ABSTRACT
Great Expectations had to be good, very good. This is because at the end of the 1850s Dickens was going through an uncharacteristically difficult time, and on a number of fronts. The Ellen Ternan story is excellently told in Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman. Great Expectations intervenes in a complex, or one might say conflicted, way in these debates. The patterns of the novel may be traced first through its interest in fathers and mothers for origins - for authority or authorship, in effect to authorise one's narrative. If that reminds students of Wuthering Heights, another connection is that in this novel as well there is a conspicuous absence of mothers. Pip thinks Miss Havisham makes him - and makes him for Estella. Magwitch makes Pip - though not in quite the way he thinks he does - not so much making him into the intended gentleman as humanising or gentling Pip's feelings - not least towards him.
