Developing the “lines”: Politically Significant Landscapes in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

Philip Collins once noted that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, two “remarkably different” novels, are “consecutive” and “close together” (“A Tale” 337). In fact, the consecutiveness of the two works deserves closer and fuller examination than Collins suggests, and the present essay teases out thematic and textual links between them, related to the overall idea of the two novels, that have gone unexplored. These links revolve around Dickens’s creation of politically significant landscape motifs, and I argue that the description of the marshes in Great Expectations is a successful development of the earlier novel’s revolutionary landscapes, both in aesthetic and emblematic terms. The marked linearity of the landscapes in the two works, pictorially presented with bruised figures in the foreground, visually represents egalitarian ideals. Yet, at the same time, they both juxtapose the paradoxical, contradictory symbols of the beacon and the gibbet, exposing Dickens’s contentious class-consciousness. The evocation of the marshes in the opening chapters of Great Expectations has always been praised and has prompted much critical interest.1 Notably, Dickens’s much abridged public reading text of the novel (never performed) retains almost all the original paragraphs describing the marshes in chapter 1, suggesting that they perform an essential role in realizing the story’s main idea. Previous studies have examined the function of the marshy landscapes in Pip’s narrative and revealed the ways in which they embody the experience of the “isolated” and “alienated” Dickensian hero (Miller 250–51).2 Concurrently, however, these landscapes evoke a wider concept