The Pleasures and Limits of Dickensian Plot, or “I have met Mr. Dickens, and this is not him”

Abstract

This article sets out to show how two revisions of Great Expectations (1860-61) Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1989) and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), reanimate the tension in the Dickens novel between the desire for plot and the forces of randomness and coincidence that work against that drive for emplotment. In Palliser’s elaborately plotted novel, ‘design’ is shown to be an important driving force in novels and lives, but it is also equated with cruelty, injustice and social inequity. In Jones’s novel, set in Papua New Guinea during its recent civil war, the heroine triumphs in creating a life for herself from chaos, but in focusing on Matilda’s assimilation of Pip’s own misreadings, the novel calls attention to the limitations of plot as well as to its powers.