<em>Great Expectations</em> occupied a fairly recently established sub-genre, autobiographical fiction, but it also incorporated other generic possibilities, in particular those of Gothic fiction and popular melodrama. For example, when the convict first comes into Pip's view, he is like an emanation from the graves in the churchyard. He is marked all over his body by the landscape and he tells the boy he wishes he were a frog or an eel. He finally limps off towards the black and deathly gibbet on the river's edge, which had once held a pirate, looking as if he were that pirate ‘come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again’ (p.7). The word ‘grotesque’ can be used to describe the surprising mixture of forms, characteristic of Dickens's writing, in which human, animal and vegetable seem to intermingle, but which is nonetheless designed to win our belief. Without winning that belief, Dickens cannot hope to engage us with the moral patterning of his text.
