Matching Tracksuits

Jaggers — the name just seems to reflect the character. Jagged and dagger-like. There is nothing rounded-off or soft about that man. He is all angles and sharp edges. Like a dagger he seems to cut straight to the heart of most matters. He’s all business at all times. “I am paid for my services or I wouldn’t render them,” he says to Pip.

And yet he takes the care to worry about Pip and his interactions with Drummle, warning him to keep his distance.  In addition, we find in chapter 51, we read

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power: “I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced. Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is still saved.” Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was cleared.”

Here we see him not standing unaffected in the the horror of Victorian London but rather moved to save the one child he can save.

So why that hard, jagged exterior? Perhaps it’s an understandable cynicism about the number of children “he saw in his daily business life [whom] he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.” He has literally seen it all — probably even executions of kids — and it has made him cynical about the level of “justice” the system seems to be metes out to the less fortunate. He knows that a child born into poverty in Victorian England is a child destined to suffer for her entire life. He knows that such poverty in London leads almost always in one direction to prison. The word choice in describing this is so effective as well: he sees them “as so much spawn,” just children produced without thought, without worry about the future or consequences. They’re no more important as individuals as newly-spawned fish in a hatchery, and they’re as easily destroyed.

I wonder if this cynicism reflects Dickens’s own cynicism.

The kids are reading Great Expectations, and this week we’ll be working on how Dickens creates such masterfully drawn and memorable characters.

Two of the characters we’re looking at are Joe Gargery, Pip’s step-father, and his wife whom Pip never calls anything other than “Mrs. Joe.” We first meet her in chapter one, but it’s in the next chapter that we get some background information:

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life.

We get a lot of information in that passage, but since it’s through Pip’s eyes, he fails to see the nuance. Pip says that “she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand” but he also admits that Joe is “a sort of Hercules in strength.” The question then arises: why does Joe allow Mrs. Joe to be abusive both to him and Pip? If we look at what she faced, a few things come into focus: at twenty, she was forced to raise her little brother as her parents joined five of her siblings in the church graveyard. Joe married her because otherwise, a single woman with her infant brother to raise, she would have had most likely to turn to prostitution to support them. Perhaps this has something to do with it.

Students today finished working on the enigmatic twenty-fourth chapter of Mockingbird, which includes this passage that stumps all the kids every year:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that [head] of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

That last line — “His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?” — always leaves students flummoxed, and this year was no exception.

What makes this passage so tricky is the intentional pronoun/antecedent that those in the conversation are employing. Like good, genteel Southern ladies, they can’t be said to be gossiping since they’re not naming names, and no true lady would gossip. But that is of course what they’re doing, and though they’re not using anyone’s name,

Few chapters are as initially bewildering as the tea party scene in chapter 24 of Mockingbird. It makes little sense because the women are all intentionally being somewhat obtuse, and while they all understand what they’re talking about, Scout is completely lost — as are most of the students.

Our first task was to break it into manageable sections. Afterward, we focused on chunk 1, which is about some previously unknown character named J. Grimes Everett and someone or something known as “those poor Mrunas.”

It’s all a mystery to them, and they work through it meticulously, discovering things here and there with me walking around offering a bit of guidance.

“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What is the antecedent of ’em in that sentence?” I ask one group.

“Mrs. Merriweather says, ‘Not a white person’ll go near ’em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.’ What two important inferences can we make from this statement?” I ask another group.

We’ll finish up the work tomorrow.