Pip, Dickens’ Unheroic Child (Part 2 of a Four-Part Series)
Pip holds on to his obsession with being rich, and it ruins his life financially and emotionally. Pip is a cog trapped in a cycle of financial worries and attempts to pay off his debts. Pip is stuck with a terrifying amount of debt and impudently forgets his childhood fears of poverty and starvation. People become annoyed with Pip quickly and treat him disdainfully when he loses his status, like the Blue Boar chef laughing at him for expecting seemingly ridiculous things. In sharp contrast, Oliver, Little Dorrit, and the other (arguably stronger, more self-denying, more Christlike) child heroes go on to make something more clearly useful of themselves while experiencing similar trauma and interpersonal dynamics, conveying that they learned something about social function from their scrapes. Pip retains bad coping mechanisms into his adult life. Grown-up Pip seemingly has the emotional maturity of a young child for not forming boundaries between what Estella says and his own personality, relegating Estella to a convenient, excuse-like projection of all the sinful parts of himself.
Arguably, Pip has had the innocence found in the standard child hero conditioned out of him. One could thoughtfully add that Pip forms a severe personality disorder after his horrifying experiences, and that this illness compounds his weak coping mechanisms—and that this specific disorder is serious enough to cause quality-of-life issues worse than any of Oliver Twist’s, Jenny Wren’s, and Little Dorrit’s possible mental health issues—because he does not know how to begin the task of making himself useful and does not show an interest in it, for he is too focused on entertaining himself through social climbing. For Pip’s failure to make something useful and more others-centered, more Christ-centered, of himself as a college-age adult, let alone as a child, it is hard to nominate him as a child hero. Pip does learn his lesson when he is elderly, but through unnecessary debts and too much frivolity, he loses opportunities to serve others. Pip is too self-important, so he is not a proper example of the child hero.
Dickensian child heroes are frequently tasked with dangerous and unpleasant missions, if not missions wherein one is to care for other people. All of those previous cogs now rise up as characters who are quite angelic. They escape the problems they start out with through finding a job or being cared for (the dependent character always intends to help the family), then attempt to help other people, and then earn a Heaven-like state. Upon doing exemplary work throughout the book, with no backsliding away from Christian spirit or actions, the hero is rewarded with an imitation of Heaven. Inside this area, the hero obtains, in analyst John Frow’s language, “a congenial substitute family.” This state includes parental figures who have a nurturing effect on the child and peace for good and all. Usually, the Heaven-like state is provided permanently in the concluding chapters of Dickens’ works, for example, “And Last” in Oliver Twist and “Gone!” in Little Dorrit. Frow states, "In Dickens' novels the social order is imagined through and as a family, and family relations — seen, above all, from the perspective of the child — take on a charged [emotional] intensity” because family loyalty and relationships are unfailingly important to these child characters, making “the substitute family” and a new life in Heaven a relevant reward.
Dickens’ first child hero protagonist, Oliver Twist, has a kindly personality, assuredly incapable of enjoying immoral things. He never performs, or wants to perform, any deception. He refuses to join the thieves, on principle, in stealing books or a handkerchief from an innocent person, or breaking into houses, even if he speaks politely to them or sits quietly in the presence of the “authority figure” thieves (Sikes, Fagin, and Nancy). For example, he did not know that Fagin was actually teaching him how to pick the monograms off the handkerchiefs in order not to reveal the rightful owners’ information. “In an instant, the whole mystery of the handkerchiefs...rushed upon him. He stood, for a moment, with the blood so tingling through all his veins from terror, that he felt as if he were in a burning fire; then, confused and frightened, he took to his heels; and, not knowing what he did, made off as fast as he could lay his feet to the ground." When Oliver realized it was illegal, he did not see Fagin the same way again, but became terrified of him. On the contrary, because he has a kind heart, Oliver always wants to help his family—these represent his closest friends; therefore, he loves Mr. Brownlow and the Maylie family like a very sensitive, affectionate child. Oliver is also on an emotional, subconscious search for his first-ever friend and family figure, his mother.
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