Great Expectations Allusions Quotes

But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these moral goads.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 4. Pip’s childhood Christmas dinner with the Gargerys and their guests was an unpleasant and humiliating one, he recalls. In a metaphor he compares himself to a little bull in a bullring, goaded and speared by the criticisms of the adults. This is an allusion to the Spanish bullfighting arena, where the bull is provoked and aggravated by the picador and banderilleros before being finally stabbed and killed with a sword by the matador.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with theatrical declamation, – as it now appears to me, something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third, – and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 4. Mr. Wopsle is a pompous church clerk in Pip’s village who loves the sound of his own voice. In the novel he is served up to the reader as an object of comic relief and social satire. Pip describes how the officious Wopsle says grace at Pip’s family dinner table as if it was a theatrical Shakespearean production. Dickens makes effective use of hyperbole and parody here to take a poke at the self-importance of English Victorian churchmen. The “Ghost in Hamlet” and “Richard the Third” are allusions to characters in William Shakespeare plays.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name, – “swine were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put before us, as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who had been praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 4. The absurdity of pompous Mr. Wopsle moralizing and lecturing to Pip at Christmas dinner is exquisitely mocked here. With an air of self-importance he preaches to Pip about gratitude and gluttony, unfairly criticizing the boy as a gluttonous pig. His comments include inappropriate references to the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This is the Bible story of a young man who squanders his inheritance, is forced to work as a swineherd, and longs to eat the food of the pigs. All this takes place while Wopsle and other guests are enjoying a pork meal at the Gargerys, Wopsle even singing the praises of the “plump and juicy” meat. Dickens serves up a delicious layer of irony and satire in this passage.

I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,” laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 7. In this passage we find an allusion to the Church of England Catechism teaching: “I should keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of my life.” Pip’s interpretation of this as meaning he must walk home in one direction is Dickens being funny and using verbal irony. He pokes fun at how poorly children were taught Christianity, by learning things by rote rather than by understanding them.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 7. Learning the alphabet doesn’t come easy to Pip, even with the help of his friend Biddy. An extended simile compares his struggles to learn his ABCs to trying to make his way through a bramble bush and being scratched by every letter. The nine figures are the roman numbers 1-9. They are likened to thieves in a metaphor and the description of them disguising themselves is a good example of personification. When Pip says he fell among thieves this is a biblical allusion to the parable of the Good Samaritan who was robbed and beaten by thieves.

“When I offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to her, ‘And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,’ I said to your sister, ‘there’s room for him at the forge!'”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 7. Rather than leave Pip to survive on his own as an orphan, the kind-hearted Joe generously takes him into his home. There is a biblical allusion here, as Joe’s words echo Luke 2:7 – “There was no room for them in the inn.” While Mary and Joseph were turned away when they sought for shelter before the birth of Jesus, Joe doesn’t turn the orphan Pip away but welcomes him into his life. He becomes a true father figure to the boy.

He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper’s out on the marshes, and on working-days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched, locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half-resentful, half-puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had was, that it was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 15. Orlick works at a journeyman for Joe and is described here by Pip as an unpleasant, lazy and slouching character. Similes compare him to Cain and the Wandering jew, foreshadowing his later violence towards Mrs. Joe and his attempt to kill Pip. In the Bible we learn that Adam’s son killed his brother out of envy. The Wandering Jew was supposed to be one of the Jews who taunted Jesus on the way to crucifixion and was cursed to walk the earth until the second coming of Christ.

With all the novelty of my emancipation on me, I went to church with Joe, and thought perhaps the clergyman wouldn’t have read that about the rich man and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had known all.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 19. When he goes to church with Joe, Pip feels a sense of guilt over the news about his “great expectations.” This happens as he listens to the clergyman reading the passage from the Bible on how difficult it is for the wealthy to get to get into heaven: Matthew 19:23 “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

He washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or a dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose, which smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer’s shop. It had an unusually large jack-towel on a roller inside the door, and he would wash his hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came in from a police-court or dismissed a client from his room.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 26. Pip finds lawyer Jaggers washing his hands with scented soap, a cleansing ritual he performs regularly. We are told through metaphor and simile that he is washing off his clients, like he was a doctor or dentist. Jaggers appears to want to cleanse himself of the sordid dealings of those he comes into contact with. The habitual hand cleaning is an allusion to the Bible passage description of Pontius Pilate washing his hands to show he was not responsible for the death of Jesus. It is also similar to Lady Macbeth repeatedly trying to wash the blood of murdered King Duncan from her hands.

I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 27. Joe is visiting Pip in London, where he feels uncomfortable and out of his comfort zone. Pip is annoyed by Joe’s awkward behavior, but realizes that he is at fault for the discomfort of his friend, whom he has neglected. The phrase “heaped coals of fire on my head” is a metaphor for Pip’s feelings of remorse over his own behavior towards Joe. Originating in the Bible it is to be found in Romans 12:20 and Proverbs 25:22. It refers to the act of showing kindness and generosity to an enemy or someone who has done you wrong.

The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 40. Pip expresses his thoughts when secret benefactor Magwitch the convict moves in with him and asks Pip to read to him. In an allusion to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, Pip imagines himself as the monster and Magwitch who created him as Dr. Frankenstein. Pip feels a deep sense of guilt and revulsion over helping Magwitch.

“You had better – and would much sooner when you had thought well of it – chop off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off too.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 51. Jaggers uses hyperbole in this warning to Pip about the destructive costs of revealing deep-rooted secrets about people. In the reference to cutting off hands, this is an allusion to Mark 9.43: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.” The secret Jaggers is talking about is Estella’s parentage.
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