A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Penguin) - Charles Dickens [437]
If you’ve read Bleak House or David Copperfield, you already know that Great Expectations is a rather compact novel by Dickens’s standards. Critics were divided about this condensation; some applauded it, others felt dissatisfied. The review in Blackwood’s Magazine, by Margaret Oliphant (May 1862), has little to recommend. She finds the novel “feeble, fatigued and colourless.” Oliphant interprets the brevity of the novel in this way: “One feels that [Dickens] must have got tired of it as the work went on, and that the creatures he had called into being but who are no longer the lively men and women they used to be, must have bored him unspeakably before it was time to cut short their career, and throw a hasty and impatient hint of their future to stop the tiresome public appetite.” Her assessment, however, is contradicted by other critics—in addition to posterity.
The Saturday Review’s anonymous review (20 July 1861) of Great Expectations was highly favorable (though considered it “too slight”): Dickens “has written a story that is new, original, powerful, and very entertaining.” The reviewer predicted, “It has characters in it that will become part of common talk, and live even in the mouths of those who do not read novels.”
In another appreciative review in the Athenaeum (1861), H. F. Chorley charged Great Expectations “with only one fault—that of being too short.” Chorley finds it “a work of Art arranged from the first moment of conception with power, progress, and a minuteness consistent with the widest apparent freedom.” He lauds, “There is nothing in English fiction, not even ‘the print of the man’s foot in the sand’ in Robinson Crusoe, fuller of engrossing and legitimate terror than the night scene of convict’s return, dogged from its first moment by Death. From this point to its close, the interest of the romance increases with a resistless and steady power never before attained by Mr. Dickens. [. . .] Great Expectations, we are satisfied, will add to Mr. Dickens’s reputation, and is the imaginative book of the year.” Similarly, Edwin Whipple, in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1861), could “testify to the felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story. In no other of his romances has the author succeeded so perfectly in at once stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers.” Even more creditable, according to Whipple, is the fact that “each surprise was the result of art, and not of trick; [. . .] the dénouement was still hidden, though confidentially foretold.” Upon rereading, the critic discovered all the hints—cleverly planted.
Critics of Dickens often comment on two apparently contradictory impulses in his style: an astute observation of detail and a tendency toward humorous exaggeration. Critics who used the standards of realism to judge Dickens’s writing admitted its humor but tended to denigrate his comic exaggerations—as well as the popular audience’s positive response to them. “[I]n Mr. Dickens’s many volumes how many characters would a fair critic deem wholly true to nature or to any reasonable conception of natural chances?” the Dublin University Review (Dec. 1861) asks. Another common critique is found in an anonymous review in the Eclectic Review (Oct. 1861): “[. . . Dickens] piles absurdities in rapid succession upon each other, like the very bricks of his humorous building. He sees in the most out-of-the-way objects grotesque, and queer, and comical analogies [. . .]. Indeed many will be inclined to regard them as one of his chief excellencies; on the contrary they are the vice of his writings.” But Great Expectations, the reviewer was pleased to note, had less of this “profusion of absurdity” than earlier Dickens fictions.