California’s central coast has been experiencing a foggier-than-usual summer, and Santa Cruz in the first week of August was no exception. Even at UCSC’s College Eight, high above the town and beaches, high fog lingered all day Sunday as Dickens Universe participants arrived—fitting weather for discussion of a novel that begins and ends (at least in one version) with mist.
This year, the adjunct meeting that has historically been held the weekend following the Universe was moved to the weekend before. Thus. “Victorian Futures” participants, as well as faculty and graduate students, had arrived Friday, and some departed Sunday morning. But a record total of 260 people were on hand for a week of discussion about Great Expectations, Dickens’s 13th novel and one of his most popular. This is the third time the Dickens Universe has worked with Great Expectations. It was the “inaugural” novel at the first conference in 1981, and in 1995, it was paired with Jane Eyre.
We were joined this summer by New Yorker reporter and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, whose wonderful piece on the event, “Dickens in Eden,” appears in the August 29 issue of the magazine. More publicity is also being planned, as independent filmmaker (and longtime Universe participant) Angie Mason and her crew spent the week filming a documentary that will be posted on YouTube to attract new Dickens enthusiasts. We were also joined by the high school essay contest winners, Rita Zevallos, from West Springfield, MA (accompanied by her teacher Marilyn Harriman), and Teresa Lewandowski , from Rockville, MD (accompanied by her teacher Justin Sybenga). The high school scholarships, consisting of tuition, room and board for the week, are sponsored by Rivka Yerushalmi and Anne Bay. The first community college scholarship recipient was Joshua Commander of College of the Redwoods. This award, which was started this year, is sponsored by Tom Savignano. Two other high school students visited this year from the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI). They were Taveen Coleman and Roselyn Cruz, accompanied by USC’s Jacqueline Barrios.
The 31st Dickens Universe week got underway Sunday in the Porter Dining
Hall. Master of Ceremonies John Jordan announced that we would start celebrating Dickens’s 200th birthday at our annual “summer camp” a little early. He explained that as Dickens would have been in utero in August of 1811, there would have been “great expectations.”
The Dickens Project, Jordan explained for the benefit of first-time attendees, is an international consortium of more than thirty universities. “What do we have in common?” Jordan asked. “We like to read Dickens. I don’t know of any other author that can sustain that kind of interest.” The week-long Universe is just one of the Project’s functions, and it is unique, Jordan reminded his audience, because of the presence of non-academic attendees—high school and community college instructors, summer school students, high school students, Dickens Fellowship members, and others who just like Dickens. “Scholars must make talks interesting enough so graduate students will pay attention,” he said, “but they also must speak to the general public.”
Jordan introduced and thanked the conference organizers, Jim Adams of Columbia University and Catherine Robson of New York University. He then introduced the keynote speaker, Andrew Miller of Indiana University. Two years ago, Miller gave a well-received lecture that, Jordan said, “created a ‘buzz’; unfortunately, it was given on Thursday,” This year Miller was scheduled on Sunday evening “so that the buzz can last all week,” Jordan said. Miller’s talk, titled, “A Stunning and Outdacious Tale,” argued that the novel is “defined by the optative mode.” Our past possibilities live within us, Miller said, but “how do we bear this understanding—these lives?” Pip is actually alienated from himself; he has an ability to create tales and “express himself in counterfactuals.” Thus what he is not is as vivid as what he is, Miller said. There are adults in the novel who regret their lives; Miss Havisham, for example, wards off the touch of the life she is not living. But Great Expectations is a reflection of the structure of society at the time—there was a change in social mobility. People were in a sense “trapped by recognition of all that has not happened,” Miller said, which is reflected by Magwitch’s adoption of Pip and Miss Havisham’s adoption of Estella; the older characters want the younger to have lives other than theirs.
After the lecture, films were screened, starting with David Lean’s 1946 version of Great Expectations and then moving on to Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 version and Tim Burstall’s 1986 Australian Great Expectations: The Untold Story, which focuses on Magwitch’s fortunes, shown in two parts. For those who were ready for bed at 9:00 after a full day of activities, the films were repeated during the afternoons.
Monday morning of the Universe always brings an introduction to the assigned “context classes” at 8:30. We were fortunate to be assigned to a group led by Patricia Pulham of Portsmouth University. If Miller’s talk did start a “buzz,” as Jordan had suspected, it was a buzz about Pip as a narrator vs. Pip as a character. Pulham started off the week by offering to explain some of the terms Miller had used in his talk: optative, counterfactual. She then asked questions that the talk had raised: “What is the older Pip’s—the narrator Pip’s—agenda?” This led, throughout the week, to other questions: How do we identify social class? What social class is the young Pip aspiring to? What does that mean? Can he do it? Can we forgive him for his actions on his way to being a gentleman? We ended the week in this class by discussing types of narration (including the older Pip’s comments on the younger Pip’s behavior as opposed to straight narrative) and the novel’s endings.
The Universe has moved, most likely permanently, from its longtime home at Kresge College to College Eight, meaning that lectures are no longer held in the Kresge Town Hall, a place this writer associates permanently with Dickens. The Porter Dining Hall, converted for the week to a lecture hall, is aesthetically less pleasing but logistically preferable, despite the need to descend a stairway to the auditorium (there is an elevator). After the context classes on Monday morning, we all made our way to the Porter Dining Hall, where coffee was served each morning in the upstairs Fireside Lounge.
Jonathan Grossman from UCLA was the morning speaker, and the title of his paper was “At Egypt Bay.” Grossman also explored the question of the narrator, pointing out that Pip plays two “tricks” on his readers. “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon,” Pip says at the start of the novel. “There’s ‘I’ at the center,” Grossman said, but Pip does not “enter into memory.” As a narrator, he has selected this moment later, after he has “entered into identity.” The event wasn’t always memorable, Grossman argued. Later events make it memorable. The second trick is that Pip never tells the reader exactly where he is, other than saying, “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.” With the visual aid of Google Maps, Grossman placed Pip in North Kent, pointing out that he lives in a “median strip” between two “high-speed transit corridors” of the time: the Thames and the Dover Road. Thus Great Expectations is “a road novel in an age of global transport,” Grossman said. Dickens’s interest in stagecoaches throughout the novel isn’t nostalgic; it’s a look at the “ramping-up” of public transportation. In 1810, when the novel is set, the stagecoaches anticipate the railroad just as the steamers in the later part of the novel anticipate ocean liners, all pointing to a new swiftness and regularity in the movement of people. All of this movement, Grossman argued, is reflected in the novel’s constant transportation of people. “How does one see oneself in a network?” Grossman asked. “Everyone is being transported. There is no controlling entity.” Thus Pip’s life story depends on the unseen transportation of Magwitch to and from Australia, and Magwitch’s story in turn depends on others crossing his path during his travels. The image is repeated in Pip’s travels up and down the river in the rowing skiff. And, of course, plans are undone when these two forms of transportation collide. But what of Grossman’s title? Pip never actually goes anywhere save back and forth from the marshes to London throughout the novel; at the end, he goes to Egypt. Why Egypt? Grossman asked. He referred again to Google Maps. Near Halstone Marshes is a place named “Egypt Bay,” where, Grossman estimates, the hulk was anchored at the beginning of the story. All of the traveling and intersecting in the novel includes an intersection of the global and the local.
After the morning lecture, participants repaired to workshops led by graduate students; these discussions focus on the text of the novel rather than the context treated in the earlier morning sections. Eight workshops give sixteen graduate students a chance to hone their classroom skills while discussing the novel; summer school and extension students also submit papers to the grad students for a grade. Grad students who are not assigned to classes took part in John Glavin’s Presentation Workshop, preparing them for their own readings of scholarly papers during their careers. Glavin, who is involved in literature, theater, and film at Georgetown University, has offered his valuable advice to students and faculty alike in the three decades he has attended the Universe. (“I have to give a speech to my high school alumni association at the 50th all-school reunion in October,” this writer confessed to Helena Michie of Rice University as we discussed stage fright just before her Friday morning talk. “Ask John Glavin for tips,” Michie replied without hesitation.)
Meals were in the readily accessible College Eight Dining Hall as they have been for some years; gone, however, is the lengthy walk from Kresge to College Eight (either good or bad depending on how much exercise one needs to walk off the meals). During lunch, rehearsals were held for those participating in John Glavin’s much-anticipated farce (a short play starring conference members young and old, scheduled for presentation Thursday evening). After lunch, a variety of activities were offered: seminars for the summer-school students, a high school teachers’ workshop, a new “Supplemental Seminar” open to all who felt they did not get enough information and insight about Dickens from the lectures and other activities; a 19th-Century seminar, a graduate student seminar, faculty work groups, and a re-showing of the day’s film.
The traditional Victorian teas, sponsored by the Friends of the Dickens Project, were served on the College Eight lawn at 3:00 Monday through Thursday, featuring a silver tea service, china cups, homemade tea cookies, tea punch, and fresh strawberries. Friends historian Elizabeth Walker, who has attended the Universe since the beginning, always has a collection of her yearly scrapbooks on display, and information about membership in this important group, which funds Universe activities, is made available during the teas. Participants then made their way back to the Porter Dining Hall for afternoon lectures, including Lillian Nader of Bates College speaking on “The Other Dickens and the Hogarth Sisterhood”; Helena Michie of Rice University speaking on “Adventures in the Archive, or, How We Came to Be Writing a Life of George Scharf, the Most Boring Man in the World”; local Victorian costumer Shelley Monson speaking on “In an Interesting Condition: Maternity and Infant Clothing in the 19th Century”; Jolene Zigarovich of Claremont Graduate University speaking on “Illustrating Pip and the Terrible Stranger”; and John Bowen of the University of York speaking on “Dickens’s Umbrellas.”
After dinner at 5:30, Post-Prandial Potations were held in the Porter Dining Hall patio, accompanied by a silent auction presented by the Friends of the Dickens Project. A number of other items were offered for sale, including T-shirts, sweatshirts and other novelties offered by the Dickens Project, books by attending scholars offered by the campus bookstore (including John Jordan’s new Supposing “Bleak House”), and antiquarian books offered by Riverside resident Tim Clark.
On Monday evening, there was a surprise presentation before the scheduled speaker. British actor Miriam Margolyes, a longtime Universe attendee, read passages from Great Expectations to a piano accompaniment (a handy piano has always lived on the upper landing of the Porter Dining Hall). Her performance illuminated both Pip’s first visit to Miss Havisham’s house, when he sees Estella for the first time, and his return years later, when he sees her grown into a beauty. She finished her presentation by saying, “Some say Estella was Ellen Ternan. I think Miss Havisham was Dickens himself.”
Margolyes’s enthusiastically received reading was followed by Teresa Mangum’s lecture on “Great Expectations and Late Depredations.” “Are you from Texas?” someone in the audience shouted when Mangum started speaking in her soft drawl. “North Carolina,” she responded. “Let’s get that straight right now.” Mangum started by thanking high school teacher Wayne Batten, who had given her a paper of his own to read, titled “Competing Narrative in Great Expectations.” Batten, she said, had tackled the question of the narrator by referring to the older Pip as “Mr. Pirrip” rather than Pip, and that she would do the same. Mangum estimates that Mr. Pirrip is approaching 60 (Magwitch, upon his return, is the age of the older narrator) and he seems to surround himself with older characters. She pointed out that the title is plural, not singular, and that the expectations “live in a space of generational difference”; they are in fact “youthful expectations vs. late-life depredations.” From young Pip’s perspective, for instance, the convict he meets has no expectations at all. Yet the older characters do have expectations; Pip is engulfed by them at Christmas dinner, and throughout the novel, he is a prisoner of others’ hopes and dreams. “We feel the presence of the author behind the narrator,” Mangum said, and Dickens’s expectations at the time were not good ones. He had suffered the loss of his brother and his daughter Katie, as well as suffering from his neuralgia. In addition, he was in effect asking Ellen Ternan to lead a life of subterfuge as his mistress, “low expectations,” indeed.
The Tuesday morning lecture, “Great Sexpectations,” was given by Claire Jarvis of Stanford. In introducing her, John Jordan praised the interest that younger scholars such as Jarvis are taking in the Universe. Jarvis in turn thanked the Friends of the Dickens Project for their support of this “strange, curious, wonderful Project.” Her talk pointed out that Great Expectations is the only Dickens novel that does not use marriage as a major plotting device. Rather, she said, there are “sexual delays” that encourage the readers to want something for the main characters that they never have. Pip and Estella’s relationship “may be sexual,” she said, “but it never ends in sex.” Pip’s “expectations” are related to his financial and social position but also to his sexual position, yet he never comes to terms with marriage, Jarvis said, and none of the marriages in the novel are presented as good except Joe and Biddy’s. Other sexual relations—those that are not conducted offstage—seem mechanical. Wemmick and Miss Skiffins perform a mechanical kind of sex, with his arm going around her again and again; the repeatability of Mrs. Joe’s fury is predictable and thus mechanical, Jarvis said, with Joe repeating only that she is “a fine figure of a woman.” Great Expectations is, as well as being a bildungsromane, is a “sensation” novel, Jarvis said, except that neither the readers nor the main characters ever get to partake.
After lunch and a full afternoon, the Herb Furse Memorial Lecture was given in memory of Universe participate Herbert Furse, a retired Chicago businessman who started a second career as an antiquarian bookseller. He shipped books back and forth to Santa Cruz each summer, donating part of the profits from his sales to the Project. He was also the impetus behind the formation of the Friends of the Dickens Project. Joe Childers of UC Riverside, the Herb Furse memorial speaker, said that he remembered Herb’s “ebullient presence.” Childers then launched into his talk, “’What do you play, boy?’: Violence, Masculinity, and ‘Beggaring your neighbor’ in Great Expectations.” Childers said that upon the recommendation of a houseguest (Jim Buzard, head of the literature faculty at MIT) he tried reading Great Expectations again immediately after finishing it, and he found that he kept returning to one passage that was, to him, “troubling but fascinating.” That passage, the book’s opening, kept returning to him while he was writing, the same way King Charles’ head kept returning to Mr. Dick. There was a new idea of a “gentleman” during the Victorian period, Childers said, and Great Expectations “recognizes this shift but is not comfortable with the new manliness,” which involved labor, money, and providing a home, rather than strength and aggression. Yet Pip’s identity, which he gives himself, immediately becomes linked to violence by the convict, and the violence continues in the fight with Herbert Pocket and even the aggressive card game (Childers explained “Beggar My Neighbor” in answer to a question following the lecture). Later, Pip’s association with Compeyson grows with the plot, and, Childers said, “Compeyson cannot be mistaken for a gentleman, and neither can Pip.” Masculinity, to the Victorians, should be “elegiac rather than combative,” Childers said. When Jaggers tells Pip and the other young men, “Behave yourself,” Childers argued that they “just don’t know how.”
On Wednesday morning: Kathleen Frederickson of UC Davis presented a fascinating lecture titled “Swamped.” Known for her work in feminist and queer studies, Frederickson introduced her lecture by suggesting that we might expect her to talk about those disciplines, but, she said, “I’m going to talk about rocks.” And she did. She started by describing the marshes Pip lives in as being “outside of human management,” in contrast with cultivated land, but she pointed out that some marshland was being industrialized in Dickens’s time, which included digging in the marshes, which turned up a curiosity to the Victorians—fossils. We know now that limestone and calcite are merely deposits of the remains of ancient, tiny beings. The phrase “mudbank, mist, swamp, work,” the convict’s description of the marshes at the start of the novel, could be a “version of the march of progress,” Frederickson said, referring to the cycle of existence, extinction, and future use. Orlick, who lives in the marshes and is covered with lime dust, is thus a kind of throwback, a “massive, ancient creature living in the swamp, yet not extinct,” she said. His attempt to “vaporize” Pip in the kiln would mean that Pip would return, as dust, to the marshes. Orlick would inhale Pip as vapor; Orlick would preserve his form, but Pip would not. This planned “private death,” Frederickson said, is echoed in the symbol of “public death” at the start of the novel—the gibbet. But even in that case, Frederickson pointed out, the hanging body disseminated into the environment. Frederickson’s talk included some fascinating related information, such as the fact that statistics were just being made available to the public at this time; “how the world works” was becoming available as statistical reporting, which made it possible for the Victorians to understand “overwhelming scenarios,” including the ideas of extinction, evolutionary survivors, Frankenstein’s monster, and fossils as a record of the past. In Pip’s world, Frederickson said, “it’s hard to distinguish survival from disappearance in the mist.”
Wednesday afternoon and evening were left free so that people could go downtown, explore the campus, or attend the Shakespeare Santa Cruz performances. Many Universe attendees chose to see the wonderful production of Henry IV, Part I in the outdoor glen theater, despite the cool weather. On Thursday morning, David Kurnick of Rutgers University spoke on “Stages,” which related not only to the previously mentioned means of transportation (and Dickens’s separation of the novel into “Stages”), but the theatricality of the novel: a stage, Kurnick said, can be both temporal and spatial. The “wildly improbable coincidence” that the convict appears on the day that Pip has his “first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things” is a theatrical convention (Pip is so distressed by his family’s graves and his situation that he has started to cry before the convict is upon him). Magwitch in turn is pure theater, twirling and then “tilting” Pip upon the gravestone. “Magwitch is not really frightening,” Kurnick said. “He’s a lot of fun.” Similarly theatrical is Magwitch’s sentencing, when a broad shaft of light coming through the windows is used as a “spotlight,” illuminated the accused, the law, and the audience, Kurnick said. And, of course, there is Wopsle and his Hamlet, which is, Kurnick said, “unavoidable.” This theatricality is ascribable to Dickens, not to Pip. Wopsle’s performance echoes Dickens’s “stylistic conventions,” Kurnick said. “Dickens wants his presence to be felt—showy, exuberant, worked up, theatrical.”
Thursday evening brought John Glavin’s much-anticipated Farce, which the playwright introduced by saying, “Except my marriage, there has not been a more important element in my life” than the Dickens Universe. (This writer echoes the sentiment, noting that she has been through three jobs, several relationships, and two houses throughout the three decades she has been attending; she often says the Dickens Universe has been “the one constant” in her life.) Glavin said he started making a list of people to thank, “and many of the papers given here were shorter than my list,” so he skipped it. He then revived a long-standing Universe tradition by having the audience sing “Happy Birthday” to Project founder Murray Baumgarten, who complained when encouraged to say a few words that “it would have been easier and less embarrassing to give a talk.” He refused to sit down unless “Happy Birthday” was sung in at least one other language, and a number of people in the room obliged by singing it to him in Italian. More singing: Glavin announced that “As Time Goes By” would be used in the farce, and he made the audience practice the chorus to warm up. Glavin then read off the cast of characters, which sounded a little like the names of the characters in Mary Norton’s children’s books “The Borrowers,” all of whose names were “borrowed” from somewhere: Maggy Veck, Edwin Snooze, Paul Sniff, Elizabeth Tubb, and so on.
The Farce begins. Two young men who had not been born when this writer started attending the Universe appear in the opening scene, rowing a skiff on the River Thames, scripts in hand. They are Handel and Herbert, who grows tired of hearing that his friend made up his own name. Past them comes Liz, hunting in the river. She pulls out a dead body and drags it offstage. Herbert is immediately attracted to her. “You’ll never reach her, Herbert,” says Handel. “She’s in a different novel.” The two then visit Mr. Waldengarver in his dressing room and tell him they will take over as Hamlet and Horatio. “Once you’re free of your own plot, Handel, what will you do?” Herbert asks. “Musical comedy,” Handel answers, and breaks into “I Just Met a Girl Named Estella.” The play within a play, so to speak, goes on. The queen, in a white satin wedding gown, tells Handel to “Play.” The King says to him, “I’m your second father.” Captain Vegetable appears but is discovered to be Arthur Clennam. “Who between Arthur Clennam and Pip is the real Hamlet?” Herbert asks. Pip claims a battle at sea in which several die. Clennam claims, “postpone, postpone, postpone.” Says Herbert, “Pip may not be the hero of his own life, but he’s the hero of theirs,” pointing to the audience. A blond soprano enters. The cast throws vegetables at the audience. There is a curtain call and calls for “Author, author.” John Jordan presents flowers to John Glavin; Glavin separates the bouquet and gives them to the cast.
The Farce was immediately followed by the Grand Party. Noted in The New Yorker as “a feast of cakes and tarts,” this yearly event is actually a stupendous party sponsored by the Friends of the Dickens Project, with lavishly prepared cakes, cheeses, fruit, wine, and other eatables and drinkables. Decorations included Satis House’s spiderwebs and spiders, thanks to organizers Bev and Clay Ballard.
On Friday morning, Helena Michie of Rice University presented “At Home with Miss Havisham.” She started with two epigraphs from the “Journal of Fictional Real Estate,” one for Elizabeth Bennet’s Pemberley and one for Miss Havisham’s Satis House (“Step back in time. Especially good for weddings.”) The houses, Michie said, “speak the meaning of the texts.” Elizabeth falls in love with Darcy because of Pemberley’s grounds and house; the tour she takes of the house is a tour of his character. Michie then outlined the difference between metaphor (it is like a butterfly) and metonymy (it attracts butterflies, as a flower). Butterflies and flowers are understandable when they’re together; the “target” is understood through its nearby image. Similarly, she argued, a home comes to stand for the people who live in it. As an example, homeowner metonymy for Miss Havisham becomes dark passageways and flickering candles. If we “read metonymically instead of metaphorically,” Michie said, “it makes the work of living in a place visible.” Similarly, for Pip, who is ashamed of his home and does not mention it at the start of the novel, we find out that, Michie said, “Home is Joe, and Joe is home.” At Satis House, Pip scans Miss Havisham’s room for meaning on his first visit; “We are trying to read the room as a clue to Miss Havisham’s story,” Michie said. We can believe the room, but can we believe its occupant? The cake is at issue. Pip never actually says there is a wedding cake on the table, yet countless illustrators have depicted an anachronistic three-tiered wedding cake (such cakes did not come in until the mid-19th century, Michie said). Miss Havisham identifies it as a cake, but Pip sees only “a yellow mass.” Does the cake symbolize Miss Havisham’s madness? To her, it is there, and metonymically, wedding dress = wedding feast on table = cake, but the cake could not have existed, recognizably, after all that time. Despite metonymical reading, “”Great Expectations is not a realist novel,” Michie said. “Don’t look for logic.”
The week closed with its usual festivities (not that there hadn’t been festivities aplenty throughout). On Friday evening, energetic auctioneer and Friends of the Dickens Project President Dan Atwell drummed up $3,000 for the Friends treasury during a live auction; John Jordan announced next year’s book as Bleak House, to cheers; and the Victorian Dance, featuring Angela Elsey and the Brassworks Band, was held. The Friends of the Dickens Project has as its logo a silhouette of people in Victorian dress above the line “Ever the best of Friends,” which of course is from Joe Gargery’s “Ever the best of friends, ain’t us, Pip?” John Jordan echoed Joe in his farewell to the attendees by saying, “Life is made of ever so many partings welded together,” a fitting farewell to those who have met, and parted, each year in the misty Santa Cruz mountains for the past three decades.
