It was a dark and stormy night

Yesterday evening, I added an entry about Charles Dickens to my Top of the Class series, wherein we investigate the world’s “best and brightest” to see if their education helped or hindered their success. Spoiler alert: it’s usually a mix of both. In Dickens’ case, he was more of a self-taught, intellectual outsider than many realize, and he had some strong opinions about education that he acted upon, not just wrote about.

Something I didn’t touch upon, however, was Dickens’ own artistic vulnerability, which might be rooted in his education—or should I say—his disrupted education, which would have traumatized any young child. A good example of this is the way Dickens changed the ending of Great Expectations in 1861.

Dickens initially wrote an excruciatingly bleak ending where the young would-be lovers Pip and Estella part ways. However, after he shared the manuscript with friend and author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton said it was too disheartening for readers who had thus far endured a very depressing novel about unfulfilled ambition and unrealized human potential. So Dickens revised the ending to a hopeful one where it looks like Pip and Estella might end up together.

It was pretty Dickensian, the way Dickens changed his ending—a seemingly random event led to deep social impact. But many of us think Dickens made the wrong call, and when you look at the social situation, I think the change speaks volumes about the complex nature of the man’s confidence and his implicit cultural reverence.

Dickens grew up in a rigid, class-obsessed society, and he naturally took seriously the opinion of the ostensibly well-educated friend who was privately schooled and a Cambridge scholar; a friend who was also a writer, though not etched in the collective memory the ways Dickens is.

For all his critiques of the educational establishment, did Dickens still defer to it, the way us Brits obsequiously tend to do? It’s a reminder of how even the most independent thinkers can be tugged back by the gravitational pull of society, even while they rally against it.