Word: blacksmiths
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Like a number of Dickens' novels, "Great Expectations" is loosely constructed. It centers around the boyhood and early manhood of Pip, who has spent his early years with his sister, the wife of a blacksmith. There are two completely separate plots, which Dickens, with characteristic wantonness, connects at the end by means of pure coincidence. Condemned as lack of skill, this deus ex machina shows only that the author was more interested in character, scene, and the fate of his hero than he was in the mechanics of plot...
Courtship. Dirty water from a blacksmith's tub, or the touch of a dead man's hand, will cure facial blemishes. A girl should never comb her hair at night, for this will "lower a gal's nature." On the last night of April, a girl may wet a handkerchief and hang it out in a cornfield. Next morning the May sun dries it and the wrinkles will show the initial of the man she is to marry. When a girl sleeps with her legs crossed, she is dreaming of her sweetheart...
Farmer Hans Schweiger explained his position last week: "My farm will yield 6,000 marks this year, from which I'll have to deduct 500 for taxes, 500 for the blacksmith, and 1,000 for seed and fertilizer. That leaves me 4,000. A pair of shoes for my wife costs me 800. I consider myself lucky when some city fellow brings me a few nails or machinery to trade in for bread and potatoes." Said Farmer Friedrich Sticht grimly: "Before the farmers starve, every single city dweller will starve first...
...Great Expectations had a magnificent story to begin with, and characters almost as magically compelling, in their peculiar way, as Shakespeare's. Yet both characters and story were plainly hard to bring to full life on the screen. The story is about young Pip (John Mills), a blacksmith's apprentice, who in childhood befriends an escaped convict, Magwitch (Finlay Currie), and a rich, decaying recluse, Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt).When Pip is still a very young man, he is snatched from poverty into Great Expectations. Miss Havisham's subtle attorney Jaggers (F. L. Sullivan) holds a fortune...
...there is a good deal of intelligent derivation from Dickens' inspired illustrators, Cruikshank and "Phiz" (Alec Guinness as Pocket is a Cruikshank in the flesh). Besides the principal actors, all of whom are excellent, the most notable (and equally good) are Bernard Miles-another living Cruikshank-as the blacksmith, Anthony Wager as the boy Pip, O. B. Clarence as a deaf-&-daft gaffer, and 17-year-old Jean Simmons as Estella in her teens...