UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA

FACULTATEA DE LITERE

Social Emancipation in Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

Coordonator ştiinţific:

Lect.univ.dr. Sorin Ion Cazacu

Absolvent: Drăguț Irina

CRAIOVA

2018
 INTRODUCTION

Throughout Dickens’s creations the language and metaphor of money, the terms of
indebtedness, lending, borrowing, rates of payment and return tell us what money can do,
how it can change distinctions of class, how it can completely alter the conditions of life.
While money is not in itself evil, we see that the drive to get money accounts for large
areas of human wickednesss depending on what is done to obtain it and how it is finally
spent. Money affects such a vast area of human nature and human activity that it stands for
things and men as they are. In the nineteenth century money came to represent and make
accessible to human ambition the means to satisfy vanity and selfish materialism, to gain
advantage, power, and luxury. Dickens attacks money, then, because it corrupts morality
and all decent values.Throughout his work, those without money tend to be better people
than those who have it or those who are bent on attaining it. Getting money raises the
question of the means used to obtain it and the source from which money comes.
The pursuit of money clashes with one of Dickens’s declared moral absolutes: work.
Nothing of value can be had without work. The moral problems raised by money are
numerous and contradictory. Money tends to corrupt when it is divorced from work, when
it is obtained solely by chance, by merely shrewd business operations, by inheritance, or
undeserved acquisition. Ruin lies ahead, he warns, for young men who depend not on their
own efforts but on their “expectations.”
That title suggests the disillusion of the author and raises great human questions,
symbolic either of defeat or acceptance of things as they are. Here Dickens’s attack on
nineteenth century optimism reaches its fulfillment.
Thus, the nineteenth century created illusions destined to be lost and inspired “great”
expectations. Once again, the villain is money, whose very existence creates illusion. So Pip
recovers his moral dignity only after he has lost everything he once considered precious.
Dickens accuses the age of encouraging illusion in the young and then frustrating their hopes,
of inspiring excessive ambi- tion and then requiring calculated acts of cruelty to fulfill that
ambition, of depriving youth of its grace, vitiating its generous sentiments. Youth is led from
a wholesome past into a corrupt future. Selfish meanness of spirit is encouraged, as youth is
led to cherish desires that are false because they are satisfied by money alone, without work.
Pip lives as a parasite, using people who love him as instruments. He makes disastrous
choices, shamefully betraying primary human relationships because the laws of the world
demand the sacrifice of those who have nothing to contribute to the fulfillment of his “great
expectations.” These wholesome relationships are doomed, the moral and human price
exacted as Pip journeys to London, the city which symbolizes the ultimate illusion, the one
that encompasses all other illusions.
All of this is suggested by the title, which introduces a book that is quite unlike any
other among the fifteen of Dickens’s novels.Yet even without the hero’s name in the title,
Great Expectations is intensely biographical, reaching out from the career of a single youth
to comment upon the world.
Only Great Expectations declares on the title page its inner meaning, using a phrase
which had been fully established in the English language by 1861, especially in the plural
form combined with the adjective “great.”A glance at some uses of the phrase within the
preceding novels shows that beyond the dictionary definition for “expectations” we are to
read “the hope of getting money without having to earn it,” a function of the corrupt human
desire to get something for nothing. The numerous uses of the term go beyond the OED,
which under the plural of “expectation” says only “Prospects of inheritance or of profiting
by testament.” This usage does not apply exactly to Pip; he hopes to get something not when
someone dies, but to be the immediate beneficiary of Miss Havisham. Elsewhere Dickens
surrounds the term with a mass of synonymous related words with various shades of
meaning. References abound to one’s future or destiny, to advancement, ascent in life, to
rising prospects, to speculations, anticipations, hopes and dreams, ambitions and intentions,
aspirations natural and justified, or assumptions , unfounded; to preconceived notions with
little or no chance of fulfillment. An expectation may be something awaited in the word’s
simplest usage, or a justified hope of progress in return for work. It may be an anticipated
pleasure, as when David Copperfield is “in a fever of expectation” before his first visit to
Yarmouth, or drawing nearer to its special meaning in the plural, a hoped-for profit that
fails to come, as in Mr. George’s “expectations” from the Gallery.
The energy of Dickens’s actual title is seen in some adaptations by the press or
modern advertising. Pregnant women are often said to have “great expectations,” and an
enterprising bank has established “Great Expectations Savings Accounts” in the form of
nine booklets with titles showing their intended use for vacation, home improvement,
Christmas, or other purposes. Clients are urged to decide which of these plans will fit “your
great expectations in life” and then to “start saving like the dickens.”
As we turn now to review the growth of Pip from child-hood’s innocence through the
folly of his illusions, to mature acceptance of things as they are, we may glance again at the
title Great Expectations and the implied irony of its comment on human affairs. The French
and English words “illusions” are spelled the same, it is again the plural that signifies most,
with the adjective perdues necessary to the theme of unjustified hope that is false to reality.
 The plural is necessarily a fiction or work of imagined realism. The word
“expectations” also, taken here as generally synonymous with “illusions perdues” has more
shades of meaning, is more ambiguous and ironical, also needing “great” to signify its falsity
and the doom awaiting its victims, not only the hero himself but those similarly
contaminated around him. An expectation becomes an illusion when preceded by the
adjective “great”—here not meant to praise but to accuse the following noun. In turn, an
illusion is corrupt when “s” is added to form a plural. Great Expectations contains then the
classical vanity of human wishes, the tragedy of the wish fulfilled, as if there were something
necessarily corrupt in what we all want, so that whatever it is we most desire will destroy us
as human beings. Certainly in Dickens’s usage, no “great” expectation can follow from work,
and the “greater” it is the less one has done to earn or deserve it. A thing so hoped for without
thinking how to achieve it or why one has more right to it than anyone else, becomes a half-
criminal kind of theft, going beyond childish fantasy or the adult day-dream of something
good that will one day come of itself.
For Pip the uncertain original of his “expectations” enables him to suppose that they
imply merit in himself, tempts him to an interpretation most flattering to himself that is
totally without justification. But they are false, for money alone can buy them, and they are
indeed all that money can buy, hence their “greatness,” their distance from what will be.
Dickens permits a conspiracy of deception whereby the young hero is allowed to see only
part of the truth, thus making wrong judgments of himself and others, pursuing to the end
a doomed illusion. Pip simply misreads the world, refusing to see its hostility, or at best
indifference to such as himself and his “expectations.” Life as it is stands against his will, just
as it seems to elude any effort to record the truth in literature. The realist’s agony then
follows: in his effort to portray the world just as it is, he intensifies and concentrates it until
it becomes incredible, so that the nearer the truth he comes, the more incredible his version
of it seems. So for the protagonist all promises from life are only in the mind of one who
would benefit from their fulfillment. Dickens clearly finds fault with the age which
encourages youthful hopes and prevents their fulfillment.The flaw is in the nature of things
which creates the insoluble dilemma of hope inspired and inevitably doomed.The very title,
then, raises the great human questions and becomes, for reader and protagonist, a prediction
of defeat in the face of timeless defects in things as they are. Thus the river, the perpetual
journey, the wind and rain promise nothing save that they will go on regardless of the human
beings who play out their lives in the time they are given. “Things eternal” do not encourage
“great expectations”; those who abandon their illusions must blame only themselves, for
nothing in the nature of things has said that what is “expected” will be fulfilled. He who
presses against possibilities, makes demands on a Nature that promises nothing, has no rights
and must take the consequences of a course of action that only increases the chance of failure.
Thus if the essential irony of life is never tempted, it may leave one alone, but if pushed
against its indifference, it may strike back. If forced by “great expectations” that is, to
declare itself, its reaction may be violent, the burden of proof resting on those who demand
what has never been promised. Human will and ambition cannot change the nature of things
which owe nothing to “great expectations,” which impose themselves upon the laws of
chance, upon the tendency of things as they are to resist change for any one individual’s
advantage.
As Pip tells it then, his emotional history appears to be dominated by fear, shame, and
remorse in varying degrees of intensity throughout.While these feelings come together at
various times, with no one confined to any stage, let us see what emerges if we say that his
childhood is dominated by fear, his youth by shame, and his matu- rity by remorse or
repentance. Pip’s recurring sense of having done shameful things is a function of his growing
up, a sign that he is at all times redeemable. Pip’s self-accusation begins with his very
existence; he lives only by accident instead of having been buried alongside his brothers in
the churchyard. Thus he feels to blame almost as soon as he is aware of feeling anything;
partly as a result, he is also afraid, so that his fear and shame are inseparable. The term
“shame” in its several meanings contains the largest area of Pip’s emotional experience;
shame as offence and as repentance marks the boundaries of the movement toward
emotional maturity that completes his education. Pip’s progress then from child to adult can
be followed by watching his response to fear, to a growing sense of sin, and to the repentance
that follows.
Great Expectations is a study in terror by a master thereof, as Dickens explores
Pip’s fear of physical danger, of exposure, of the law, fear for his own fate and for that of
Magwitch. Under the sense of sin come all of Pip’s offenses and all of the varieties of shame
that afflict him: of himself, of his appearance, of his home, of his friend Joe. He overcomes
the sins and makes amends to the degree that he sees the enormity of what he has done and
is ashamed of it, leading to his remorse wherein he accuses himself without allowing for his
ignorance, or inexperience, making no excuses for behavior that is not uncommon in young
persons before they know themselves and the world. But Pip, once repentant, does not sin
again. It never occurs to him that he might kill himself, because he might be unable to reorder
his life according to the lessons of experience. Since he has no other possible solution, he has
to go on growing up, accepting the consequences of what he has done, earning his way by
work in the world, until he can safely return to the ruined garden that meanwhile lies beneath
the rain of years for his reward at last.

Chapter 1
The life and work of Charles Dickens

More than any British writer other than Shakespeare, Dickens has engaged the
popular imagination with his crowded gallery of memorable characters and his detailed
rendering of the life of his times.
The most important writer of his time, Dickens is often seen as the quintessential
Victorian. “Dickens’s England” has almost become synonymous with Victorian England.
Since he frequently based hisbcharacters on real people and used real places particularly the
streets and neighborhoods of London as settings for his tales, the connections between his
fictional world and the actual world of Victorian England have fascinated his readers.
Dickens enthusiasts have often applied themselves sometimes overzealously to connecting
the people and places in the novels with counterparts in the real world. Understanding the
historical context in which Dickens worked is especially important to understanding his life
and his novels.
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, the second
child of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office there, and Elizabeth Barrow Dickens
. The family moved a good deal during Dickens’s childhood, as his father was transferred
from one station to another: in 1815 to London while John worked at Somerset House, and
in 1817 to Chatham in Kent, where the boy spent the happiest years of his childhood. For
five years he roamed in the countryside, observed the activities in the bustling seaport town,
and began his education with William Giles , the son of the local Baptist minister, who
thought him an exceptional student. But in 1822, when John Dickens returned to London
and the family took up residence at 16 Bayham Street , Camden town, the boy’s prospects
darkened. The family’s straitened finances meant that Charles was not able to continue his
education. When his mother undertook to increase the family income by operating a school
herself, the family moved, in 1823, to a house suitable
for the project at 4 Gower Street, but the school failed to attract any pupils.
Early in February 1824, with the family nearing financial ruin, Charles was sent to
work at a shoe polish factory, Warren’s Blacking, Hungerford Stairs, the strand, a job
obtained for him by his cousin James Lamert . On February 20, John Dickens was arrested
for debt and imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison. His wife and three of the younger children
joined him in the prison; Charles took lodgings with Elizabeth Roylance , a friend of the
family, at her house in Camden Town and continued to work at the blacking factory. He
performed his job, pasting labels on the bottles of blacking, while stationed in the front
window of the establishment, visible to all who passed by in the street; the work was
humiliating to the sensitive boy: “No words can express the secret agony of my soul,” he later
wrote, “as I sunk into this companionship [with his fellow workers]; compared these
everyday associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing
up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast” . In late April, John’s
mother, Elizabeth Ball Dickens, died and left John £450, which paid some of his creditors,
and on May 28, after successfully negotiating a settlement, John was released from prison.
Later that summer, over his mother’s objections, Charles was removed from Warren’s
Blacking. After leaving Warren’s, Charles entered Wellington House Academy , where he
would be a student for the next three years, his only sustained period of formal
education.There he won a Latin prize and with his schoolmates wrote and produced plays
for a toy theater.
When the family again fell into financial difficulties in 1827, they were evicted from
their house for nonpayment of rent. Fanny withdrew from the Royal Academy of Music, and
Charles left Wellington House to work as a solicitor’s clerk in the offices of Ellis and
Blackmore, Gray’s inn . There he quickly learned shorthand and in 1828 became a
shorthand reporter in Doctors’ Commons . He became so proficient as a shorthand reporter
that in 1831 he moved on to record verbatim the proceedings in Parliament for the Mirror
of Parliament , a paper managed by his uncle, John Henry Barrow, and in 1832 became a
regular reporter for the True Sun . As he covered parliamentary debates, elections,
catastrophic events, and other public occasions, he developed an ear for the many class and
regional dialects that he heard and an eye for the great variety of people in metropolitan
London. When his father was again arrested for debt and held in a sponging house, a kind
of way station between freedom and the debtors prison, Dickens moved out of the family
house into rooms at Furnival’s inn. From there he roamed the streets of London, acquainting
himself with its neighborhoods, its street life, and, in the evenings, its theaters. He even
entertained ideas of becoming an actor, but illness forced him to cancel an audition at Covent
Garden Theatre in 1832.
He also met John Forster , drama critic and journalist, who would become his closest
friend. In May 1830, he met Maria Breadnell, the flirtatious daughter of a banker, whose
family looked with disdain at young Charles, the son of a bankrupt. They sent their daughter
to the continent to cool the romance, which waxed and waned over the next three years and
was finally broken off in May 1833. This was an eventful year for the young reporter, for his
first story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” appeared in the December issue of the Monthly
Magazine . Dickens later recalled the moment when he saw his first literary work in print:
“My eyes so dimmed with pride and joy that they could not bear the street, and were not fit
to be seen” .In 1834, Dickens published six more sketches in the magazine and five in the
Morning Chronicle, a daily newspaper for which he had become a reporter. He also met
Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the music critic on the paper, and began courting her.
The Hogarths, unlike the Beadnells, were impressed with the energy and talents of the young
reporter, and they encouraged the relationship. Dickens continued to publish his sketches;
20 “Sketches of London” appeared in the Evening Chronicle in 1835, 12 in Bell’s Life in
London and Sporting Chronicle. In February 1836 the sketches were collected into the first
series of Sketches by Boz, and their popularity earned him notice as a writer and a contract
for a monthly serial, The Pickwick Papers, which began its run at the end of March 1836.
On the strength of these literary successes, Dickens married Catherine on April 2 and
the couple went to Chalk, Kent, for a brief honeymoon. Soon after, although Dickens had
been hired to play second fiddle on The Pickwick Papers by providing copy to accompany
the work of a famous illustrator, Robert Seymour , the arrangements changed when
Seymour, in the second month of the project, committed suicide. On April 20, Dickens took
over the dominant role in the project. He doubled the length of the text for each monthly
number and reduced the number of illustrations. After interviewing several candidates to
replace Seymour, he selected Hablot Knight Browne, the illustrator who would work with
him through most of his career. By November Pickwick had become a runaway best seller,
and Dickens left the Morning Chronicle to devote himself full-time to his literary work. In
January 1837, the month in which his first child, Charles Culliford Dickens, was
born,Dickens initiated his first editorial project, Bentley’s Miscellany, the magazine in which
Oliver Twist began appearing at the end of the month. For much of the year, both Pickwick
and Twist were appearing monthly. The publication of both novels was suspended for a
month in May, however, afternthe sudden death of Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s younger
sister who was living with the Dickenses. Dickens was holding her in his arms at the moment
of her death and was deeply grieved; he took a ring from her finger which he wore to the end
of his life. In his obsessive memories of her, Mary became an angelic ideal, innocent and
perfect, the model for many of the fragile young women in his novels, especially for Little
Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Charles and Catherine left their newly acquired house at 48
Douhty Street and retired to a farm in Hampstead to recover. Later in the summer they went
to Broadstairs, Kent, for the first of many holidays they would spend at that seaside town.
By the end of the year the completed Pickwick was published in book form. Having a new
project in mind, Dickens went to Yorkshire with Browne in January 1838 to observe the
infamous Yorkshire Schools there, schools that warehoused and mistreated illegitimate and
unwanted children and stepchildren who were banished to them. In March he began the
novel Nicholas Nickleby, his exposé of such schools. The new project was Master
Humphrey’s Clock, a weekly periodical begun in April 1840 in which Dickens serialized his
next two novels, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). By the end of
1841, Dickens was exhausted, tired and weakened by the two novels; a fourth child, Walter
Savage Landor Dickens, born in February; an active public life that earned him an
invitation, which he refused, to stand as the Liberal candidate for Parliament from Reading;
and an operation for a fistula in October. He decided to take a trip to the United States to
recuperate.
After returning to England in summer 1845, Dickens organized the first of his
Amateur Theatricals, playing Bobadil in Ben Jonson’s Every man in his humour . A sixth
child, Alfred D’Orday Tennyson Dickens, was born, and the third Christmas book, The
Cricket on the Hearth, appeared. After Christmas Dickens began a shortlived attempt to
edit a daily newspaper. The liberal Daily News commenced publication on January 21, but
on February 9, burdened by the demands of a daily paper and at odds with some of its
sponsors, Dickens gave up the editorship. In May the restless author again took his family
abroad, this time to Switzerland, where he wrote The Battle of Life, the Christmas book for
1846, and began Dombey and Son (1848), sometimes viewed as the first of the great social
novels that characterize the second half of Dickens’s writing career. In Dombey he subdued
the comic strain of his early work, developed a set of working notes in which he planned out
the novel in advance, and centered his work on the theme of pride. There are some wonderful
comic characters Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, for example—but the novel’s focus is a
melodramatic critique of the institution of patriarchy in its economic, social, and marital
dimensions. In Switzerland, cut off from the sources of his inspiration in London, Dickens
found writing Dombey difficult, and after three months in Paris, the family returned to
London in February 1847. His energy restored on home ground, Dickens returned to his
characteristic multitasking. He completed Dombey in April, the same month in which
another child, Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, was born. During the summer, Dickens
organized another series of amateur theatrical performances. With Angela Coutts he
organized Urania Cottage, a philanthropic project to redeem fallen women from the streets,
which he opened in November, shortly after the death of his sister Fanny. He planned
another Christmas book, but after beginning The Haunted Man (1848) he put it off until the
next Christmas. Fanny’s crippled son, nine-year-old Henry Burnett, the original of Tiny Tim
and Paul Dombey, died a few months later in January 1849, the same month in which
Dickens’s eighth child, Henry Fielding Dickens, was born. By February Dickens had begun
work on his “favorite child,” David Copperfield (1850), an autobiographical novel and his
earliest use of first-person narrative in a longer work. Usually viewed as an interlude
between the early and late novels, Copperfield has also been the favorite of many of Dickens’s
readers. The closely observed and deeply felt depictions of childhood, the comic hyperbole
of Wilkins Micawber, the writhing villainy of Uriah Heep, and the veiled revelations of the
author’s life, especially of his time in the Blacking Warehouse, give the novel an appeal
transcending both the comedy of the early works and the social analysis of the later ones.
While Copperfield was still running in monthly numbers, Dickens initiated another major
project, a weekly magazine, Household Words, that began publication in March 1850. He
both edited and contributed to the magazine. Meanwhile, his work with Urania Cottage and
the amateur theatricals continued. While preparing a theatrical performance at Knebworth,
Bulwer-Lytton’s country house, Dickens and Lytton came up with the idea for the guild of
literature and art , a charity to aid indigent writers and artists through benefit theatrical
performances that would tour the country.
At the time, A Child’s History of England (1852–53) was appearing in weekly
installments in Household Words. Dickens began work on Bleak House (1853), the first of
his later social novels, at the end of 1851, a year darkened by a series of personal tragedies.
In early March Catherine had suffered a nervous breakdown, and at the end of that month
Dickens’s father died. His infant daughter, Dora Annie Dickens, born August 16, 1850, died
eight months later in April 1851. After a family holiday at Broadstairs, life improved.
Catherine recovered her spirits and, under the pseudonym Lady Maria Clutterbuck, wrote
a cookbook, What Shall We Have for Dinner? The Dickens family moved from Devonshire
Terrace to the larger house in Bloomsbury, where their 10th and last child, Edward Bulwer
Lytton Dickens, was born on March 13, 1852. Nevertheless, Bleak House presents a darkened
vision of the times, describing England as a nation shrouded in foggy precedents and ravaged
by crippling laws. The courts, especially the court of chancery,are identified as the source of
England’s diseased condition, which allows ignorance and want to stalk the streets and haunt
the slums. In summer 1853, Dickens took his family to BOULOUGNE, FRANCE, a seaside
town on the English Channel where he spent several holidays. After a trip to Italy with
WILKIE COLLINS and AUGUSTUS EGG in autumn, Dickens returned to England in time
to give the first PUBLIC READING of Carol at the BIRMINGHAM town hall just after
Christmas.
In spite of failing health, Dickens planned a new series of readings for 1870 and began
work on a new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). He began his final series of
readings in mid-January and on March 15 gave his final performance, a reading of Carol
and the trial from Pickwick. The first installment of the new novel, a story about the
disappearance and probable murder of its titular hero, appeared at the beginning of April.
On June 9, 1870, after spending the afternoon at work on the novel, he suffered a stroke and
died that evening. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on June 14.
A bildungsroman narrated in the first person by its hero, Great Expectations recalls
David Copperfield, but Pip’s story is more tightly organized than David’s and Pip is more
aware of his shortcomings. Pip tells his story in three equal parts, casting his life as a journey
in three stages: his childhood and youth in Kent, when he wishes he could overcome his
humble origins and rise in the world; his young manhood in London after he receives his
great expectations; and his disillusionment when he learns the source of his good fortune and
realizes the emptiness of his worldly values. The novel’s concise narration, balanced
structure, and rich symbolism have made it the most admired and most discussed of
Dickens’s works.

Pip begins his story with his father’s name it will remain a constant element in his life.
Pip’s story begins in a graveyard, where all “Great Expectations” must end, in death and
nothingness. Of six children, he alone has survived, and now at the grave of his true father, he is
about to meet a substitute father in the criminal Magwitch. All of the other children were brothers,
possible men that is, to intensify loss and desolation.Why should they all have died and Pip alone
have been called upon to live? Only to embrace the folly they are spared, of his “expectations,”
something that his true father could never have provided.
Pip is about to record his first emotion: that of fear. The sequence of the first scene itself
leads naturally into the child’s terror, as we respond to the atmostphere created by the graveyard,
the marshes, river and sea, with a continuous wind sighing over all.The river makes it appearance
at once, and runs through the whole of Great Expectations, present now at the first meeting with
Magwitch and the scene of his own last hope of escape, embodying the motif of fear. Now as Pip
is growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry he encounters “a fearful man.” The paragraph that
follows is without a sentence, with three groups of words in apposition to “man” showing Pip’s
terror as he can record only the impressions that pour in upon him at once.As his story unfolds, we
learn of other varieties of fear in Pip’s childhood, of many humiliations and denigrations, so that
Pip takes his place in the long succession of Dickens’s orphaned, neglected and miserable children
who yet manage to come out whole from their wretched beginnings.
Now as he prepares to steal food and a file for Magwitch, Pip sets forth the full dimensions of the
terror afflicting him:” I have often thought that few people know what secrecy there is in the young,
under terror. No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in mortal terror of
the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the
iron leg; I was in mortal terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
no hope of deliverance through my all- powerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn; I am afraid
to think of what I might have done on requirement, in the secrecy of my terror”
Pip’s fear gives way to self-accusation which becomes a marked trait in his maturing character,
and mingles with further sensations of shame and remorse: “The terrors that had assailed me
whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be equalled by the
remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had done.”1 For Magwitch himself, Pip is
capable of deep pity upon seeing “his desolation,” a pity and charity that lead him to commit a
form of crime, destined to haunt the remainder of his days. His sympathy extends to the “poor
wretches” of escaped prisoners on whose handcuffs Joe works at the forge, while Pip continues
“in an agony of apprehension.” Yet this pity is rewarded in the benefaction of Magwitch, and leads
to, if it does not justify, his “great expectations.” The child’s complex emotions are joined by the
intense excitement of the search for escaped prisoners, as Joe carries Pip on his back, with sinister
forms visible, in “the low red glare of sunset, the beacon, and the gibbet, and the mound of the
Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain, though all of a watery lead colour.” Sunset
gives way to the darkness in which so large a part of Great Expectations is placed, while over the
marshes the wind and rain continue without ceasing, until this first terrible episode of Pip’s story
comes to its end. Magwitch is taken up the side of the prison-ship and disappears, while “the ends
of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.”
Having escaped the consequences of his theft, Pip knows that he ought to tell Joe the truth; Joe
whom he loves and admires, who is now and always the center of Pip’s moral universe. So long
as he is at peace with Joe, Pip is securely in touch with the absolute. But at this point in his growth,
Pip lacks the world’s easy duplicity, and is overcome by another kind of fear. In his determined
self-exposure he confesses that “I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been
too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”2 But in the course of time the painful
subject is largely forgotten, and Pip proceeds with his elementary education, learning the three R’s
with Biddy’s help. Then the mysterious call to play at Satis House leads Pip to that “one

1
2
memorable day,” after which his life will never be the same. Before the call, Pip is conscious once
again “that I was looking up to Joe in my heart,” admiring the genuineness and unselfish largeness
of his nature. And in Dickens’s world of departure and farewell, none is more poignant than Pip’s
first parting from Joe, with its invocation soon to be forgotten, “God bless you, Pip, old chap!”
Pip’s arrival and reception strike him with awe and fear, as Estella conducts him across the
courtyard. He sees the unused brewery and is conscious of the wind, speaking like a chorus at
decisive moments in his story: “The cold wind seemed to blow colder there, than outside the gate;
and it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the brewery, like the noise of
wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.” His terror mounts as he is led in to the darkness, up the
inevitable staircase to the landing and the terrible rooms where Miss Havisham leads her life in
death. Like Mrs. Clennam, she exists in a self-created prison, excluding all natural light and all
that it stands for in normal human life.The stopping of time resembles the suspension of life as in
a prison, but at this moment Pip cannot see fully the meaning of what is now so terrifying. He
cannot interpret as yet the signs of decay, of unhappiness and ugliness, of the fact that the illu-
sions to be inspired by Miss Havisham and her house are doomed, and that the world here
displayed, which seems one to which he should aspire, is in fact a state of perpetual imprisonment.
Just as Pip ignores what is confusing to him in Estella’s character, so he is blind to the fatal
influence of Satis House.
And now after the dominance of fear, Pip feels a profound shame. For the first time in his
life, Pip is made to feel ashamed of something common in himself, his manners and appearance.
It is his hands that call up Estella’s contempt, but far worse, Pip’s shame of Joe begins. His shame
comes of seeing himself and the world through Estella’s eyes, so that his corruption is a function
of Estella’s falsity, itself imposed by Miss Havisham. As he begins to see fault in Joe’s ignorance
and crudity, wishing him to have been better brought up, his moral universe collapses, as he falls
into a mass of complicated feelings beyond his comprehension: “I was so humiliated, hurt,
spurned, offended, angry, sorry…that tears started to my eyes.” He weeps in bitterness and angry
frustration, his sensitive nature over- come by a child’s sense of injustice, for Pip long heightened
by the cruelty of his sister, the violence and caprice of her temper.
After another experience of terror brought on by his fancy of seeing Miss Havisham’s figure
hanging from a wooden beam, Pip is at last pushed out the gate by the disdainful Estella and walks
home to the forge. At home the fear of not being understood persuades Pip that it would be idle to
tell the truth about Miss Havisham and her house. On his invention of a lurid account, he is
“overtaken by penitence” because of Joe, still the voice of his conscience. His confession to Joe
that it was all lies is followed by a summary of Estella’s view that he is ignorant and common, and
by his own later reflection that Estella would consider Joe equally common. And so the
“memorable day” ends after causing “great changes,” as he calls them, in Pip and his life. But if
the day marks the dawn of his “great expectations,” its first result is to create a falsehood which
continues in many forms until Magwich appears to end it on the dark staircase.
Bent on making himself “uncommon,” Pip decides to learn all that Biddy knows. She agrees, being
“the most obliging of girls,” but at this point Pip does not see why she is so acquiescent, out of
love for him. He is yet too self-absorbed for a proper insight into anyone else. The incident of the
strange man, the file and pound notes disturbs his rest however, as he thinks of “the guiltily coarse
and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts,” as already his
connection with a convict is seen to clash with his ambition. On his return to Satis House, the
perpetual wind tries to warn him as he waits looking out on a corner of the neglected garden where
some light snow remained: “…the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the window, as
if it pelted me for coming there.” On the symbolic staircase he meets a new element in his destiny,
the ominous figure of Jaggers who as yet means nothing to him but whose powerful face and
scented hands make a firm impression. Pip is shown into another room on the landing, again dark,
silent, airless, a portrait of rottenness with obscene crawling things, the atmosphere poisoned, to
infect and pervert Pip’s responsive young mind. Indeed in the heavy darkness, “I even had an
alarming fancy that Estella and I might presently begin to decay.” His encounter with Herbert
Pocket, and the absurd fistfight in which Pip is the victor, leave him prey to a new fear, certain
that “the pale young gentleman’s blood was on my head, and that the Law would avenge it.” But
like many of Pip’s fears, this is groundless, while ele- ments in his life that he should fear take
their course, such as the repeated assumption by Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook that Miss Havisham
intends to benefit Pip in some markedly generous way, despite her never giving him anything but
his dinner.Meanwhile, Pip grows conscious of the effect of Satis House upon him, and seems at
first to excuse himself as helpless against an inevitable corruption:
”What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by
them? Is it to be won- dered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into
the natural light from the misty yellow rooms? ”
Thus Pip may be seen as a gifted and sensitive child, out of place now at the forge, feeling
ignorant and desiring to learn, yet even more misplaced at Satis House, where the effect is
increasing fears, bewilderment, and humiliation for the increasingly shame-filled Pip. For after
Satis House, Pip changes irrevocably. Once is indeed not now and never can be again. What he
must change into, is never clear to him; he sees only that he must know more, have better manners
and appearance; must, that is, seem to be something else in the eyes of the world.
 As for Joe, Pip’s shame is explicitly admitted when the indentures are brought to Miss
Havisham, for Joe is a ludicrous sight in his Sunday clothes which only show that he is not a
gentleman, whereas for Pip a new costume will be the initial step toward his transformation.
Then seeing Joe through Estella’s eyes, Pip admits “I know that I was ashamed of him—
when I saw that Estella stood at the back of Miss Havisham’s chair, and that her eyes laughed
mischievously.” The payment of twenty-five guineas as a premium encourages the later
assumption that Miss Havisham is the source of Pip’s expectations. Now they make their way to
Pumblechook’s and dinner at the Blue Boar, while another “most melancholy day” passes. Finally
alone in his little bedroom, Pip is “truly wretched,” victim of a feeling invariable among such as
he. He has a strong conviction “that I should never like Joe’s trade. I had liked it once, but once
was not now.”
His shame deepens, becoming more complex and explicit, as Pip declares his misery in
being ashamed of home. He continues to be relentless in admitting the worst of himself, but allows
for the possibility that he might not have been entirely to blame at this point.Yet the change has
taken place, “excusably or inexcusably, it was done.” While his misery deepens, at least Pip does
not let Joe discover it, and Pip’s shame makes him unhappy; he is ashamed of himself for feeling
ashamed of Joe. His many kinds of fear are also involved, as the adjectives which he increasingly
applies to himself accumulate upon “restlessly aspiring discontented me” as he dreads the thought
of Estella seeing him at the forge: “I was haunted by the fear that she would...find me out…and
would exult over me and despise me.” He would suffer moments of fancy when she seemed there
“just drawing her face away” and later he “would feel more ashamed of home than ever, in my
own ungracious breast.”
Pip’s desire to learn becomes more intense, and insofar as Satis House has increased the
desire, its influence was good upon him. But Pip in his honesty does not wish to let anything seem
to his credit when in fact it arose from base motives. He tries to impart his knowledge to Joe, but
only to make him “less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society and less
open to Estella’s reproach.” One Sunday, after lessons, Pip raises the question of another visit to
Miss Havisham, which Joe opposes because “she might think you wanted something expected
something of her.” The word “expected” is allied to the title; if Pip already does “expect”
something from Miss Havisham, it is the more natural for him to think of her as having provided
his money when it comes. Yet she has terminated the relationship in paying the twenty-five
guineas, which are intended to show that nothing more is to be “expected,” even though they seem
to have the opposite effect of inspiring hope of some- thing more. When Pip makes his visit
“simply one of gratitude for a favour received,” he finds Miss Havisham alone, her surroundings
unchanged. Her blunt statement, “I hope you want nothing. You’ll get nothing” should have stood
as proof that she could not be his benefactor, but the sole result of the visit was to make Pip “more
than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with everything…” On his way home,
Pip is delayed by Mr. Wopsle and a long reading of George Barnwell, so that it is very dark on the
walk home. By now we accept the ominous signs of the coming of important events, as Pip notices
how “the mist rose with a change of wind from a certain quarter of our marshes,” the sinister Orlick
appears, and soon the revelation that Mrs. Joe has been struck down by the con- vict’s leg iron,
inspiring new feelings of fear and guilt. Seeing that he, however undesignedly, had provided the
weapon against his sister, Pip considers again telling Joe the full truth about Magwitch, the stolen
food and the file. But it seems unlikely that Joe would believe it, “in addition to the dread that,
having led up to so much mischief, it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from
me…” So as a possible moment of truth again passes, Pip settles into the routine of his life as
apprentice, and visits Miss Havisham on his birthday where he receives a guinea, which keeps
alive the notion of her generosity.The “dull old house” never changes—dark, silent, mysterious,
motionless—and its influence on Pip remains the same, causing him “at heart to hate my trade and
to be ashamed of home.” But he becomes more aware of Biddy, now part of the family as attendant
to the ailing Mrs. Joe, and sweetly contributing as always to Pip’s increasing knowledge. He invites
her for a walk the following Sunday, and it is beside the river on a fine summer afternoon that Pip
makes his confession to Biddy of his longing to be a gentleman. The river’s steady dignity among
things eternal remains a setting for Pip’s folly and illusion, made to seem the more trivial by the
river’s own majestic indifference. He confesses to Biddy his unhappiness, the discontented quarrel
being waged with himself, his need to change into “a different sort of life from the life I lead now.”
He reveals that it had been Estella who said he was coarse and common, and that he wanted to be
a gentleman on her account: “Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up
grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it,” the nearest Pip seems to move
toward a form of suicide or death wish. Biddy makes him realize the extent of his folly and
absurdity, as she emerges far superior to Estella and his present lot happier and more wholesome
than the falsity and corruption to which he aspired: “But how could I, a poor dazed village lad,
avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?” The
right way is once again rejected in Pip’s confusion. He seems even more insufferable when, with
crude self-absorption and insensitiveness, he expresses the wish that he could fall in love with
Biddy, and is annoyed when, in her pragmatism, she sees that he never will. As moments of clear
reason are about to prevail, Pip’s wits are scattererd again by the thought “that perhaps after all
Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune when my time was out.” This provides a natural
sequence from hope to assumption when Pip’s “expectations” are announced, so that having hoped
that Miss Havisham would make his fortune, he proceeds to assume that she is the benefactor.
 One Saturday night at the Three Jolly Bargemen, in the fourth year of Pip’s apprenticeship,
Jaggers reveals “that he has Great Expectations,” that he will have access to “a handsome
property,” and that he is to be “immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this
place, and be brought up as a gentleman—in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations.”
Pip’s immediate response is to imagine that “my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss
Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.” Despite numerous hints that it is
someone else, that it could in fact be Magwitch, Pip’s mistake is inevitable. Clues to the truth are
more accessible to the reader than to the protagonist, Dickens intending that we should guess the
identity of his benefactor before Pip himself does. Given the state of his knowledge and experience
at the time, he could hardly have thought of anyone else. She is the only person known to be
wealthy, or at least thought to be so, and the first thing Pip knows about her is that she has money:
“I had heard of Miss Havisham uptown...as an immensely rich and grim lady…” He would
probably have thought this in any case, it being easy for those low in society to suppose that anyone
far removed from their own existence must be rich. In lives whose chief fact is poverty it would
be natural to think that a life different from theirs must be different in this essen- tial way—the
way in which they would make their lives different if they could.Then too, many of the others have
“expectations” depending on Miss Havisham; in such a feudal context, anything good that happens
must come from above. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe repeatedly assume that Pip is about to be
handsomely patronized; Jaggers is her lawyer, and Miss Havisham herself does nothing to
undeceive Pip, once the error is made. We must in any case reason from within the creation of
Dickens. Great Expectations is a fiction, not a statement of fact subject to analysis as such, so we
must beware of reasoning about Pip and what he could or should have known outside the realm of
Dickens’s imagined possibilities. Pip is finally the beneficiary of a large sum of money, about
whose source he is at first mistaken, but which he is to accept under three main conditions: he
must keep his name as it is; he must never inquire into the identity of his benefactor or try to
discuss it in any way; he must enter at once on a course of education suited to his new
circumstances.
The first of these conditions means that Pip will finally be saved. Pip’s name reveals his common
origin, and his being not anyone or anything in particular through its being spelled the same either
way. He has started from the discontent inspired by Satis House, the desire to be a gentleman, the
coming of great expectations and the acceptance of illusory values. Yet he finds that everything in
his life may change except his name; he does not see that therefore his nature cannot change, that
he is destined to be what he has been. He is forced to stay with an original natural value in his own
identity, giving him a base to which he can always return. The meaning is that the illusions can
come to nothing, Pip has to go back to what he was in his moral being.
The conditions being acceptable, the first sign of change must be an outfit
of new clothes which must not be working clothes. Work, that is, becomes a thing
of the past; Pip’s expectations are not to be fulfilled by anything he does for himself. They come
from without, his moral reform from within. Dickens’s early work shows as much interest in
describing a man’s clothes as in telling what his actual person looked like, as if by knowing what
a man wears, we know what is necessary to interpret him. For Pip now, he must have new clothes
proper to his new status; the clothes will imply what he has done to obtain them, they being at
once the result of, and a sign of, the price paid for his “great expectations.” No sooner are these
established than Pip does something he is ashamed of, in his immediate, ungrateful readiness to
leave Joe behind. He “was lost in the magic of my future fortunes” and is eager to abandon his
family in pursuit of illusion. But Pip must leave home, as Jaggers reminds him: “The sooner you
leave here as you are to be a gentleman—the better.” Pip nowhere says what he thinks a
“gentleman,” the kind of person he is to become, might be. It is not simply the inner condition of
spirit which “may be attained by any man,” as Mr. Twemlow says in the final chapter of Our
Mutual Friend.Whatever it means it will cost money, and it can be found out only by going to
London and so into illusion. Thus Pip’s hopes must be false since they can be fulfilled only in
London—the grave of illu- sion and all hope in the young.
At this point Pip desires to visit Miss Havisham: as he had wished to see her while thinking that
she would provide for him, he now wishes to see her again, in the certainty that she is the
benefactor. Meanwhile, at home, the news of Pip’s departure is received with sadness and wonder.
The notion of his being a gentleman seems remote to Joe and Biddy; it is inappropriate, they feel
that he will not sustain it well; they are apprehensive, filling him with resentment, dissatisfaction
with himself, and intimations of his final remorse. After the argument over his new clothes and
when Pip is to be seen in them, the division and uncertainty continue, his good news having
increased rather than removed it. In his little room he falls again into a “confused division of mind,”
torn between two worlds and the dualism of “once” and “now,” as the inception of “bright
fortunes” leaves him feeling sorrowful, strange and lonely.
But on the morrow after church, as Pip goes out to the marshes, glowing in his new role and full
of condescending thoughts over the poor villagers, he is overcome by a feeling of shame at his
relationship to Magwitch. Shame permeates the whole of his human relationships, extending to
the source of his expectations. But Pip’s efficiency in putting down such inner distress increases
with the crudity of his patronization, as he remarks to Biddy on the need to improve Joe’s learning
and manners. He does not see the implication of Biddy’s tribute to the dignity of Joe’s own pride
in remaining in a place he fills with respect. It follows that Pip has no right to feel a similar pride,
now that he is abandoning his own place for the pursuit of illusions, for “London and greatness”
as he says, while the very cattle at their grazing show new respect. As always when clashing with
the perfect genuinesness of Biddy’s nature, Pip is defeated, retreats into a “virtuous and superior
tone,” ending another day in unhappy dejection.
But next day, as Pip waits upon Mr.Trabb the tailor to order his new clothes, he discovers
again a new truth in “the stupendous power of money.” It compels a fawning amiability in Trabb
himself, puts down the malice of his servant boy, and increases the obscene obeisance of
Pumblechook, as Pip continues in triumph at the hatter’s, bootmaker’s, and hosier’s, wondering at
the variety of enterprises required for his embellishment. Thus Pip finds that money, like original
genius, radiates energy. Once acquired, it transforms a man’s position, elevates him in the general
esteem, and gives a new value and dignity to his opinions. It changes all of his relationships with
others, inviting deference, servility on all sides. Money, being what all others have desired, has
the effect of changing Pip from an object of contempt or indifference to one who has in fact
obtained what all have been seeking. He is suddenly what they all want to be, and they give him
the deference they would themselves expect in his place. Money in turn deceives, in persuading
one of his own merit in acquiring it, so Pip’s money must reward his merit as Pumblechook loses
no time in saying that his fortune is “well deserved.” Pumblechook’s servility and asininity are
forgotten as he now seems a sensible, “prime fellow.” Once one has money then, from whatever
source, the mystery or fortune in it fades away, and the money becomes a just reward to a deserving
man. Luck has simply displayed good judgement.
Thus all that money can buy begins to flow into Pip’s new
life. It can buy the fulfillment of his “great expectations” in all their forms external to himself, in
all their hollowness and final disillusion. Can it buy Estella too? What can money buy in women
but the favors of a prostitute? What is Estella if she can be obtained for Pip by money alone? In
the end, however, Estella will be his, only when money is lost and cannot be offered to her. But
now, Pip’s newly bought clothing is “rather a disappointment.” He seems incongruous in his new
outfit, an imposition on one not ready for it, a source of discomfort and self-consciousness, like
Joe’s Sunday raiment. Like the rest of his expectations to come, the clothes fall short as Pip refers
to the singular in “the wearer’s expectation,” wherein the term is general, applicable to anyone,
unlike its plural which can apply only to those who, like Pip, have “great expectations.” Feeling at
a disadvantage, ashamed to be seen by the shopman, Pip goes circuitously to Miss Havisham to
say goodbye, she knowing that he owes her nothing, while in a final sign of all his illusions, he
goes to his knee to kiss her withered hand. So Pip leaves his “fairy godmother...standing in the
midst of the dimlylighted room, besides the rotten bridecake that was hidden in cobwebs,” still
incapable of learning from what he sees.To the very last, the contending forces in Pip continue
their struggle. He is ashamed to be seen with Joe, and makes his way alone to the coach on the
morning of his departure. He weeps at the baseness of his ingratitude, resolves to turn back and
make amends with a decent farewell, but it is soon “too late and too far to go back…” The mists
have risen to show Pip the world that must now have its way with him and his illusions. Much
thought has been given to the identity of Pip’s home village, which is never actually named, and
given at the start of Chapter 20 only as “our town” from which he now goes to London in a journey
of five hours. Dickens wisely omits a particular name, for Pip as Everyman remains the same and
any small town is the same as that from which the everlasting young man sets forth into the world.
Now he enters a coach, a public vehicle demanding payment, yet Pip has given up his soul in order
to enter it. At his arrival, he spends no time on the effect or appearance of London, beyond saying
that its immensity scared him, a “rather ugly, crooked, narrow and dirty” place. These adjectives
have been illustrated for the reader in Dickens’s preceding works and are left for the moment as a
summary of first impressions. But after arrival at Jaggers’s offices in a gloomy street, and waiting
for the great man in a dismal room, Pip goes for a turn in the air only to be horrified by the
atmosphere of Smithfield and Newgate Prison which gives him “a sickening idea of London.”
Thus London itself seems to become the first of Pip’s illusions to be lost, just as it will be the scene
where one after another illusion will be lost. It is necessary that London seem like a land of dreams
if “great expectations” are to be realized there, illusions of perfection and grandeur that are to
follow from possessing money. Later Wemmick assures Pip that London is indeed a very wicked
place but only as all places containing people are certain to be. But Barnard’s Inn turns out
mournful and dilapidated, an imperfect realisation indeed “of the first of my great expectations,”
as they ascend a rickety staircase to Herbert Pocket’s door. But Pip soon realises that if London is
“decidedly overrated,” in appearance it remains the place of destiny where everything is decided:
how one is to behave, what manners one must display as Pip accepts with patient docility Herbert’s
correction of his manners according to London standards. He finds that Herbert too has illusions
of great success in business through exploitation of a non-existent fleet of ships, only one more of
the many “expectations” comparable to his own.
Hints of coming uneasiness and self-accusation start toward his mind. “That I could have been in
our old church in my old church-going clothes, on the very last Sunday that ever was,” seems a
combination of impossibilities, geographical and social, solar and lunar.Yet in the London streets,
so crowded with people and so brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening, there were depressing
hints of reproaches “for that I had put the poor old kitchen at home so far away; and in the dead of
night, the footsteps of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard’s Inn, under
pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.”
 Pip’s life and education expand as he settles into two establishments, with the Pockets and
at Barnard’s Inn. He does not describe a series of formal Bildungsmächte in the sense of certain
people or influences who bring about changes in himself. He is not advanced or retarded in specific
ways by the Pockets, Drummle and Startop, or by Wemmick and Jaggers. He narrates and descibes
this period of study and experience, but says little of its effect on him, unlike Satis House which
had on a single day changed his entire life. Pip shares with Carlyle’s Wilhelm Meister the problem
of a choice of vocation; he needs to know what to do with himself, but Mr. Pocket can only say he
is never supposed to do anything, not being “designed for any profession.” He is to behave like
other young men in prosperous circumstances, and so in the time-honored fashion he develops
expensive habits and spends money foolishly. His only defense is that “through good and evil I
stuck to my books...having sense enough to feel my deficiencies.” Under tutelage, Pip can only
say that he “got on fast”, but toward what end he cannot say. Pip does not tell us what books he
read or what he learned from them; he never refers to any- thing that he remembers or makes use
of his reading. After the first impact of disillusion, London itself is not a special influence, and
Pip’s life narrows itself to his own two centers, to Jaggers’s office and house, the court and prison,
varied by the complete change of visits to Wemmick at home. Into this round of study, experience
and education, the emotions of fear and shame have not intruded markedly until one Monday
morning Pip receives a letter announcing the imminent arrival of Joe. It leads to behavior for which
he will never forgive himself, the shame of Pip indeed. Written by Biddy, the letter adds a P.S.,
which contains a bitter thrust at Pip’s new status of “gentleman.” Biddy does not doubt “it will be
agreeable to see him even though a gentleman, for you had ever a good heart and he is a worthy
man.” Pip now wishes to “confess” his exact feelings, the right term for behavior which he knows
to have been sinful. He gives explicit terms to his feelings: disturbance, mortification, a sense of
incongruity, for although he despises Drummle, he does not want this high-born scoundrel to see
Joe. His weakness and meanness become the more despicable from their cause.
Much has been done to emphasize the clash between Pip’s circumstances and Joe’s
unchanging simplicity: the chambers have been expensively redecorated, a servant in colorful
costume is on hand, and Pip himself is attired in a dressing gown of flowered pattern. As often
when a scene of the first importance is at hand, the rain is descending in the drizzly morning, when
Pip hears Joe on the staircase again essential to the fullness and meaning of the scene, Pip hearing
Joe, as he will at last hear Magwitch, upon the staircase. And it is on the staircase up to Pip’s
London rooms that Joe in his pitiful crudity stumbles into what is Pip’s most shameful moment,
as he greets Joe in his contemptible dressing gown and fails to take Joe into his arms, to soothe the
anguish of his most loving friend. Now the painful encounter unfolds until Pip’s shame of Joe
before Herbert is relieved by his friend’s departure, while Pip fails to see that he is himself to
blame for Joe’s blunders: “I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was
all my fault,” as Pip’s impa- tience and annoyance turn again into self-accusation. When he hears
the message from Estella, Pip sees that he would have treated Joe more warmly had he known his
errand, and so Pip’s account has spared nothing to his own discredit. Precisely what Pip does to
make Joe so unhappy is not told; the effect upon Joe’s feelings, however, is clear and the shame
of Pip’s conduct is seen in its result. His offense is not that he sees Joe’s crudity more clearly than
ever before, but that he makes Joe know this and suffer for it. Pip’s way of seeing others must
necessarily change, and he has a right to learn from experience of the world. But Joe is past
changing, is perfect as he is, and should never be made to feel that there is anything about him
which would be better for changing. Pip wounds his friend where Joe is totally defenseless, and
he never can, nor should he, forgive himself—for he had ever a good heart and it shows here. The
episode closes with Joe’s moving speech of renunciation and farewell. Joe sees two things at fault,
beyond himself: London and his clothes. If he and Pip “is not two figures to be together in
London,” the fault lies with the city in Dickens’s world, the scene of illusion, the goal of those
pursuing “great expectations.” Joe is in turn “wrong in these clothes”: thus the elements
inseparable from Pip’s own “expectations” are shown to be false, disastrous in their effect upon
his moral being, the cause of his profoundest shame. Now Pip makes his first journey back home,
but not to see Joe—who he invents a series of cheap excuses to avoid, cheating himself by these
pretences. On the coach are two convicts being carried down to the dockyards, one of whom Pip
sees, to his horror, had met him at the Three Jolly Bargemen. Sure of not being recognized, Pip is
nonetheless relieved when Herbert calls out his nickname, for the convict might have attended had
he heard the name “Pip”—the fact that ties him to the past and to the most important single element
in his preceding existence. As the wind returns when they near the marshes, Pip learns how he had
gotten the two one pound notes, and as the coincidence draws him back nearer to Magwitch, a
nameless undefinable fear returns upon him, a “revival for a few minutes of the terrors of
childhood.”
As the time approaches for the return to Satis House, Pip’s illusions as to his patroness and her
plans for him and Estella again become vivid. His judgment had been sound while he remained an
innocent child, but is now blurred by his “expectations,” the dreams of love and money inseparable
from each other, as he now repeats as clearly and firmly as possible the clue into his “poor
labyrinth,” the corrupting influence of Estella and his wild, unreasoning love for her. Pip shares
the young man’s fictional dream of a beautiful woman with whom he is to live in luxury. In Great
Expectations the dream corrupts the dreamer, and the nearer to being realized, the more it corrupts.
Pip repudiates those who have loved and aided him; he becomes idle and wasteful, he does no
work for the money he spends; he loses his dignity as a man, becoming almost unfit for the society
of others. At Satis House once more, he ascends the darkened staircase leading again into the past,
and again kisses the withered hand with the obsequious deference of one who still “expects.”
Before the spec- tacle of Estella grown now to elegant womanhood, combining the effects of
France and London to come, Pip is overcome by feelings of inferiority, or retrogression, of having
made no progress since his cruder days. A sense of distance, disparity, inaccessibility afflicts him,
as Pip again chooses the terms for his condition. Estella was the cause of Pip’s first shame of home
and Joe, of the hankerings, aspirations and visions which had preceded even his “expectations”
and were to be fulfilled by them. Her power over him continues as she once again comes between
what is redeemable in his nature and Joe. Of course, she observes, Pip’s change of fortune and
prospects would necessarily demand a change of companions, invoking the terrible refrain of
“once was not now,” ensuring that he will pay no visit to Joe.
Meanwhile Pip is haunted by a resemblance of Estella to someone. If at this point he can see that
Estella does not remind him of Miss Havisham, he should give up the notion of her patronage, as
he should abandon the assurance that she intends Estella for him—he knows that Estella has been
brought up to ruin, not to fulfill, the hopes of men.When Pip is urged to love Estella, it is clear that
he will not be happy for it, the words from Miss Havisham’s lips sounding “like a curse.”
Nonetheless, that night Pip reaffirms his love for Estella “hundreds of times” and persists in the
hope “that she should be destined for me, once the blacksmith’s boy,” for once is not now. Pip is
again the fictional young man marking the distance of his rise from what once was, and as a result
he keeps away from Joe to avoid Estella’s contempt, just as he had not wished to have Joe seen by
Drummle: Pip loves one and despises the other, but betrays Joe because of them both.
Next day Pip’s complacency is shattered by the satiric comment of “that unlimited
miscreant,Trabb’s boy,” an impish little comic mocker in the tradition of Puck and English
folklore. It is fitting that the mockery of Pip’s foppish manner and appearance comes from the
tailor’s boy, who had made the clothes which were the first result of Pip’s fulfilled “expectations,”
as Pip records in his usual precise terminology the “terror, amazement, and indignation,” the
“aggravation and injury” and final disgrace wrought by his smirking tormentor.
In London with Herbert, Pip declares his love for Estella, revealing his inner discontent, his sense
of shame at having done so little on his own behalf, his unhappiness despite his good fortune. Pip
is now twenty-one, and Herbert’s summary of him at this point discloses unresolved divisions and
contradictions. Herbert calls him “a good fellow, with impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and
diffidence, action and dreaming, curiously mixed in him.” Yet thinking of Estella, he feels
uncertain, at the mercy of change, his future dependent on someone still unknown. As Herbert
soberly cautions him against believing that Estella is meant for him, we are made to see the
moment as important by Pip’s reference to the wind: a feeling smites upon his heart again, “like
the old marsh winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued me on the
morning when I left the forge…”
The somber mood of ominous coming events is dispelled by attendance at Mr. Wopsle’s Hamlet,
after which Pip and Herbert are treated to a Micawberesque review of Wopsle’s past triumphs and
the development of his future plans. On retiring after Wopsle’s prophecies, Pip’s misery and
uneasiness return, and perhaps inspired by the obvious futility of Wopsle’s plans, Pip dreams that
his expectations are all ruined in a context of defeat and humiliation.
Pip’s deepening mood is further disturbed by news of Estella’s coming to London, and by the
accident of his visiting Newgate with Wemmick while awaiting Estella’s arrival. He behold“a
frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing scene” and later broods over the ominous fact that his life is
inseparable from crime and prison. He contrasts the atmosphere of the jail with the proud and
beauteous Estella, just as he has contrasted Joe with her to his shame. But both turn out to be false
contrasts: it is ironic that the prison taint should afflict Pip with reference to Estella, as if she were
high above it, whereas she is steeped in it from birth, being more deeply rooted in crime than he
is. Pip’s expectations further lead not to Estella as she now is but back to Joe. The present interview
with her gives him only pain, “but everything in our intercourse did give me pain…yet I went on
against trust and against hope.” As they drive by coach to Richmond, they pass under the walls of
the prison “of which I was so ashamed,” and Pip would no more have confessed to visiting
Newgate, than he would have spoken of friendship for Joe.As he leaves Estella, he can only reflect
that here, where he had hoped to find happiness, he “never was happy with her, but always
miserable.”
Pip now pauses to reflect on his expectations and their harmful influence upon him, upon
his “chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to Joe” as well as Biddy, upon the dubious
wisdom of his ever having left the forge.Then thoughts of Estella renew his confusion, but he
cannot doubt his corrupting influence on Herbert as he continues to fall into the classical actions
of his genre, wasting his time as one of the Finches of the Grove, spending foolishly and
contracting immense debts.
Pip’s underlying uneasiness, his sense that he could not indefinitely continue so futile an existence
remote from what his “expectations” had seemed to promise, prepares him for the immense
changes to come. The first of these is the death of Mrs. Joe, as Pip invokes the journey comparison
again in a story that had begun in a graveyard: “It was the first time that a grave had opened in my
road of life,” and with steady honesty he admits that he felt no tenderness, only regret and some
indignation against the savage Orlick. Pip’s deficiencies come out in glaring form at this stage
when- ever he opposes his moral absolutes, Biddy or Joe, with whom our sympathies lie. His blind
self-absorption, a condescending complacency come forth in his lofty pleasure, when Pip asks to
sleep in his own room—feeling that he had done “rather a great thing in making the request.” In
speaking to Biddy he almost makes the error of offering her money, and later as she turns their
conversation in praise of Joe, she quietly exposes his self-deception, the virtuous self-assertion of
Pip’s then “murmuring soul.” She says what they both know, that in fact Pip will not come near
Joe, despite his resolutions and promises, and on his departure the mists themselves again continue
their revelations, this time on the baseness of his conduct.
As Herbert had predicted, Pip reaches the age of twenty-one without more precise knowledge of
his benefactor. He learns only from Jaggers that the “handsome sum” of five hundred pounds a
year is now available to him, while he is left in the continuing illusion concerning Miss Havisham.
Now withWemmick’s secret aid, he arranges a partnership for Herbert in a shipping firm, and
while he had not been able to shed a tear at the death of his sister, he weeps for joy that his
“expectations” have had the power to make someone happy, mean- while his own wretchedness
continuing under the influence of Estella, who drives Pip into jealous distraction, luring on a host
of admirers to torment him. His irrational, contradictory helplessness continues: “I never had one
hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping
on the happiness of having her with me unto death.” Yet Estella only obeys in all this the command
of Miss Havisham, to whose presence Pip is again asked to escort his tormentor, feeling deeply a
bitter sense of his dependence and degradation.
The return to Satis House shows once again the meaning and influence of this darkest of the many
“dark houses” in Dickens, whose forbidding gloom descends upon and is concentrated in this
“darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden from the sun.” But more than any of
the others, this house declares the hero’s own situation, telling Pip the true nature of his
“expectations” as “I saw in everything the construction that my mind had come to, repeated and
thrown back to me.” Pip understands almost to the full what Miss Havisham’s perverted use of
Estella means, yet he persuades himself that she is reserved for him “assigned to me.” At night,
unable to sleep, Pip goes out to escape the haunting visions of Miss Havisham that surround him,
only to see her going up the portentous staircase, a ghostly figure uttering a moaning cry. His
unhappy mood continues next day as Pip again is made jealous and miserable by Estella’s
encouragement of Drummle, without so much as the satisfaction of knowing that Estella favors
the lout only in order to plague him.
Such was the condition of Pip’s aching heart as he approaches the moment whose importance in
his life is beyond exaggeration and for which he prepares us with the greatest solemnity. He
develops an analogy from an “Eastern story” wherein a huge slab of rock is designed to fall “on
the bed of state in the flush of conquest.” When the hour comes, the sultan cuts the cord and the
slab falls, just as now for Pip “the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.” Security and success
are only apparent, as there lurks some hidden menace which, at the decisive moment, destroys all
hope, visiting a retribution which men have invited by the folly of their illusions.
Thus “all days come that are to be,” events run their course, and Pip hears a fatal step upon
the staircase. Time now becomes specific, whereas for Pip the period of irresponsible illusions has
seemed timeless, a sense of suspended time enforcing the unreality of his hopes, as the clocks are
stopped in Satis House. Only when illusion is finally doomed does life declare itself in the
relentless units where it is in fact lived. Time starts up again now for Pip with the ominous tolling
of eleven o’clock at night as Magwitch sets foot upon the stair—the past emerging from darkness,
mounting the staircase into a lighted present, in contrast to the steps in Satis House, leading from
the present to a dark, mysterious past.
As the climatic moment approaches, Pip reviews, with customary precision of terms, his actual
condition. At age twenty-three, he is yet unsure of his expectations. He has moved to new
chambers “down by the river.” Full of hope for the morrow, he is unable to get down to anything
but his continuously unspecified reading, and alone in Herbert’s absence on business, he is
dispirited, anxious, disappointed. The scene itself is carefully reviewed, for Dickens clearly means
to present the fatal encounter as fully charged with associations as possible, filling the scene with
“things eternal” and recalling elements from Pip’s first meeting with Magwitch on the marshes.
Nighttime, in the city of London, the river, wind and rain, the Bells of St. Paul’s striking the hour,
the sound upon the staircase—Dickens seems to draw together lines from the whole of his created
universe to make of this scene the highest manifestation of his artistic capacity. Eternity comments
upon the human scene, collides with what is always there, as the narrator speaks of a heavy veil
driving over London “as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind.”
Pip closes his book at eleven o’clock, the hour strikes with the sound flawed by the wind, footsteps
are heard on the stair, a man comes into the light of Pip’s lamp after calling him by name.The
staircase lamps were blown out, so when Pip goes to the stairhead he takes up his reading lamp.The
person had stopped on seeing Pip’s lamp, and remains invisible in the darkness below. He then
comes slowly into the light. Pip at first resents the man’s familiar tone, as if something were
assumed; then his responses mingle with the feelings that had first beset him on meeting the
criminal. Fear, horror, bewilderment, exasperation, astonishment, and as Magwitch’s
possessiveness grows, physical revulsion: the whole of Pip’s emotional life is concentrated and
lived again in a few moments.The moment of recognition invokes the continuing wind and rain as
Pip says, “I knew him! If the wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years…I could
not have known my convict more distinctly that I knew him now…” It is as if he has seen a ghost,
one returned from the death Pip had supposed or hoped for.When after hearing of his
“expectations” from Jaggers, Pip thinks of Magwitch, he comforts himself by thinking how long
ago it had been, how Magwitch was dead to him and might in fact be dead. Would not Pip naturally
expect, that is, hope, Magwitch to be dead, if he had known him to be his benefactor, something
he had never as yet allowed himself to think? As Magwitch stretches out his hands to Pip, his
physical revulsion continues, and it will be a sign of his changed heart when later at the criminal’s
trial Pip holds his hand tenderly. Now feelings of moral righteousness intrude as Pip continues to
shrink back, and has to say in effect that “once was not now,” circumstances are different from
their first encounter and “our ways are different ways. ”We think of the child’s repetition of “Sir”
in the graveyard as he is terrified of the criminal, a term soon to be heavily ironic: an apprehensive
deference to one soon to be considered far beneath the “gentleman” whom he creates. But a feeling
of sympathy, of self-reproach follows when Pip sees “with amazement that his eyes were full of
tears.” Attempting to repay the two one pound notes, Pip sees Magwitch burn them, listens as the
details of his fortune unfold. As the truth establishes itself in his mind, Pip nearly faints away,
seeming to suffocate, for he knows at last that his money has not come from Miss Havisham. Pip
must now learn to endure the crudities of the man who has paid for his education into such
fastidiousness as now afflicts him; he must suffer the man who has paid to make his sensibility the
very kind that would certainly find his benefactor revolting. What of Magwitch himself, returned
“fur to see my gentleman,” only to find that he has thrown his money away? The crudity of his
language comes as a sudden and fearful plunge into reality, measuring the distance between Pip in
fact and Magwitch’s “gentleman,” between the “expectations” and things as they are. For
Magwitch’s expectations are also disappointed; money and education do not make a
gentleman.We have not been shown an example of the kind of man Pip should try to become if he
is to be a gentleman; we see only the kind of man Pip will probably become if his “expectations”
are fulfilled. At this point, Pip only passes for a gentleman, becoming one in fact when he acts like
one, forgetting himself, blaming no one else, and letting his moral qualities finally prevail through
shame at his behavior. Magwitch now fails to see that if his plan succeeds and his creation becomes
a “gentleman” as he understands the term, personal association between them is impossible. If he
too had come back disguised as a clergyman or in some other form of total concealment, Pip might
not have been similarly revolted by a benefactor, however criminal, who seemed to be himself a
gentleman. But the very qualities he wishes to see developed in Pip exclude him, and take away a
creator’s greatest satisfaction: personal enjoyment or contemplation of his finished work.
Yet Pip’s own aversion to the criminal is not merely a function of gentlemanly fastidiousness,
since anyone might recoil from such a social outcast. He is only repeating in some measure the
feelings he had when as a child he saw Magwitch for the first time, as our own belief and sympathy
rests always with Pip the child. Meanwhile, as the unspeakable encounter runs its course, Pip’s
blood runs cold within him. He tries to collect his thoughts in stunned confusion while the voices
of wind and rain go on, Pip hearing them over the sound of Magwitch himself.
The final blow comes with the knowledge that he must protect Magwitch from death as one
returned from life punishment. Pip’s condition makes him think again of a voyage ending in
disaster. When alone and able to think clearly at last, “I began fully to know how wrecked I was,
and how this ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces.” In agonies of shame and remorse Pip
reviews his broken dreams; he must tell himself what he had obtained in return for his perfidy,
“my own worthless conduct” to Biddy and Joe. His old fear returns, as he hears in the wind and
rain the threat of nameless dangers, ominous pursuers, sinister whispers and knocking at the door.
The fear of possible violence from Magwitch himself is calmed by seeing him asleep, and Pip falls
himself into uneasy rest. The “clocks of the Eastward churches were striking five” as he awakens
in darkness intensified by the everlasting wind and rain, these recurring elements of Dickens’s
imagination having continued steadily throughout this the greatest chapter in all of his creation,
their con- tinuance warning Pip that his troubles must go on with no escape from the consequences
of his corrupt illusions. But one cause at least of Pip’s continual distress has been removed:
uncertainty now he knows. His inner problems remain however. He must recover from the
influence of Satis House, whose dark rottenness has polluted his life, and he must return to Biddy
and Joe to be forgiven.
To these internal pressures Magwitch has now added the external problem of his
concealment and eventual escape. While this recreates Pip’s old fear in another form, it releases
his natural energy and resourcefulness, gives purpose and direction to his wasteful existence,
letting him display qualities as yet undisclosed in his nature. In the darkness of early morning as
he goes out to get a light from the watchman, Pip stumbles over a crouching figure that quickly
disappears. The mystery only increases the “distrust and fear” to which he is now more prone than
ever, as the presence of Magwitch in the light of day only intensifies Pip’s “insurmountable
aversion” to the man’s actions, “uncouth, noisy, and greedy” as they are.The criminal’s terrible
hands again reach out for Pip’s own as he contemplates “the gentleman what I made”; “I mustn’t
see my gentleman afooting it in the mire of the streets; there mustn’t be no mud on his boots. My
gentleman must have horses, Pip!” Pip is then to ride in carriages, or on horseback, doing no work
on his own behalf, not even walking as his meaningless life goes on unhappily. Odious as the
criminal is to him, he must be protected. He is to pass as an uncle from the country, be given the
name of Provis, and occupy lodgings in a nearby house. Having arranged this, Pip goes to Jaggers,
who confirms the dreadful truth, more ominous than ever as Pip tries in vain to disguise Magwitch
as a prosperous farmer. For the man’s criminality would not disappear; it seems to Pip “that he
dragged one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and that from head to foot there
was Convict in the very grain of the man.” Knowing that he should be grateful to Magwitch, Pip
can only say that his abhorrence grew to the point of starting up out of bed one night, intending to
leave him there and “enlist for India as a private soldier.” But the long nights must be endured
“with the wind and the rain always rushing by”, and Pip thinks of Frankenstein, pursued by his
impious creation, not more unhappy than himself, “pursued by the creature who had made me, and
recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion” the more Magwitch loved his “gentleman.” Pip’s
disgust seems to resemble his shame of Joe, both emotions a betrayal of some- one who had been
good to him.
The return of Herbert enables Pip to review the details of his actual position: in debt, without the
money he had been taking from an unknown source, and incapable of earning his own way, “bred
to no calling, and I am fit for nothing.” Herbert shares Pip’s fear that if he repudiates Magwitch,
the criminal will give himself up; Pip would then be his murderer. They resolve to get Magwitch
out of England, after which Pip may safely break with his benefactor. His fear of discovery is now
constant, while his perplexity and frustration at being so ignorant of Magwitch’s life are in part
relieved when one day the man consents to tell his own story. This however, adds another fear,
lest Compeyson, faithless betrayer of Miss Havisham and Magwitch’s companion in crime, should
discover Magwitch’s presence and inform on him.
The decision to leave England with Magwitch obliges Pip to visit Satis House to see both Estella
and Miss Havisham. Pip sees clearly that his revulsion against Magwitch is inspired by thoughts
of Estella, just as she had caused his betrayal of Joe. Again Pip does something to be ashamed of:
he pretends an obligation to visit Joe in order to explain his absence from London. It is a true
obligation but never met until it is useful to Pip. He can do what he should, but not for Joe’s sake
only for his own. The day itself corresponds to Pip’s mood, as it came “creeping on, halting and
whimpering and shiver- ing, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of mist, like a beggar.”
After a stubborn encounter with Drummle, Pip makes his way, “heavily out of sorts,” to the dark
house, which it had been better for him never to have seen.
Declaring that “I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be,” Pip gives his news without
revealing Magwitch’s identity. Miss Havisham repulses his objection that she had allowed him to
think her his benefactor, and only assumes that he has come to ask for some material favor. In his
growing maturity, Pip now asks that justice be done within Miss Havisham’s family, and
specifically that money be given to complete his own provision for Herbert. As he declares his
love for Estella, recalling the cruelty of the trial to which he had been subjected, Estella in turn
repeats her cold indifference, as if before his arrival, she had agreed with Miss Havisham what
both must say to Pip, as their joint role in his life is played out. The revelation that the object of
his love not only repudiates him but is to marry Drummle, “a stupid brute”, sends Pip into new
agonies. Weeping bitterly, he confesses his long enslavement to Estella, pouring out a rhapsody
that gushes out from within him in an “ecstasy of unhappiness.” Going, he notes only that Miss
Havisham’s hand covers her heart still, while her spectral figure seems “all resolved into a ghastly
stare of pity and remorse.” Unable to face the thought of seeing Drummle or speaking to anyone,
Pip walks back to London, arriving past midnight “muddy and weary” only to receive a note from
the night watchman with the warning, “Don’t go home.” In his misery and exhaustion after reading
Wemmick’s message, Pip goes to lodgings in Covent Garden where “in the gloom and death of
the night,” he stares at a pattern of Argus eyes cast by the night-light on the wall, while the silence
teems with accusing voices and the eyes on the wall repeat the warning, “Don’t go home.” Next
day,Wemmick reveals the reason for his message: Pip’s chambers are being watched, and he is
advised to take advantage of London’s vastness to lie close, not trying the escape of Magwitch too
soon. Time is gained and confusion created by finding a new hidden place for Magwitch near the
river, as Pip rests under the healing influence of Wemmick’s Castle. When the transfer is safely
made, and plans to escape by rowboat are agreed upon, Pip becomes aware of changing feelings
toward the man who had so horrified him on the staircase, this object in the human scene
continuing its signficance. He takes leave of Magwitch in the new hiding place, “on the landing
outside his door, holding a light over the stairrail to light us downstairs.” Looking back at him, Pip
thinks of that night when their positions had been reversed, “when I little supposed my heart could
ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him as it was now.” Pip cannot throw off a sense of
being watched, and his fear persists that Magwitch will be pursued and caught, the very river itself
seeming to flow toward the criminal, bearing his pursuers with it.
Although now desperate for money, Pip continues to refuse help from Magwitch, his unhappy life
dominated by a terror like that of his childhood: restless, suspended, inactive, “the round of things
went on” as Pip waits. His fears are magnified by a report from Wopsle, that Compeyson had sat
behind Pip in a theatre once. He feels a “special and peculiar terror” at the description of
Compeyson sitting behind him “like a ghost.” Now through Jaggers again and Wemmick, Pip
learns that he is to visit Satis House, that Jaggers’ servant Molly is Estella’s mother, whose story
is filled in to recover more details of the past. As the essential narrative rounds itself out, Pip
remains passive, unaffected in his emotional history, but completing for us the knowledge to make
comprehensible his own story. Pip returns to his home village “quietly by the unfrequented ways,”
wishing to remain unseen, having something to conceal. In the tolling bell’s sound, the atmosphere
is of death and the end of things as “the cathedral chimes had at once a sadder and a more remote
sound…” Once again Pip enters the dark passage, takes up the candle and goes up the staircase of
this house, himself a part of its “wrecked fortunes.” Miss Havisham has called him back to
complete his endowment of Herbert, and to offer help to Pip himself which he continues to
refuse.Thus Herbert alone finds his expectations by aid of his own effort. Pip is truly his
benefactor, enabling him to succeed by work, and at last his self-forgetfulness saves him for a
decent life in the world. Given to Pip by Magwitch, the original money had corrupted him; given
to Herbert, the money saves them both. Miss Havisham now asks forgiveness, which Pip readily
gives out of a sense of shame at his own “blind and thankless” life. Pip’s story takes on an
increasingly religious tone, along with his references and appeals to Heaven, different from the
“Heaven” awaiting Little Nell and Paul Dombey, belonging rather to the sequence of sin,
punishment, and the desire for pardon, the New Testament’s forgiveness. As Miss Havisham falls
to the ground before him, overcome by the enormity of her offenses, Pip shows the growth to
maturity and largeness of spirit toward which his suffering has moved him. Filled with com-
passion and understanding, he sees more deeply beneath the surface of life, sees that the
appearance of virtue may be only a monstrous vanity, a self-absorption concealing an egotistical
martyrdom. Miss Havisham’s offense lay in her theft of Estella’s heart, and Pip delivers the moral
lesson that the natural human feelings must have their way, and the consequences accepted. When
his belief that Estella was Molly’s child is confirmed, Pip takes his leave.
It is twilight as Pip lingers for what he is certain must be his last view of the place
inseparable from his illusions. He passes by the wilderness of casks, now decayed by the rain of
years, and walks about the ruined garden. At last, about to go, he looks back and fancies again that
he sees the body of Miss Havisham hanging from the beam, inspiring with immediate force a
return of his childhood terror. Returning to assure himself of her safety, he finds her suddenly burst
into flames which he manages to control by use of his own garments and the great cloth from the
bridal table, dragging down with it the “heap of rottenness” that had lain upon it these many years,
and releasing for terrified flight the crawling things in hiding there. Assured of her recovery, Pip
gives to the corpse-like figure a farewell kiss, far different from the obsequious token to her hands
on his first departure for London.
There remains only the final revelation to complete Pip’s knowledge of the past, that Magwitch is
Estella’s father. When confronting Jaggers with his new discoveries, obtained after an Oedipus
like determination to know the full truth, Pip displays his mature thought for others in protecting
Wemmick from Jaggers’ displeasure. He pretends to have learned from Miss Havisham what in
fact he had learned from Wemmick. Jaggers’ reply to his plea for candor confirms all, but ends
with an admonition to conceal secrets whose revelation can profit no one, least of all Estella.
Jaggers consoles Pip in that his experience has been representative, not only his own, in making
Estella the object of the “poor dreams” that have bereaved his life, such dreams as have come into
“the heads of more men than you think likely…”
When Pip to his great satisfaction completes his provision for Herbert, he must admit, “it was the
only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done, since I was first apprised of
my great expectations.” Meanwhile the plans for Magwitch go forward, Pip again showing himself
farsighted and resourceful, when he receives a mysterious letter bidding him to come alone to a
rendezvous at the marshes, offering information “regarding your Uncle Provis.” After another
journey by coach, Pip finds himself in his home village, where he avoids the Blue Board Inn,
inquires after Miss Havisham’s improvement, and dines with the help of his landlord who must
cut the meat. Pip receives another chastisement from his conscience as he learns of Pumblechook’s
claim to be his benefactor and his charge of base ingratitude. Ungrateful he has been indeed, but
to Biddy and Joe, who now start to his mind in all their faithful goodness by contrast to “the brazen
imposter Pumblechook.” Amid his dejection and remorse, Pip hears the clock strike as it has done
at decisive moments in his life, reminding him now of his rendezvous near the limekiln on the
marshes.
Again it is a dark night, but the moon rises as a melancholy wind plays over the dismal
scene, and the rain begins to come down fast to complete the elements of another climactic
Dickensian scene. Suddenly Pip is seized and fastened to a ladder against the wall; he is faint and
sick with pain in his injured arm, bewildered and terrified as he presently recognizes his assailant,
Orlick. Orlick’s malice inspires a new and terrible fear: if Pip should die without a trace, he might
be “misremembered after death…despised by unborn generations…” But his courage returns, and
Pip resolves not to ask for mercy. He is defiant and resigned, asks the pardon of Heaven, and
regrets that he cannot say farewell, or ask the compassion of those he loves “on my miserable
errors.” His resolution sustains him as he shouts and struggles until his rescuers come to free him
at last.
Returning to London, Pip has only one day to recover before the time set to free Magwitch.
His terror increases, lest he be disabled by illness on the morrow, a day “so anxiously looked
forward to, charged with such consequences, its results so impenetrably hidden though so near.”
After a night of agonies approaching delirium, the day comes up at last to illuminate the dark and
mysterious river, a veil seems to be drawn and Pip rises strong and well for the coming ordeal.
When the expedition sets forth, Pip is profoundly relieved as the river itself, in the sunlight of a
day in March, becomes a beckoning road, a benevolent accomplice to their purposes, its eternal
surface reassuring. All goes well, as Magwitch joins them without incident, but at night, when they
take refuge in a public house, Pip’s fear returns on hearing of a fouroared boat at large on the
water. Meanwhile the sinister wind mutters around the house, and its ominous forewarning is at
last fulfilled, when they are overtaken by the fouroared galley, Compeyson is drowned in a struggle
with Magwitch, whose arrest follows. Now Pip says farewell to his friends, takes his place at
Magwitch’s side to remain there while the criminal lives, determined to be “as true to you, as you
have been to me.” The experience helps Pip to recognize the meaning of his own behavior, his
repugnance melts away, and he sees in Magwitch “a much better man than I had been to Joe.”
It is possible not to take Pip’s growing sympathy at face value, and to see only self-interest in his
effort to get Magwitch out of the country. He has to be rid of a contamination, of the taint of crime
and prison derived from Magwitch, of which Pip has been deeply ashamed. Magwitch has to be
gotten out of the way, for the sake of Pip’s respectability. If this had been Pip’s only motive, it is
difficult not to see a growth in unselfish maturity in his renewed assurance of fidelity to Magwitch,
and in his merciful concealment of the fate of the criminal’s wealth. Pip knows that the money
must be forfeited to the crown, but lets his benefactor think to the end that it will continue to
support his life as a gentleman. We may admit that Pip’s resolution of fidelity is easier to sustain,
knowing that Magwitch must soon die, his condition deteriorating day by day once the
“prison door closed upon him.” But if we continue to believe that Pip’s conduct is what he says it
is, Magwitch himself is given every comfort within his “gentleman’s” power, chiefly in the form
of “holding the hand he stretched forth to me.” When Magwitch is sentenced to death, as the April
rain shows on the windows of the court, Pip faithfully holds his hand. He then struggles to the
limit of hope in order to obtain clemency for the condemned man, but all petitions are in vain.
Pip’s seemingly genuine desire not to evade the truth of his own behavior continues as well to the
final interview and the dying man’s gratitude that Pip has not deserted him. “I pressed his hand in
silence, for I could not for- get that I had once meant to desert him.”
The illness to be expected at this point in the action has been convincingly prepared. Pip has been
subjected to great physical strain from the fire, the menaces of Orlick, and the river fight, while
the end of long emotional stress makes inevitable some violent reaction. But on the return of sanity,
Pip finds himself in the gentle hands of Joe once more, and is stricken with remorse at the kindness
of his friend and his own ingratitude. He now gradually returns to the relationship from which his
illusions had withdrawn him, “and Joe stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.” They
go one Sunday by an open carriage into the country: the idealized Dickensian rural scene once
more with singing birds, wild-flowers and sunshine, accompanies Pip’s return to his love for Joe,
the open air and daylight signifying the reality to which Pip should have been faithful, in contrast
to the illusions bred in the dark unwholesomeness of Satis House. But when Pip tries to inform
Joe concerning Magwitch and the end of his expectations, Joe invokes his refrain “ever the best of
friends.” It reminds Pip of his own failure in friendship and renews his shame. Then as his strength
returns and he become less weak and dependent on Joe, Pip sees a change: as he returns to normal,
Joe is “a little less easy” with him. It must be his own fault, as the painful meeting in London long
ago had been his fault. His feelings of remorse are perplexed by another form of shame: he was
ashamed to tell Joe of the complete ruin of his expectations, a not unworthy reluctance, however,
lest Joe try to help pay his debts. But as Pip resolves to remove all reserve, Joe departs as no longer
needed, having paid the debts after all.
Pip’s resolution to follow Joe to the forge, there to make his peace, is joined to another that had
been forming in his thoughts, showing that his education was not in fact complete, that despite his
growth in compassion, courage and humility, there still lingered in him traces of the false, the
selfish and immature Pip. He resolves to offer himself to Biddy, asking forgiveness in his
repentance, hoping that he is now worthier of her than in the days when he could have married her
but chose not to do so. It is a blunder from which he will fortunately be rescued, for the strain
between him and Joe on his recovery showed not that he was again capable of betraying his friend,
but that he is simply not the same as in childhood. Morally he has returned, but, as a mature man
of the world, he can never bear the old relationship to Joe, and by the same token he cannot marry
Biddy.
It is a delicious June day amid the idealized Dickensian countryside, as Pip is about to be reunited
with Biddy and Joe. He allows himself a “tender emotion” and shows that he is yet self-absorbed,
using the terms of a self-conscious, returning prodigal who thinks of the improvement to come in
himself, “of the change for the better that would come over my character” under the guidance of
Biddy’s faith and wisdom. But Pip becomes an object of pity as he learns that he has returned on
the wedding day of his friends. It is a cruel punishment, but one that he has deserved with more
justification than any of the lessons that make up his apprenticeship to life. It may be suggested
that the proposal to Biddy is a natural result of having given up Estella, and that it reflects a new
sense of value. But if Pip’s new values were such as to demand union with Biddy, they would
forbid the last reunion with Estella, an unalterable fact through which Pip’s history must be
interpreted. Pip’s design on Biddy is a mistaken attempt to do what he would have done, had he
never left the forge, and never seen Estella or Satis House.Yet Pip has in fact had these experiences
whose effect upon him, he has to absorb and whose consequences he must accept. If he can return
spiritually to the moral absolutes of Biddy and Joe, he cannot return to them for the conduct of his
life in the world. Pip is not what he was in childhood. He has lived in London, has read and thought
and learned to know himself and the world, so that while he can throw off the corrupting effect of
his expectations, he cannot rub off his entire style. He must cease to condemn Joe’s manners, but
he has a right to improve his own.
When Joe loses Pip’s sister and Pip himself, he gains Biddy, whom Pip had lost in pursuit of his
illusions. This may be seen as proving that the real cost to Pip of following his dreams, is the loss
of Biddy. Yet again this must suppose that in the end he is the same as he was when first he
thought of Biddy. But she is the same, as everyone in the story remains the same except for Pip
and Estella and Miss Havisham, who must change as Estella does, and whose change of heart
foretells that of her creation. Since Pip is different, that he could in his maturity be happily married
to Biddy is as much an illusion as the former one, that he could be happy with the original Estella.
He can be happy only with an Estella who has changed as he has done. But Pip’s recovery is not
final until he loses this, the last of his “expectations,” related to the rest of his old false hopes. It is
another thing that he wants or “expects” to get for nothing, simply because it is he that desires it.
This is the last taint of condescension, of selfish lack of thought for others that marked his
immaturity and his “great expectations.” The episode reveals what ails Pip even now; it is precisely
because he does think that Biddy will marry him, that she is there as always to be his if he wishes
and that she would not think of refusing him that Pip is not yet totally free of his illusions.
Now he sees how contemptible this last expectation that Biddy would marry him was, and
so he does not resent her marriage to Joe. He sees that he has deserved this by continuing to
“expect” that Biddy would still be there for him because in his superiority he assumes she would
prefer him to anyone else. He does not cry out against his fate; he has learned the final lesson.
Pip had thought himself too good for Biddy when he could have married her, only to return to her
after his expectations fail. He loses his desire and hopes to rescue himself with what he now thinks
he should have wanted. But now after seeing the radiant happiness of Biddy and Joe, Pip performs
a kind of sacrament of penance, offering forms of prayer and a firm purpose of amendment. He
thanks his friends, he promises to work so as to repay the money that kept him out of prison, and
begs them never to tell their son-to-be, how thankless, ungenerous and unjust Pip he has been to
them, as he returns to telling adjectives for summary of his misdeeds.
A few sentences now suffice to review the sobriety of his ensuing life, his hard work, his modest
success in the world, ending with a last admission concerning himself: that he had underestimated
the qualities of Herbert, seeing as in the times of his uneasiness with Joe, that “the inaptitude had
never been in him at all, but had been in me.”
4 The Rain of Years
ELEVEN YEARS PASS, AND PIP IS NOW IN HIS THIRTY-FIFTH YEAR “when, upon an
evening in December, an hour or two after dark” he touches the latch of the old kitchen door. The
room discloses a new little Pip amid a scene of ideal domestic happiness so far denied to his mature
namesake. When Biddy raises the question of Pip’s old love for Estella, the transition is natural to
Pip’s own return to Satis House, although it does not ensure Estella’s being there. The final scene
takes place at an hour most favored by Dickens, the end of day. Pip finds the place of illusion now
in ruins, but a solitary figure inhabits the desolate garden-walk on which the rain of years has
fallen, keeping the scene as awaiting their return. The ensuing brief dialogue discloses that Pip
does well indeed he works, and therefore does well “expecting” nothing, and therefore no longer
afraid, ashamed, or repentant. For Estella, suffering teaches, and we come to the celebrated
“second” or “happy” ending, which on examination may seem to be neither second nor happy.
Much has been written about the endings of Dickens’s novels, how in the earlier works
expectations are fulfilled, while toward the end, Dickens shows them to be false and doomed by
life as it is, despite the ambiguity of his two possible endings for Great Expectations. If the earlier
works are supposed to be more optimistic, it is a despairing optimism wherein Dickens abandons
all pretense of mimesis and ends his work in lyrical idealization of a scheme of things unrelated to
what is or could be. Dickens seems to admit that to end these works in any way demanded by, or
consistent with, the view of life presented in the foregoing action would be wellnigh unbearable
to his audience. The whole point of the happy ending in Dickens is that it is the opposite of a
necessary and probable action it does not correspond to anything: neither to the possibilities of
life as it is, nor to what would logically follow from the preceding action. Hence we wonder which
is the more pessimistic; the happy or the so-called unhappy ending in Dickens although we say
that the nearer Dickens’s imagined world comes to a correspondence with the actual world he lived
in, the deeper the pessimism. Is the Dickens happy ending like that of ancient Greek comedy, not
intended to represent anything that is or can be in this harsh world but only something remote, a
logical dream that for the moment conceals the reality?
On this question, a little knowledge has indeed been dangerous. We learn from Forster that
Dickens had at first imagined a more austere, uncompromising conclusion which he altered in
response to Bulwer-Lytton’s fear of an unpopular reception. A number of possible attitudes emerge
from discussion: the present ending is either better or worse than the abandoned one; it makes no
real difference, either con- clusion being defensible given the events of the preceding story; it is
wrong to say that there were two endings, since only one was ever pub- lished, and if we assume
that we know nothing of a change, there is no problem. Again let us reason from within the world
of Dickens—the imagined world, which was for him the real one. Certainly Dickens himself does
not seem in the least uneasy at the end of a work of remarkable assurance in commanding his full
artistic resources. Not to accept his own decision is too great a repudiation of Dickens himself at
this point in his career, and we cannot, like the man dissatisfied with reports of Micawber’s success
in Australia, simply decide that Dickens had been misinformed. Since the so-called “first” ending
was never pub- lished, it has no more status than any other set of materials that had been considered
and then rejected for the author’s own good reasons. Pages are often considered, written, tried out
in the manuscript, and finally rejected, like so many of Dickens’s titles. We have before us the text
decided on by Dickens. It tells us nothing about endings, save that there could have been an ending
different from the one we have.This would have been true if the “first” ending had been decided
on, and most of the other novels which could have ended otherwise.
The inner logic of the story, the rain of years, demands that Miss Havisham and Magwitch—the
lunatic and the criminal—must lose. So Miss Havisham fails to dehumanize Estella, as Magwitch
fails to make Pip a gentleman. These are free at last to answer the call of the ruined garden—to
look for each other at the scene of their first encounter, kept waiting for them by the rain of years.
In the vast uncertainty of Great Expectations, Pip’s love for Estella remains clear and genuine,
quite unlike anything of its kind in the whole of Dickens. After the return of Magwitch and in Miss
Havisham’s presence, Pip tells Estella, “I love you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in
this house.” Despite its connection with Pip’s “wretched hankering after money and gentility” (Ch.
24) this is not an illusion certain to be lost, but the dominant presence and influ- ence in his life.
In the world as Dickens has imagined it, this cannot come to nothing, but must have its reward in
the scene of its first inception, the ruined garden.
Further, if we knew nothing of the rejected materials, the pres- ent solution would not seem so
“happy” in its ambiguity. Pip has no romantic victory, no triumph over enemies.There is no
promise that his future is to be ideal; nothing in fact is ensured or predicted except that the two
will never part again.There is no sentimentality here, as at the end of Martin Chuzzlewit withTom
Pinch playing the organ and the writ- ing becoming a disguise for Dickens’s own dissatisfaction
with his material.We are not told that Pip and Estella will live happily ever after and indeed the
conclusion is not final in that it does not end or solve the questions raised in Pip’s story, its moral
problem being only partly answered. We are inclined to believe Pip’s assertions about himself
since, like Othello, he says that he would nothing extenuate. Nonetheless, doubts remain, as we
wonder if Pip, like a speaker in Augustan satire, reveals his true nature unconsciously, while trying
to conceal it. He rejects the criminal’s money, not because it is unearned by himself, but because
it is contaminated at the source, and his ensuing poverty does not entirely solve the moral problem
raised by his story. Does Pip know himself completely? He thinks that he has matured and

has overcome the falsity of his values, but the ending leaves much yet to be seen. His shame is
made clear, but not whether he is incapable of it once more. In trying to show how he has changed
he may fail to see that there still lingers a trace of what he has been so ashamed of.
But so his creator has left him, and all things considered, it would seem rightly so. An ending is
the “right” one if it is in harmo- ny with the action of which it is in fact the end, and if it is
compatible with the view of life offered in a writer’s whole creation. In Dickens this view may
seem morally commonplace, but the end of Great Expectations does not violate it: a man cannot
realize his highest qualities if he is guilty of cowardice, selfish ambition, envy and indolence, but
his life will achieve meaning when he comes to terms with the demands of primary human
relationships.
Pip’s problem in three stages is that of one whose life is dis- rupted by some element in the past,
demanding that a harmony be achieved between what has happened in the past, his life in the pres-
ent and what is to come in the future. If he is reunited with Estella, this harmony will have been
achieved. But Estella too must have changed as much as Pip thinks he has himself changed. She
must have overcome Miss Havisham’s evil influence, and we are prepared for this by Miss
Havisham’s own repentance, thus releasing Estella to become a normal person. Estella was
moreover not naturally depraved but only artificially diverted from spontaneous feeling, just as
Pip’s own natural feelings had not been disrupted until his “expec- tations” arose to pervert them.
Pip changes in every way save in his love for Estella. Although it affected his “expectations” it
was not cor- rupted by them as everything else about him was. Its genuineness shows the
redeemable element in his nature, and is another confir- mation of the ending.
The comparison of his life to a journey demands as well as a setting forth a return. Now Pip has
to seek what he had aban- doned and the return must be final, the journey completed by reversal.
For Pip we are sure that it is final, but it could not have been so had Estella remained as she was.
She too must change to

justify the steadfastness of Pip’s love for her. Further, if it is inevitable that Pip return to the forge
and its moral absolutes for his right values, so must he return to the ruined garden where he must
now find a value and a presence unlike what had first cor- rupted him there. The forge and all it
stands for must remain as it was, and so the ruined garden must contain the opposite of its first
corruption. A still remote and heartless Estella might test the final- ity of Pip’s reform, but since
that is final, it needs not to be tested, but rewarded as it is by a purified Estella. She is purified and
free once Miss Havisham is gone, the evil influence that had kept her from loving Pip; so also is
Pip free, now that the evil influence of Magwitch is gone. Alone in the world now, neither has
anyone left but the other, and so must seek the last reunion.
Here again, the rain of years influences the return of both Pip and Estella to the ruined garden. It
is through the recurring, inevitable movement of life that Pip and Estella must return to the ruined
gar- den in search of each other.They were destined for each other, not by Miss Havisham, but by
the rain of years. Their meeting is no accident if they come back to this scene seeking, or hoping
to see, each other. As Pip’s love for Estella is the one thing in his life that has never changed, so
he loves her still and must come seeking her. So too, Estella’s life has been an unhappy failure as
she cannot live without Pip and is compelled by the rain of years to return to the ruined garden.
Indeed, it is Estella who comes first, and she now reveals, “I have very often hoped and intended
to come back, but have been prevented by many circumstances. Poor, dear old place.” Having then
been preced- ed by Estella, Pip finds the gate ajar, enters, and becomes aware of her presence,
dimly within.
The garden and its meaning have been kept before the reader throughout the rain of years, in
Chapters 29, 38, 48 and 49. In Chapter 29, Miss Havisham has asked Pip to come to Satis House.
Estella is there—more remote, more beautiful and inaccessible than ever.They go out to the ruined
garden and walk about, as Estella, still disdainful, says “I have not bestowed my tenderness
anywhere.” Her

In the Garden
An original pen-and-ink drawing by F.A. Fraser for the Household Edition of Great Expectations
published by Chapman and Hall in 1876. Courtesy Rare Books Division,The NewYork Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.

beauty and manner torment Pip, even as he thinks that Miss Havisham has chosen them for one
another. Has she in fact destined them for one another without intending, choosing to do so?
Anticipating the climax of Chapter 39, “the events that had begun to be prepared for, before I knew
that the world held Estella,” Pip says that before he tells of “the turning point of my life” in the
return of Magwitch, he “must give one chapter to Estella.” Miss Havisham has asked Pip to escort
Estella back to Satis House, where Pip is still sure Estella is meant for him, once she has
sufficiently enacted Miss Havisham’s revenge on other men. The two women quarrel sharply as
Miss Havisham accuses Estella of ingratitude, preparing for the last scene again. Since Estella had
been forced into her cruel hardness to Pip, when she is free of Miss Havisham she can respond to
her natural feeling toward Pip’s love, for he has always loved her.
After the quarrel scene, Pip walks for an hour or more, about the courtyard, and about the brewery,
and about the ruined garden; the rain of years is waiting for his return. The marriage that we now
assume to follow, would have been in the order of nature and normal life, if Miss Havisham had
not intervened. Now it can and should take place as something temporarily suspended, allowed to
take its natural course when artificial barriers are removed. Certainly it is the only marriage that is
conceivable for Pip. Only two women are ever mentioned, and since Biddy has quite properly
removed herself, it is either Estella or no one. Indeed, after Satis House, Biddy is out of the
question, as Pip in his then insensitive rudeness informs her. He could have married Biddy only if
he had gone on as Joe’s apprentice and had never known any other possibility. After Satis House
only Estella will do, at first for wrong reasons, at last for right and proper ones: he loves her still
after his expectations are lost, his love for her being, unlike them, not an illusion. Although he has
repented and accepted again the moral rightness of his old home, he cannot go back to being the
same as when a child. Therefore his impulse to marry Biddy is false on every count, the last illusion
still to be lost. After this, if he is to marry anyone it must be the only person he can possibly marry
with any chance of success. The ending gives him this chance, and rightly so. There are no more
hints of self-accusation; nothing is left of fear, shame and remorse and no mention is made of
wishing that he had never left the forge, as before in moments of disillusion. His self-respect is
genuine, it has been hard won, and Pip has earned the right to it. Regardless of unresolved chords
that remain, Pip is a different person, with a chance to love and be loved, and he ends by having
all that he ever should have desired. Pip and Estella are given a second chance, and Dickens must
have considered that they had earned it, since he leaves them free to make what they can of it.They
have earned the right by experience and suffering to a decent try for a happy life together, although
in Estella’s case the process is only reported, not shown as taking place in detail, only implied as
inevitable given her previous errors. As they walk away into a new life together, it is not to be
happy like the happiness of Oliver Twist living in a childhood governed from without, perhaps the
only way that anyone can live “happily ever after.” Dickens makes no such prediction but only
sets them on their way, mature enough to appreciate this second chance.
This departure is made to seem right, to follow from the pre- ceding action by the simple gesture
of Pip’s taking Estella’s hand as they go out together. The mists too are benevolent, justifying
hope, and the stars that once had called to mind the cruelty of illusion, the cold remoteness of
Estella herself, now shine brightly. It may be argued that Pip’s repentance is extreme and that he
has not been entirely just to himself; that he is a better and stronger man than he represents himself
to be. He should be able to answer the question that comes to everyone after his youth is gone and
he looks back from the assurance of knowledge gained by experience: what would he then have
done, if he had known what he now knows? It has been natural for him in moments of defeat and
shame, to wish that he had never left the forge, to believe that his old way of life was best and that
he had been wrong to give it up for his “expectations.” But such reflections have not troubled him
after the speech he had composed for delivery to Biddy, wherein she was to decide whether Pip
should work at the forge with Joe. In the end Pip cannot answer that he would have chosen to omit
all of the larger experience into which his expectations had led him. The sober, decent human
being reunited with Estella is far beyond the blacksmith’s apprentice, married to Biddy and never
thinking beyond his origins.
We must believe that Pip should be what he has become, that his present human maturity
is worth what it has cost him, and that if he had not done so much to be ashamed of, he would not
have been so redeemed. Pip escapes the tragedy of the wish fulfilled since it was good that in a
measure he have his desires, so that he can know the degree of their falsity, and find himself a
better man, with a better chance for happiness in the uncertain future.