Dickens’s last two completed novels are “dark” with a sense of social estrangement. Their keynote is the orphaned Pip’s intuition of life as a “universal struggle” (GE 1), their arena increasingly London, the site of modernity. By the 1860s Dickens’s domestic life was in tatters, with his wife discarded, his home sold, his family a disappointment (even Kate, his favorite daughter, having married precipitately to get away from it all), the letters enshrining the past put to the bonfire, and his relationship with Ellen Ternan illicit. He had long despaired of the institutions of social power. Increasingly, and despite his reactionary tendencies as he grew older, a profound questioning of such basic conditions of Victorian life as class privilege and the effects of capital became the ground bass of his work.

Near the end of the first movement of Great Expectations, Pip watches in the gloom as the recaptured Magwitch is rowed out to the black Hulk moored off the marshes. As the convict disappears over the side of the ship, “the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him” (5). This evocation of the archetypal ferrying-off of the damned by torchlight to the underworld, coming as it does after the whole community has enjoyed the ritual of a hunting down, has something of the purgative force with which, at the climax of melodrama, the villain is hissed and flung out in a circle of dying stage fire.