What the Dickens?
Notes from beside an ending that should have been left alone
Sometimes the person holding your pen is the friend you handed it to.
Today I learned that Great Expectations does not have the ending Charles Dickens originally wrote.
In his first ending, Pip encounters Estella years after the events of the novel. She has remarried. They speak briefly, understand that life has changed them both, and part again.
Then Dickens showed the ending to his friend and fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Bulwer-Lytton did not like it.
Apparently, he thought it was too sad. Dickens listened, went back to the manuscript, and replaced it with the ending most readers know: Pip and Estella reunited among the ruins of Satis House, leaving together beneath the famous suggestion that he saw “no shadow of another parting from her.”
It is not exactly a happily-ever-after. Dickens left enough ambiguity to preserve plausible deniability. But it is considerably more hopeful—and considerably more conventional—than the ending he first intended.
My immediate reaction was: Why the hell did you let Edward read it?
Recently, I explained the ending of one of my manuscripts to a friend. She told me I could not end it that way. Readers would need answers. Someone would need justice. There had to be at least a little hope.
No.
There does not.
Sometimes there is no justice. Sometimes no one ever learns exactly what happened. Sometimes the absence of an answer is the answer. That does not mean I failed to finish the story. It means I finished the story I intended to tell.
This is one reason I plan to self-publish. I will listen to people I trust. I will accept criticism. I will reconsider a sentence, a scene, an entire structure if someone shows me that it is not doing what I meant for it to do.
But “people won’t like it” is not the same as “it is wrong.”
Then I learned something even more ridiculous.
Charles Dickens and Catherine Dickens gave many of their ten children names borrowed from famous authors, personal friends, actors, artists, critics, public figures—and even one of Dickens’s own characters. The resulting names included Walter Savage Landor Dickens, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens—and, yes, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens.
Dickens named an entire child after the man who talked him out of his endingNB.
That would be like me giving one of my children the complete name of one of my best friends, adding Bodie to the end, and then calling everyone into the parlor so that friend could renegotiate the conclusion of my novel.
I love my friends.
I am not doing that.
To be fair, not every Dickens child was named for a famous writer, and not every namesake was his personal friend. The family names were a strange mixture of affection, admiration, memorial, literary tribute, and what I can only describe as Victorian maximalism. But Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens was real, and his father really did revise Great Expectations after Bulwer-Lytton urged him to reconsider its ending.
And because language enjoys arranging its own little jokes, I also wondered whether the expression “What the dickens?” had anything to do with Charles Dickens.
It does not.
The phrase is older than he was. Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, more than two centuries before Charles Dickens became famous. “Dickens” was apparently a softened substitute for “devil”—the historical equivalent of changing a curse just enough to say it in polite company.
So “What the dickens?” does not mean “What in the name of Charles Dickens?”
Although after learning that Dickens changed his ending for a friend and then gave a child that friend’s entire name, perhaps it should.
I also started listening to The Great Courses today. I made it through the beginning of one course and already have enough ideas circling my brain to create approximately twenty more manuscripts.
This is not an exaggeration.
It may be a threat.
Every historical fact seems to conceal another story. Every word has something buried beneath it. Every text has passed through hands that copied it, translated it, edited it, corrected it, censored it, completed it, or decided what its author must have meant.
Somewhere between the original ending and the published one is the question I keep returning to:
How many people can touch a story before it no longer belongs entirely to the person who wrote it?
I already have a manuscript about people taking hold of an author’s pen.
Today, Charles Dickens handed me another margin note for it.
What the dickens, indeed.
Sources: Stanford University on the two endings of Great Expectations · The Folger Shakespeare Library’s text of The Merry Wives of Windsor · The London Review of Books on the Dickens children’s names