Bulwer-Lytton and the Changed Ending of Great Expectations

. BULWER-LYTTON AND THE CHANGED ENDING OF Great Expectations WE DO NOT KNOW the specific reasons with which Bulwer-Lytton urged his view that the original, unhappy ending of Great Ex- pectations should be changed. We know only that Bulwer pre- sented "such good reasons'"1 and stated them "so well" that Dickens, as he says, "resumed the wheel" and took "another turn upon it." 2 Forster, who disliked the change, adds nothing either factual or conjectural about the reasons for it. With so little and such neutral evidence to go on, it is surprising that nearly every- one, even those recent critics who see merit in the second ending, should assume that the advice must have been crassly inspired. J. Hillis Miller, for instance, who makes the best case for the alteration, says that the advice came from "Mrs. Grundy in the 1. Letter to John Forster, 1 July 1861, The Letters of Charles Dichens, ed. Walter Dexter, Nonesuch Dickens ed., 3 vols. (Bloomsbury [London], 1938), 3:226. 2. Letter to Wilkie Collins, 23 June 1861, Letters 3:225.
Notes 105 mask of Bulwer-Lytton," 3 and Sylv&re Monod urges that in justice to Dickens we try to forget "that Bulwer originated the change." 4 Bulwer's arguments were presumably presented orally, and even if they were subsequently supported in writing, any letters would have been destroyed along with the rest of the correspond- ence Dickens received. However, from several of Bulwer's letters to other writers we can reconstruct at least the nature of the ad- vice, and I believe we can conclude that it was based on aesthetic principles which, however faulty they may be judged, should not be dismissed as either commercial or merely conventional. The general bent of Bulwer's practical criticism may be de- rived from a letter to W. E. Aytoun regarding the latter's Norman Sinclair, which concluded in Blackwood's in August 1861 simul- taneously with the last number of Great Expectations in All the Year Round. Bulwer writes: Perhaps if an old hand in the art might presume to offer suggestions, you might in future works of this kind find an advantage in deciding more resolutely between the questions of Plot and No Plot. I think that if, on the one hand, you discarded story altogether, and gave the freest swing to your powers of observation through one or two elaborated characters, like Sterne in "Tristram Shandy," or through playful philosophical monologue, like Le Maitre or T6pffer, you might make a delightful work of high character. On the other hand, if you resolved to seek interest in the movements of passion through the creatures and construction of fable, you might find it advisable to give your tale a more determinate backbone than there is in "Norman Sinclair." 5 This is elementary genre criticism based on "rules" which Bulwer had derived from his wide reading of fiction. In the final paragraph of the letter Bulwer is flexible enough to grant that Aytoun does "achieve an interest in defiance of rules," 6 but he had always been opposed to such unconscious license. As early as 1834 he had written to Lady Blessington: People often say to me "I shall write a novel." If I ask "On what rules?" they stare. They know of no rules. They write History, Epic, the Drama, 3. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 278. 4. Dickens the Novelist (Norman, 1967), pp. 476-77. 5. & Jan. 1862; quoted in Theodore Martin, Memoir of William Edmondstoune Aytoun (Edinburgh/ London, 1867), pp. 217-18. 6. P. 218.
106 Nineteenth-Century Fiction Criticism by rules; and for the Novel, which comprises all four, they have no rules. No wonder that there is so much talent manqu6 in half the novels we read. In fact we ought to do as the sculptors do-gaze upon all the great masterpieces of our art till they sink into us, and we are penetrated by the secret of them.7 David Masson writes of Bulwer in 1859 that "of all British novelists, he seems to have worked most consciously on a theory of the Novel as a form of literature," 8 and a hundred years later Richard Stang calls him "the most articulate advocate" of the idealist position in prose fiction.9 The masterpieces on which Bulwer based his theories are those of Cervantes, Fenelon, Field- ing, Smollett, Le Sage, Apuleius, Sidney, and Goethe, writers of what he calls "narrative" as opposed to "dramatic" fiction.'0 From their works he derived his "rules," including the one which pertains to our problem of the ending of Great Expectations. In a letter justifying the questionable happy ending of his own novel, What Will He Do with It? (1858), he writes, "I hold it a principle in true art, because a vital element in durable popularity, which true art must always study, that the soul of a very long fiction should be pleasing." ll Translated into practical criticism for himself and other writers, this principle legislated, so Bulwer believed, that disagreeable or unpleasant elements have no place in a novel and especially in its ending. Thus he writes to Percy Fitzgerald around 1866 that he was "exceedingly struck by the depth and power of the earlier portions [of Fitzgerald's The Second M-rs. Tillotson], but with the later numbers I am not so well satisfied, and I believe the rea- son to be, not in any fault of mere construction, but because to- wards the close the antagonistic or disagreeable element over- powers the sympathetic or agreeable." 12 And in a letter written in 7. Quoted in The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, by his Grandson, The Earl of Lytton, 2 vols. (London, 1913), 1:460-61. 8. British Novelists and Their Styles (Boston, 1875), p. 235. 9. The Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870 (London, 1959), pp. 155-54. 10. This theory appears in a number of Bulwer's essays and prefaces, most fully in "On the Different Kinds of Prose Fiction, with Some Apology for the Fictions of the Author," in The Disowned (London, 1835), pp. vii-xxii. 11. Letter to John Blackwood, 25 Jan. 1858; quoted in "The Letters of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton to the Editors of Blackwood's Magazine, 1840-1873, in the National Library of Scotland," ed. Malcolm Orthell Usrey (Ph.D. diss., Texas Technical Coll., 1963), p. 178. 12. Quoted in Percy Fitzgerald, Recreations of a Literary Man, 2 vols. (London, 1882), 1:122-23.
Notes 107 1860 referring to The Mill on the Floss, he makes almost the same point. "In studying plot and incident-this very remarkable writer does not eno' weigh what is Agreeable or Disagreeable. Now the Disagreeable should be carefully avoided. You may have the pain- ful, the terrible, the horrible even; but the disagreeable should be shunned." He then lists several disagreeable elements in George Eliot's novel, including the ending, and, lest anyone suspect a com- mercial motivation in his advice, goes on to say: These are to my mind the same dass of defects as those in Ad. Bede, but they are not so marked, & those did not prevent or even injure the great popularity of Adam Bede. Neither will they, in this case; I even doubt whether they will be visible to most readers. -Where such de- fects really tell, (even supposing I am right which I may not be-) is 10 or 20 years hence in the duration of a work. They scarcely touch its first sale or the author's immediate reputation.'3 The stress Bulwer plaCes on "durable popularity" reflects his awareness of the recent change in author and reader acceptance of unhappy endings. Besides The Mill on the Floss, the last dozen years had produced Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hawthorne's romances, The Newcomes, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and of course A Tale of Two Cities. Bulwer obviously missed the aesthetic im- plications of this change but certainly not its commercial aspect, for he must have remembered that years before, when his literary theories were unformed, both he and Dickens had achieved great popular successes with unhappy conclusions. Bulwer's all- time best seller, Rienzi, had ended tragically, and the great heart- throb of English fiction before Little Nell had been provided by the death of Nadia in The Last Days of Pompeii. Clearly there was money to be made through tears. But while French fiction had not suffered financially from its long predilection for tragedy, the accepted classics of English fiction, which were Bulwer's chief points of reference, had traditionally ended happily. Exceptions like Clarissa and The Bride of Lammermoor had appeared so infrequently that they must have seemed confirmations of Bulwer's theory. Thus as regards Great Expectations Dickens was probably urged to forego what his friend considered a fashionable unhappy end- 13. See Usrey, pp. 233-34. The letter was addressed to John Blackwood with instruc- tions that it should be shown to the author.
108 Nineteenth-Century Fiction ing, designed to gain immediate popularity, and encouraged to substitute for it a conclusion more in keeping with what looked in 1861 like the time-tested rules of English narrative romance. Bulwer was fully aware that such advice was liable to the kind of misinterpretation it has received. In November 1861, only a few months after the talk with Dickens, he was forced to explain himself to his own son, to whom he had offered similar counsel. What Bentham makes his axiom in politics, helps to the axiom of poetic art. He says, "The greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the object of Govt." I say "the greatest delight of the greatest number" should be the object of poetic art. I add-which Bentham does not-for both-"and for the longest possible periods." Without that, both theorems are incomplete.... It is the greatest de- light of the poetic art for the moment to read Eugene Sue or Dumas. But we must look to the long run, and in the long run intellect pre- vails over numbers. The "popular" authors whom he recommended to his son, for study and emulation were Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Byron, Goldsmith, and Dante.14 We are still free to question whether Bulwer was right in equating the happy ending with pleasure as an aesthetic criterion. But the validity of Bulwer's rules is not at issue in this note. I seek merely to point out that the currently accepted opinion of his advice to Dickens is unsupported by any evidence, and that the advice was fully consistent with Bulwer's criticism of other writers, with his own practice, and with long-considered theories, which he, and probably Dickens as well, regarded as literary prin- ciples rather than commercial practices. EDWIN M. EIGNER University of Kansas 14. Quoted in Life of Edward Bulwer, 2:397-99.