Episode 25: Great Expectations

As previously noted on the classic Better Read than Dead Christmas Carol show, Katie and Tristan are both fans of Charles Dickens. So needless to say, we had, uh, great expectations about this episode! Before you delete us for that horrible dad pun (thanks, Tristan), may we just point out that the phrase “great expectations” appears about 400 million times in Great Expectations (1861). Which actually makes a lot of sense. This novel is all about contingencies, and the unseen and often unknowable forces that come to bear on our lives, and what all that means for even starting to understand “the individual.” It also works toward a compelling critique of the nineteenth-century carceral state via the transported felon (Abel Magwitch), it has interesting things to say about class, and we could literally spend three episodes just talking through Miss Havisham and Estella and gender politics in this novel. We repeat -- Dickens is good. Fellow pinkos will like him, despite certain unfortunate lib tendencies (give the guy a break, he’s a freakin' Victorian). On the show, we read the Oxford edition edited by Margaret Cardwell with an introduction by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. For more on capital, empire, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century penal codes, see E. P. Thompson’s landmark Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act and Kirsty Reid’s Gender, Crime, and Empire: Convicts, Settlers, and the State in Early Colonial Australia. *Note to our listeners. Megan is on maternity leave. She’ll be back on the show in a couple weeks. Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

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