Mr Wopsle

Mr Wopsle is the church clerk in Pip’s home town in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1). He is prone to delivering poetic and dramatic pieces at the drop of a hat, particularly Shakespeare and “The Passions: An Ode to Music” (1746), by William Collins. Even a newspaper story becomes fodder for a dramatic recitation:

“A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus.” (Chapter 18)

Mr Wopsle’s excessive fondness for recitation leads him to quit his clerkship to become an actor (under the name ‘Waldengarver’). At a small metropolitan theatre in London, Pip attends a hilariously appalling performance of Hamlet, with Wopsle in the role of the melancholy Dane (Chapter 31). Pip later sees him in the deus ex machina role in a nautical melodrama (the genre parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore) and in a Christmas pantomime (Chapter 47).