[In the following essay, Hardy examines the use of food ceremonies celebrating sociability, hospitality, and love in Great Expectations.]

We all know that food has a special place in the novels of Dickens. He loves feasts and scorns fasts. His celebration of the feast is not that of the glutton or the gourmet: eating and drinking are valued by him as proofs of sociability and gusto, but more important still, as ceremonies of love. The conversion of Scrooge is marked by his present of a goose to Bob Cratchit and his reunion at his nephew's table: both the giving and the participation show his newly found ability to love. The Christmas dinner and the geniality of the English pub are not sentimentalised as isolated institutions of goodwill, conveniently cut off from the poverty and hunger outside the window. Good housekeeping is proved by nourishing and well-ordered meals, and Mrs. Jellyby cannot feed her family properly; but the same is true of the bleak housekeeping of England, which cannot feed Jo or the brickmakers. Chadband's superfluous feasts are put beside Jo's hunger and Guster's loving crust to qualify the approval of good appetite. The social emphasis in Great Expectations is rather different from that of Bleak House, but in both novels, and elsewhere, the same moral values are attached to meals—to the giving, receiving, eating, and serving of food. These values might be summed up as good appetite without greed, hospitality without show, and ceremony without pride or condescension.

All these values are shown, positively and negatively, in the meals in Great Expectations. Food is used to define various aspects of love, pride, social ambition, and gratitude, and the meals are often carefully placed in order to underline and explain motivation and development. Dickens's attitude to food has no doubt considerable biographical interest. Dickens—deprived child, food-lover, great talker, oral type—juxtaposes Mrs. Joe's pincushion breast and her dispensation of bread, and this may well be his grimmest attack on the maternal image. But in spite of this grotesque instance, I believe that the generalised association of food and love in Dickens strikes us less by its neurotic fantasy than by its use of what we all feel to be the natural appropriateness of the metaphor ‘hunger’ when it is used of love. I do not call the meals in Great Expectations symbols: their affirmation of value seems to involve no conceptual transference and little heightening. It is our awareness of the Last Supper which often tempts us to describe this kind of significant meal as symbolic (the meal shared by Bartle Massey and Adam Bede in the upper room is a good example) but the Last Supper (like the Passover and other ritual feasts) became an effective symbol, in part at least, because it tapped the significance of ordinary communion—the eating, giving, and receiving, in public, amongst friends and associates. The meals in Dickens convey no more, I suggest, than the elementary implications of natural domestic and social order, given particularity by the context of the novel. The generalisations which the meals in Great Expectations carry involve none of the transference associated with symbolism, nothing of the movement from a first term to a second which is involved in our reading of the symbol of the wild waves, the fog, or the prison. There is certainly an accumulation of significance in Great Expectations, and we soon come to expect that when characters sit down to eat there will be more than a furtherance of action, local colour, or comic play. We come to expect some extension or qualification of the moral significance already correlated with the meals. This is an extension of the particular definition of character, a way of emphasising the connections and distances between different characters or different events, showing the irony and necessity of the internal moral pattern. The meals themselves are charged with no more than the moral significances of everyday life, where good mothers feed their children lovingly; where meals are sociable occasions; where good manners are desirable but not all that important; where theft may be condoned if the thief is starving; where there is something distasteful about the host or mother or cook whose meals are merely boasts; where there is something meretricious in the splendid feast which is strikingly different from the routine meals of the same household; where abstinence may be either unhealthy or unselfish.

The first meal in Great Expectations is demanded in the first chapter. Magwitch in desperate hunger terrifies Pip into stealing food: ‘You know what wittles is … you get me wittles.’ In the third chapter Pip brings the food, and Magwitch makes the first response of gratitude which begins the long chain of obligation, illusion, pride, and love. It is important to see what moves his gratitude: it is not the mere provision of food, important though this is. Pip is doing more than satisfy the physical need, he is allowing nature more than nature needs. Magwitch is eating like a beast but Pip treats him as a guest and makes him respond as a guest:

He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious manner—more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent hurry, than a man who was eating it—but he left off to take some of the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it off. …

He was gobbling mincemeat, meat bone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round us, and often stopping—even stopping his jaws—to listen.

This is a grotesque table, spread in the wilderness of mist and marshes for a man who is wolfing down the food out of fear. Pip is no more in the conventional position of host than Magwitch is in the conventional position of guest, but the very lack of ceremony moves Pip to do more than steal and give in terror and in minimal satisfaction of need. Pity moves him to sauce the meat with ceremony and turn it into something more than Lady Macbeth's ‘bare meeting’. Just as Lady Macbeth's rebuke has special point because it is made at a great feast to the host who is a guest-murderer, so Pip's ceremony has special point in this bare rough meeting where the guest is desperate and the host terrorised:

Pitying his desolation … I made bold to say, ‘I am glad you enjoy it’.

‘Did you speak?’

‘I said, I am glad you enjoyed it.’

‘Thankee, my boy. I do.’

The child's civility and pity take no offence from his guest's table-manners. These are carefully observed, without revulsion:

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and now I noticed a decided similarity between the dog's way of eating, and the man's. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction of somebody's coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.

The detached account makes the politeness more marked. It is apparent that Pip's naïve comparisons, to the dog and to more comfortable meals, imply no sense of social superiority, though the social implications are plain to the reader. Pip is not repelled by the resemblance to the dog, but is sorry for it, and instead of treating the man like a dog, gives with love. The ‘I am glad you enjoy it’ and the ‘Thankee’ turn the rudest meal in the novel into an introductory model of ceremony. What makes the ceremony is love, generosity, and gratitude. I need not labour the attachment of this scene to the main themes of the novel.

This meal acts as a model of ceremony, and controls our response to the many related descriptions of meals which succeed it. The gratitude and compassionate love are both present in Chapter V, when Magwitch lies about stealing the food, to protect Pip, and is answered by Joe:

God knows you're welcome to it—so far as it was ever mine. … We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.—Would us, Pip?

This in its turn evokes another response of gratitude—an inarticulate working of the throat—from Magwitch. The first small links are forged in Pip's chain, ‘of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers’.

It is not until much later, in Chapter XXXVIII, that Pip sees that this is where his chain really begins, ‘before I knew that the world held Estella’. The actual image is narrowed down, in the next chapter, to the ‘wretched gold and silver chains’ with which Magwitch has loaded him. When the image of the chain first appears (in the singular) it has no connection with the convict for Pip sees its beginning in his encounter with Miss Havisham and Estella, in Satis House. The beginning of his illusory great expectations, like the beginning of the real ones, is marked by a significant meal. Estella is the hostess, Pip the guest. The meal is less grotesque than the meal with Magwitch but it too lacks the ceremonious cover of a roof, for Estella tells Pip to wait in the yard:

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry—I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart—God knows what its name was—that tears started to my eyes.

(Chap. VIII)

The contrast is clinched by the comparison with the dog. Pip's full wants are not satisfied, even though this is the hospitality of Satis House, but in terms of physical need he is given enough. He is treated like a dog, given no more than nature needs, but he does not lose his appetite, any more than Magwitch, treated with courtesy, stops eating like a dog. Dickens makes this distinction unsentimentally and truthfully, merely allowing Pip to observe that ‘the bread and food were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me’. Like Magwitch, and for similar reasons of protective love, Pip lies about this meal. His sense of humiliation and his desire to protect Estella from ‘the contemplation of Mrs. Joe’ makes him elaborate the marvellous childish fantasy about the ‘cake and wine on gold plates’, which Pumblechook and Joe and Mrs. Joe, in their social innocence, accept. Pip invents a meal appropriate to Satis House, and hides his shame, but he preserves both the hierarchy and the bizarre quality of his encounter by placing the meal in a coach, and saying that he ‘got up behind the coach to eat mine, because she told me to’. Even the dog comes back, magnified into ‘four immense dogs’ who come off rather better than Pip did since they fight ‘for veal-cutlets out of a silver basket’. On his next visit to Satis House we return briefly to the dog: ‘I was taken into the yard to be fed in the former dog-like manner.’ The two meals respond in perfect antithesis.

The first ceremony of love finds another responsive scene when Magwitch discloses his responsibility and motivation to Pip. We are carefully reminded of the first meal on the marshes:

I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a eating my dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here's the boy again, a looking at me whiles I eats and drinks!’

(Chap. XXXIX)

It is to this actual memory of the meal that he attaches his plan to ‘make that boy a gentleman’ but when the gentleman serves him with a meal he does not look at him as the boy did:

He ate in a ravenous manner that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog.

If I had begun with any appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat much as I did—repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and gloomily looking at the cloth.

(Chap. XL)

The uncouth eating, the hunger, the sideways movement, and the comparison with the dog are repetitions from the early scene which emphasise the distance between the child and the man. This time the observation is full of revulsion, the food is not sauced with ceremony. But if the host has changed, the guest has not, and he apologises for his doglike eating with undoglike courtesy:

‘I'm a heavy grubber, dear boy,’ he said, as a polite kind of apology when he had made an end of his meal, ‘but I always was. If it had been in my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha' got into lighter trouble.’

The apology is made without shame or self-pity on the part of Magwitch, and provokes no sympathy on the part of Pip. In the early scene the child's pity was impulsive and provoked simply by the desperate eating and panic. In the later scenes, Pip is in a position to see the connection between the heavy grubbing and the heavy trouble, but describes without pity the roughness and greed: ‘there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as plain could be’.

The next meal is described without emphasis. We are told that Magwitch wipes his knife on his leg, but by now Pip is too concerned to hear the convict's history to have room for shame and revulsion. The very last meal described—supper on the night before the attempted escape—contains no comment on manners or response:

It was a dirty place enough … but there was a good fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various liquors to drink.

(Chap. LIV)

By now Pip's pride has been entirely subdued to the need for action. The quiet disappearance of comment testifies to the naturalness and literalness of the scenes of eating and drinking: a series of related scenes has been established, bringing out the moral significance of needs and hospitality and good manners, but it is brought to no formal climax. There is no explicit comment on the irrelevance of good manners in the crisis of need, no reminiscence of the fellowship of the first meal and the first occasion when Pip helped Magwitch to escape his pursuers, nothing of the climactic recognition of symbolism which we find in James's dove, or Lawrence's rainbow, or Dickens's own wild waves. The meals are only tapped for their moral significance on occasions when men need food desperately or when there is scope for hospitality: towards the end of the story the meals are inartifically subordinated to other features of the action. I do not make this distinction in order to decry the more contrived symbolism in other novels, but merely in order to bring out Dickens's unheightened and sober reliance on everyday moral and social facts. There is, I think, no question of an unconscious moral pattern, for the repetition of details makes the control quite plain, but Dickens is content to subdue this significant series of meals to the proportions and emphases of his story.

With the same almost unobtrusive reflection of ordinary moral fact, the meals with Estella are also described without schematic arrangement. They scarcely develop into a pattern, and Dickens can allow himself to describe a meal without relating it to earlier significances. When Estella and Pip have tea together in the hotel, or when Pip does eventually dine with some ceremony inside Satis House, no moral emphasis is present: on the first occasion Dickens is concerned to develop aspects of the relationship to which need and ceremony are irrelevant; on the second he is concerned with the tense understatement of Jaggers's observation of Estella. But although some of the meals in this novel make no moral definition, it is true that nearly all the characters and families are given, at some point, their significant ceremony of food. Magwitch tells Pip and Herbert how his heavy grubbing explains his troubled career and begins his life-story with the little boy who stole turnips and who was always driven by the need ‘to put something into his stomach’. Pip as a child is not physically deprived in this way, but although he is given enough to eat, he is not given his food with love. In Chapter II, between Magwitch's demand for food and Pip's generous response, we are given a glimpse of Mrs. Joe's ‘bringing up by hand’. She is an unloving mother-surrogate who feeds her family unceremoniously:

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib—where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaister—using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister. …

The pins and needles have already been mentioned as characteristic of this unmotherly breast:

She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles.

Some of the implications of this juxtaposition are terrifying, but the Gargery household is treated with comedy rather than with the harsh violence which is the medium for the Murdstones. But both the comic mode and the grim seem at times to draw freely on Dickens's fantasy. The moral implications within the novel are plain: Mrs. Joe gives unlovingly, to put it mildly, taking most pleasure in the administration of Tar-Water and fasts, while Joe shares the wedges of bread in love and play, and tries to make up for Pip's sufferings at the Christmas dinner with spoonfuls of gravy.

The cold comfort of Mrs. Joe's meals, like her uncomfortable cleanliness, makes her an ancestress of Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, though Dickens inflicts a terrible revenge on her in the action. She has the front-parlour mentality, and the only ceremony in the Gargery household, apart from the rough meals shared by Pip and Joe, is the false ceremony of hospitality. Her showing-off at the dinner-party contrasts rudely with her earlier words to Joe and Pip: ‘I ain't a going to have no formal cramming and busting and washing-up now’, and they have their slices served out as if they ‘were two thousand troops on a forced march instead of a man and boy at home’. I need not dwell on the Christmas dinner, with Mr. Wopsle's theatrical declamation of grace, with the adjurations to Pip to be grateful ‘to them which brought you up by hand’, with Pumblechook's immodest generosity and gluttony and the comic nemesis when he chokes on the Tar-Water. The contrast between the ceremony of love and the false ceremony is there, together with the rebuke of starvation. For Magwitch has eaten the pie and drunk the brandy. This is underlined when Pip observes Pumblechook's possessive appropriation of the wine he has given to Mrs. Joe and his generous treating of the flattering sergeant. The false giving and receiving are put in the context of the first meal with Magwitch when Pip comments, ‘I thought what terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was’.

Pip's humiliation by Estella is also put into a larger context when he explains that his susceptibility to injustice and shame was attributable to the unloving home. Joe makes even the hacked bread and superfluous gravy the food of love, but Estella sharpens the sense of false ceremony, in part by denying ceremony, and Pip becomes less conscious of love's seasoning than of good manners. He continues in fantasy, and eventually moves from the back of the coach. The actual social significance of eating habits becomes emphatic in a novel about snobbery and aspiration, and there are other meals which raise the question of love and ceremony. When Pip has his first meal with Herbert Pocket, a difficult social situation is eased by Herbert's friendly delicacy, and he gives both the strawberries and the lessons in etiquette with true ceremony. This is a scene which establishes both the importance of good manners and the importance of love. It contrasts strongly with the second meal with Magwitch, where Pip is the bad host, and is paralleled by the first, when Pip is the true host. It is closest of all to another scene, where Herbert and Pip are entertaining Joe to breakfast. Joe is ‘stiff from head to foot’, cannot say outright that he prefers tea to coffee, and is as self-conscious in his politeness as Magwitch is unself-conscious in his roughness:

Then he fell into such unaccountable fits of meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; had his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much more than he ate, and pretended he hadn't dropped it; that I was heartily glad when Herbert left us for the city.

(Chap. XXVII)

This failure in hospitality—‘I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault’—prepares us for the greater failure, the greater social gulf, and the greater shame, when Magwitch returns and Pip makes a first false, but healthy, comparison between his shame for Joe and his shame before the convict, for whom he had deserted Joe.

There are other scenes, more or less emphatic, in which the social values of eating are defined. There is the false show, lightly touched on, in the last celebratory supper at the forge before Pip leaves home, when he sits ashamed in his splendour for their delight and they are all ‘very low’ despite roast fowl and flip. This contrasts with another kind of false show, in the same chapter, when Mr. Pumblechook flatters and celebrates in a travesty of the love-feast. He toasts Pip in extravagant mock-abasement when he toasts Pip—‘May I?—may I?’—and elaborately deprecates the chicken and tongue—‘one or two little things had round from the Boar, that I hope you may not despise’—and apostrophises the fowl—‘Ah! poultry, poultry! You little thought … when you was a young fledgling, what was in store for you.’ (Chap. XIX.) At the other social extreme from this exhibition of hospitable abasement, but close to it morally, is Pip's little fantasy, at the beginning of the same chapter, of feasting the villagers, ‘bestowing a dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension’. There are many other meals too, which might be mentioned: the funeral repast after Mrs. Joe's death, Jaggers' good food and ruthless hospitality, the geniality of the pub, Pip's susceptibility to wine on one or two occasions, the lavishness of his housekeeping with Herbert, and the ordered, warm, and unpretentious hospitality of Wemmick.

Almost every character and family is given moral and social definition by their attitudes to food and hospitality. Old Barley keeps the provisions in his room, and provides Clara with bread and cheese while he has mutton-chops, potatoes, and split pease stewed up in butter; he roars and bangs for his grog and growls in pain while trying to cut through a Double Gloucester with his gouty hand. The ill-fed children are the unloved children. The baby Pocket, like Pip, is endangered by being fed on pins, though in his case the inappropriate food is the result of neglect and disorder not of an aggressive display of good housekeeping. The disorder, bad economy, and inadequate meals of the Pocket family are another version of the neglected Jellybys in Bleak House, and just as Mrs. Jellyby is ironically exposed as a model of displaced charity, so Mrs. Pocket is shown in her disorder as another qualification of class-distinction and great expectations. Her delusions of grandeur lead to the disregard of proper ceremony. Although each bad mother is attached to the special theme of each novel, the basic moral failure is the same. It is a failure in love.

I have not yet mentioned one of the most prominent failures in love in Great Expectations. This is Miss Havisham's failure. Her love-feast is preserved in its decay to make the most conspicuous contribution to the themes of love and nature. Nothing remains of the expectations of Satis House but a gruesome parody of ceremony:

The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An épergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it. …

(Chap. XI)

Miss Havisham makes a symbolic correlation between the mouldering wedding-breakfast and her own life. She has been gnawed by pain as the food has been gnawed by mice, she has worn away with the meal, and when she is dead she too will be laid out on that table, where she has allocated the places for her predatory family to sit and ‘feast upon’ her. The betrayal of love and the hypocritical greedy show of love are both bracketed as false ceremony in this grisly image of transubstantiation. The ghastly conceit stands out from Dickens's other significant correlations of love and food as a product of a diseased fancy and an impossible attempt to pervert nature. Jaggers makes explicit the other implications of the stasis and decay which relate this meal to the pattern of normal routine and relationship:

He asked me how often I had seen Miss Havisham eat and drink. …

I considered, and said, ‘Never’. ‘And never will, Pip,’ he retorted, with a frowning smile. ‘She has never allowed herself to be seen doing either, since she lived this present life of hers. She wanders about in the night, and then lays hands on such food as she takes.’

(Chap. XXIX)

Miss Havisham's rejection of ordinary public meals is like her attempt to shut out the daylight. Food in Great Expectations, as in Macbeth, is part of the public order, and the meals testify to human need and dependence, and distinguish false ceremony from the ceremony of love. They are not symbols but natural demonstrations.