Only after finishing Great Expectations, did I learn that Dickens had written two quite different endings to his epic story of ambition, love and loss.
(163-year-old Spoilers ahead.) In the version I read, Pip returns from Cairo to his village in Kent and pays a nostalgic visit to the estate of the late Miss Havisham. There he finds Estella, long the object of his affections, now widowed and somewhat softened.
Their youthful follies long buried by the cold, hard experience of life, Pip and Estella make their peace, and leave the garden together:
‘I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.’
It’s not exactly wedding bells and ‘happily ever after’, as you might expect of Dickens, who had a tendency to end his novels on an optimistic note. But there is, finally, the promise of a life together and of the happiness that has eluded them both.
In the original version, Pip ran into the widowed Estella on a London street, finding her to have remarried. It is said that friends of the author, among them Wilkie Collins, urged Dickens to rewrite a more conventional finale.
And so he did, telling friends that he had, “put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could”, adding that it would like be more acceptable. In the former he is absolutely right: the writing is beautiful. Astonishingly so.
Since then, literary argument has raged about whether he was right to do so. Fighting the corner for the original ending were no lesser figures than George Orwell and George Bernard Shaw. The latter called the happy ending, of a book he revered, an ‘outrage’. ”[It] is too serious a book to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it.”
The counter argument is that this the novel has come full circle to reconciliation and redemption and that both Pip and Estella have emerged much changed from their suffering and deserve their own happiness.
From a literary perspective I would tend to side with those advocating the original ending. I found Great Expectations unsettling, dark and often difficult, and Pip suffering one last disappointment seemed in keeping with its tone and themes.
That said, I am pleased Dickens was prevailed upon to deliver his last, joyful line. There’s quite enough suffering in the world, and indeed in the hundreds of pages that preceded it. At heart, I’m a romantic, and I left the story with that heart just a little lighter, imagining a happier future for Pip and Estella.
And it says so much about Dickens and the incredible power of his work, and the hold it has over us, that 163 years on, his choice divides opinion.