Hair is the topic in my eighth-grade English class, specifically the unruly mop belonging to Matthew Pocket, Pip's tutor in Great Expectations . Pocket's topsy-turvy home life--snooty spouse, unruly children, inattentive servants—frequently causes him to fist "his disturbed hair [ . . . ] and make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it" (Dickens, 151). Wanting my students to appreciate the image, I muss my own 'do and feign agitation. A girl sitting mid-row asserts slyly that I "usually got this hair thing goin' on," and I smile self-consciously, pat down the mess, and ask what Dickens is doing. "Signature trait!" someone offers, parroting a point I made earlier about the author giving his characters self-reflecting mannerisms. "Such as?" I ask. Hands rise, answers fly: Jaggers bites his forefinger. Miss Havisham never takes off that old, nasty wedding dress. Orlick slouches.

Part of the novel's appeal to thirteen and fourteen year olds lies in such characterization, the more outlandish the better. Kids this age relate well to the bizarre because adolescence is bizarre. Volcanic emotions, shifting social alliances: the barrage is relentless and has been throughout much of middle school. This phase, someone told me, is like a frog's leap between lily pads: leaving a familiar place, traversing a considerable divide, and plopping onto new territory. Eighth graders are on final approach, ungainly strivers whose ninth-grade landings are usually anything but graceful. My job, as I see it, is as much about easing this transition as it is about teaching the language arts. While standbys like To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet adequately serve both aims, neither rivals the efficacy of Great Expectations.

Dickens's audience was, of course, the Victorian middle class (House, 572), not the hormonally-charged middle schooler. Yet he targets the middle , people relieved to have departed or dodged whatever is behind them but anxious about what lies ahead. Dickens pokes fun at middlers, populating his novel with comic manifestations typifying the tribe's follies and foibles. Among the more memorable are Uncle Pumblechook and Herbert Pocket, the former a pop-eyed, fish-lipped seed merchant sowing bombast among bumpkins, the latter an aspiring "capitalist—an Insurer of Ships" (Dickens, 144) who befriends Pip and serves as the novel's beau ideal . Antithetical in style and substance, they are variations on a theme: one-dimensional characterizations of the emerging middle, their respective trades symbolic of their respective worldviews. Neither, however, is the very model of the "middling sort" (Loftus 1), and for this we get Wemmick, a quirky, likable legal clerk.

Wemmick personifies his role, owning a face that might have been finer had it not been "imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel" and assuming a mannerly air tarnished by a crass affinity for "portable property." Brisk at work and amiable in private, Wemmick lives in what Pip describes as "the smallest house I ever saw," yet his home is literally his castle: tiny battlements adorn the roof, queer gothic windows line the castle walls, a moat circles the property. Here he dotes on his mostly deaf father, and here he doggedly puts the moves on his green-gloved girlfriend, Miss Skiffins:

I [Pip] observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick's mouth, powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm around Miss Skiffins's waist. In course of time I saw his hand appear on the other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were an article of dress, and with the greatest deliberation, laid it on the table before her. (225)

Pip dubs this buffoonery "straying from the path of virtue" and, ironically, the behavior makes Wemmick more virtuous, not less. His virtue lies in his persistence, a trait endemic to the middle. It also lies in his decency. He is a laughable lothario with a good heart, attempting to snatch his girl as if she were another item of portable property, yet doing so chastely and decorously. And how should middlers take Wemmick? First, for what he is: a spoof on their materialistic, single-minded, unrefined selves. Next, for what he is not: a fool. Dickens exaggerates Wemmick's eccentricities to help readers appreciate how comic they look while grubbing for the next rung on the economic ladder, but he solidly anchors the clerk to his work, his family, his home and his friends. Wemmick therefore captures what eludes many middlers: the golden mean, a balanced life lived harmoniously. Using this character, Dickens makes the point that the middle is more than an extended social pit-stop; instead, it is an everything-in-moderation mindset paramount to contentment.

Today's self-centered thirteen-year-old is as well served by Wemmick's example as some Fleet Street dandy who in 1861 paid two pence for the latest serialized installment of GE . (Rosenburg, 404). Entertainment was the dandy's aim, garnering the same pleasure some now derive from watching a soap opera, and, indeed, GE is soap operatic, complete with cliffhangers. That the novel is also social commentary was probably apparent to many of its first readers, and, hopefully, most beneficial to those it was meant to move. Thus, a close reading of GE could be both enjoyable and prescriptive. Making it so for a class of callow eighth graders involves creative story-telling, out-loud imagining of particular characters, and highlighting themes and motifs applicable to the students' experience--effective literary pedagogy with a touch of vaudeville. This, however, is easier said than done. How to tell this story? Which characters are best imagined? What themes and motifs are most applicable?

When I first taught GE, I was more of an English teacher by temperament than by training. I read constantly, but the extent of my formal schooling in literature consisted of three courses I had taken to partially fulfill the requirements of a graduate writing program. Neither GE nor anything Victorian was part of my studies, so I was as ill prepared to pitch the novel as my eighth graders were to receive it--they'd heard it "sucked." My approach, therefore, was similar to Uncle Pumblechook's: I sowed bombast among bumpkins, praying my scholarly veneer was not too thin. That I pulled it off is surprising, and I can only attribute my survival to the fact that I was sometimes as adolescent as my students. Like them, I was negotiating unfamiliar territory, questioning my ability to find my way through and posturing comically, sometimes absurdly, to hide the fact that I seemed to know little about what I was doing and where I was going. Did they give me a pass because they pitied me? I can't say. What I can say is that my hair-pulling on the day we discussed Matthew Pocket was not entirely an act.

From the vantage of shared discovery, my students and I tackled GE. Resonant was the redemption motif, the idea that Pip, Phoenix-like, rises and falls and rises again, finally redeemed and ready to move on, which seemed to me an apt middle-school metaphor. Also appealing was the idea that where one lands is not necessarily where one envisions; rather, redemption happens in unlikely places with unlikely people, as Pip discovers on board a galley where the convict Magwitch lies injured, helpless, and under arrest:

When I took my place by Magwitch's side, I felt that that was my place henceforth while he lived. For now my repugnance to him had all but melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I saw only a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously towards me with great constancy through a series of years. (332)

Socially, Pip can sink no lower; monetarily, he is penniless, but here Pip becomes a decent human being, achieving what neither friends, fortune nor "the sunshine of respectability" confer (Gilmour, 577). In stages one and two of the novel, "sunshine" illuminated Pip's moral complexion, starkly revealing a self-centered snob but in this stage-three moment he is transformed by the goodness emanating from the convict's heart, an ironically redemptive beacon. Decreeing, "I have seen my boy and he can be a gentleman without me" (332), a trussed Magwitch frees Pip, unwittingly shooing him toward self-respectability.

This is what we eighth grade teachers do with our charges: shoo them along paths for which we prepare them, hoping they can be somewhat civil and scholarly without us. I imagine teachers of other benchmark grades, fifth and twelfth, feel similarly uneasy about letting go, but we release our kids with special trepidation. They remain rough cuts of their potential selves, doggedly certain about some things, maddeningly steadfast in their few convictions. By novel's end, Pip achieves personal and professional equilibrium--Wemmick's golden mean. By middle school's end, eighth graders also achieve equilibrium of sorts, appropriately evident at graduation, a milestone my school dubs Honors Night. Here they dress and comport themselves with surprising maturity, and I marvel how the transformation burnishes each graduate, faintly but perceptibly foreshadowing the adult within the child. But this moment does not parallel Pip's climactic self-actualization. It is more akin to his first receiving his great expectations and preparing to depart for London and high society. He too spruces for this commencement, and he too affects a new-found cool, admitting to "an immensity of posturing" (122), sucking up to Miss Havisham, who he believes is responsible for his wealth, and snubbing Joe the blacksmith, his gentle protector and father figure.

To his credit, however, Pip does not blithely leave. On the day of his farewell, he rues his crummy treatment of Joe and sobs when last surveying his village, telling us that here he was "so innocent and little" (124). Intrepidly he sets off, first on foot and then by coach, nagged by the impulse to go back and have "a better parting." Home, however, is not where Pip's heart is. He is drawn irresistibly towards the big city, and as he bumps along the coach road, he convinces himself with each passing mile that it is "too late and too far" to return and make amends. And besides, he tells us, "The whole world lay spread before me."

The whole world," Pip soon discovers, is a mess. London is "ugly, crooked, narrow and dirty" (129), and the trip there is short, hardly the odyssey Pip suggests in the previous chapter. He arrives a little past mid-day and hops another coach for the inner-city jaunt to Little Britain, the address of his lawyer and guardian, Mr. Jaggers. Again, the journey is brief, the destination gloomy. Finding Jaggers unavailable, Pip wanders the neighborhood, first treading the Smithfield cattle market "all asmear with filth an fat and blood and foam," then touring Newgate prison in the company of "an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk minister of justice" and finally slumming with the dregs of Bartholomew Close, some clients, like Pip, of the venerable Jaggers. (131).

Distance is important here, literal and figurative distance. Before realizing his expectations, Pip escapes his troubles—an abusive older sister, a pre-redemptive Magwitch—by sidling up to Joe's forge, a symbol, as my eighth graders will tell you, of the blacksmith's radiant goodness. Within this cozy orbit, Pip is secure; beyond it, he is at the world's mercy. Again, the novel's ironic premise is that for Pip to rise, he must fall, and the fall occurs in London, proximate to Smithfield, Newgate and Bartholomew Close--Magwitch's milieu. Were Pip able to breach the social distance separating him from Joe, he might again find the forge a welcome refuge and the blacksmith a mitigating influence. Unlike Wemmick, Pip lacks the gumption to trip home and touch base, so he suffers accordingly and, for the plot's sake, necessarily. During a rare visit to London, Joe reminds Pip of what he is missing:

You won't find so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat something nigh the rights of this at last. (173).

Until recently I fancied myself as a teacher evolving from a Pumblechookian imposter into something of a Joe, a homespun educational smithy using the fire of my convictions and a modicum of hammering to mold students into critical thinkers. I imagined alums flocking in appreciation to my "forge," yakking about old times and seeking my advice, academic or otherwise. A few have returned, and others have politely saluted me on campus (the middle school and high school share the same space), but these encounters are rare. Why didn't occur to me until this fall, when one of last year's superstars, a terrific writer and insightful reader, leaned through my office door, flipped her hair, giggled, and informed me that on certain days, eighth grade English had been rather "silly." The rebuke stung, for among the adjectives I'd use to describe my teaching, "silly" was not one. Brooding about her remark, I realized she was right. The class was silly because I was silly. In my enthusiasm to animate characters, I had become a caricature, pitching classics as gospel and hamming them up with a televangelist's zeal. This I believed was good teaching. If I were antic enough, if I trooped about the room and whooped and hollered, kids would remember me and, consequently, Joe, Pip, Wemmick and Pumblechook. But like those TV preachers, the messenger supplanted the message. What I now know is that Dickens's people inhabit the imagination on their own. My reality can't compete, nor should it. I'm simply there to act as a host, to introduce Pip and his cohorts, to coax them out of the pages and let them speak for themselves.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations: A Norton Critical Edition . Ed. Edgar Rosenberg. New York: Norton, 1999.

Gilmour, Robin. "The Pursuit of Gentility." Great Expectations: A Norton Critical Edition . Ed. Edgar Rosenberg. New York: Norton, 1999. 576-582.

House, Humphrey. "Pip's Upward Mobility." Great Expectations: A Norton Critical Edition . Ed. Edgar Rosenberg. New York: Norton, 1999. 572-576.

Loftus, Donna. "The Role of the Victorian Middle Class." bbc.co.uk 24 May 2005 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/society/middle_classes-01-shtml.

Rosenberg, Edgar. "Launching Great Expectations." Great Expectations: A Norton Critical Edition . New York: Norton, 1999. 389-423.

Buck Johnson teaches eighth-grade English at Berkeley Preparatory School in Tampa, Florida. He also serves as the school's eighth-grade academic counselor.

To comment on this article e-mail independentteacher@nais.org .