Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel of Charles Dickens, published in weekly instalments in his magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861, and for many readers his finest — shorter, more tightly plotted and more psychologically searching than the great panoramic novels before it. It is told in the first person by Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan raised “by hand” (that is, with blows) by his harsh elder sister and her gentle giant of a husband, Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith, in the Kent marshes. One Christmas Eve, Pip is terrorised in a churchyard by an escaped convict and helps him. Later he is taken to play at the decaying mansion of Miss Havisham, a rich, half-mad old woman who has stopped all the clocks at the moment she was jilted on her wedding day, and falls hopelessly in love with her beautiful, cold adopted daughter Estella. When a lawyer announces that an anonymous benefactor has given Pip “great expectations” — a fortune to become a gentleman — Pip assumes Miss Havisham intends him for Estella, goes to London, and grows ashamed of Joe. The truth about his benefactor shatters his illusions and begins his moral education.

George Bernard Shaw called it Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. It is a story of guilt, snobbery, money, love and redemption, and an inquiry into the question its age obsessively asked: what is a gentleman?

At a glance

Published	Weekly in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 – 3 August 1861; in three volumes, 1861
Setting	The Kent marshes near the Thames estuary, and London, c. 1812–1840s
Narrator	Pip, looking back from middle age
Length	59 chapters in three “stages”
Endings	Dickens wrote an unhappy ending, then — on the advice of the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton — a more hopeful one, which was published

The story

The novel opens in a bleak churchyard on the marshes on Christmas Eve. Seven-year-old Pip, an orphan, is contemplating his parents’ gravestones — his ideas of what they looked like come from the shapes of the letters — when a fearful man in grey, with a great iron on his leg, starts up from among the graves: “Hold your noise!… Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!” The convict, escaped from the prison ships (the “Hulks”) moored in the river, turns Pip upside down, and orders him to bring “wittles” and a file the next morning, threatening him with a terrible young man who will tear out his heart and liver. Terrified, Pip steals food and a pork pie from his sister’s pantry and a file from Joe’s forge. He finds a second, different convict on the marshes, then feeds the first, who devours the food like a dog. On Christmas Day, soldiers come to the forge to have handcuffs mended; Pip and Joe follow the hunt and see the two convicts captured, fighting each other in a ditch. Pip’s convict, to protect the boy, claims he stole the food himself. Pip, haunted by guilt, never confesses to Joe.

Pip lives with his sister, Mrs Joe, who constantly reminds him what a trouble he is and beats him with a cane called “Tickler”, and with Joe, who is simple, illiterate, tender and good, and who treats Pip as a fellow sufferer: “ever the best of friends, ain’t us, Pip?”

Uncle Pumblechook, a pompous corn-chandler, arranges for Pip to go and “play” at Satis House, the home of Miss Havisham. Pip finds a gloomy mansion where daylight is shut out and all the clocks are stopped at twenty minutes to nine. Miss Havisham sits in her yellowed wedding dress, one shoe on, the veil, the flowers, the half-packed trunks around her; in another room the wedding feast lies rotting on the table, with the cake overrun by spiders and mice. Decades ago, on her wedding day, she received a letter from her bridegroom jilting her, and has stopped time ever since. With her lives Estella, a proud, beautiful girl of his own age, whom Miss Havisham has trained to break men’s hearts in revenge on the whole male sex: “Break their hearts, my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!” Estella mocks Pip’s coarse hands and thick boots and calls him “a common labouring-boy”. Pip, who had never thought himself anything else, is filled with shame. He visits Satis House for months, and falls in love with Estella, though she treats him with contempt. He meets a pale young gentleman, Herbert Pocket, who challenges him to a fight and is knocked down.

When Pip is old enough, Miss Havisham pays the fee for him to be apprenticed to Joe. He is miserable; the forge he once loved now seems common. Mrs Joe is struck on the head by an unknown assailant — the iron from the convict’s leg is found beside her — and left brain-damaged and mute; Joe’s surly journeyman Orlick, who hates Pip, is the likely culprit. A kind, clever village girl, Biddy, comes to look after the household and teaches Pip; he confides to her that he wants to be a gentleman, for Estella’s sake.

In the fourth year of his apprenticeship, a London lawyer, Mr Jaggers — a formidable man with an enormous forefinger, who constantly washes his hands with scented soap — arrives at the village inn and announces that Pip has “great expectations”: he will come into a handsome property and is to be brought up as a gentleman, on two conditions — that he always keep the name Pip, and that he never inquire who his benefactor is. Pip is certain it is Miss Havisham, who intends him to marry Estella. Joe, offered compensation for losing his apprentice, is hurt: Pip has been his friend, not his employee.

So ends the first stage. Pip goes to London, a “dirty” city. He shares rooms in Barnard’s Inn with Herbert Pocket — the pale young gentleman, now a cheerful friend, who gives him lessons in table manners (“in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth”) and renames him Handel. Herbert tells him Miss Havisham’s story: her half-brother and a confidence man, Compeyson, plotted to take her money; Compeyson courted her, and jilted her on the wedding day. Pip is tutored by Herbert’s father, Matthew Pocket. He meets Jaggers’s clerk Wemmick, who is hard and dry at the office (“portable property” is his creed) and warm-hearted at his home in Walworth, a tiny wooden castle with a moat, a drawbridge and a gun, where he cares for his deaf “Aged Parent”.

Pip becomes a fashionable idle young man, runs up debts, joins a club of “Finches of the Grove” who dine expensively and quarrel. When Joe visits London, awkward in his best clothes, his hat continually falling off the mantelpiece, Pip is embarrassed and patronising. Joe senses it and leaves, with great dignity: “Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together… You and me is not two figures to be together in London… I’m wrong out of the forge.” Pip feels ashamed — of Joe and then of himself — but does not change.

Estella comes to London to enter society. Pip is her escort but no more; she warns him that she has no heart. She is courted by the brutish, rich Bentley Drummle. When Pip’s sister dies, he returns home for the funeral and promises Biddy and Joe to visit often; Biddy doubts him.

At twenty-three, Pip is living in the Temple with Herbert, whom he has secretly helped by buying him a partnership in a shipping firm. On a stormy night, a man climbs the stairs: rough, weathered, grey-haired — the convict of the churchyard. His name is Abel Magwitch. Transported to New South Wales for life, he made a fortune as a sheep farmer, and it is he, not Miss Havisham, who has made Pip a gentleman, in gratitude for the boy’s kindness and to revenge himself on the society that despised him: “I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it!” Pip is horrified. His gentility was paid for by a criminal; Miss Havisham never meant Estella for him; and Magwitch, by returning from transportation, has committed a crime punishable by death.

So ends the second stage. Pip, though repelled, cannot abandon Magwitch. He and Herbert hide him as “Uncle Provis” and plan to smuggle him abroad. Magwitch tells his life story — an abandoned child, a thief from his earliest memory, he fell in with Compeyson, the gentleman swindler (the same man who jilted Miss Havisham), who used him and, when they were tried together, received a lighter sentence because he looked and spoke like a gentleman. Compeyson was the second convict on the marshes; he is now in London, hunting Magwitch.

Pip pieces together a further secret: Estella is the daughter of Magwitch and of Jaggers’s housekeeper Molly, a woman with scarred, strong wrists who was once tried for murder; Jaggers placed the child with Miss Havisham. Estella marries Drummle, who will mistreat her.

Pip visits Satis House a last time. Miss Havisham, seeing in his misery an image of her own, repents — “What have I done! What have I done!” — and asks his forgiveness. As he leaves, her dress catches fire from the hearth; he wrestles her down and smothers the flames, burning his hands; she dies some weeks later. Orlick lures Pip to a lime kiln on the marshes and tries to murder him, confessing to the attack on Mrs Joe, but Herbert and friends arrive in time.

Pip and Herbert row Magwitch down the Thames to meet a steamer to the Continent; Compeyson, with the police, intercepts them. In the struggle Magwitch and Compeyson go into the river; Compeyson drowns, and Magwitch is gravely injured. He is tried and condemned to death. Pip, now truly loving him, stays at his side in the prison infirmary; as Magwitch dies, Pip tells him that his daughter is alive, a lady, and that Pip loves her. Magwitch’s fortune is forfeited to the Crown; Pip’s expectations are gone.

Pip falls ill with fever, and is arrested for debt. When he recovers, Joe is nursing him, and has paid his debts. Ashamed and humbled, Pip goes home to propose to Biddy — and arrives on the day of her wedding to Joe. He goes abroad to work as a clerk in Herbert’s firm in Cairo, lives frugally, and after eleven years returns. At Joe and Biddy’s fireside he finds their little son, named Pip.

In the published ending, Pip visits the ruins of Satis House at evening and finds Estella there, widowed after an unhappy marriage, softened by suffering: “I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.” They leave the ruined place hand in hand, “and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light it showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” In Dickens’s original ending, they meet briefly by chance in London, Estella remarried; Pip sees that suffering has taught her to understand his heart, and they part.

Themes

What is a gentleman? The Victorians argued endlessly over whether a gentleman was made by birth, wealth, education, manners or moral character. Great Expectations dismantles the first four. Pip becomes a “gentleman” by money and manners and becomes worse — idle, snobbish, ungrateful. Compeyson, the novel’s villain, is a gentleman in appearance. The true gentleman is Joe, a blacksmith who cannot read — “God’s own gentleman”, as Herbert’s father puts it of someone else — loyal, humble and loving. Pip learns this too late, and almost too late.

Guilt. Pip is guilty from the first page — for stealing the food, for his secret, for the harm to his sister, for his ingratitude. The novel is pervaded by crime and prisons: the Hulks, Newgate, Jaggers’s office, the hanging of Magwitch. Society itself seems criminal; the line between respectable and criminal wealth is thin.

Money. The money that makes Pip a gentleman comes, hidden, from a convict’s labour in Australia — an image of how Victorian gentility rested on sources it preferred not to see: empire, transportation, exploitation.

Snobbery and shame. The novel’s most painful passages show Pip’s shame of Joe. Dickens, who had hidden his own blacking-factory past, knew this shame from the inside.

Time and memory. Miss Havisham’s stopped clocks are an image of a life frozen by a wound and a refusal to move on; Pip’s narrative looks back across decades with rueful irony at his younger self.

Love. Pip’s obsession with Estella is a love he knows to be “against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope”. Estella, trained to be heartless, is as much a victim as he.

Characters and style

The novel is rich in Dickensian characters — the hypocrite Pumblechook, who claims credit for Pip’s fortune; Wemmick and his Aged P., the double-lived clerk; Jaggers the lawyer, all-knowing and inscrutable; Mr Wopsle, the parish clerk turned bad actor in Hamlet. Its symbolism — the stopped clocks, the rotting cake, the iron leg-shackle, the mists on the marshes — is unusually concentrated. The first-person narration lets Dickens combine the boy’s terror and wonder with the mature man’s irony and remorse.

Reception

Popular from the start, the novel was later admired by critics from Shaw and Orwell to Edmund Wilson. David Lean’s film (1946) is often called the finest adaptation of any Dickens novel; Alfonso Cuarón set it in modern Florida (1998); Peter Carey’s novel Jack Maggs (1997) retells it from Magwitch’s point of view, and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) imagines it read on Bougainville during civil war.

In conversation

• A Miss Havisham — someone frozen in the moment of an old wound, refusing to move on.
• “Great expectations” — high hopes of fortune, often illusory.
• Pip’s shame of Joe — the classic image of the social climber ashamed of where he came from.