ABSTRACT
Dorothy Van Ghent proposes that two kinds of crime form Dickens’s two chief themes, the crime of parent against child, and the calculated social crime:
And so, she is led to suggest, the crime of the hero’s malign “foster-parents” in Great Expectations, Mrs Joe and Pumblechook, is their inculcating in Pip a sense of original sin. Pip’s treatment as a thing, manipulated for the gratification of the adult ego, is made even more stark in the foster-parenting of Magwitch. The linking of Magwitch’s childhood with Pip’s further suggests to Van Ghent how the two kinds of crime are “inherent in each other”: Magwitch is himself a victim of the social crime he inflicts on the child. She sees the ultimate cause or root of this vicious circle as “evasive, unless one would resort to some dramatically unmanageable rationale such as original sin.”2 Yet Van Ghent draws on a version of that rationale, or theological paradigm, in characterizing Pip’s forgiveness of Magwitch as an action “sufficient to redeem not only the individual ‘father,’ but society at large.”3
