Christian: do you even read, bro? DECEMBER READS

A Dickensian treat for all my disaffected Millennials

DECEMBER READS

I am writing this in November. We have just put up our tree, and our home is already looking inappropriately festive given that we are British, and are therefore contractually obliged to be scandalised by any Christmassy venture before the 1st December. This year, I am as brazenly prematurely festive as the John Lewis Christmas shop, or the pubs that start playing Wizzard and Slade straight after Bonfire Night. For us, this year is different. By the time you read this post, our duumvirate will probably have become a triumvirate; our pair, a trio; our classic two-finger KitKat, a rare three-finger limited edition Cadbury Orange Twirl—as such, this post is both excessively long (as I’m unsure when I’ll next be able to write), and was written well before any of you gets the chance to even venture into the loft to dig out your Christmas decs.

So, here it is, the essential ingredient to any sufficiently literary festive break: a healthy dose of Dickens. Best enjoyed with a mug of something hot beside a crackling fire—or, at the very least, the dystopian Netflix simulacra, Beechwood Edition.

Merry Christmas, kind readers. And thanks for spending the year with me!

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (1861)

Who should read?: Millennials, left jaded by their own thwarted ‘expectations’, and Gen Z, who may feel they never had any expectations to begin with.

Key quote:

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”

Difficulty rating: 6/10

It was September 2008. Thousands of Millennials, me included, had just left school, and were about to enter The Real World. Like Oliver Twist on his pilgrimage to London, we were all off to ‘seek our fortune’, and, after years of being led to believe that the world was waiting with bated breath for us to burst onto the scene, we discovered that we had disastrously optimistic.

Our central problem was that we were kids of the absurdly prosperous Tony Blair ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ generation, marinated in the culture of Third Way politics where capitalism was kind, opportunities were everywhere, and the doors to universities lay wide open for anyone wanting an education (and regular boozy nights out at the Student Union). We are, famously, the participation trophy generation, a generation that never left a Sports Day without some kind of ribbon or medal for simply showing up. That September, many of my peers went straight off to university, promises of three years pouring themselves from classrooms into nightclubs followed by glamourous careers in the city ringing in their ears. You don’t even need to do any work in your first year, they told us, just focus on developing ‘soft skills’ to start with, like socialising at the Dinosaur Appreciation Society, or drinking Tequila through your eyeballs (an actual thing, apparently).

It was all supposed to be so easy.

I didn’t go off to university that September; instead, I had found a job in a department store. I wasn’t exactly the most dedicated of employees, I confess, and spent much of my time sneakily accessing the internet through the till point. One of the few websites I could get into was, underwhelmingly for 18-year-old me, BBC News—and that September the newsreel was dominated by the Darth Vader of news stories. The Global Financial Crisis. As I read article after article, it dawned on me that the prosperity that had so marked my teenage years had been built on sand; a foundation of subprime mortgages, predatory lending, and financial ‘products’ that no one understood, and that turned out to be worthless. When the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt on 15 September, it was widely understood that a recession was on the way. And with that, the rug of my own expectations, and that of thousands of other young people the world over, was pulled from beneath my feet.

I spent the subsequent three or four years somewhat black-pilled, veering from low paid job to low paid job, resenting all I’d been told at school about the cornucopia of opportunity that I would surely be presented with post-secondary education. To be honest, I was Big Mad. My expectations had been severely undermined, and, let me tell you, expectations are powerful things. C. S. Lewis understood this when he wrote in his essay ‘God in the Dock’:

If you’re shown a hotel room you’ve been told is the Honeymoon Suite, your expectations will be high. If there’s no plush carpet, spa and champagne, you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you’ve been told before the door opens that it’s a jail cell, you’ll be delighted to find even modest comforts.

Forget the Honeymoon Suite—we, children of the 80s and 90s, had expected the Super Deluxe Penthouse Honeymoon Suite, complete with hot tub balcony and perfect lighting for selfies, and we’d ended up at a Premier Inn in Milton Keynes. And not even Premier Plus.

I know you came to read about literature, and not the incredibly banal story of my early working life; however, I promise I’m not just being self-indulgent—there some relevance. You see, when I came to read Great Expectations for the first time a few years ago, I found myself identifying very strongly with Pip, and it didn’t take long for me to realise that the reason for this simpatico was down to the years of professional disappointment, and constant sense of having been promised something that remained tantalisingly out of my reach. While not born between 1980 and 1995 (unless the novel has time travel themes that I hadn’t quite tapped into), Pip’s dilemmas, troubles, and struggles are incredibly reminiscent of my cohort. Really, Pip Pirrip is as much a quintessential Millennial as I am.

When we meet Pip, he is a poor orphan (this is Dicken’s, after all), in line to be apprenticed as a blacksmith by his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery. Pip’s prospects aren’t terrible; though he can’t really see it at the start, Joe is the sort of mentor that anyone would be lucky to have, full of homespun wisdom, selflessness, and kindness—much like a Victorian Ted Lasso. However, one day, out of the clear blue sky, Pip receives an invitation that changes everything. He is summoned by Miss Havisham.

Miss Havisham is, deservedly, one of those fictional characters that have achieved a kind of mythical status, like Heathcliff, Moby Dick, or Barry from Eastenders. Once upon a time, Miss Havisham had been jilted on her wedding day and had subsequently decided, with an almost admirable commitment and determination, to not move on. Like, at all. Sat in her decaying mansion, in her decaying wedding dress, next to a decaying wedding cake, Miss Havisham is a walking, talking Hallowe’en costume. Of all the characters in the novel, she is the first we meet whose expectations had been brutally shattered, and she along with them. Her way of coping? A malevolent intention to shatter someone else in the same way. Enter: Pip.

Now, it may seem strange that Pip would come running when summoned by an elderly crazy cat-lady dressed in an oversized doily; however, social status is a powerful thing. Pip is a humble orphan, set to grow up to be a working man, and Miss H—regardless of how undeniably bonkers she is—is a lady of inherited wealth, and while her mansion, Satis House, is a ruin, it is still a ruddy mansion. So, when Miss H decides she wants to find a boy to be a playmate for her ward, Estella, she barely needs to lift a finger before Pip’s obsequious and ambitious great uncle, Pumblechook, comes running to her aid, offering up Pip for her service.

This is where things get interesting for Pip. As he engages with Estella and Miss Havisham over a number of years, Pip’s attitudes begin to develop a very particular flavour—that of dissatisfaction, shame at his roots, and an ardent, insatiable desire for more. It’s no mistake that Dickens decided to name the crumbling mansion ‘Satis’—a word taken from the Latin for ‘enough’—it’s a darkly ironic name for a place where desires are very decidedly unsatisfied, and wherein nobody ever has ‘enough’. Dressed in her rotting wedding dress, the lady of the house is a living, walking, honking great mascot for dissatisfaction, after all. Unfortunately for the young impressionable Pip, it is in Satis House, rather than his home at the forge, where (ironically) his character is, erm, ‘forged’. As Pip himself remarks about his time at Satis House:

I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed.

Which is less than ideal, as the ghoulish Miss H has less-than-friendly hopes for our young Pip. In a weird MKUltra-style experiment on the human psyche, Miss Havisham has been raising her ward for the very purpose of literally crushing the hopes and dreams of young men—just as she, herself, was crushed by her betrothed. In inviting an ordinary boy of modest means to her house to play with her ward, Miss H’s master plan was to ensure that the boy would get a taste for a more exotic, upper-class life (not to mention a more exotic, upper-class girl), only to make sure that these things were just out of his reach. Worse still, her desire is for that young boy to walk away feeling ashamed of his humble roots, and she has essentially programmed her ward to be an emotional sharpshooter in this regard. When Pip first meets Estella, he reflects:

She seemed much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.

His first impression is pretty much spot on, too. Throughout their acquaintance, Estella is always cold and harsh towards Pip, referring to him, condescendingly, as ‘boy’. However, as it turns out, Victorian males had just the same level of tolerance for the ‘hot-but-crazy’ girl as men of the twenty-first century, and so Pip takes it all on the chin, choosing to believe that Miss H intends for Estella to be betrothed to him one day. Unfortunately, the old adage holds true: pretty girls corrupt, worldies corrupt absolutely. Sadly for Pip, desire for this haughty, unattainable young woman leads him down a dark path.

CAREER-ING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

In a typically Millennial turn, Pip develops a serious case of career dissatisfaction. When he comes of age and begins to be apprenticed by good old Joe Lasso down in the forge, he agonises over the thought that Estella might one day see him working:

What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour, I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she would […] exult over me and despise me.

It is typical human nature, isn’t it, to try and impress the people who hate us the most? Due to Estella’s ‘scorn’ of his common background, and his ardent desire for her to see him as a suitor worthy of her, Pip begins to despise his prospects in the forge with Joe. At this point, the reader is like the overly-invested Who Wants to Be a Millionaire viewer, screaming at the screen in frustration that Pip can’t perceive what is right in front of him: that Estella isn’t worth his time, but that Joe’s mentorship and attention is gold dust. We can see how thoroughly good Joe is, and how thoroughly bad Estella and Miss Havisham are, and we are desperate for Pip to wake up and smell the decaying wedding cake. In a moment of retrospective clarity, Pip comments on his time apprenticed by Joe:

It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain […] I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

In this moment, we see Joe set up as the perfect antidote to the poison of Satis House—where Miss Havisham had tried to sow seeds of discontent, making Pip dissatisfied with anything that didn’t look ‘right’ to the upper classes, Joe was working double time to show Pip a different life which, while far plainer on the surface, was a life he could be content with, and where character could be cultivated.

While this is a hopeful moment of clarity, it is short lived. In an odd twist of fate, Pip comes into a significant sum of money via a mysterious benefactor and, in no time at all, is totally offskies. Due to this timely and convenient cash injection, he suddenly has what other characters refer to as ‘Great Expectations’. Being with lovely Joe is all very nice and everything, but the chance to live as a gentleman is far too tantalising a prospect for Pip—especially as it would be far more likely to impress his not-exactly-girlfriend Estella. In a particularly haunting moment, Pip is about to leave the forge for a new life as a gentleman in London and looks back through the forge windows at Joe going about his work:

There I stood, for minutes, looking at Joe, already at work with a glow of health and strength upon his face that made it show as if the bright sun of the life in store for him were shining on it.

In contrast, almost as soon as Pip leaves the forge, he finds himself totally lost, and reflects:

This first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.

But why is Pip so lost? Hasn’t he just found what he’s always wanted—this gentlemanly life of wealth and status? In this quote, it’s as if Dickens is trying to highlight to us, even before Pip embarks on his London-life, it was really the forge that contained the bright future all along. Not to give too many spoilers, but this does end up bearing out in the events of the novel; as it turns out, ‘mo’ money mo’ problems’ about sums it up. In order to impress his new friends and to display his social status, Pip ends up in lots of debt—because of course he does. In abandoning character development, money and the status it can buy is all he has left. Much like the lives of online ‘influencers’, Pip’s job ends up being to spend fat stacks and to look like a gentleman. He even ends up hiring a servant whom he also has to pay to dress like a gentleman in order to appear more gentlemanly himself.

On reading Pip’s experience, I found myself wondering—how many Millennials want to live this kind of lifestyle, where the main output is ‘looking right’ or ‘having the right stuff’ in photos? Is it any wonder that so many of us feel bereft of meaning in our lives when this is so often the case? In her book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, journalist Anne Helen Petersen comments on the Millennial phenomenon of consumption-as-identity when she writes:

You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.

Peterson concludes that this phenomenon—that is, the idea that our consumption choices define us—is causing ‘burnout’ in Millennials, something she describes as being ‘a failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves’. The problem with defining yourself by your consumption is that consumption never has an end point, more is always needed. An endless, joyless, Satis House life, full of lots of decaying, pointless stuff.

When Joe comes to visit Pip to witness this gentlemanly life of consumption, Pip is embarrassed of his roughness and tries to dress Joe up in clothes like his, but Joe declares that he prefers his forge clothes and hammer—in short, the kind of dress linked to his work actually making useful things, things of value. As it turns out, it was Joe all long with the ‘bright fortunes’, and the forge which held the Greatest Expectations, if Pip could have but seen it.

RELATION-SHOPPING

Poor old Pip’s troubles don’t end with money worries, however. His love life is, as the Friends theme goes, DOA—and, again, for oddly Millennial-esque reasons. It’s no secret that my generation has trouble with finding romantic partners. Our attitude towards consumption has, inevitably, carried over into our intimate relationships. Apparently, statistics now show that the most common way for couples to meet is online and, while this approach isn’t a bad way to meet someone in and of itself, it does have a very ‘flip through a catalogue to find a partner’ vibe. It’s very a straightforwardly retail approach. Perhaps we like it so much because it reminds us of when the Argos catalogue used to turn up just before Christmas, and we’d devour that bad boy like ravenous little tigers in pursuit of the perfect Lego set, or disturbing baby doll with the capacity to urinate (who remembers Baby WeeWee?? OK, just me then).

The reason this approach causes so many issues for those looking for relationships is the way it enforces the purely superficial approach of assessing potential partners purely on the basis of their photos, combined with the sheer volume of options. In her book Millennial Love, journalist Olivia Petter touches on this point when considering the typical experience of searching for a partner through said dating apps:

We have become very picky. So picky, in fact, that something as inane as height and eye colour can be the reason why you swipe right on one person and left on another. Nowadays, we’re so conditioned to find our perfect ‘match’ that if someone doesn’t meet our increasingly specific criteria we discard them […] the most insignificant things can be an immediate turn-off.

When you’ve got thousands of potential partners in the palm of your hand, the decision paralysis is real. The minute you discover that the person you started messaging with has any flaws whatsoever, why would you stick around when you could just start swiping again? Why would you settle when you could get stuck back into the Argos Love Catalogue!

The problem is, of course, that many of those options aren’t exactly real. According to some estimates, roughly 10% of all dating profiles are fake, often created by romance scammers looking for easy marks. Naturally, any scammer looking to lure in unsuspecting users is going to put up impossibly attractive photos in order to generate interest. One bizarre BBC podcast, ‘Love, Janessa’, highlighted the problem when investigating how the photos of one very attractive young woman had been used by thousands of different scammers and catfishers to lure unsuspecting men into online ‘relationships’ which essentially entailed them sending vast sums money to fake Janessa. Furthermore, many other users on these sites simply forget to deactivate their profiles once they’ve moved on or found a partner, and so tons of the swipes taking place right now are, essentially, completely pointless. However, unfortunately, most swipers aren’t aware of this, and the sense that there are so many hot options out there simply causes daters to keep looking for better and better options.

While our Pip doesn’t have access to Tinder or Salt or Christian Mingle, his Satis House experience imbues in him exactly the same attitude. Having been brainwashed by Miss Havisham to love the beautiful, aristocratic, but harsh, cold and unattainable Estella, Pip can’t see the perfectly good options staring him in the face. In fact, Pip did have another option, a great option—Biddy. After his sister falls ill, Biddy moves in with Pip’s family as a kind of Home Instead carer of sorts. She’s from a similar background to Pip, orphaned and poor, but is bright, sensible, and kind. She can even read, and helps Pip in his own self-improvement mission, prompted by his desire for Estella. On many occasions, Biddy acts as the voice of reason in Pip’s life, calling out his foolish antics, his empty aspirations and his silly obsession with unattainable women, and confronting him on his bad behaviour. Biddy is everything a good partner should be—and the sad things is, Pip even see it. But his warped taste for ‘better’ renders him unable to consider her as a serious prospect: his expectations for a potential partner having been so inflated by his depressing little playdates with Estella. When (rather fatuously) assessing Biddy at one point, Pip thinks to himself:

She was not beautiful,— she was common, and could not be like Estella,— but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered. She had not been with us more than a year […] when I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.

I mean, what an absolute Clown. The truth is, Estella was never an option for Pip—she was basically a honeytrap dating profile created by Miss Havisham to lure in unsuspecting young men and crush their dreams. But even if she had been an option for Pip, even he realises that she wouldn’t have made him happy in the way that, say, Biddy might have:

I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, “Pip, what a fool you are!”

Amusingly, in a moment that should be a lesson to all Millennials swiping through their grotesque romantic catalogues, Pip realises that he wants Biddy too late—he spent too long perusing and pining after a ‘ten’ and, lo and behold, the true gem in his life has already been snapped up by someone else. I don’t want to give any spoilers but, my goodness, the moment Pip sees Biddy happily settled with a really excellent match and laments his foolishness is one of the most satisfying moments in any book I’ve ever read.

Cue aggressive Beyonce-style dancing in tiny black swimming costume, accompanied by chants of ‘[i]f you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it.’

REDEMPTION

‘[M]y great expectations had all dissolved, like our own marsh mists before the sun.’

Eventually, everything goes A over T for Pip. When he declares, near the close of the novel, that his great expectations had all dissolved, we all heave a collective sigh of relief. After all, what did these expectations ever do for him, but tear him away from truly decent people, warp his view on life, and give him a major dose of main character syndrome? ‘Great expectations’ were leading Pip down the same road that Miss Havisham had walked all those years ago; he was being built up for a major fall, both romantically and financially—and, when expectations are as high as Pip’s or Miss Havisham’s, the disappointment thereof can be like a death. In fact, on first meeting Miss Havisham, Pip describes her as though she were a kind of zombie like creature, a manifestation of the undead:

Without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.

However, where Miss Havisham’s shattered expectations destroyed her, the end of Pip’s is his redemption. It is fitting that Dickens describes his expectations as dissolving ‘like our own marsh mists before the sun’, as the laying aside of said expectations causes Pip to be able to see clearly again, particularly with regard to the really good eggs in his life back at the forge, Joe and Biddy—even if a little too late to salvage his love life.

Really, Pip is a good example of the old Oscar Wilde quote:

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

So, Millennials, if you feel your expectations of life dissolving like a ‘marsh mist’ (or any kind of foggy weather condition), you might have cause to be thankful. ‘Great expectations’ seldom turn out to be as beneficial as they originally seemed to be, and often obscure the really good things in your life—when you’ve dropped your Insta-fuelled fever dreams and laid aside those thousand perfect (and likely fake) Tinder profiles, you might just have the headspace to spot the Biddys and the Joes that were there with you the whole time.

In short, be more Pip and less Miss Havisham about it all.