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Liwen Zhang, Great Expectations and Dickens’s Spelling Book Predicament, Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 24, Issue 4, October 2019, Pages 507–520, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcy061
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Abstract
In Great Expectations (1860–61), Pip and Herbert’s formal introduction to each other in London is a rare occasion on which Pip discloses his first name to someone else, and even more unexpectedly, accepts a blacksmith-related nickname with alacrity. Herbert asks Pip to address him on a first-name basis, and Pip, in return, reveals his first name Philip. Herbert dislikes this name, for ‘it sounds like a moral boy out of a spelling book’. Instead, he proposes a familiar name ‘Handel’, namesake of the famous composer. While previous scholarship has extensively explored the various possible connotations of ‘Pip’ and ‘Handel’, it has not adequately examined the connection between ‘Handel’ and Dickens’s passing comment on spelling books. This paper examines the complex intertextuality between Dickens’s novels and spelling books. For Dickens, the spelling book not only represents an unpleasant type of elementary schoolbook or an undesirable method of teaching; it stands for the arbitrary blend of literacy training and moral cultivation. Although Dickens welcomed both of these undertakings, he objected to the common pedagogical practice of learning to read by memorizing moral tales. As he implies in Great Expectations, a good moral tale should be morally ambivalent and narratively sophisticated. Instead of being memorized and taken for granted like a spelling-book text, it should elicit empathy and encourage idiosyncratic interpretation. The spelling-book mentality is a predicament for a novel writer, and a hurdle in the way of sympathetic reading of a novel. A novel may be moralistic, but it belongs first and foremost to the realm of knowledge and experience, rather than the vacuum of innocence.
