A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Penguin) - Charles Dickens [441]
A typical trajectory for a young servant girl from a rural village would begin with a low-paid position in a nearby village. She would stay at that job until she had gained experience, and perhaps savings to buy better clothes, to make her suitable for a town job. Eventually she might be promoted from housemaid to nursemaid to lady’s maid. (Victorian employers preferred to hire country girls: they not only considered them healthier but also less apt to gossip because they knew no one in the community. Servants, of course, were privy to much that went on in the house.) An unlikely trajectory is that of the character Sam Weller, the manservant of Mr. Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel. Sam advances from “boots” (boot-cleaning) to valet.
Dickens held solidly middle-class attitudes toward the servant-master relationship that were shared by even the most liberal, reform-minded Victorian middle-class people, all of whom would have employed servants. Dickens’s views regarding the loyalty of the servant class to its employers find their way into several of his novels. Sam’s loyalty to Mr. Pickwick is rewarded at the end of the novel; he marries and retires from service but still lives near enough to Pickwick to look after him. Florence Dombey, in Dombey and Son, has a faithful servant, Susan Nipper, who also ends up comfortably married. Readers from all strata of the society enjoyed Dickens’s servant characters. Besides Sam Weller’s huge hit, the humorous Mrs. Sarah (Sairey) Gamp, the slovenly drunken nurse from Martin Chuzzlewit, who is given to philosophizing on life and death and constantly quoting an imaginary friend named Mrs. Harris, later became one of the most popular of Dickens’s public readings. In A Tale of Two Cities, Miss Pross is the loyal servant character. The narrator describes her bond to Lucie as making her a “willing slave.” Indeed, fidelity partly defines the Englishness of many of Dickens’s servant characters.
In Great Expectations, the representation of the relations between master and servant are more complicated, and, hence, much less idealized, than in many of Dickens’s earlier fictions. This complexity arises, first, as a result of Pip’s education and upward mobility, and second, due to the air of secrecy in the novel. Had Pip stayed in his old life of blacksmithing, he might well have married good-natured Biddy, who comes to work as live-in help for Joe and Mrs. Gargary after the latter’s assault and consequent paralysis. But, symbolic of his status as a gentleman, Pip requires a manservant. So, he says with a degree of self-irony, he “started a boy in boots—top boots—in bondage and slavery to whom it might have been said I passed my days.” Pip suggests that, because he’s young and inexperienced in the role of master, he creates a bit of “a monster” in Pepper (whom he dubs the “Avenger”), his servant at Barnard’s Inn. After the expense of purchasing the boy’s livery, Pip confides to the reader that he “had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.” On another occasion, he puts the irony of the power reversal in ever starker terms: “A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster [the Avenger] could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment.”
In addition to the ways class mobility complicates the master-servant relationship in Great Expectations, the numerous secrets that characters in the novel are keeping also give rise to complex depictions of those uneasy power relations. The grown-up Estella, returning to visit Miss Havisham, is told to come without her maid because the reclusive old woman has a “sensitive horror of being talked of by such people,” as Estella explains to Pip. Similarly, Mr. Jagger, the lawyer, also is