Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella in Bloomington, MN

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed
Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction
examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in
Great Expectations
, Dickens not only updated
David Copperfield
but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from
The Tales of the Genii
(a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.