Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism
- 2 Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette
- 3 Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity
- 4 Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home: institutionalization and form
- 5 Professing renunciation: domesticity in Felix Holt
- 6 A prejudice for milk: professionalism, nationalism and domesticism in Daniel Deronda
- Afterword
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
3 - Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism
- 2 Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette
- 3 Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity
- 4 Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home: institutionalization and form
- 5 Professing renunciation: domesticity in Felix Holt
- 6 A prejudice for milk: professionalism, nationalism and domesticism in Daniel Deronda
- Afterword
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
“YOU WITH A PLEASANT HOME?”
Domesticity, the idea of home as a personal ideal and narrative objective, emerges in Great Expectations in the shape of Wemmick's Castle. Compared with Harville's ingenious apartment and Lucy's school-room cottage, the “Pleasant Home” that this dutiful clerk sequesters plays on Ruskin's idea of the home as a shelter from the “anxieties of the outer life … the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world” (Sesame and Lilies 85). But at the same time that Great Expectations makes fun of the idea that a home can be successfully sequestered from the world of business, the opposition is endorsed as an immensely happy fiction. Although the presence of a Pleasant Home would seem to be what makes Wemmick and Jaggers different, it is home as an ideal that they share:
“What's all this?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You with an old father, and you with pleasant and playful ways?”
“Well!” returned Wemmick. “If I don't bring 'em here, what does it matter?” …
“You with a pleasant home?” said Jaggers.
“Since it don't interfere with business,” returned Wemmick, “let it be so. Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn't wonder if you might be planning and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own one of these days, when you're tired of all this work.”
Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and actually drew a sigh.
(Great Expectations 424)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Professional Domesticity in the Victorian NovelWomen, Work and Home, pp. 70 - 99Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998