A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations

A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations

Goldie Morgentaler, assistant professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, compares Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations with Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, suggesting that a Darwinian influence can be found within its text. Morgentaler argues her point using the time the two books were written and the sudden disregard of heredity as a formative influence of human identity in Dickens’s writing. Morgentaler’s arguments are somewhat weak in evidence but I agree that it probably isn’t a coincidence that Dickens’s writing on this subject matter changed around the same time as Darwin’s book was published. I will engage some of the points that I thought were strongest in favor to Dickens having been influenced by Darwin’s writing.

Morgentaler states criticism from K.J. Fielding’s article, she writes, “Fielding suggests in his article ‘Dickens and Science?,” that Dickens’s enthusiasm for the idea of evolution owed more to Robert Chambers’s 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation than it did to Darwin” (quoted in Morgentaler, 707). Morgentaler states that the only “hard evidence” that Fielding uses for Darwin’s influence on Dickens can be found in an allusion to the “universal struggle.” This evidence is found in the second paragraph of Great Expectations (707). She first addresses the possible critics and criticisms against the Darwin and Dickenson connection which I find makes her points more credible.

Morgentaler states, “My primary argument for a Darwinian reading of Great Expectations rests on the fact that this novel marks the first time that Dickenson jettisons heredity as a determining factor in the formation of self” (707-708). Prior to t...

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...evidence and textual evidence. She delves deeper into the lives of the characters in comparison to the prior works of Dickenson and Darwinian influence. According to Morgentaler, “Pip represents the evolution of the human species away from its primitive origins, whether the primitive be defined as the degenerate or the spontaneously goodhearted. For better or worse, Pip—and the rest of humanity around him has been civilized” (719). It can be said that Pip’s great expectations are equivalent to what is expected of mankind. As we, humans, evolve and grow, we can be expected to have great expectations and they are not to be determined by those who’s DNA we share.

Works Cited

Morgentaler, Goldie. "Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations." Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900 38.4 (1998): 707-21. ProQuest. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.