All references to Great Expectations are to the Penguin edition, ed. Angus

I have come to feel that Dickens, more than almost any other nineteenth-century novelist, is driven by his strong and intimate apprehension of the heft, texture and substance of things, by what I have got into the habit of calling, after Gaston Bachelard, his ‘material imagination’. The moral and social dimensions of Great Expectations, along with its narrative and linguistic construction, are rooted in, and in large part directed by a kind of intuitive physics, by a concern with the composition and decomposition of things. In part, what I shall be doing in this essay is looking closely at patterns of image and symbol. But I am convinced that Dickens’s writing is formed, forged even, in a kind of literalism, in which the word is never wholly immaterial, and figure and fiction never mere figments. The work of writing is a palpable work, that encounters, transforms and is itself transformed by bodies and substances, in much the way that Pip’s ideas about his parents are formed by the shape of the letters on their tombstones, ‘square, stout, dark ’ in the case of his father, and ‘freckled and sickly ’ in the case of his mother. (1.35). In Great Expectations, Dickens’s imagination is cast, to borrow from the Prologue to Henry V, ‘In the quick forge and working house of thought ’ (Henry V, Prologue, 22-3). ‘All the iron is in the fire, and I have “only ” to beat it out’, Dickens said to Forster in the last stages of writing th