This post has been contributed by Christian Lehmann, Bard High School Early College, Cleveland. Read his previous contribution here. 

On January 16^th 2019 I wrote a Twitter thread about Great Expectations in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I am grateful for the Dickens Society communications team for the opportunity to expand those thoughts into a two-part blog post.

In Spider-Verse, Miles Morales—the current iteration of the eponymous arachnid-metamorphosed super-hero—gets into an elite school called Visions because he tested well. His parents insist that he attend and take advantage of the opportunities, but he is clearly overwhelmed as we watch him in the first minutes of the movie go from class to class accumulating homework. The camera dwells for a moment on his homework in English: two chapters of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Although I have not been able to find the copy they are reading (please let me know if it is an actual edition in the comments), the cover is familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the novel. The convict Magwitch holds Pip, who has been visiting the graveyard with his parents’ and siblings’ tombs, in the air while threatening him.

“After darkly looking at his leg and at me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his.” 

(Ch. 2, p. 5 Penguin)

Iterations of this illustration appears on the covers of the Dover Thrift Edition, Baker Street Readers edition, and the New English Library, to name just a few.

Great Expectations was published weekly from 1 Dec. 1860-3 Aug. 1861 in the Dickens-conducted journal All the Year Round. When Miles’ teacher assigns two chapters, we get a general sense of the exciting way he is running this class. It seems that they are reading the novel according to its publication schedule. The installments of GE frequently only contained two chapters. Thus, an eight second clip in a movie that is almost two hours long ends up giving us a lens through which to consider a variety of approaches to the movie and, just as importantly, the way that the movie challenges us to rethink the novel. This post will not argue that Spider-Verse is an adaptation of GE, but that it creates several loose analogies that allow us to investigate thematic similarities between Miles Morales’s acceptance of his super-heroic status and Pip’s acceptance of not being a gentleman.

Spider-Verse is a film deeply invested in its own textual history. Miles knows about Spider-man both because he exists in his world and because he has read comic-books about him. Those comics, illustrated stories that appeared serially, are direct descendants of Dickens’ publishing practice as well. Many of his novels—but not Great Expectations—were published with illustrations. (Avery Kaplan also makes this point about serialization in an article on Easter-eggs in Spider-Verse although the explanation about “Boz” illustrating GE is wrong: “These chapters featured illustrations by the artist Boz, whose art is visible on the copy of the book Miles uses to write his report.”) This textual awareness is what allows the film to avoid the tired trope of the origin-story. Miles has a brief, and humorous, moment of thinking that his physical changes are due to puberty, but once he realizes that his inner-monologue has already appeared in published comics, he accepts it and moves on. 

Later on in the school day, Miles is caught deliberately failing a physics test. The teacher, in an admirable moment of interdisciplinary discipline, assigns Miles a personal essay. “I’m assigning you a personal essay, not about physics, but about you and about what kind of person you want to be.” Because the film ends with Miles handing this essay in, it is an easy step to consider that what we watch over the next hour and a half is Miles’ personal essay: we watch as he becomes the kind of person he wants to be, a spider-man worthy of the mask and the myth. But before we get there, Miles has to start with a blank piece of paper.

Here we have a visual reminder of the composition of GE, not just of Dickens and his manuscript, but of Pip himself who occasionally interrupts his own narrative to remind us that he is writing it down.

A few examples. This is the conclusion of chapter 38, “A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella” (GE ch. 38, p. 299 Penguin). And here is Pip’s horror at death sentences, “But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and women put before the Judge to receive that sentence together” (ch. 56, p. 456-457).

Miles quickly finds himself distracted and goes to visit his uncle, Aaron, who just happens to be a surprise villain, the Prowler. With the death of Aaron and Miles’ difficulty reconciling the two sides of his uncle, we have a parallel with Magwitch himself, the villainous patron whom Pip comes to respect only to lose. The two have an easy rapport, and Aaron encourages his nephew’s interest in art. This leads him to show Miles an untouched section of wall under New York City to tag. Miles’ interest in graffiti, an art form that combines text and image, places him in the tradition of the “Pips” who are artists: Ethan Hawke’s Finn in the 1998 Great Expectations directed by Alfonso Cuarón, and Aditya Roy Kapur’s Noor in the 2016 Fitoor directed by Abhishek Kapoor.

In a visually stunning montage, Miles transfers his image to the wall.

Here we see the cynical side of Miles. In the draft, his left hand covers the area above the initial “e” of expectations. It is only when he sits back and looks at it that we see, between him and his uncle, the addition of “no.” Miles, at minute 13 sees himself as a figure without any expectations. The blankness of his silhouette in the middle of the image—recollecting Banksy’s silhouettes and showing,inadvertently, his awareness of an artistic tradition to which he belongs—is another form of a mask.

The scene ends with an electronic spider biting Miles. Here is the start of the super hero portion of the movie. This is the moment when Miles goes from having “no expectations” in his own mind to the external world forcing expectations upon him. He wakes up in the morning and his body has transformed. The scene is comical as he adjusts to his new body, and it also recalls another young man who suddenly finds himself inhabiting an embodied yet alienated presence, namely Pip’s first meal as a gentleman. Incidentally, Herbert’s renaming Pip fits in line with needing a secret identity.

 “Let me introduce the topic, Handel,” Herbert tells him, “by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth,—for fear of accidents,—and that while the fork is reserved for that use, it is not put further in than necessary. It is scarcely worth mentioning, only it’s as well to do as other people do. Also,the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under. This has two advantages.You get at your mouth better (which after all is the object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on the part of the right elbow.”

(ch. 22, p. 179 Penguin)

 When Miles discovers that he is likely a spider-man, he tracks his steps and finds the electronic spider. This leads him to stumble upon a battle in which the current spider-man is attempting to stop Kingpin from opening a rift to other dimensions to bring back his wife and daughter. This spider-man dies and the plot kicks into gear when Miles goes to the graveyard to look at Peter’s grave. A shadowy figure approaches him from behind and we are in the world of the cover of Great Expectations.

Unlike Pip,who is helpless and turned upside down, Miles has a range of new powers, one of which is electro-magnetic control and he zaps the shadowy figure who turns out to be Peter B. Parker, a spider-man from another dimension. Patrick Callahan has succinctly summarized the connection between this moment and GE: “we find Miles on a snowy night in the cemetery visiting the grave of what was supposed to be his father-figure mentor and stumbling upon a man he later describes as “hobo Spider-Man” (an older, sadder Peter Parker from another dimension). The scene is a re-mix of Pip visiting his parents’ tomb on Christmas 1812 and running into the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, who despite his uncouth appearance turns into his hidden benefactor and later friend.” Smuggler Army made a similar point in their opening post: “Imagine a cemetery in the dead of winter. Imagine that, within that cemetery, a scared young kid meets a man on the run. This encounter changes both of their lives forever, witnessed by one particular headstone. The headstone bears the name of one of the very-much-alive men.” Both of these brief blogs make the important point that the cemetery scene consolidates Spider-Verse’s bona-fides as a piece of Dickensian reception. The movie does not just name-drop, it engages.

Before developing the idea of Peter as a kindly Magwitch, it is worth pressing the evidence for it. Once Peter comes to, he finds himself bound to a punching bag by Miles.

Unlike GE, however, where Magwitch demands a file, Peter frees himself and says to Miles “Don’t watch the mouth. Watch the hands.” This scene repeats later when Peter webs Miles to a chair keep him out of the final fight. The minor recollection of GE is Magwitch’s manacle in the first chapters and Pip’s binding by Orlick in chapter 53: “the next thing I comprehended, was, that I had been caught in a strong running noose, thrown over my head from behind…I struggled ineffectually in the dark, while I was fastened tight to the wall” (ch. 53, 422-423).

The Magwitch connection continues after the interrogation and Peter’s decision to help Miles when we hard-cut to Peter eating a hamburger at a restaurant that has since closed in his dimension.

The grease dripping down his face, and his speaking with his mouth full, recall to the viewer, who is already primed to think of GE, Pip’s delivery of the Christmas pie to Magwitch. “He was gobbling mincemeat, meat-bone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at once” (ch.3, p.19). Where Magwitch questions Pip about whether he has betrayed him, Peter waxes poetic about the burger and their plan. We thus come to the central question: should we see Peter as a Magwitch figure? Yes, but as I already implied, we should also see Uncle Aaron in the same way. Peter is also a Herbert figure, helping Miles adjust to the new clothing and accoutrements of his new status. Costume and web-spinner for Miles, suit and manners for Pip.

Set-up complete, we launch forward into the main plot. But for that you will have to wait two weeks for the second part.