“Filth and Fat and Blood and Foam”

This chapter suggests some of the ways that Great Expectations can be read as a conflicted text about the biopolitical administration of bodies and lives under the aegis of civil society and imperial rule at a time of significant transformation in human attitudes towards other species. Charles Dickens’s animated description of Pip’s Christmas dinner not only draws on a conventional comparative logic of animal figure—animals to humans, humans to animals—but also confronts readers with the materiality of animal death and the animal body as a commodity with an exchange value. Pip’s kinaesthetic experience of animal matter—“filth and fat and blood and foam”—becoming part of him, draws attention to the real and metaphoric relations between the animalized animals and the animalized humans housed in and around Smithfield market, in rookeries, workhouses, and Newgate prison.