Bleak Expectations Read online

  BLEAK EXPECTATIONS

  Sir Philip Bin

  Edited with an introduction and notes by

  Mark Evans

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Corsair,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2012

  Copyright © Mark Evans 2012

  The right of Mark Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-47210-340-6 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-47210-341-3 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For my beloved Victoria, Rosie and Georgia; for my wonderful parents; for my late Granny because she’d have loved me having written a book; and for the marvellous Mr Gareth Edwards, Bleak producer extraordinaire.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  BLEAK EXPECTATIONS

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Part VI

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Appendix III

  Nothing Else

  INTRODUCTION

  In my experience, many introductions to classic novels do one thing very well: they ruin the story you’re about to read. If an introduction is going to discuss the plot, it should really be an afterword or appendix, but your typical academic has to stick it at the front just to boast that they’ve actually read the massive book, even if it does ruin it for everyone else.

  This introduction will not do that.

  Though I have read the book.

  Honestly.

  First, a word on the author. Sir Philip Bin is almost unknown outside academic circles these days, yet he was the best-selling author of the nineteenth century, selling more than Eliot, Trollope or even Dickens. Sadly, after the Victorian era his fame dwindled until he actually became the worst-selling author of the twentieth century, selling less even than some very bad writers who should never have had books published in the first place.

  Indeed, by the start of the twenty-first century he was a forgotten man, and his books were thought lost to the world – until that fateful afternoon in the British Library when, full of intellectual curiosity, I was ferreting around in the book stacks, eager for a new area of study.

  All right, I was actually full of a big lunch and eager for somewhere to have a nap.

  Eventually I found a comfortable-looking corner in which there was a handy manuscript I could use as a makeshift pillow. The instant my head settled on it, I knew I had made a colossal literary discovery. In truth, the realization came only when I visited the lavatory after waking, washed my hands and glanced in the mirror to see imprinted on my face the inky impression of a title page: ‘Bleak Expectations Sir Philip Bin’.

  I rushed back to seize the precious manuscript and decided it must be immediately reprinted. The fact that the author was long-dead and therefore the royalties would entirely come to me barely even crossed my mind.

  And here it is: Bleak Expectations, Sir Philip’s most autobiographical work, a book that, in its original 1872 printing, sold 40,000 copies – one for every person who could read in Britain at that time.

  The harrowing yet ultimately triumphant story of how— Ah, no. I said I wasn’t going to do that. So I won’t.

  But I really, really have read it, even the massively long, complicated paragraphs with words we don’t really use any more and stupid Victorian syntax.

  I have added explanatory footnotes throughout.1 They appear at the bottom of each relevant page, not like some books where the notes are all at the end and you have to keep different fingers jammed in different bits of book to read it properly, usually resulting in a sprained finger or angrily thrown-away book.

  If you want to tweet your thoughts while reading, don’t. You’re supposed to be reading. Get off the Internet.

  For the same reason, you can’t find me on Facebook.

  Though, if you want, you can find a short clip of me on YouTube shouting, ‘Get off the Internet and keep reading!’

  Finally, I hope you enjoy Sir Philip’s tale as much as I did.

  Because, for the last time, I really have read it.

  Mark Evans

  The British Library

  About to have a nap, 2012

  1 Look! A footnote!

  PART THE FIRST

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  In which I am birthified and acquire a family

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else should be perfectly obvious. After all, what manner of a man would set down the story of his own life if at the end of it he came out looking like an idiot, buffoon or wally-chops?1 Only an idiot, buffoon or wally-chops would do thusly and, barring one incident involving a lack of trousers and an unnaturally curious horse, I have never been one of those.

  You, the malodorous public, know me as Sir Philip Bin: best-selling novelist, Member of Parliament, accidental yet still best-ever Prime Minister, scourge of the French, hammer of the Belgians and adjustable spanner of the Italians, discoverer of the West Pole, hider of the source of the Nile, inventor of the Scotch egg, the Welsh roll and the Irish bun, adventurer, explorer, philanthropist, misanthropist, xenophobe and nine-time all-England foreigner-baiting gold medallist.

  But I was not always so.

  Indeed, regarding my not-always-so-ness, there has recently been much speculation in the press as to my true origins: both the Expressington Times and the Daily Standagraphian have run scurrilous, fib-filled stories that have made my blood run hotter than a boiled kettle in an angry volcano. Hence this tome, my attempt to stop that speculation in its tracks like a shot elephant or a lazy train. With this book I shall set the rumour mill at rest and stop it grinding the flour of gossip, from which cometh the bread of scandal and thence the sandwich of despair, filled with the beef of misery and the mustard of grrrr.

  Many clues as to my early life are to be found in my novels. A Story of Two Towns, Miserable Mansion, The Old Shop of Stuff, Graham Grambleby, Massive Dorritt – all my books contain hints at the truth. Apart from Lustful Killer Bees from Mars, which, I’ll grant you, is almost entirely fictional.

  But now the time has come to cast away hints, clues and obliqueness and instead present the unadulterated story of my fascinating life, with its endless progression of trials, set-backs and conveniently spaced cliff-hanger endings. For adventure has followed me like a dog follows a man with bacon trousers and beef-steak underpants; that is to say keenly, and with a good deal of slobbering.

  I was born in 1806, having been conceived the year before in celebration of Admiral Nelson’s victory at the battle of Trafalgar. Family tradition has it that my father, Thomas Bin, heard the news, exclaimed, ‘Hurrah for the King’, then immediately donned a three-cornered hat and eye-patch
before boarding my mother, Agnes, and giving her a swift broadside amidships. Whatever the truth, some months later my mother was heavy with child or, as the local poor women described it, ‘all lumpy with a sex-meringue’.

  I am told my birth was easy. But I did not need to be told, for I was there, and remember it as well as I remember anything of importance to me, such as my hat size (nearly clever), my shoe size (exactly one foot, obviously) and my blood group (Proper).2 At one moment all was amniotic calm, my mother’s heartbeat soothing me as I nestled on the placental pillow within her, then the next there was the dread sensation of falling as Nature’s cruel but necessary process expelled me into the world. Fortunately, my birth-plummet was arrested by the pair of Dr Helplady’s reinforced pregno-bloomers my mother was wearing, otherwise the first acquaintance I should have made in my life would have been with a hard stone floor, and I am quite sure we would not have got along.

  As I birthed out, my mother was in the midst of a harpsi-chord recital for my father, but being made of stern British stuff, she bravely continued to the end of the piece before presenting me as a baby-shaped encore. Alas, the only music I could provide was a childish wailing in an utterly different key from that of the Purcell my mother had recently completed and, furious at the cacophony, my father immediately left the house to do business abroad.

  My father’s family name being Bin, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Flip-top Bin. Over the years this was shortened to Ip, then extended once more to the far more name-worthy name of Pip. My mother, however, took my original mispronunciation personally, decided she had given birth to a twitiot and, embarrassmented, retreated to her room for a year to blush.

  With my father abroad and my mother upstairs, I was raised by the housekeeper, Maggotty.3 Ah, Maggotty. Dear Maggotty. Dear, sweet, warm, strange-smelling Maggotty. Her starched apron was my maternal bosom in those early months, her starched cap the boundary of my vision. In fact, my main memory of her is starch. She had a motto: ‘If it moves, starch it. If it does not move, starch it. If it seems it has enough starch already, it hasn’t, so starch it again.’

  The kitchen was Maggotty’s domain and hence the kitchen was my playroom. And what toys I had! Copper kettles full of boiling water, great pans of bubbling soup, pointed skewers, sharp knives . . . Among my first words were ‘Ow’, ‘That hurts’ and ‘Can I have some real toys that won’t hurt me, please?’ Or at least they would have been, if I could talk at that age, which I couldn’t. But Maggotty would just smile her strange, starchy smile and encourage me to go exploring in the hot pastry oven.

  Actually, now I come to think of it, I despised Maggotty.

  Fortunately, my mother eventually emerged from her room, and Maggotty was given notice to leave. She took the news as well as would any person taking news incredibly badly, viciously attacking my young self with a meat cleaver. Alas for her vengeance but un-alas for my safety, the repeated massive starchings she had applied to my clothing had left me encased in an impenetrably hard shell and I suffered no injury. Poor Maggotty – hoist by her own starchy petard.

  Actually, I don’t mean poor Maggotty, I mean eeurgh horrid Maggotty, good riddance, yuk.

  To my delight, after Maggotty left, my mother introduced me to the newest member of the household. It was a sister, and not just any old sister, it was my sister. Her name was Pippa, a name not dissimilar to my own name, which was Pip. In fact, it differed only in as much as it had an extra p at the end, as well as an additional a and, at the front, a silent and invisible g.

  There were many things I wanted to know about this new sister of mine. Where had she come from? Was she from Mrs Sellstuff’s village shop, like an apple, a sack of flour or a portable oik-poker? Or had she come from London like a letter, a Cockney or diphtheria? My mother shook her head, no, and told me that Pippa was the product of prayer and stern application by herself and my father. My young head cared not what ‘stern application’ meant, but surely my parents practised it assiduously, for some short time later a second sister joined us.

  This sister, too, was mine, and her name was Poppy, again a name not dissimilar to my own, differing only enough that if, at some future point, Poppy was perhaps to be summoned by my mother, I should not make the mistake of thinking she was in fact summoning me, Pip, a mistake which, if made, might result in me inadvertently responding and consequently attending a girlish occasion such as a dress-fitting or embroidery class, despite being a boy and not a girl like Poppy, though with regard to my other sister, Pippa, at certain times when my mother summoned her the wind would blow away the final syllable of her name turning it, in its new, wind-created brevity, into my name Pip, thereby resulting in me attending an event intended for her, namely the aforementioned dress-fitting or embroidery class, thus indicating that my parents had never properly thought through the whole almost homonymous name thing, though, that said, even if the Pip and Pippa confusion did happen occasionally, there never was a Pip and Poppy confusion except once during a thunderstorm.4

  With their desired number of children achieved, alongside his foreign businessing my father now took up the twin hobbies of cold showers and botany and my mother took up never touching him that way again. But at least my family was complete: my parents Agnes and Thomas, my sisters Pippa and Poppy, and me, Pip Bin.

  1 Derived from the Olde Englishe ‘wolly’, a fool, twit or sillyton, and ‘cheps’, face, head or, in the north-east, deep-fried potatoes. See Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ‘The Loss Adjuster’s Tale’ ‘. . . he weir an wally-chops of sight, all blethy and tistawint’.

  2 Nineteenth-century blood groups were Royal, Aristo, Proper, Hoi Polloi, Riff Raff and Eeurgh Negative.

  3 Cf Thackeray’s Wormitty in Vanity Fair II: Judgment Day. Maggotty and Wormitty are the Biblical twin exotic dancers who slew the Hashemidiaskanite King Zedelshratt with a pair of trained assassin-chickens. Book of Hens, 3: 4–199999.9.

  4 See? One of those long paragraphs with silly Victorian syntax I mentioned in the introduction. This was in fact the author’s attempt on the world’s-longest-sentence record, though it falls lamentably short. Even in 1874 the record was well over 20,000 words, held by a sentence in Laurence Sterne’s almost unreadable first novel Tristram Brandy, which he later re-worked into the now famous work Barry Brandy.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  Of growth and fun and meetings of future import

  My family may have been complete in as much as I now had as many mothers and fathers and sisters as I was ever to have in the world, but at times it seemed incomplete, due to the absence of my father. For he was a distant man in a very physical sense, his place of business being some four thousand miles away in the recently discovered North Indies, where he was a partner in the famed North India Company, bravely exploiting indigent populations for the greater good of God, King and Country.

  I and my sisters missed our father; my mother missed her husband; and as father and husband were one and the same to some or the other, it meant a deal full of wistfulness tinged with saddingtons.

  Nevertheless, he regularly sent us parcels of money and rare jewels and, though they were not he, they were a more than adequate substitute, proving that old adage ‘An absent father is easily replaced by lots of money.’1

  We lived in a large house, Bin Manor, set in several snectares2 of grounds. The grounds offered plentiful enjoyment for spirited young children, and we were spirited indeed. There were ponds, lakes and tiny oceans, trees and other trees and great manicured lawns on which we played games such as shuffle-hoop, bashy-bat and spong.3

  When the weather was too ill-tempered for outside activities, we retreated inside, where there were great rooms and corridors in which we played other games, such as pointy-throw, clicky-ball and spang.4

  Life was splendid. In a time when others less fortunate than ourselves struggled for the most basic amenities, our home brimmed with plenty. Where most folk bathe
d but once a year, in a festering stream or a puddle, we bathed daily – and not in disease-bearing water, but in healthy, hygienic jam. Oh, the sybaritic delight of wallowing in warm preserves! The soothing feel of the fruity goo sluicing through one’s hair! The jammy delight of my mother letting me lick the bath deliciously clean afterwards!

  Then there was the food, all richly rare meats and delicacies. We ate swan, otter, pig, heron, ox and natives from the colonies. For pudding there would be candied fruits, caramelized horse or hen brûlée, often a sparrow trifle or tree cake, sometimes even mouse crumble with chicken custard.

  And after these splendid feasts, we would repair to our soft, goose-down beds, beds so luxurious that the goose-down was still attached to the geese. Once, during a particularly fierce winter that bit like an angry, ice-toothed alligator, I accidentally left a window open, and before we could stop it Poppy’s entire mattress migrated south to warmer climes. How we laughed! Until she turned blue with cold, at which point we stopped laughing and started crying. Little did I know then that I had just witnessed a precursor to Poppy’s eventual–– But no, for this is the happy part of my story, and pain and misery must wait until properly invited into the narrative.5

  We were frolicsome children, Pippa, Poppy and I, constantly joyous and never sad. And whenever Father returned on one of his visits, his cases chock full of gifts, our joy was unrestrained as we bounced and bollibled6 with happification.

  I remember one particular paternal visit well. I had attained what seemed to me the grand old age of twelve years. Pippa was a year younger, which was a relief as a while back she had somehow been older than me for a year or two, and Poppy was a year younger than her, namely ten years old, which was a relief to everyone as she had spent the past few years refusing to grow any older than two and had only recently put on a growth spurt of eight years in four months. It was a bright summer’s day, and I and my sisters were returning from a morning’s hard fun clodding mud at poor folk, when we saw our mother standing outside the house balanced on one leg and waving her arms like a crazed windmill, a pose she adopted whenever she was excited. To make matters more intriguing yet, she was wearing the special hat she donned only on occasions of great import: bright ribbons attached a whole hollowed-out badger to her head.