London in Great Expectations
We look forward to Angela Harris’s course on London in Literature, 10 September to 19 November 2025. Here Angela offers some thoughts on London in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), which we will study on the course.
London and the Meritocratic Self in Great Expectations
In Great Expectations we first encounter London through Pip’s experience of Smithfield Market at the beginning of the nineteeth century. He finds it a disgusting place where livestock are traded.
‘So, I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison.’*
It is as though the grime of Smithfield market infects Pip, as it seems to ‘stick’ to him. Self and city intertwine and make Pip feel that he, himself, is now filthy. Reading this, we might expect that Dickens will set up an opposition between the wholesome countryside and the corrupting city, but this is not so. Pip seeks an escape from the ‘smear’ of Smithfield by turning towards the great and beautiful dome of Saint Pauls – which Dickens himself loved to look at from his Kentish Town residence and curiously called ‘the real London’. Pursuing ‘the real London’, Pip nevertheless ends up at Newgate Prison. For a stranger in a strange city, London is dirty, beautiful, full of promise and fiendishly difficult to navigate.
What is London in Great Expectations? The novel is about social advancement and how the glittering city of London seems, illusively, to offer this. And, on the other hand, with its overcrowding and poverty, the city positively requires its citizens to seek this. Like Frances Burney’s Evelina, this novel betrays an underlying desire for social wish-fulfilment. Burney gave us a heroine who triumphs over the various London scenes, and her text closes when Evelina wins her father’s recognition as well as an advantageous marriage. Now, Dickens seems to bestow a comparably rosy fortune on Pip rather quickly in Volume 1, but goes on to undermine the wish-fulfilment narrative thoroughly, until Pip comes full circle and even momentarily desires a life in the marshes with Biddy where he began.
Whether in London or in the marshes, social advancement is upheld as admirable, but, for Dickens, it must be done with honesty and thrift. Dickens offers us two happy men who represent this way: Joe in the marshlands and Wemmick in London. Each man advises and guides Pip as they seek to better themselves in different ways. Neither offers a perfect model, but Dickens emphasises that it is their honesty and humble thrift that matters, and rewards them with happy marriages at the end of the novel.
* Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; OUP, 2008), p. 151.
London in Literature I with Angela Harris. Live online course, 18 September to 19 November 2025.
