Introduction

As a novelist and social critic, Dickens was an acute observer of professional life, its construction, its power and its effect on society. In Great Expectations, a classic Bildungsroman of social education, he explored the corrosive power of legal action separated from feeling in the professional lives of the lawyer Jaggers and his clerk, Wemmick, as seen through the eyes of Pip. Wemmick’s strategy for survival in Jaggers’ legal world is schizoid: the complete separation of feeling from professional acting, and this is enacted in almost every representation of him in the novel. Wemmick takes his cue from his capable employer, Jaggers, who throughout the novel eradicates all feeling from the law. ‘Get out of this office’, he tells a client at one point who is pleading that he can’t help his emotions, ‘I’ll have no feelings here. Get out’ (Dickens 1999: 524).