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In this novel you are either a victim or a bully. How could he not be a conformist? He is only doing unto others what's been done to him. When he comes unexpectedly into money, he seizes this social elevation as his right.

He becomes more, not less, deferential, angry not with his "betters" but with his guardian, Joe the blacksmith, for not being genteel.Ī timid little boy, cowed by his sister's beatings and as undersized as his name, Pip starts telling tall stories about his experiences, inflating his sense of self-importance. It's an extraordinary analysis of the pathology of class. Pip is "humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry" but nothing can describe the damage done to his self-esteem.

The woundedness Pip feels goes beyond words: it is "the smart without a name". Pip is changed for ever by this new vulnerability - "I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before". "Why, he's a common labouring boy!" exclaims Estella, the little girl up at the big house, when Pip is sent to play with her, mocking his clumsiness and the way he speaks. Dickens calls it the "metaphysics" of ill-treatment, what comes of being made to feel inferior. It is an intimate account of learning your place, of class as a feeling but also as character formation, something that goes on inside. No other novel I've encountered makes the connection between bullying and deference in English society so unflinchingly. There are pages in Great Expectations I still read with my heart in my mouth. And like many a working-class child, the better I did at school, the further it seemed to take me from home. They ripped up my belongings (a treasured George Best poster torn from inside my desklid, I recall), flushed my school-hat down the toilet, poked and elbowed me at random, and, with rather more originality, formed an anti-Alison club whose members sported home-made "AA" badges. My schoolmates certainly did their utmost to take me down a peg or two. I was a noisy, bouncy, chatterbox of a girl who loved putting her hand up in class, and I convinced myself that the problem was not just being brainy but also being "common". I'd never read a book before that turned me into an accomplice.Īround this time, my second year at grammar school, I was being bullied. As the adult Pip looks back on his obnoxious younger self, watching himself grow into a fully-fledged snob, he shares the most embarrassing, guilt-ridden confidences with the reader. Dickens's story of the blacksmith's boy taken from his sphere by a mysterious benefactor to be made into a gentleman made me squirm. "It is a miserable thing to be ashamed of home," Pip, the hero of Great Expectations, tells us, and I was amazed to read a book in which such secret, agonising sentiments were displayed. Do children still worry about becoming snobs? At 13 I was terrified of putting on airs and graces and of looking down on where I came from.