It was the same kind of flamboyance that I felt before my departure to the US as Pip felt when he surveyed the marshes, as the so-hinted mysterious Great Expectations loomed at large before him. So was the record:
After our early dinner, I strolled out along. proposing to finish off the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I felt a sublime compassion for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the low green mounds. I promised myself that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roastbeef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everybody in the village. (Dickens, 1960, p. 148)
The condescendingly "sublime compassion" came from both a youth's impatience with the current lot of living and his inability in appreciating the ever more scarce love in the upper society that he had in his environment then. Dickens grasped this eager feeling by Pip positioning himself in the "gentleman's" perception even before his parting with the family and friends. Poor thing, life will be different, but how so? And to your satisfaction or dismay?
Dickens, C. (1960). Great expectations. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston.
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