Introduction to 'Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns'

Abstract

In the opening chapter of 'Great Expectations', Pip vividly recalls the childhood terror of an involuntary somersault that he is forced to perform by the desperate convict he encounters on the marshes: "The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside-down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself-for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet-when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously." Compelled to see his small world so suddenly inverted, Pip is ironically unaware just how formative this fearful experience of being turned upside-down will prove to be for him. Both traumatic and comic at once, the episode is the first in a series of surprising turnabouts that the novel charts, the most significant of which will be Magwitch's return from the antipodes, his pockets filled with the profits made from his colonial adventures in Australia.