Great Expectations

A bit of Dickens today, if I may.

In a wonderful passage in Great Expectations, a character named Herbert Pocket is filling in Pip (and of course the reader) on Miss Havisham's life. This is crucial exposition, but so as to not have it SOUND like a block of exposition, Dickens has hit upon the device of having Herbert teach Pip table manners. Herbert, accordingly, keeps interrupting his story to tell Pip that it is "not the custom in London" to do this or that.

We get the idea that Pip looks like a terrible yokel, and of course since he meekly submits to Herbert's corrections we also get a sense of the strength of his desire to make a gentleman of himself. All those elements in the scene allow the crucial material on Havisham's past to pass into our consciousness unobtrusively.

[Herbert also has just given Pip a private nickname, Handel.]

"Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after as a great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what with debts and what with new madness wasted them and most fearfully again. There were stronger differences between him and her, than there had been between him and his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep and mortal grudge against her as having influenced the father's anger. Now I come to the cruel part of the story -- merely breaking off, my dear Handel, to remark that a dinner napkin will not go into a tumbler."

Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it within those limits. Again I thanked him and apologized, and again he said in the cheerfullest manner, "Not at all, I am sure!" and resumed.