Tag: 19th century

Day 401: Literary Wives: Ahab’s Wife Or, The Star-Gazer

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Cover for Ahab's WifeToday I am doing something a little different–participating in a virtual book-discussion group with Literary Wives. Literary Wives is a group of bloggers who are wives and are reading books about how wives are depicted in fiction. Toward the end of my normal review of this month’s choice, I will answer some specific questions that appear in every Literary Wives review. Be sure to check out the other reviews by Audra of Unabridged Chick, Ariel of One Little Library, Emily of The Bookshelf of Emily J., Carolyn of Rosemary and Reading Glasses, Cecilia of Only You, and Lynn of Smoke and Mirrors.

I have quite got to like what appears to be a newish fashion of rewriting works of fiction from a different viewpoint. Although it has produced some mediocre results, it has also produced some gems, a few of which are Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, The Solitary House by Lynn Shepherd, and now, Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund.

I was somewhat put off by Naslund’s writing style in her most recent novel, The Fountain of St. James Court; however, it is imminently suited to her most well-known novel, this one, which is a reworking of Moby Dick. This novel is truly an adventure. It begins with a brief look forward to Una Spenser’s delivery alone in a cabin in the wilds of Kentucky of Ahab’s child, which does not live long, and the subsequent discovery that her mother has died in the snow while going for help. If this isn’t enough going on, while she is in labor, Una also has an encounter with bounty hunters looking for an escaped slave. Later, she helps the slave girl escape.

After this glimpse ahead in time, the novel returns to take a relatively straightforward path, beginning with twelve-year-old Una’s banishment from this same cabin in Kentucky. Una has faced some abuse at the hands of her father because of a difference in religious beliefs, so her mother sends her to her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Jonathan, where they live on a lighthouse island off Massachusetts. So begins Una’s fascination with the sea.

Although not every 19th century woman would think life with a loving, thoughtful, intellectually curious family confining, Una eventually finds it so, when she is sixteen. Her feelings are complicated by the arrival of two young men who come to prepare for the installation of a new light for the lighthouse. They are best friends Giles Bonebright and Kit Sparrow. Una knows she likes them both but is not at first sure which one she likes best. This fateful meeting is to affect the rest of Una’s life.

But I am writing nothing here that reflects how unusual this novel is. First, it documents the extraordinary life of an extremely uncommon character. If some of the other characters are not so fully drawn, you really feel as if you know Una. Next, in its occasional long asides and fits of oratory, it is a fitting companion to Moby Dick, with its dissertations on bits of whaling gear and its exhortations by Ahab. If any woman is a match for Ahab, Una is. Finally, its language and ideas are lyrical and soaring, as Una grows intellectually, meets her own life full on, and becomes acquainted with historical figures from her time and place.

If I have a caveat, it is that I feel the exceptional Una would have had more problems of acceptance in the actual 19th century American setting. In keeping with a theme about the enjoyment of life, not only does Una throw off debillitating experiences with little trouble or regret, but she also finds warm friends and acceptance everywhere she goes. It would give away too many plot points to discuss why I find this unlikely.

For Literary Wives: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?Literary Wives logo

This novel does not draw on a conventional idea of a wife, particularly for the time it is set. For Una, being a wife seems to mean giving unstinting loyalty up to a point, but this loyalty can vanish fairly quickly if the relationship becomes disrespectful, and Una’s natural ebulliance takes her over some terrible difficulties with relative (and perhaps unlikely) ease.

I don’t think Una lets the conventional notions of wifehood affect her at all. She just does what she wants and what she thinks is right, but her ideas of right are different from other people’s. For her, a husband seems to be the more modern idea of a partner. Certainly, mutual respect, sexual attraction, and love enter into this equation but not so much the typical 19th century idea of duty.

In what way does this woman define “wife”–or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

I don’t think Una is defined by “wife” at all. I think “person” is more what Naslund is interested in. In a review of this book, it was referred to as a feminist, earth mother, reinterpretation of Moby Dick. I don’t see the earth mother so much, but the feminism is certainly there. “What was a promise? A way to enslave the future to the past,” Una thinks at one point.

Day 397: Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle

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Cover for SylvesterOn occasion, I reread a few of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, which have been some of my favorite reading for many years. Just recently, I reread Sylvester, which in some editions is titled Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle.

The extremely eligible bachelor Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has decided to take a wife. His only difficulty is in deciding which of five eligible girls to marry. When his beloved mama mentions that she and her best friend made a plan for their children to marry many years before, he decides to go inspect the girl, his godmother’s granddaughter, to see if he might like her. Although he is warm and thoughtful to those he cares for, since his twin brother’s death, he has been aloof to others and comes off as haughty.

Sylvester’s visit is disguised as a hunting party, but Phoebe Marlow is informed by her detestable stepmother that the duke is coming to make her an offer. Unfortunately, Phoebe has already met Sylvester and took such a dislike to him that she used him as the villain in a novel she wrote. That novel is going to be published, despite all expectation. Normally, she would not expect him to recognize himself in a silly gothic romance that pokes fun at various society figures, but for the mention of Sylvester’s very distinctive eyebrows.

Fearful of her stepmother’s pressure and not understanding that Sylvester has no intention of proposing, Phoebe talks her childhood friend Tom into escorting her to her grandmother’s house. However, an accident and a snowstorm strand her and Tom with Sylvester in a small country inn.

After Phoebe gets to know and like Sylvester, she is horrified to find out that he has a nephew, since in her silly romance his character is a wicked uncle who wants to steal his nephew’s fortune. Another horror lurks, because Phoebe’s book proves to be a smashing success, much read by society members, who are all trying to identify their friends. Since Phoebe has never brought herself to admit to Sylvester that she wrote a book, she soon fears that people will find out she is the author.

Heyer creates delightful, engaging characters and puts them into silly and unbelievable situations, which is part of the pleasure of reading her novels. They are very well written, with entertaining and sparkling dialogue and a complete understanding of the customs, dress, and speech of the period. If you decide to read Sylvester, get ready for some fun. Many of Heyer’s novels have been re-released in the past few years, so they should not be hard to find.

Day 394: The Fountain of St. James Court or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

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Cover for The Fountain of St. James CourtI received this book in a First Reads giveaway from Goodreads. I haven’t read Naslund before, so I am not sure whether she adapted her writing style for this novel, but it took me awhile to accustom myself to it. She follows the activities of two artists, one Kathryn Callaghan, a fictional older writer in the current time, and the other a once-living person, Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, a painter known especially for her portraits of Marie Antoinette.

The modern-day story begins at midnight next to a fountain of Venus in a neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Kathryn, or Ryn, is taking her newly finished manuscript to her friend Leslie’s door because she can’t wait to deliver it.

The novel’s structure is a book within a book. Chapters following one day in Ryn’s life are interleaved with chapters covering the whole of Vigée-Le Brun’s life, which are from Ryn’s book. Both stories are about the theme of what it means to be an artist and what you must give up of your personal life to pursue your profession. The novel is said to be a deliberate variation on Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, but it has been so long since I’ve read it that I cannot comment on that.

This novel is contemplative, especially in the modern-day narrative, but the interleaving of stories in such short chapters slows down the pace too much. It literally takes until page 34 for Ryn to walk across the street and deliver the manuscript. Even with some chapters from the 18th century interleaved, the pace is frustrating. I found myself thinking, when is this woman going to make it across the street?

I found the story of Vigée-Le Brun’s life more compelling than the modern-day story, during which we follow Ryn’s every thought. She is an excitable, emotional woman who contemplates everything she looks at and repeatedly broods over the same things. We read about the russet and yellow fall colors or the appearance of the fountain many times. Nothing much happens all day until a late-night confrontation that seems artificially created to provide some tension.

I did not feel, however, that the two women, Ryn and Vigée-Le Brun, were two different people–they seemed to be the same person in different time periods. Vigée-Le Brun is slightly less emotionally excitable than Ryn, but their observations of the world around them, their attention to color and the details of design and structure, are very similar. Vigée-Le Brun’s narrative style, in first person where Ryn’s is in third person, is a little more formal as befitting an earlier age, but conversations in this story often sound stilted, and her first conversation with Marie Antoinette is positively sycophantic.

Naslund’s writing style, although sometimes vibrant and lyrical, often seems affected, particularly in the modern-day story. The copy I read was an advanced reader’s edition and it had quite a few typos, which I assume will be corrected. I was not quite as sure of some self-consciously unusual phrases, whether they were stylistic choices rather than errors. Naslund’s writing style tends to the unusual, to be sure, but I stumbled over some of these phrases. The only one I wrote down was an instance where some characters “made quick chat.”

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. I think the theme of women and art is worth exploring, although I’m not sure how much this novel actually explored this issue, despite its obvious intentions. I am actually curious about the alleged feminist leanings of Naslund and their effect on this book. Vigée-Le Brun has to put up with her father and then husband appropriating all her money and, in her husband’s case, only giving her a bit of it back as an allowance. When they divorce, he gets almost everything. Yet, she is determined not to let it bother her. I am not sure whether that is a feminist viewpoint or not.

However, the characters in this novel certainly reflect the “gift for pleasure” noted in reviews of Ahab’s Wife (which I am currently reading). The women go on pursuing their lives and dreams without much heed to their menfolk, they have cordial relations with those around them, they delight in color and the fineness of life. Their regrets and sorrows mostly focus on their children.

One thing that surprised me about the historical story was that Vigée-Le Brun hardly seemed to notice the causes of the French revolution or the revolution itself. There is one scene where a woman confronts her on the street and another where she grieves for the fate of so many. That’s about it.

Conversely, it is hard to believe that she would be shocked to the core by seeing a model of internal organs, as artists had been studying the body for hundreds of years. I do not know how much of this novel actually reflects Vigée-Le Brun’s true thinking and feeling. The danger when portraying a historical person is that you are imagining who the person really is–you don’t know–and you have no idea if you are doing them justice or injustice.

Day 392: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

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Cover for The Invention of MurderJudith Flanders, a British journalist and history writer specializing in Victorian times, has written an entertaining and exhaustive book showing how the Victorian fascination with murder grew and forced improvements in policing. In addition, it resulted in the evolution of the detective novel. Flanders begins this discussion with the interest in a few major crimes from before the Victorian era, explaining how public response changed during the Victorian age.

One theme of the book is class. Flanders effectively shows that the public interest in murder was for crimes that involved the middle or upper classes, with a tendency of the newspapers and popular songs and legends to elevate in class the murderers who were from the lower classes. Newspapers flagrantly made up “facts” about accused murderers that sensationalized their backgrounds or their crimes, including changing their social class. Even as late as the Jack the Ripper murders, interest was probably only taken by the public (since the victims were lower-class prostitutes) because of the number and viciousness of the crimes.

Flanders tells us about a series of panics that took place as a result of a growing audience for this kind of subject matter. Once a tax was removed from newspapers in 1855 that had kept the price high enough to restrict their circulation to the middle and upper classes (although the poor shared newspapers or picked them up in coffee houses), circulation greatly expanded and the papers found a new audience for sensationalism.

Even though there had only ever been a very few cases of murder by poisoning, in the early and mid-nineteenth century a poisoning panic resulted from a highly publicized murder case. In the ensuing rash of accusations, people were brought to “justice” when there was no actual proof that anyone had been poisoned let alone any proof that the accused was guilty of any wrongdoing. Unqualified persons were allowed to testify on the “scientific” evidence, including one Alfred Swaine Taylor, who for years testified to the presence of arsenic using a test that actually introduced arsenic into the sample through copper gauze. Even worse, the lower class “poisoners,” who usually had little or no legal representation, were invariably hanged, while the middle and upper class accused often got off completely or with lighter punishment, even if there was more real evidence against them.

Eventually, with improvements in the science of criminology and the rise of public indignation about some obvious miscarriages of justice, the police force was compelled to become more professional and the law to pass more stringent rules of evidence.

Frankly, our lurid interest in crime hasn’t changed, as shown by the prevalence of true crime shows on TV. A large part of the fascination and entertainment value of this history has to do with the details of the crimes as well as the plots of the many plays, novels, and penny dreadfuls that derived from them. Flanders has written an entertaining and lively history for anyone interested in true crime, the evolution of the mystery novel, or the history of advancements in criminology.

Day 383: The Hamlet

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Cover for The HamletWhen I got into The Hamlet a bit, I realized that a bastardized version of it had been released as a movie years ago called The Long, Hot Summer. But Paul Newman’s charming rascal is not at all the same animal as his original, Flem Snopes, a despicable man who rises in life using chicanery, cheating, and blackmail to wrest what he can from the poorest of the poor.

The Hamlet is part of a trilogy of novels about the history of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, beginning shortly after Reconstruction. In particular, it is about the rise of Snopes, the son of an impoverished sharecropper. It begins when Jody Varner, the son of Frenchman’s Bend’s most powerful citizen, Will Varner, leases a property to Snopes’s father Ab, suspected of being a barn-burner. Jody thinks he’ll be able to cheat Snopes out of his yearly crop by alluding to his alleged crimes at the appropriate time. But soon he is more inclined to fear that Snopes will burn him out, so he offers Snopes’s son Flem a job as clerk in the Varner store as insurance.

Soon Jody has lost his own position as manager of the store to Flem Snopes and Snopes has apparently taken over Jody’s standing with his own father. Somehow Snopes begins accruing valuable property and gives away many of the jobs in the village, over which Will Varner has control, to Snopes cousins, whether they are capable of doing them or not. Eventually, he makes a deal to marry Will Varner’s young daughter, the voluptuous Eula.

Life among the Frenchman’s Creek sharecroppers is grim, and the story of the rise of this gray, tight-lipped, cold man is told through a limited third-person narration that moves from person to person. This narrative style creates a sort of plural viewpoint of all the village folk and is combined with the intelligent observations of itinerant sewing-machine salesman V.K. Ratliff, who alertly follows Snopes’s maneuvers and understands all his cheats–or so he thinks.

This novel is created from a series of tales, and it is really about how the tales of an area form its history. It is elegantly written, reflecting a formidable intelligence and education, and is sometimes grimly comic. It comments on the decay of the South in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction, as Frenchman’s Bend is a run-down little village built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. The legend of gold supposedly buried on the grounds of the plantation plays a pivotal part in the story.

Day 380: Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush

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Cover for Lady Gregory's ToothbrushLady Gregory’s Toothbrush is more of a biographical essay than an extensive biography of Lady Gregory, one of the founders with William Butler Yeats of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and a huge figure in the Irish cultural revival of the 1890’s and early 1900’s. The title of the book is based on a comment she made that reflected her own inconsistencies, that is, her firm roots in the Protestant aristocracy against her support for the culture of rural, Catholic Ireland. When Playboy of the Western World was being produced by the Abbey, there was a huge uproar by Catholic nationalists. Lady Gregory remarked that the dispute was between “those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.”

Tóibín’s sketch effectively shows the contradictions in Gregory’s character. It would be easy to dismiss her as an elitist snob, but Tóibín makes very clear her contributions to Irish theatre and folk lore. She was one of the first people traveling to rural Ireland to collect Irish folk tales before they were forgotten. As well as writing her own plays as part of the movement to encourage and advance Irish culture, she collaborated with Yeats on his without credit, and some of her contemporaries believed she wrote the bulk of one or two.

An interesting detail from Lady Gregory’s life is how this redoubtable woman cossetted and gave in to Yeats. Tóibín recounts her son Robert’s indignation, for example, when he found that his mother had served Yeats “bottle by bottle” the entirety of his prized Tokay handed down to him by his father.

Copper Beech in Coole Park
The copper beech at Coole Park

Tóibín makes very clear the love she had for her husband’s estate, Coole, which she carefully preserved for her son while he was in his minority. There she entertained many of the great talents of Ireland, including Yeats, his brother Jack, J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey. The home no longer stands, Tóibín says it has been covered in concrete, but I myself have seen the great copper beech bearing their initials.

If I have any complaint of this short book, it is at my own ignorance (even though I have done some reading), for my lack of knowledge of the events of this time and particularly of the plays discussed makes it difficult to understand some of Tóibín’s remarks, particularly the furor around some of the plays. Having never read or seen Playboy of the Western World, for example, I don’t understand what was so upsetting (and indeed he implies that a modern audience may not).

Tóibín effectively and elegantly draws a brief but balanced portrait of this complex woman, showing us both her accomplishments and faults. Although I have read some of Yeats’ poems and some of Shaw’s plays, this short work makes me want to do more exploring around these figures in the Irish cultural nationalism movement and their works.

Day 366: The Pale Blue Eye

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Cover for The Pale Blue EyeGus Landor, a retired New York police detective, is dying, and he writes the account of his last case in The Pale Blue Eye. Gus is a lonely widower who earlier moved up to the mountains near the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter to help improve his lungs. But his wife died within a year, and his daughter left him soon after. So, Gus lives as a veritable hermit.

On an October morning in 1830, an officer from West Point fetches him. The body of a cadet named Fry was found hanged the night before, presumably a suicide, but during the night his body was stolen and later he was found with his heart removed. Superintendent Thayer and Commander Hitchcock wish to hire Landor to find who stole the heart. Landor is quick to figure out that Fry did not commit suicide but was murdered. A mysterious message clutched in his hand seems to indicate an assignation.

Landor soon realizes that his investigations on the reservation will be sorely hampered without the assistance of an inside man. So, he asks for the help of an unusual cadet he has met who is not in good favor with the academy–Cadet Edgar Allan Poe.

This is a clever novel with a macabre mystery that would have been completely to Poe’s taste. Just when we think everything is figured out, Bayard presents us with a twist. His portrait of the young Poe, bombastic, ridiculously romantic, and fearfully intelligent, is a great pleasure.

I would only fault the novel for a slow-paced middle section, and only because Landor doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Most of the plot is driven forward by Poe’s reports, which begin to dwell on his infatuation with a lovely young woman, Lea, the daughter of the post doctor, who unfortunately suffers from the “falling sickness,” or epilepsy.

Of course, Landor is doing something–he’s deciphering Fry’s diary–but since he doesn’t relate its revelations, his investigation seems to flag, and he barely seems to look into a second death, with a second missing heart. Otherwise, the novel is well written, with well-developed and interesting characters and a surprising ending.

Day 359: The Yard

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Cover for The YardThe Yard contains elements that should have made it interesting to me, particularly the period, but it didn’t really grab me.

The novel takes place shortly after the failure of Scotland Yard to capture Jack the Ripper, and the police are dispirited, while the public has grown scornful of them. The body of Detective Little turns up in a trunk at Euston Square Station. Detective Inspector Walter Day is put in charge of the investigation to the surprise of everyone, as he is new to the force.

We are not left in ignorance of the identity of Little’s murderer, as he is watching the case from the sidelines. He didn’t intend to murder anyone, but Little discovered his secret. Soon another officer stumbles onto his secret and also must be killed.

Constable Hammersmith is assigned to the case, but he becomes embroiled in another incident. A thief breaking into a house finds the body of a boy stuck in the chimney and stops Hammersmith on the street to tell him about it. Directed by his superiors to concentrate on the more important case of Detective Little’s murder–the death of a chimney sweep’s boy not being considered a crime–Hammersmith continues to search for the sweep on his own time.

Another case is preoccupying Inspector Blacker. Some men have been found murdered with their beards newly shaven. Blacker thinks it is unlikely that two serial killers are loose in London at the same time, but Day and Dr. Kingsley, the coroner who is interested in new forensics research, do not agree.

This first series book sets the stage for all the recurring characters as well as attempts to recreate the chaos of the Yard. I feel it is spread a bit thin. The writing is capable rather than brilliant, although I encountered enough clichés in the first few pages to irritate me. A technique used several times of flashing back to explain something right in the middle of the action seems very disruptive and only serves to stall the flow.

Some unlikely events disturbed me as well. That two police officers would stumble onto the killer’s secret in the space of two days seems completely far-fetched. A minor incident where a family claims to have made a day trip to Birmingham seems equally absurd. I can’t imagine even in these days that a trip from London to Birmingham and back would be something anyone would want to do in one day, but back then the trains were surely slower. Such a trip may have been possible, but that the police officers receiving this information don’t challenge it seems absurd.

Almost despite myself I found myself beginning to like the major characters, but I still don’t think I’ll be picking up the second book anytime soon.

Day 358: People of the Book

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Cover for People of the BookBest Book of the Week!

I read People of the Book several years ago and remembered that it was good, but when re-reading it for my book club, I enjoyed it even more. The novel is based on the history of a Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Part of the novel is envisioned based on what is known of the book’s history, while the rest is invented.

In the immediate aftermath of the Bosnian war, Hanna Heath, an expert in the restoration of old books, is asked to restore the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, a famous book believed twice to have been destroyed by war that was both times rescued by Moslem museum curators. The book is especially important because of its beautiful illustrations, as before it was discovered, scholars believed that old Hebrew books did not contain such illuminations.

While Hanna is working on the book, she makes observations and collects artifacts that will help trace its history. She notes that the book once had clasps that are now missing, collects an insect wing, and scrapes residue from staining.

Hanna also becomes involved with the man who rescued the book, Ozren Karaman, whose wife was killed during the war and whose baby son is in the hospital with a brain injury. As Hanna was raised by an aloof and competitive mother, though, she is poor at forming attachments.

When Hanna finishes restoring the book, she follows up with research into the clasp and the artifacts she collected. As she finds out about each item, the novel goes farther back in time, explaining what happened to the book and telling the stories of the people involved with it, until the creation of the book in 15th century Spain.

A poor Jewish girl named Lola works for the partisans in the forest outside Sarajevo during World War II after the Jews are expelled from the city by the Nazis and her family is shipped off to camps. Later she is helped to safety by the Moslem curator of the museum, who also has a book to hide. A 19th century Viennese bookbinder who is dying from syphilis steals the beautiful silver clasps from the book to exchange with his doctor for treatment. In 1609 Venice, a priest working for the Inquisition saves the book from burning but confiscates it from its owner. A young girl saves the book as the Jews are expelled from Spain in 1492.

These are just the bones of some of the absorbing stories that draw you along as Brooks imagines the history of the book. Each tale is vividly imagined and skillfully told, and they are all held together by Hanna’s experiences. People of the Book is a gracefully written and imaginative novel that emphasizes the contributions of multiple cultures and religions to the book’s creation and safety.

Day 356: Great Expectations

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Cover for Great ExpectationsGreat Expectations has long been my least favorite of Dickens’ more substantial novels, because I dislike the character of Pip. However, upon my re-reading it after many years, I’ve changed my opinion, because only in this novel does the main character undergo a complete change of his assumptions and values.

The novel begins with Pip as a young boy growing up in a vast and desolate wasteland of marshes. He is cared for by his ambitious and abusive older sister and kindly brother-in-law Joe Gargery. In the opening scene he is in the cemetery looking at his parents’ graves when he meets the escaped convict Magwich.

Under Magwich’s instructions, the terrified boy steals some food from his sister’s pantry and a file from his brother-in-law’s smithy. Magwich might have got away, but Pip tells him he met another convict on the way, so Magwich throws away his chances of escape to fight the other man, his sworn enemy.

After this odd and atmospherically fraught incident, Pip is soon engaged to entertain the wealthy but deranged Miss Havisham, an old woman who was long ago deserted at the altar and has lived the rest of her life in her bride clothes with her wedding cake rotting away on the table. Miss Havisham introduces Pip to her beautiful ward Estella, and from that time he is captured. He fails to understand, however, that Miss Havisham has brought Estella up to enthrall and torture men.

Pip grows old enough to apprentice as blacksmith to Joe, but his association with Miss Havisham and Estella has made him discontented with his lot. Soon, though, he is informed that he has “great expectations,” that an unknown benefactor has chosen him for his or her heir, and he is to become a gentleman. Pip and his associates assume his benefactor is Miss Havisham, and Pip thinks that she intends Estella to be his.

With only a few qualms of guilt, Pip throws off his childhood, including his gentle, loving friend Joe, to become a gentleman and chase after the dream of Estella. It is only through a series of misfortunes that he realizes he must learn to look at his life differently than he understood it and comes to appreciate his true friends.

I am not at all sympathetic to Pip’s desires and think the pursuit of Estella is a worthless one, but Dickens’ strengths are in his characterizations and complex plots. In addition to a cast of unusual, lovable, or repellent characters, he does a masterful job of developing Pip into a wiser and more honest man.