember I casually said to them, oh, I wonder where he got that money from. And they turned to me and they went, obvious, obvious. It was from Miss Havisham, obviously. And then I hung around at the moment where they discovered that it was Magwitch. Their little faces were a picture.

One of the great reveals. What a great plot. We'll talk about Dickens and plot later on. My rereading of this, I did this in the, you remember I read The Way We Live Now by Trollope. You do. In its monthly instalments. You did this.

I did the same for Great Expectations, so I very consciously read it as it was published. And the thing, certainly the opening number, the first few weeks, published in December, it starts with that incredible scene. This is all just in the one month. Then there's a Christmas scene that would have fallen just in the week before Christmas.

Quite a doer Christmas by Dickens standards. And then Dickens is sitting around thinking, oh, I've got to top that. What will I do? I know, Miss Havisham. I'll just fling her in at the end of the first number. So the opening instalment is just, he's already got you. He's already given you what you want in a Christmas sense.

And then he goes and he makes this wild steer off to the left into this gothic nightmare scene with the spiders and the cake and the woman in the wedding dress. Just brilliant. I mean, I first saw the film. I was probably four and I was completely terrified by it. So much so that I had nightmares and I couldn't have it mentioned. I thought Miss Tavisham was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. You internalise this book like very few others, that the sense of shame, the coarse common boy and looking at his own hands and seeing his own hands for the first

time differently, the details in this book. But his sense of being a child, I don't think there has ever been a more precise way of showing how children think than him looking at the tombstone of his own parents and working out what their appearance had been from the carvings on the tomb. It's absolutely extraordinary. And the gravestone of his little brothers and they're all neat and square and it's as if they've been born lying on the back with their hands in their pockets.

I have various commentators on Dickens to contribute to today's episode, all of whom, well, nearly all of whom, are authors that we have featured on previous episodes of Batlisted. And here's one, George Orwell, in his brilliant essay about Charles Dickens. And it is brilliant. It is a brilliant essay. And he's agreeing with you, Lyssa, here.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view i must have been about nine years old when i first read david copperfield the mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that i vaguely imagined they had been written by a child oh i mean italicized by a child. This dark matter in Dickens, you know, his childhood,

the damage, the wound of his childhood. And he has three goes at telling this story. The first is Oliver Twist. The second is David Copperfield. And then, in my view, he finally knocks it out of the park, kind of transcends it. It gets billed as a buildings roman, a novel of development. It's a novel written by a man in a midlife crisis.

He's about 50, just about to turn 50. So he's separated from his wife, Catherine. He's in the middle of his affair with Alan Ternan. He's at his absolute peak of success. But he writes this book, which is a book about not written by a young man, it's a book written by an older man, looking back at the kind of mess that he's made of his life. It's the last full novel he writes, he writes one more, Our Mutual Friend, which is another masterpiece. And one of the reasons I always recommend it to people is it's the least Dickens-y

reasons I always recommend it to people is it's the least Dickensy Dickens that I know yes yeah I mean I was thinking about Dickens's situation at the time that he wrote it he was as you say he was not a young man he wasn't well he was suffering from what he calls neuralgia facial neuralgia and also he was writing it between these two these two poles of his life at the time but the two poles of this novel which which is London and the marshes. So he has this place in Gad's Hill near Rochester. He has his home in London. I think he starts it in London and then finishes it in Kent. And I think for me, if I imagine this novel,

there's a tension between the two kind of geographical poles. So there's the Martyrs on the one hand, the kind of the Who Peninsula between the Thames Estuary and the Medway. And then there's London. And between those two places, there's this extraordinary nightmare edifice of Sartre's house. nightmare edifice of Sartis House. And the relationship between those three places, the kind of freedom represented by London, the different kind of freedom represented by the marshes,

and the absolute claustrophobic sense of incarceration that's exemplified by Sartis House. And those three settings, that's what's in my in my mind whenever i think of great expectations and i think about i think about light and dark lightness and darkness and white and black and it's one of the things that david lean's film which i suspect we're going to come back to again and again um does so beautifully it's a film of extraordinarily deep blacks and extraordinarily bright whites and it's true for novel as well yeah it's extraordinary what we normally do on bat list is we talk about the biographical data to do with with our author we are going to do that but i've what i've done

is i've outsourced it to a couple of other creative teams we're going to hear a little bit from former subject of Battlestead, Angus Wilson, explaining what Charles Dickens was to aliens. And I thought this was really, if we want to understand why we still live with Dickens in the culture, this seems as good an explanation as any. Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in a small, lower-middle-class terrace house in Portsmouth,

a busy seaport situated almost in the centre of England's southern coast. He died 100 years ago on the 9th of June 1870 near the cathedral town of Rochester, Kent, some 30 miles south-east of London, at his small country house, Gadds Hill Place, a property which, like most properties belonging to the well-to-do professional upper middle class, he had much, and at some cost, improved. He was a social critic, active philanthropist, literary editor, journalist, public speaker, talented actor, keen traveller, long-distance walker, by day with boon companions often as

the years went by at night alone, amateur but serious criminologist, amateur but less serious conjurer, hypnotist, devoted organiser of convivial social occasions and boisterous participant in them when the guests were children or old friends, particularly at Christmas time and above all on Twelfth Night. His deep vein of benevolence was only slightly seemed both publicly and privately by a capacity for occasional relentless quarrelling pursued with a masterful implacability. He stood to a vast section of Victorian public both at home and abroad as a symbol for household happiness. Now John what you were saying about the moment that Dickens

wrote this book, so he has this crisis in his private life for which he was judged, I don't want to say judged harshly, he was certainly judged at the time and has been judged ever since and continues to be judged, perhaps justifiably so. Angus Wilson makes the point that the idea that people would be talking about Dickens' later novels as his masterpieces, Bleak House, Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, they wouldn't have believed you because Dickens was phenomenally successful, the most famous writer in the world in the first 25 years of his career. And after that, it was perceived at the time that although he remained popular

and though he was never critically feted in that era, that he was a busted flush. And to some extent, it's why he goes out on tour for the last 10 years. He's like Bob Dylan. He's made all the records. Let me give you two contemporary reviews, okay? Dick from the Saturday Review, Dickens' comeback. Mr. Dickens may be reasonably proud of these volumes.

After the long series of his varied works, after passing under the cloud of Little Dorrit and Bleak House, he has written a story that is new, original, powerful, and very entertaining. It is in his best vein, although unfortunately it is too slight and bears many traces of hasty writing. It is impossible not to regret that a book so good

should not have been better. It is impossible not to regret that a book so good should not have been better. It is rather a story with excellent things in it than an excellent story. And then from The Spectator. The cloud of bleak house. The Spectator, which says, you know, the most successful of his works have been incoherent. If Mr. Dickens could only see how much he would gain

if he could take a vow of total abstinence from the Estella element in all future tales and limit himself religiously to vulgar life. We do not use the word in the depreciating sense. He might still increase the number of his permanent additions to English literature. This Great Expectations certainly has not done. Wow! It was, though, selling 100,000 copies a week. So he was making money, handover fist. He owned 75% of all year round. So brilliant commercial success.

But this is kind of, as you're saying, this has always been the issue with Dickens. Oh, he'd have been writing soap opera. You know, he was a writer for the people. I think these last two books are what I think his reputation probably is as a sort of writer to rank alongside Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, both of whom are massive Dickens fans. Lister, I know this is a theme you and I return to with some venom.

Do you think Dickens is not taken seriously because he is a funny writer? I'm not sure about that because I don't think most people who like him regard him as primarily a funny writer. I don't regard him as primarily a funny writer. He's brilliant at funny lines. But, no, I don't think that's the case. I think it's because you could

choose elements of Dickens that he doesn't do well. Most of the women he writes are complete rubbish. His plotting can be embarrassingly awful. The number of coincidences are appalling. There are terrible, terrible endings. Look at the ending of Our Mutual Friend. You just

want to put your hands over your head and wail. We'll get on to the ending of this book. You can pick bits out of Dickens which are no good at all. But then you're missing the point because there are such transcendently brilliant elements of everything he writes. And I think he's not taking it seriously because people are looking at the wrong bits. I found it fascinating.

I haven't read Great Expectations for definitely 30 years. There are things that surprised me going back to it, and just a couple of them. The first thing was, even at this late stage, Dickens hasn't lost the thing that he became famous for, sketching. So a lot of the time the chapters have been clearly envisaged as almost like a project. here's a group of people here's a place I need to get in there describe it and get out again so that anyone could pick this

one chapter up read it derive pleasure from my skills that I had developed earlier in my career so that element is still at play in how he structures a novel. The other thing that struck me, and we've talked about this before, I have a queasy relationship to plot now. I'm suspicious if there's too much plot in a book because I think it is there to take my eye off some flaw in the writing. If they hook me with the if they hook me with the story i feel tricked right but reading dickens plot is so important to dickens and it's not important to make you and this is a doozy to sell the ideas it's important plot is the raison d'etre of the novel and here is i found the

this piece this was written about 10 years ago by howardon. And I read this, I thought this is spot on. So I'm just going to read this. Great Expectations is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does. Since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance, but the profoundest moral truth. Back, back we go, in time and convolution, only to discover that the taint of crime and prison which Pip is desperate to escape is inescapable. Not only is the idea of a gentleman built on sand, so is the idealisation of woman that was at the heart of Victorian romantic love.

Great Expectations, in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation could be. That Great Expectations achieves its seriousness of purpose by sometimes comic means, that the language bursts with life, that its gusto leaves you breathless, and its shame makes the pages curl. That you are implicated in every act of physical and emotional cruelty

to the point where you don't know who's the more guilty. You, or Pip. You, or Orlick. You, or Magwitch, goes without saying if you are a reader of Dickens. How Dickens was able to lower himself into these black depths of the soul and still make us laugh is one of literature's great wonders. He took us where no other novelist ever has.

You don't have to like him, but you're impoverished if you don't. That is absolutely... Mic drop by Howard Jacobson. Frankly, end of podcast. That's very, very good. But the idea of both plot and humour being not add-ons but entirely integrated with the artistic purpose of the novel is is totally right there's Jacobson's expressed it brilliantly there's a great piece by Humphrey House who was a really

good critic of the novel as well he said the final wonder of Great Expectations is that in spite of all Pip's neglect of Joe and coldness towards Biddy and all the remorse and self-recrimination that they caused him he is made to, at the end of it all, a really better person than he was at the beginning. It is a remarkable achievement to have kept the reader's sympathy throughout a snob's progress. And that is true, isn't it? You want to hate Pip because he hates himself.

Yeah. And Dickens achieves pathos in this in a way that he doesn't in some of his other novels where, you know, he rings the handkerchief and we can hear the patter of teardrops. There is no more painful scene, I can think of in literature, than when Joe Gargery comes to visit Pip as a new gentleman in London and Pip feels Joe is beneath him. And it's comic as well, right?

I don't think of comedy when I think of this novel. Nor me. Nor me. I think it is regarded by some readers as kind of comic and by some readers as a novel of grotesques and a novel about plot. And, of course, it's those things. But actually on the sentence level

it's extraordinary he writes so precisely and yes with so many surprises and with such tenderness and and kindness and tenderness towards towards place as well as towards individuals and i'll read a bit from the first page. This is about the marsh country. This is where Pip grew up, close to where Dickens spent some of his formative years, very close to where he lived as an adult. Ours was the marsh country down by the river,

within as the river wound 20 miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard and that Philip Pirip, late of this parish and also Georgina, wife of the above, were dead and buried, and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried, and that the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes,

and gates with scattered cattle feeding on it was the marshes and that the low leaden line beyond was the river and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip. Do you know what it suddenly reminded me of? It's wonderful. The chapter at the beginning of Side with Rosie, Laurie Lee, first light,

expanding from a small child sitting in the grass. Anyway. I would like to now move from the sublime to the less sublime. So, as you know on Backlisted, I am a great fan of musical theatre and I'm never happier than when we do a book that's been turned into a musical. And Dickens, of course, some very famous musicals have been written around Dickens novels. Oliver, of course, Scrooge.

And I wasn't sure if there'd ever been a musical adaptation of Great Expectations. Then I discovered there had been. It had been about 25 years ago. The DJ and UKIP campaigner Mike Reed. Mike Reed is also the author of the musical Oscar which opened and closed after one night famously but anyway he penned a two-act musical adaptation of Great Expectations and it starred the young Darren Day in the role of Pip. There was another attempt at a musical in 1975 and I spent some time trying to track it down, see if there was any copy of it in existence, and I failed.

But the story goes that once it was in post-production, they found that the songs were, A, so bad, but B, interrupted the narrative flow to such a degree that they removed the songs. So there's a musical version of Great Expectations without any songs in it. Somewhere, somewhere in a vault. William, you're big on the adaptations. Other than David Lean, which, I mean, is not only a great film,

I think it might be the greatest adaptation of a novel into film, although we could talk about The Little Dorrit. Are there any other adaptations of this story that have worked for you? I think it's such a high bar. I think it's one of the great films. I think it's certainly one of the great adaptations. There's a South Park version. Pip's a recurring character in South Park.

And Miss Havisham, it takes some liberties. Miss Havisham has a kind of protectorate of robot monkeys i prepared a little quiz for today brilliant the fact that lisa's here i know lisa will be aiming to get a full five out of five but you are allowed to confer between yourselves this is a quiz that i've devised called havisham or not havisham where um i'm going to give you the name of an actress and you have to tell me if this actress has or has not ever played the part of Miss Havisham in a stage or TV or film adaptation of Great Expectations. Very good.

Okay. All right? Okay. I've thought of another song for the musical. What? Satisfiction. Oh! Yeah, go on.

She's on fire. I've got my read on the phone. Okay, here we go. So question one. The only answer I will accept is Havisham or not Havisham. Okay. Martitia Hunt. Havisham.

Havisham. Havisham. That's correct. Havisham played Miss Havisham. Martitia Hunt played Miss Havisham in David Lean's film adaptation, Melissa. Do you want me to read this? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is fantastic. This is from Alec Guinness, who played Herbert Pocket in the film, and who was a great friend. I didn't know how to pronounce Martisha. I think it is. Okay, right. Let's say it is. We'll say it is.

Well, Martisha Hunt was a great friend of his. She was an extraordinarily eccentric woman who played Miss Havisham. David Lean invites Alec Guinness to watch some of the rushes of the film. And he sees the scene of Miss Havisham showing the young Estella her ancient wedding cake. I watched it fascinated but was troubled at the back of my mind about something in Marticia's performance. And when David turned to me happily saying,

Well, I could only mutter, It's marvellous, but I didn't realise you put the sound on afterwards. What do you mean, he asked, suddenly worried. It's in perfect sync. I had no knowledge at all of filming and didn't want to make a fool of myself, so I just said, it's just that I couldn't see Marticia's mouth move when she was speaking. It looked as if she had a stiff upper lip. He obviously thought that I was mad. Then it dawned on me, a week or two earlier when I told Marta I was going to play

Herbert Pocket, she said, My darling, I have at last found the secret of acting on the screen. It is never to move the upper lip. Brilliant. Very good. So that's Havisham. Question two.

Helena Bonham Carter. Havisham's Havisham. Question two, Helena Bonham Carter. Havisham. Havisham, yeah. Correct. Played Miss Havisham in the 2012 film adaptation directed by Mike Newell and adapted by novelist David Nicholls. Paula Wilcox, best known for her performance in Man About the House. Havisham, I saw her on stage, I think.

You are right. Havisham, Paula Wilcox played Miss Havisham in the West End adaptation by Joe Cliff in 2013. I saw it. Anne Bancroft. I'm going to say Havisham, but I can't remember what it was in. Havisham, yeah. Not Havisham.

Lissa is correct. Not Havisham. Because although Anne Bancroft played a Miss Havisham-like figure in Alfonso Cuaron's 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, which relocates the action to 1990s New York, she plays a character called Nora Dinsmore, so technically it's not Havisham, I'm afraid. And finally, Jean Simmons.

No. And I will accept either Havisham or not Havisham, but you have to tell me why. Havisham, because at the end of the film, she becomes Miss Havisham, doesn't she? No, okay. That was poor. Not Havisham, because she plays Estella in the film.

Okay, so she's not Havisham, because she plays Estella in the David Lean film. But she's also Havisham, because she plays Miss Havisham in the 1989 TV adaptation which had Anthony Hopkins as Magwitch. And someone had the bright idea of asking her back nearly 40 years later to haven't seen it. No, I was being clever.

You know she droops around the house at the end. I read a piece quite recently saying that Dickens is falling out of popular consciousness in a way that perhaps he hasn't done before. For instance, when Oprah Winfrey chose Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities for her famous book club in the late noughties, I think, it was a tremendous flop. It's perceived as the only book that Oprah couldn't make work and the publisher in the States had printed up tens of thousands of copies of a special double-time edition of A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

They had to pulp two-thirds of them. I think we all grew up in an era when Dickens and clearly works by other authors were being adapted by the state broadcaster, the BBC, constantly because there was a centralised operation that it was in the national interest to reproduce the great works of fiction for a popular audience, those have fallen away. Far less classics are being turned into significant TV serials than even was happening 10, 15 years ago. And so the public's exposure to Dickens in a way that makes the characters vivid is draining away. I think Dickens is more challenging than perhaps we think he is. I mean, I don't actually think it has anything to do with the adaptations. I think

it's to do with the fact that the prose does take thought and time and it's hard. It's a hard read by the standards of an easy read. That sounds ridiculous. What I mean is it it's

actually more challenging than one would think yeah it's true i mean if you're reading if you're reading thrillers where it's it's it's page turning and it's it's plot i suppose what i struck me again rereading it this time was this how brilliant the structure is the marshes the first section is all all about the marshes and and then the arrival in London, Pip's arrival in London, that sense of London for the first time, I hadn't remembered just how vivid that is, all the smells and the details and the greasiness of the thing and all of Jagger's clients kind of bustling around on the street.

And then the final section goes plot-tastic. You've had sort of two mood pieces, London and the marshes, and then suddenly, you know, he's got to turn the story. And there are people who don't like the fact that the novel almost compresses too much plot into the – and I think it does. It's a tricky one. We should talk about the ending because he wrote two endings. The story is that he was persuaded by Bull Willet

and he changes it. He does write. It's a beautiful bit of writing, the last thing, where he, you know, no shadow of another parting and he meets Estella and sat his house. But I think the first one, he meets her on Piccadilly and that amazing final sentence. What's so interesting about those endings,

there aren't actually two endings, John. There are, technically speaking, four different endings to Great Expectations because he even got as far as moving words around when he does his collected edition ten years after the novel is published. And that final ending moves one word in such a way that makes it ambiguous again. So he goes from an artistically consistent ending to the one which we are most familiar with, where he and Estella are united.

To updating that to then go, well, I'm going to put back some ambiguity in here. I thought about this quite a lot while I was reading the book. And I was thinking, because I was reading a copy and I didn't know what ending I was going to get. Because I hadn't looked ahead, so I didn't know which one I was going to get. And I got the original ending. The first ending. Yeah. And I was disappointed.

Because they didn't get it. Because the revised ending in The Garden is a magnificent piece of writing. You know how Casablanca is a film full of brilliant bits which shouldn't work together and yet you wouldn't lose any scene because they all add up to Casablanca. I feel that about Great Expectations that although the original ending is more austere and morally consistent and correct you would lose the moonlight, you would lose the moonlight. You would lose the imagery of the garden, right? So the original ending is they cross on Piccadilly.

Can I read you the last sentence? Because it is one of the great, I think. From which ending? From the original ending. I think it's one of the great sentences in literature. Although the other one is pretty good as well. I'm going to read the other one. Yeah, you should.

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview for in her face and in her voice and in her touch she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than miss havisham's teaching and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be. Okay, so press your red button now and we'll see what your votes are. Here's the alternative, one of the alternative endings. I took her hand in mine and we went out of the ruined place. And as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now. It's the most beautiful thing. It's pretty and it's lovely and it's quite emotionally satisfying. But the psychology of the original sentence,

him realising that Miss Havisham didn't win and that Estella understands with a look, she understands what he has been through. That is a far more satisfying moral ending to it. The idea of Pip and Estella getting together makes kind of a nonsense of the whole book. I don't know what Mike Reid did. But my real point is you don't have to choose. Isn't it brilliant? We have both.

And I use this all the time. There's a third or even a fifth option, which is David Lean's ending, which was, I think they struggled with it as well. I mean, obviously Dickens struggled with it. And George Bernard Shaw says of the original Dickens ending that he messed it up. And he takes exception with the idea of its kind of moral consistency.

And he says it's marred by Pip's pious hope that her husband, I.A. Stella's husband, may have thrashed into her some understanding of how much she has made him suffer. Very sure. He says it's too matter of fact. But I had this, I'm not sure I kind of hold with it now, but certainly I used to feel that David Lean's ending was the ending that Dickens would have chosen,

with some caveats, had he thought of it. Can I play it? Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Because I'm a geek, I recorded this when I was watching the film again this week. Have we ever, sorry Lissa, have we ever had a better guest

than William? He's researched non-existent musicals and he's brought his own clips. It's very impressive. Very impressive. Debut of the year. So as in the final version, Pip goes back to Satya's house to sort out Miss Havisham's affairs after she has her accident.

And he finds Estella. She's been dumped by Bentley Drummle, her husband, because he found out about her, who her father was. And he finds her sitting in Miss Havisham's room with the cobwebs, with the wedding cake, with the curtains closed. I have no wish to laugh, Mr. Lowe. I'm truly sorry. No need to pity me. I've simplified my life. There's now no need to sell the house. It is mine and I shall live here.

Now, no need to sell the house. It is mine and I shall live here. I shall like it here, Pip. Away from the world and all its complications. Stella, how long have you been here? I don't know. Estella, you must leave this house. It's a dead house.

Nothing can live here. Leave it, Estella, I beg of you. What do you mean? This is the house where I grew up. It's part of me. It's my home. It's Miss Havisham's home. What do you mean? This is the house where I grew up. It's part of me. It's my home. It's Miss Havisham's home. But she's gone, Miss Taylor,

gone from this house, from you, from both of us. She is not gone. She's still here with me in this house, in this very room. Then I defy her. I have come back, Miss Havisham. I have come back to let in the sunlight. And with that, he tears down the curtains. I think that is a very persuasive third or fourth option.

Do you have a favourite Dickens novel other than Great Expectations, Will? This is the only novel I know well of Dickens. And I was thinking about dickens's reputation and his his legacy and i i don't really think about him very much i mean i'm interested in his relationship with with the places he he wrote about and and the marshes particularly but i think about this novel especially as something that kind of exists as an artifact very, very deep in the sort of fossil record. It's deep within us. And it's as if it's a,

this is a kind of fable that Dickens excavated somehow. And it's always existed. It's so archetypal. So the characters and their relationships and the plot seems so kind of intensely archetypal that i barely associate it with dickens and so the events happen almost as a product of place as you say right that they rise out of the marsh or they they ooze out of the walls of sars's house the idea that the place makes the person i mean again that kind of thing of the the poles of the the locations of this the novel and the margin the

marshes as a marginal as a place there's a kind of nowhere place a place without narrative and without without value and the the opposite of that being the mythical city, the citadel on the horizon that Pip is able to go to. Lister, you were talking about the flaws in Dickens that make the immaculate whole. I've got a copy here of John Sutherland's book Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? He takes specific events in classic novels. The first of these books was called Is Heathcliff a Murderer?

where he proves to you that Heathcliff is a murderer. There's an essay in this book called How Good a Swimmer is Magwitch. I'm just going to read one paragraph. Magwitch is the convict who has staged an escape from one of the great hulks, one of the great prison ships. At the beginning of the book, that's all you need to know. John Sutherland says, By Dickens's own private reckoning,

Magwitch is around 45 years old when he leaps on Pip in the graveyard. For a middle-aged man and a heavy smoker, he is in truly excellent physical shape. Diving into the current-ridden Thames estuary in winter and swimming several hundred yards to the shore fully clothed is no mean athletic feat. Doing it weighed down with a great iron suggests superhuman powers. Nor would it seem is Magwitch unique.

On his way to the graveyard with the required whittles and file, Pip means Compison, who has also gone overboard from the Hulk. Quote, he was dressed in coarse grey too and had a great iron on his leg. Like Magwitch, Combeison must be a remarkable swimmer. Now, what John Sutherland then goes on to say brilliantly is that is a forgivable error because Dickens was writing in an era where nobody swam much, where not much was known about swimming beyond splashing about. And what mattered was to get the characters from the Hulk to the shore

as recognisable convicts. I take issue with that, I think, because Dickens was a keen swimmer. I'd always imagined them wading. Unfortunately, as so often on Backlit, our expectations have proven greater than the time we have available. And here we must make an end of it. Huge thanks to William and Lissa, to our multi-tracking stand-in producer, Alana Chance,

and to our esteemed patron, Unbound. You can download all 90 of our shows, most of which feature Lissa Evans, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, battlisted.fm, and you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. Thank you and good night. See you in a fortnight.

John, we've had some larks together. What larks? What larksarks together. What larks? What larks, Andy? What larks? If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.