Dickens must pronounce positive additions to the characters his rich and
various genius had already created.

Pip, the hero, from whose mind the whole representation takes its form
and color, is admirably delineated throughout. Weak, dreamy, amiable,
apprehensive, aspiring, inefficient, the subject and the victim of
"Great Expectations," his individuality is, as it were, diffused through
the whole narrative. Joe is a noble character, with a heart too great
for his powers of expression to utter in words, but whose patience,
fortitude, tenderness, and beneficence shine lucidly through his
confused and mangled English. Magwitch, the "warmint" who "grew up took
up," whose memory extended only to that period of his childhood when he
was "a-thieving turnips for his living" down in Essex, but in whom a
life of crime had only intensified the feeling of gratitude for the one
kind action of which he was the object, is hardly equalled in grotesque
grandeur by anything which Dickens has previously done. The character
is not only powerful in itself, but it furnishes pregnant and original
hints to all philosophical investigators into the phenomena of crime. In
this wonderful creation Dickens follows the maxim of the great master of
characterization, and seeks "the soul of goodness in things evil."

The style of the romance is rigorously close to things. The author is so
engrossed with the objects before his mind, is so thoroughly in earnest,
that he has fewer of those humorous caprices of expression in which
formerly he was wont to wanton. Some of the old hilarity and play of
fancy is gone, but we hardly miss it in our admiration of the effects
produced by his almost stern devotion to the main idea of his work.
There are passages of description and narrative in which we are hardly
conscious of the words, in our clear apprehension of the objects and
incidents they convey. The quotable epithets and phrases are less