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associates him with the smell of scented soap, with which the man has a habit of washing his hands after leaving the court, as well as his creaking boots. Mr. Wemmick is introduced as having a “square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel” and later is described as having “such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling.” Wemmick, as Jaggers’s chief clerk, must keep his knowledge close. But this businesslike manner conceals another side to his personality. Whereas Dickens’s early critics—using realism as a standard—found these kinds of fanciful association to detract from his greatness as a writer, most readers, then as now, consider the vividness and imaginativeness of these descriptions as his peculiar genius.

Gothic Elements in Dickens

The Gothic was a popular late-eighteenth-century and Romantic literary form that united the characteristics of terror and romance. Fictions such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), and The Mysteries of Udolfo by Ann Radcliffe (1794), established the genre. Elements of the gothic in literature survived well beyond Jane Austen’s parody, Northanger Abbey (1817). In the nineteenth century the gothic eventually developed into related genres such as sensation fiction and the detective novel, and a new form of the gothic emerged at the end of the century, with novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Characteristically, gothic fictions employed the supernatural—ghosts, monsters of various sorts, such as vampires, werewolves, and other undead (Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein is a notable example)—to evoke psychological and physical terror. Gothic atmospheres and settings include dungeons, castles, and cemeteries, and its stock plots involve innocent maidens imprisoned by villains, as well as madness and secrets, aristocratic decay, doubles, and hereditary curses.

Although the gothic is supplanted by realism for most of the nineteenth century, one does find these characteristics in Victorian fiction. Robert Mighall claims that Dickens’s novels are the best evidence to the persistence of the gothic during its putative Victorian hiatus. Arguably the most gothic of all of Dickens’s fictions is A Tale of Two Cities. Dr. Manette is imprisoned in the famous Bastille prison by secret means for his knowledge of an act of brutality. He is driven to madness by his solitary confinement, and even reverts to his traumatized state in moments of trouble and psychic pain. His buried curse, resurfaced, causes his son-in-law, Charles Darnay, to be re-imprisoned. Darnay tries to keep his aristocratic identity a secret from his wife but is persecuted for his lineage and his uncle’s sins by the vengeful revolutionary Madame Defarge. The cemeteries where Jerry Cruncher robs graves for bodies to sell to the surgeons are another gothic element, in which Dickens weaves the ironic moniker “Resurrection Man” with the Christian theme of sacrifice, personified in Sydney Carton’s final act.

Miss Havisham, “the strangest lady that [Pip] has ever seen,” and her Satis House—both in states of moral as well as material decay—are the most obvious gothic elements in Great Expectations. Arrested in time, all the white bridal objects have become “faded and yellow,” including the bride within the bridal dress, who reminds Pip of both a skeleton and a waxwork figure he once saw. “Now wax-work and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me,” he recounts upon meeting the weird recluse for the first time. All natural light is shut out of Satis House, its garden “overgrown and rank,” the wedding feast moldering upon the dining table.

The secrecy of Pip’s benefactor; the “nameless shadow” that dogs Pip’s memory whenever he is in Estella’s presence; the revenge that Miss Havisham intends to wreak upon mankind through Estella; Pip’s sense that he is “taint[ed]” by prison and crime—all these details are Victorian echoes of