SOURCE: Hardy, Barbara. “Food and Ceremony in Great Expectations.” In Essays in Criticism 13, no. 4 (October 1963): 351-63.

In the following essay, Hardy examines the use of food ceremonies celebrating sociability, hospitality, and love in Great Expectations.

We all know that food has a special place in the novels of Dickens. He loves feasts and scorns fasts. His celebration of the feast is not that of the glutton or the gourmet: eating and drinking are valued by him as proofs of sociability and gusto, but more important still, as ceremonies of love. The conversion of Scrooge is marked by his present of a goose to Bob Cratchit and his reunion at his nephew's table: both the giving and the participation show his newly found ability to love. The Christmas dinner and the geniality of the English pub are not sentimentalised as isolated institutions of goodwill, conveniently cut off from the...