Low Expectations from the College Board

Posted on April 26, 2004 in Compassion Reading Social Justice

When I looked at the list of books suggested by the College Board, I was surprised and dismayed by the choice of Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities instead of the superior Great Expectations which I had read twice for class and a few more times on my own.

I rested my eyes and slept on the question. When I woke in the morning and heard the gardeners sweeping the sidewalks, it occurred to me what the reason was. It did not please me. Great Expectations is a novel about what it means to be a gentle man. Not a gentleman as Pip, the narrator, believes, but as a gentle man who respects the dignity of others.

Where Pip’s story rises above the sentimentality of many Dickens’ works, A Tale of Two Cities (which I have read in parts and seen in a few film adaptations) wallows in it. Where Great Expectations speaks of how we must live with others in the here and now, A Tale of Two Cities puts all its action in a country removed from English society. Where Great Expectations mocks the degeneracy of the wealthy, A Tale of Two Cities exalts the French nobility. The thirteenth novel challenges us to see the dignity that even the most wretched of the poor possess, while the twelfth portrays them as monsters who click needles while the guillotine falls. Great Expectations is the antidote to the cult of heroism erected in A Tale of Two Cities. It remembers that gentility stands on the back of the poor.

It is true that Charles Damay is not an ordinary nobleman, that he loves the daughter of a former prisoner of the Bastille. The French working poor have gone mad and make no accounting of character in their trials. The gentry that they struggle against did not strive to be gentle, however. Telling the story only from the perspective of Charles Damay lends no understanding to the terrible black wind which arose in 1789 or the Reign of Terror. It’s a book that might someday be written about Iraq or Iran, full of glory and stories of American dignity in the face of a mad mob, telling us little or nothing about why the mob was obsessed with our destruction.

In Great Expectations, on the other hand, we have true conciliation between classes. Pip’s roots are all our ancestors, his beneficiary Magwitch the redneck and blue collar shoulders upon which we depend. It provokes us to consider the heroism in our lessers, the possibility of courage and love in a whole class of people rather than a few elites.

Why did the College Board choose the one over the other? Why did it not at least include Great Expectations as an alternative to A Tale of Two Cities?

I believe it is the times we live in, those blind, selfish days when we revel in vainglory and fear of the Other — the Arab, the African American demanding equal rights, the Latino coming over the border to work in our gardens — when we condemn the poor as unvirtuous; when we incarcerate thousands in landbound, overcrowded, concrete and steel hulks; when we ask millionaires about the homeless problem and never get the views of the homeless themselves.

Would we return to promoting an appreciation of our place in this Universe and respect for what others do to help us survive!

Those times, this agnostic faith tells me, will come again. But why must we endure this cycle of false compassion and horrific war in the meantime? When we will learn to glide instead of relying on Fortune’s simultaneously crushing and exalting wheel?

You may enjoy David Perdue’s Charles Dickens’ Page.