ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the grotesque idea has opened upon the author that he begins to doubt whether he had better not cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. These are the words that announce, in a letter to Forster, the origins of Great Expectations, a major novel generated, like Joyce's Ulysses, from a much smaller component of another work. The words 'grotesque' and 'tragicomic' seem to refer, above all, to the relationship between Magwitch and Pip, which is characterised from the start by mixed emotions. Magwitch terrifies Pip in the first scene with his threats to have his 'heart and liver out'; but he is also a comic ogre, his sadistic bullying, to an adult reader, transparently fictitious. In the novel's first version, there is no apotheosis at the end of the novel either; an emphasis, rather, upon Pip's return to Biddy and Joe, and upon Estella's visit.
