Book Reviews: Student Companion to Charles Dickens by Ruth Glancy. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1999. / Charles Dickens: Great Expectations by Michael Hollington and Marianne Camus. Paris, CNED: Didier Érudition, 1999

Ruth Glancy's book is overseen by a board of editors who identify “the needs of students and general readers for accessible literary criticism” among “secondary school, community college, and four-year-college classrooms”: The discussion of each work is organized into separate sections on plot development, character development, and major themes. [...]the import of Christmas: Christmas dinner at the forge…is anything but “Christmassy” for the child, squeezed into a corner of the table, fed the most unappetizing parts of the pork and fowls, and further tortured by barrage of criticism from the adults, who are all the time tucking into a large meal. Great Expectations begins almost as a Christmas requiem: in a graveyard on Christmas Eve; the chimes that ring in the festive rites are the great guns from the prison ships a few miles off…the Christmas dinner itself culminates in a hideously spun-out fantasy in which the child-hero is butchered and turned into roast pig. (xii) Plot alone, moreover, cannot impart what James Kincaid has so movingly shown, that Joe, “the good Christian” who “heaps Pip's plate with gravy to show his sympathy” (132), is actually helpless. Where class does matter, in the seduction of Emily by the gentleman Steerforth, no mention is made of 231 the significance of such a fall for a Victorian girl; young readers today have trouble understanding what drives Lady Dedlock from her home, and what risk attends Lizzie Hexam should she remain in London vulnerable to her love for Eugene Wrayburn — so it would be appropriate to say more than that Emily has been “lured away by Steerforth” to elope (77).