Lollygagging Pipsqueak

The differences writing style and character develpment in Great Expectations are obviously quite numerous. This is my attempt to pinpoint some of them.

The most mentioned difference has been the way in which Dickens and Miller describe the events and circumstances of the story. This distinction is commonly made in the form of observation that Dickens delves in great depth into careful depiction of a scene while Miller minimizes the words she uses for the purposes of just description and focuses instead on moving the story forward.

However, what has not really been mentioned is that both authors use their techniques not to make the novels "easier reads", but rather to hide information from the reader until they choose to have it revealed. In Great Expectations for instance, Dickens will often introduce a questionable situation to the reader, yet because he effectively distracts the reader from questioning what is going on by providing a mountain of lengthy descriptive language. For instance, Miss Havisham is introduced for the first time in page after page of description about the yellowness of her room, the broken clocks, the cake, the cobwebs on the walls, the dust covering everything, and so on. It is not until (what feels like) two hundred pages later that we actually learn why the house is the way it is; before Herbert explains the story, the reader merely takes the state of the house and its inhabitant at face value, assuming they had always been as they are. In another example that was pointed out in class, when Pip receives news in London that his sister has died, our reaction was to realize that we had forgotten she was alive, even though she had been of pivotal importance in the first twenty chapters of the book.

In Lolly Willowes, on the other hand, Miller uses the opposite approach. Although she uses only one word where Dickens might use a hundred, it is still incredibly easy for the reader to forget information, even while they are reading it. For example, when we were asked in class what was laid down for Lolly at her birth, and how it was different from what was laid down for her brothers, we had to look back in the book just to remember that the information was given. The same was true for the question of what exactly Lolly had said to Mr. Arbuthnot in conversation with him, and what Caroline and Henry's reaction had been.

Whether it is Dickens burying the reader with pages of description to hide the lack or existance of one sentence of vital information, or Millers using only a single word from which the reader must draw an entire scene, the effect is the same, and the resulting mastery of control that each writer has over their readers is truly astonishing.