Great Expectations

A year or so later, Pumblechook arranges for Pip to go and “play” at Satis House, the barred mansion of Miss Havisham, a rich and famously strange lady in the nearby town. A girl about Pip’s age, beautiful and contemptuous, leads him down dark passages by candlelight. Her name is Estella.

Miss Havisham sits in a candlelit room in a wedding dress gone yellow, one satin shoe on and the other on the table, her trunks half packed. Every clock has stopped at twenty minutes to nine: the minute, years ago, when a letter came from the man she was about to marry. In the next room her wedding feast still sits on the table under a black growth of cobweb, the cake rotting in the middle while speckle-legged spiders run in and out. When she is dead, she tells Pip, they will lay her on that table.

“Play,” she orders. Pip and Estella play cards. Estella sneers that he calls the knaves Jacks — “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!” — and Pip, who has never been ashamed of his hands in his life, catches her contempt like an infection. He cries behind the brewery and kicks the wall. At home, unable to describe what he saw, he invents an astonishing story of a black velvet coach and dogs fighting for veal cutlets out of a silver basket, which Pumblechook and Mrs Joe swallow whole. Only to Joe does he confess, and Joe kindly tells him lies don’t get you anywhere.

The visits go on for months. Miss Havisham’s greedy relatives circle, waiting for her to die. In the garden Pip is challenged by a pale young gentleman, knocks him down by accident several times, and afterwards Estella, who watched, lets him kiss her cheek. Meanwhile, at the village inn, a stranger stirs his rum with Joe’s stolen file, looks hard at Pip, and gives him two one-pound notes. Someone has not forgotten him.

When Pip is old enough to be apprenticed, Miss Havisham sends for Joe, hands over twenty-five guineas, and dismisses Pip from Satis House as casually as she took him in. Joe, overawed, addresses all his answers to Pip instead of to her. Pumblechook takes the credit.

Now Pip’s misery begins. “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,” he writes. He works at the forge dreading that Estella will look through the window and see him black-faced, doing the coarsest part of the work. He knows, writing as an older man, that whatever good came of those years came from plain contented Joe and not from restlessly aspiring him.

The forge has a journeyman, Dolge Orlick, a hulking, sullen man who resents Pip as the master’s favourite. When Pip is given a half-holiday, Orlick demands one too; Mrs Joe screams at him; Joe knocks him flat. That night Mrs Joe is found senseless on the kitchen floor, struck from behind. Beside her lies a convict’s leg-iron, filed open long ago — Pip is sure it is his convict’s, and is sick with secret guilt at having supplied the file. Mrs Joe survives, but damaged: she can’t speak properly and keeps drawing a T on her slate. It is Pip’s friend Biddy, a poor, clever girl who comes to keep house, who realizes it means a hammer and stands for Orlick.

Biddy, wise, honest and fond of him, is the best thing in Pip’s life, and he knows it. He tells her he wants to be a gentleman — for Estella’s sake. Biddy asks him whether he wants to be a gentleman to spite Estella or to win her, and whether she is worth it. He knows he ought to love Biddy instead. He just can’t.

In the fourth year of his apprenticeship, a big, dark lawyer with hands that smell of scented soap appears in the village inn. He is Mr Jaggers of London, and Pip recognizes him from the stairs of Satis House. In Joe’s kitchen he makes his announcement: Pip “has great expectations.” An unnamed person means him to inherit a handsome property and wants him removed from the forge at once and brought up as a gentleman. There are two conditions: he must always keep the name Pip, and he must never ask who his benefactor is until that person chooses to tell him.

Pip doesn’t need to ask. It must be Miss Havisham, and she must intend him for Estella. Jaggers offers Joe money for the loss of his apprentice; Joe, wounded, refuses, and when Jaggers presses, he squares up to fight.

The village changes overnight. Mr Trabb the tailor bows and shouts for the best cloth, while Trabb’s boy, the most audacious boy in the countryside, mocks Pip’s new grandeur mercilessly. Pumblechook pumps his hand and claims the credit. And Pip begins to talk down to the people he loves: he tells Biddy that Joe would do well to improve his learning and manners, so that Pip could raise him up later. Biddy looks at him and asks whether he has ever considered that Joe may be proud.

He leaves at dawn, having asked Joe not to walk with him to the coach in case they are seen together. At the finger-post at the end of the village he breaks down. “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears,” he says, and he almost gets off the coach to walk back. He doesn’t, and the mists rise, and the world lies spread before him. Dickens closes the chapter with a line in capitals: the end of the first stage of Pip’s expectations.

London is filthy, crowded and a disappointment. Jaggers’s office in Little Britain stands in the shadow of Newgate prison, full of desperate clients and two hideous casts of the faces of hanged men. Jaggers bites his forefinger, crushes witnesses and, after each client, washes his hands as if scrubbing off the case. His clerk, Wemmick, is a dry little man with a mouth like a post-office slot who collects mourning rings from grateful condemned clients; his guiding star, he says, is “Get hold of portable property.”

Pip is lodged in dingy Barnard’s Inn with a cheerful young man who turns out to be the pale young gentleman he knocked down at Satis House: Herbert Pocket, cousin of Miss Havisham. Herbert renames him Handel, after the music called The Harmonious Blacksmith, and corrects his table manners so gently that Pip barely notices. He also tells him Miss Havisham’s story: an heiress, she fell for a charming man who, with her own resentful half-brother, swindled her and then jilted her by letter on the wedding morning. Pip studies with Herbert’s hopelessly disorganized father, Matthew Pocket, alongside a rich, sulky brute called Bentley Drummle, whom Jaggers, oddly, likes. He calls him the Spider.

The best surprise in London is Wemmick at home. He lives in Walworth in a tiny wooden house he has turned into a castle, with gothic windows, a moat, a drawbridge, and a cannon he fires at nine every night for his very deaf and very happy old father, the Aged Parent. At home Wemmick is warm and generous; at the office he is a post-box again. “Walworth is one place, and this office is another,” he explains. He keeps his decency in the suburbs, safe from his job.

At dinner, Jaggers shows his guests the hands of his silent housekeeper, Molly, which are scarred and astonishingly strong. Pip remembers this later.

Joe comes to visit, in his Sunday clothes, terrified of London and even more terrified of Pip. He calls him “sir,” can’t decide where to put his hat (which keeps falling off the mantelpiece), and sends Pip into an agony of embarrassment. Joe feels it. Before he leaves he delivers the most beautiful speech in the novel: life, he says, is made of ever so many partings welded together; one man is a blacksmith and another a goldsmith, and they are not two figures to be together in London. He is wrong in these clothes, he says, wrong out of the forge. If Pip ever wants to see him, let him come to the forge and look in at the window. Then he is gone, and Pip, too late, runs after him.

Estella arrives in London, a dazzling young woman, and Pip escorts her about, aching. At Satis House he sees the truth of her upbringing: Miss Havisham pulls his head down and whispers fiercely, “Love her, love her, love her!” She has raised Estella to break men’s hearts, as revenge on all of them. Estella warns Pip outright that she has no heart to give. He doesn’t believe her.

He and Herbert drift into gentlemanly ruin: an expensive dining club called the Finches of the Grove, and debts. Mrs Joe dies, and at her funeral Pip promises Biddy he will come home often. Biddy doubts it, and he is offended because she is right. At twenty-one, Jaggers tells him he will receive five hundred pounds a year, and Pip does one wholly good thing: with Wemmick’s help (Walworth sentiments only), he secretly buys Herbert a place in a shipping firm, Clarriker’s.

Estella, meanwhile, encourages Drummle, the worst man available, apparently because he is the worst. Pip watches Estella quarrel with Miss Havisham: “I am what you have made me,” she says, cold to the woman who taught her coldness.

Pip is twenty-three. On a night of howling wind and rain, a grizzled, weather-beaten man climbs the stairs to his rooms in the Temple and holds out both hands. It is the convict from the marshes, Abel Magwitch, transported for life to New South Wales, where he worked as a shepherd and made a fortune. He is Pip’s benefactor. Every penny came from him.

“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you!” he cries, meaning it with his whole heart: in his lonely shepherd’s hut he saw the boy’s face and swore it. Pip’s reaction is the great honest moment of the book: he is horrified. Miss Havisham never meant anything for him; Estella was never intended for him; his fine life was paid for by a criminal he shrinks from like a beast. And Magwitch has come back on pain of death. If anyone recognizes him, he will hang.

Pip hides him as his “uncle,” Mr Provis. Herbert is told everything and is loyal at once. Magwitch tells them his life: jailed again and again from childhood, until he fell in with a gentleman-swindler named Compeyson, who used him and, when they were caught together, got seven years to his fourteen, simply because he looked and spoke like a gentleman. The other convict in the marsh ditch was Compeyson. And Herbert, listening, realizes that Compeyson was the man who jilted Miss Havisham.

Pip goes to Satis House to face her. Yes, she let him believe, to torment her relatives. “You made your own snares,” she says. Estella announces she will marry Drummle. Pip pours out his love — “You are part of my existence, part of myself” — and she is unmoved. Back in London a note from Wemmick waits at the gate: “DON’T GO HOME.” Compeyson is watching. They move Magwitch to a riverside house where Herbert’s fiancée, Clara, looks after her bedridden, rum-drinking father, and Pip starts rowing on the Thames every day, so that a boat on the river will look normal when the time comes.

The mysteries close like a trap. Watching Molly’s hands at Jaggers’s dinner table, Pip sees Estella’s hands and eyes. Wemmick tells him Molly’s story: years ago she was tried for strangling a rival and acquitted thanks to Jaggers, and she had a child she was believed to have killed. Magwitch, meanwhile, has told of a wife and a little daughter he lost. Pip puts it together: Estella, the proud lady of Satis House, is the daughter of a murderess and a convict. Jaggers, cornered, admits it in a hypothetical — “put the case” — about a lawyer who saved one child from the gutter for a rich woman who wanted a girl to raise.

At Satis House, Miss Havisham, shaken by Estella’s marriage, finally sees what she has done. She gives Pip nine hundred pounds for Herbert’s partnership, kneels to him, and cries, “What have I done! What have I done!” As Pip leaves, he looks back and sees her dress go up in flames. He wraps her in his coat and the tablecloth, pulling down the rotten bride-cake, and burns his hands badly. She lives a short while longer.

Then an anonymous letter lures Pip to a sluice-house by the limekiln on the marshes. Orlick is waiting. He ties Pip up, drinks, and gloats: he struck down Mrs Joe, and Pip is next. Herbert, Startop and, gloriously, Trabb’s boy arrive just in time.

The escape is set for the next morning. Pip, Herbert and Startop row Magwitch down the Thames to meet a Hamburg steamer. A police galley shoots out alongside; in it, cloaked, is Compeyson. Magwitch lunges for him; the steamer bears down; both men go under the paddles. Compeyson is drowned. Magwitch is dragged out, badly injured, and taken in chains. Pip sits beside him, holding his hand, and something in him has changed for good. He no longer sees a beast, but a man who has loved him more faithfully than anyone except Joe.

Magwitch is condemned to death, one of two-and-thirty men and women sentenced together, and his fortune is forfeit to the Crown. Pip visits him every day in the prison infirmary and at the end tells him: the child he lost is alive, a lady, very beautiful — “And I love her!” Magwitch lifts Pip’s hand to his lips and dies before the hangman can reach him. Pip can think of no better prayer than the one from the Bible story they have been reading together: “O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!”

Then Pip collapses. Penniless, in debt and in a raging fever, he is nearly arrested in his bed. When he wakes, Joe is there. Joe has nursed him for weeks and paid his debt without a word. He calls him “old chap” again and promises rides — “what larks!” But as Pip recovers, Joe grows shy and starts saying “sir,” and one morning he is gone, leaving a note: not wishful to intrude, now Pip is well. And beneath, the old motto: ever the best of friends.

Pip goes home humbled, planning to ask Biddy to marry him, and arrives on her wedding day: she has married Joe. He asks them both to forgive him, and goes abroad as a clerk in Herbert’s firm in the East, where he works hard, pays his debts and becomes a partner. They are not in a grand way of business, he says, but they have a good name and do very well.

Eleven years later he comes back to the forge, and there on Pip’s own little stool by the fire sits a small boy: Joe and Biddy’s son, named Pip. That evening he walks to the site of Satis House. Dickens wrote two endings for what happens next. In the first, Pip meets Estella briefly in a London street, remarried to a country doctor and softened by suffering; they part, and that is all. His friend the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton thought it too sad, and Dickens rewrote it. In the published ending, Pip finds Estella, widowed, in the ruined garden in the evening mist. She says she has been bent and broken into a better shape. They walk out together, and Pip sees “no shadow of another parting from her” — a sentence readers have argued over ever since.

Pip is apprenticed to Joe at the forge and hates it, dreading that Estella will see him black with soot. His sister is struck down by an unknown attacker — the surly journeyman Orlick — and kind, clever Biddy comes to keep house. Then a London lawyer, Mr Jaggers, arrives with astonishing news: an unnamed benefactor has given Pip “great expectations.” He is to be educated as a gentleman, and he must never ask who is paying. Pip is sure it is Miss Havisham, and that she means him for Estella.

In London Pip shares rooms with the cheerful Herbert Pocket, meets Jaggers’s clerk Wemmick, who is cold at the office but lives in a little castle with a drawbridge and his delighted deaf father, and learns to spend money he doesn’t have. He becomes a snob. When Joe visits, Pip is embarrassed by his manners. Joe feels it, tells him that life is made of “ever so many partings welded together,” and goes home. Estella, now a dazzling young woman, warns Pip she has no heart, and plays with a rich brute named Drummle.

On a stormy night when Pip is twenty-three, the convict from the marshes climbs his stairs. He is Abel Magwitch, transported to Australia, where he made a fortune; he is the benefactor, and every penny was his. Pip is horrified: Miss Havisham never meant him for Estella, and his fine life was paid for by a criminal who will hang if he is caught in England. Pip hides him, and slowly the secrets unravel. Magwitch’s old partner Compeyson, a gentleman-swindler, was the man who jilted Miss Havisham. Estella turns out to be the daughter of Magwitch and Jaggers’s housekeeper, Molly. Estella marries Drummle. Miss Havisham, finally seeing the damage she has done, begs Pip’s forgiveness, then catches fire; Pip burns his hands saving her. Orlick tries to murder Pip and fails.

Pip, Herbert and a friend try to row Magwitch down the Thames to a foreign steamer, but Compeyson leads the police to them. The two convicts struggle; Compeyson drowns; Magwitch is captured, condemned and dies in prison, with Pip — who now loves him — holding his hand. The fortune goes to the Crown. Pip falls ill and wakes to find Joe nursing him; Joe pays his debts and quietly leaves. Pip goes home to propose to Biddy and finds she has just married Joe. He goes abroad to work with Herbert, honestly and modestly. Eleven years later he meets a widowed, gentler Estella in the ruins of Satis House. Dickens first ended the book with them apart; he rewrote it on a friend’s advice, and the published last line leaves their future hopeful but uncertain.