This is the second part of Christian Lehmann’s analysis of how Into the Spider-Verse engages with Great Expectations. To read part one, click here.

When we left off last time, we had set up a number of ways in which Great Expectations appears throughout Spider-Verse. In this installment, we shall look with greater detail at a few examples.

The first melee comes when the spider-beings from different universes have all gathered at Aunt May’s home and the villains attack. The fight culminates with Prowler (Miles’ uncle) dangling Peter over the edge of the roof. This is a powerful recollection of Magwitch dangling Pip on the cover of Miles’s copy of the novel. Miles, like Pip, is desperate. But, unlike Pip, he has recourse to a solution and lifts his mask. 

The Prowler, shocked, lifts his own mask in order to process the shock of seeing his nephew, and in that moment is shot by the Kingpin. This whole scene acts to complicate the relationship of Spider-Verse with Great Expectationsbecause the best approach is to consider that both Aaron and Peter are the Magwitch figures. Peter B. acts to introduce Miles to his Expectations, but the reveal of villainy comes from Aaron. In the following scene, Miles takes Aaron’s dying body to an abandoned alley and mourns his death in a manner reminiscent of Pip visiting Magwitch at Newgate.

With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for my yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips. Then, he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away, and his head dropped quietly on his breast.

Great Expectations ch. 56

This observation about multiple perspectives allows me to revisit the proposition with which I began this essay a few weeks ago. The relationship between Spider-Verse and Great Expectations is not a 1-1 analogic one, but one that challenges us to consider connections from a variety of points of view. During the final fight, Miles has the opportunity to mirror this moment when he grabs his mentor’s costume to save him from falling. Thus, these two images triangulate the Magwitch-Pip relationship.

Of all of Dickens’s novels, Great Expectations fits the best with the idea of a multiverse. It is, after all, the only one of the novels for which we have a variety of endings. As is well known, there are two endings of the novel: the one that Dickens originally wrote, and the one that he wrote after Bulwer-Lytton said it was too depressing. As is less well known, there are actually six endings to the novel, a coincidence fitting with Spider-Verse’s six worlds: Miles and the first Peter’s, Peter B. Parker, Gwen Staci, Penny Parker, Spider-man Noir, and Spider-Ham. The film itself shows a preference for just Miles’ ending. The world saw Dickens’ original ending for the first time in Forster’s biography. It is longer than that eventually published, but one sentence is especially pertinent. Pip is out walking with little Pip, Biddy and Joe’s son, in London when a woman calls him over.

“I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

From the unpublished ending to Great Expectations

They part ways. In the published version, we find a very different use of hands.

     “I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.” 

     “We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.

      “And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.

      I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Great Expectations ch. 59

“We are friends” Pip says, and before they take hands, Estella declares “And will continue friends apart.” Spider-Verse ends on the exact same note. And, given the careful engagement with Dickens as an ur-text, I want to strongly suggest that this is not a coincidence. 

“Friends?” Miles asks just before Gwen has to return to her universe. “Friends,” Gwen agrees while clasping his outstretched hand.

The Well-Read Catholic similarly noticed this moment, however, they stopped with asking the reader to “compare.” The great relief that I felt at this ending matches that of the ambiguity of Great Expectations. These are both works that are mature enough to consider friendship a noble goal. After 2 hours, or 20 months, having a heterosexual pair come together with a handshake rather than a kiss is remarkably mature. Even more impressively, Spider-Verse does not end its engagement with Great Expectations at this moment. Instead, Gwen returns home, Miles has his final showdown with Kingpin, reconciles with his father, and hands in his homework. He provides a cover page, which poignantly is his graffito without the “no” and without the silhouette. It is, in fact, entitled Great Expectations. He has, after all, accepted his role as a super-hero. Thus, while Pip realizes that his greatness lay in recognizing his humbleness, Miles actually earned his greatness. He behaved as a hero in a way that Pip never could have behaved as a “gentleman.” Pip never understood that a gentleman, like a superhero, must be on the side of justice, as Biddy tells him.

“Yet a gentleman should not be unjust neither.”

Great Expectations, ch. 19

In addition to the published ending of Great Expectations, there is a small textual crux that comes from the “happy ending,” that is, the one that was published while Dickens was alive. Following this are two others, the source of which can be found in Edgar Rosenberg’s discussion of the novel’s endings the second of which is Rosenberg’s own discovery from the manuscript.

“I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” (Author revision 1862)

“I saw the shadow of no parting from her.” (1st edition)

“I saw the shadow of no parting from her, but one.” (Rosenberg discovery)

For Rosenberg, the deletion of “but one” is crucial. However, it is not my aim here to discuss this particularly rich and fascinating issue. Rather, I want to end with a celebration of the proliferation of options that Spider-Verse has allowed us to see. Each of these endings can exist simultaneously because each has been written. The film’s last scene—before the post-credit sequence (a narrative device I think Dickens would love)—shows Miles lying in bed and listening to music after declaring, “because I’m Spider-man…and I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot.” The music rises when suddenly a light shines down on Miles’ face and Gwen’s voice calls out, “Miles. Miles!”

The bubbles swirl and she asks, “you got a minute?” Then the credits role. This is the film’s “shadow” and “parting.” Is she calling to say hi? To pursue a relationship? To ask for—or offer—help? The movie does not let us know. And so we, like Dickens’ Victorian audience, are left to wonder.

So what is the ultimate conclusion of this engagement with Great Expectations? I have already suggested that one answer is the way that both texts investigate what it means to be a gentleman/superhero. But I want to end by suggesting that Pip is another character in the spider-verse. Another name for the film could be: Into Dickens-Verse.