Emirates Litfest: Charles Dickens's great-great-great granddaughter holds Miss Havisham's wedding in Dubai

Monday was the 210th birth anniversary of Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 — June 9, 1870), who was inarguably the greatest novelist and social critic of the Victorian era (1837-1901) in Great Britain.

His great-great-great granddaughter Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, an author of over 20 books, celebrated the day at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, where she held an engrossing event called Miss Havisham’s Wedding —an ode to one of Dickens’ most popular novels, Great Expectations (1861).

Who is Miss Havisham?

Miss Havisham is portrayed as a vengeful and wealthy woman in Dickens’ 13th and penultimate completed novel. She lived in a dilapidated mansion and wore an old wedding dress daily.

A single tragic event changed her outlook towards life. She was jilted by Compeyson — the main antagonist in the novel — on what was supposed to be their wedding day. That life-altering incident steeled Miss Havisham never to move beyond her heartbreak.

Consider this: She stopped all the clocks in Satis House at 20 minutes to 9pm, the exact moment she learnt that Compeyson was gone.

She wore only one shoe because she heard the news that she had been abandoned before she had finished dressing up and had only fastened one shoe. So, she never put on the second one.

The obsessive cruel facet of her character came to fore after she adopted Estella, who was weaponised to achieve her own revenge against men. Her single-minded devotion is a running theme of Great Expectations, as she and those who came in contact with her suffered because of her insatiable quest for revenge. Blinded by rage, she was unable to comprehend that her actions are hurtful to Philip Pirrip, or Pip, the protagonist of the novel, and his love interest, Estella.

However, Miss Havisham came around in the end and she redeemed herself by seeking Pip’s forgiveness. She was no longer the “wicked witch” of the fairy tale.

Did Great Expectations age better than David Copperfield?

Dickens once claimed that David Copperfield was his “favourite child” and that Great Expectations was a close second. Yet, popular perceptions suggest that Great Expectations has aged better.

Dickens-Hawksley shared a new take on her great-great-great grandfather during an exclusive interview with Khaleej Times at the annual literature festival’s new canal side venue this year — Hilton Dubai at Al Habtoor City.

“Personally, I preferred David Copperfield to Great Expectations , even though both are excellent novels. Perhaps, more people have read Great Expectations in school. However, in recent years, there has been a great interest in David Copperfield . Armando Iannucci made a superb adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019). This has introduced a whole new generation of people into Dickens’s works. So many people asked me that they didn’t know Dickens was so funny. To turn around a novel like into a film is an incredible feat. And the fact that Iannucci could do so with so much knowledge shows that he’s a great Dickens scholar,” she said.

Great Expectations: The literary genre

Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, a novel dealing with a person’s formative years or spiritual education.

The genre traces its origin to Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s second novel Wilhem Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhem Meisters Lehrjahre), which was written between 1795 and 1796.

The novel focused on the psychological growth and maturation of an identifiable protagonist. This literary genre became very popular and was translated into many languages.

Several English and French authors adopted the genre and produced the classics like Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte and David Copperfield (1850) by Dickens.

There was new interest in class mobility on the back of the genre’s growing popularity. The rise of industrialised capitalism engendered a discerning trend: An individual’s social status was no longer rigidly determined at birth.

In this light, a fictional character in Victorian England could make his/her way in the world and that would be adroitly used by a master storyteller like Dickens as a significant plot device.

In the 20th century, the expanded into a broader, “coming-of age” genre, as seen in classic works like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by American novelist Betty Smith and her compatriot JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Dickens's 'complicated relationship' with his mother

There has been a long-standing view that Dickens is believed to have had an erratic relationship with his own mother and that reflected in the relationship between Pip, the protagonist of the novel, and Miss Havisham.

However, Dickens-Hawksley wanted to set the record straight.

“Dickens did have a very erratic relationship with his mother. His relationship with his parents was very good when he was very small. However, when he was 12 years old, his father John was taken to prison because of mounting debts. Prisons were a crazy place in Britain those days. You could be arrested for your debts and put into prison, where you have to pay for your boarding and lodging. So, in the Dickens family, it was the 12-year-old Charles who had to foot the bill,” Dickens-Hawksley told Khaleej Times.

“His older sister remained in school. She was a music student and was presumed to make the family fortune…when his father managed to come out of prison a few months later, his mother wanted Charles to stay on his job and did not want him to go back to school. Perhaps, one can understand her. She was aware that her husband was a terrible financial provider and Charles had worked diligently and held the family together. However, Charles never forgave her for that desire. His father, eventually, said he should come out of the factory and go back to school, which he did. But he always blamed his mother for making him work for what he considered to be a dead-end job. He described quite a lot of it in David Copperfield as a little labouring hind,” she says.