Great Expectations Study Guide

Characters

• PipArriving on Joe and Biddy's wedding day, he asks their forgiveness, then goes abroad to work for Clarriker's, pays his debts and in time becomes a partner in the firm.First appears: Chapter 1
• Abel MagwitchSentenced to death, he dies in the prison infirmary holding Pip's hand, after Pip tells him that his lost child is alive, a beautiful lady, and loved by Pip.First appears: Chapter 1
• Mrs Joe GargeryShe never recovered from the attack; Biddy says that at the end she asked for Joe, had Biddy put her arms round his neck, and said "Pardon" and "Pip".First appears: Chapter 1
• Joe GargeryHe has married Biddy, and forgives Pip everything, doubting there was anything to forgive.First appears: Chapter 1
• CompeysonHe sat cloaked in the pursuing galley to identify Magwitch. When Magwitch pulled off his cloak the two went overboard together, and Compeyson drowned.First appears: Chapter 3
• Mr WaldengarverNow playing small parts, he tells Pip he saw one of the two convicts from the old marsh chase sitting just behind him at the theatre.First appears: Chapter 4
• Mr and Mrs HubbleThe village wheelwright and his wife, guests at Christmas dinner.First appears: Chapter 4
• Uncle PumblechookRobbed and tied to his bedpost by Orlick and others, he still calls himself the founder of Pip's fortunes, and lectures the fallen Pip in public on his ingratitude.First appears: Chapter 4
• BiddyNow the village schoolmistress, she marries Joe on the day Pip comes home, and freely forgives Pip.First appears: Chapter 7
• Miss HavishamShe has died. She left most of her property to Estella, and four thousand pounds to Matthew Pocket because of what Pip told her of him.First appears: Chapter 7
• Mrs Bentley DrummleFreed by her cruel husband's death and changed by suffering, she meets Pip in the ruins of Satis House, and they agree that they are friends.First appears: Chapter 8
• SThe strangerNow a convict in irons on the coach, being taken down to the prison ships, he does not know Pip. Pip overhears that the two one-pound notes came from Pip's convict, for "that boy that had fed him".First appears: Chapter 10
• CCamillaMiss Havisham's will leaves her five pounds, for rushlights to cheer her when she wakes in the night.First appears: Chapter 11
• CRCousin RaymondCamilla's husband, "Mr Camilla", another of the relations who wait on Miss Havisham on her birthday.First appears: Chapter 11
• SPSarah PocketMiss Havisham's will leaves her twenty-five pounds a year, to buy pills.First appears: Chapter 11
• JMr JaggersAdmitting nothing, he "puts a case" of a lawyer who saved a murder suspect's little girl by giving her to a rich lady to bring up, and took the mother into his service. Until Pip tells him, he did not know who the father was.First appears: Chapter 11
• HPHerbert PocketMarried to Clara, he works with Pip abroad, and learns at last from Clarriker that Pip secretly paid for his partnership.First appears: Chapter 11
• MPMr Matthew PocketMiss Havisham has left him four thousand pounds, because of what Pip told her of him.First appears: Chapter 11
• OOrlickHe is in the county jail, after he and others broke into Pumblechook's house, robbed him and tied him to his bedpost.First appears: Chapter 15
• TMr TrabbHis firm, Trabb & Co., runs Mrs Joe's showy funeral.First appears: Chapter 19
• TBTrabb's boyTrue to his habit of turning up where he has no business, he guides Herbert and Startop to the sluice-house in time to save Pip's life.First appears: Chapter 19
• JWJohn WemmickHe marries Miss Skiffins in a wedding he pretends is unplanned, with the Aged giving her away, and means to keep it from Mr Jaggers.First appears: Chapter 20
• AHArthur HavishamHerbert's note reveals that Arthur, Compeyson's partner in Provis's story, was Miss Havisham's half-brother. Provis saw him die poor and terrified, raving that a mad woman in white was coming to put a shroud on him.First appears: Chapter 22
• BPBelinda PocketHer name is Belinda. A knight's daughter, brought up to marry a title and to be perfectly useless, she leaves her house and children to the servants.First appears: Chapter 22
• BDBentley DrummleHe treated Estella with great cruelty, and has died in an accident caused by his ill-treatment of a horse.First appears: Chapter 23
• SStartopA skilled oarsman, he readily agrees to help row Provis away, and goes with Herbert to rescue Pip from the sluice-house.First appears: Chapter 23
• MMollyMr Jaggers's imaginary case all but confirms it: he took her child to save it, and has kept her wild, violent nature down ever since she came to him for shelter.First appears: Chapter 24
• AThe AgedHe gives the bride away at Wemmick's wedding, after missing his cue.First appears: Chapter 25
• AThe AvengerPip's boy servant, really called Pepper, taken from his washerwoman's family and dressed in a blue coat, canary waistcoat and top boots, with little to do and a great deal to eat.First appears: Chapter 27
• CBClara BarleyNow Herbert's wife, with whom Pip lives happily abroad.First appears: Chapter 30
• OBOld Bill BarleyHis growls have fallen silent: he is at peace, and Herbert has married Clara.First appears: Chapter 30
• WMrs WemmickNow Wemmick's wife, after a quiet morning wedding that Wemmick pretends is unplanned.First appears: Chapter 37
• CClarrikerOnly when Pip becomes third in the firm does Clarriker tell Herbert that Pip secretly paid for his partnership.First appears: Chapter 37
• YPYoung PipJoe and Biddy's little son, named after Pip, who sits on Pip's old stool by the fire and is thought to look like him.First appears: Chapter 59

Chapter summaries

1. Chapter 1

   Pip, a small orphan, is alone in the bleak marsh churchyard where his parents and five little brothers are buried when a fearful man with an iron on his leg starts up from among the graves and seizes him. The man, soaked, muddy and hungry, turns him upside down, eats the bread from his pocket and learns that Pip lives with his sister, the wife of Joe Gargery the blacksmith. Tilting Pip backwards on a tombstone, he orders him to bring a file and "wittles" to the old battery early next morning and to tell no one, or a young man hiding with him will find Pip and tear him open. Pip promises and runs for home, looking back to see the man limping towards the gibbet by the river. Pip is a lonely, frightened child in a harsh landscape, and the older narrator looks back on him with humour as well as pity.

2. Chapter 2

   Pip lives with his sister, Mrs Joe, a harsh woman more than twenty years older than him, who hits both Pip and her husband and uses a cane called Tickler on Pip. Joe, a mild, good-natured blacksmith, treats Pip as a fellow-sufferer and shields him when he can. At tea Pip hides his bread and butter down his trouser leg for the man on the marshes, and Joe's alarm that he has bolted it whole gets them both dosed with tar-water. That evening, Christmas Eve, guns from the hulks signal that another convict has escaped, and Mrs Joe snaps that people are sent to the prison ships for murder and robbery and "always begin by asking questions". At first light Pip steals food, brandy and a pork pie from the pantry and a file from Joe's forge. Terrified of the man and the young man, and with no hope of help from his sister, Pip keeps his secret, and the older narrator reflects on "what secrecy there is in the young under terror".

3. Chapter 3

   Pip hurries across the misty marshes with the stolen food, and his guilty conscience makes the gates, dikes and cattle seem to accuse him. Near the battery he comes upon another man in grey with an iron on his leg, who swears at him, aims a blow and runs off into the mist; Pip decides this must be the young man. His own convict is waiting, shaking with cold, and he wolfs the food like a dog, often stopping to listen for pursuers. Pip pities him and says he is glad he enjoys it, and the convict thanks him. When Pip mentions the other man and his bruised face, the convict turns fierce, vows to hunt him down and starts filing at his leg-iron like a madman. Pip slips away, and when he stops in the mist to listen, the file is still going. Pip's fear is now mixed with pity, for the convict, who calls himself a "wretched warmint", seems as hunted as he is frightening.

4. Chapter 4

   Pip gets home to find that the robbery has not yet been discovered, and Mrs Joe is busy preparing for Christmas dinner. The guests are Mr Wopsle, the church clerk, Mr and Mrs Hubble, and Uncle Pumblechook, Joe's uncle and a well-to-do cornchandler in the nearest town. Over dinner they take turns to lecture Pip on gratitude and the wickedness of the young, while Joe quietly gives him more gravy. When Mrs Joe offers Pumblechook some brandy, he drinks it off and rushes outside choking, because Pip had filled the bottle up from the tar-water jug. Pip is saved for a while when Pumblechook waves the matter away and asks for hot gin and water, but then Mrs Joe goes to fetch the pork pie that Pumblechook had given her. Pip runs for the door in terror, straight into a party of soldiers, one of whom holds out a pair of handcuffs to him. The grown-ups' lectures are comic, but they show a boy treated at home as "a young offender", and his guilty secret makes every minute of the dinner an agony.

5. Chapter 5

   The soldiers have not come for Pip: their sergeant needs Joe to mend some handcuffs before they close in at dusk on two escaped convicts. While Joe works at the forge the company drink Pumblechook's wine and enjoy the excitement, but Pip pities the "poor wretches" being hunted. Joe, Mr Wopsle and Pip go with the soldiers, and on the way Pip whispers that he hopes they will not find the men, while Joe says he would give a shilling if they had got away. Out on the marshes they find the two convicts fighting in a ditch, and Pip's convict insists that he has dragged the other man back rather than let him go free. When the convict sees him, Pip shakes his head to show that he did not bring the soldiers, but he cannot tell whether the man understands. In the guard hut the convict says that he stole food, drink and a pie from the blacksmith's, and Joe, full of pity, tells him he is welcome to it. Pip watches him rowed out to the black prison ship, which looks "like a wicked Noah's ark".

6. Chapter 6

   Although the convict's confession has cleared him, Pip does not tell Joe the truth about the theft. He feels no guilt towards Mrs Joe, but he loves Joe and is afraid that Joe would think him worse than he is, and that he would lose his friend. Joe carries the sleepy Pip home on his back, while a tired and bad-tempered Mr Wopsle keeps sitting down in the damp. In the kitchen, as Joe tells the company about the convict's confession, Pumblechook decides that the man climbed on to the roofs and let himself down the kitchen chimney on a rope made of his bedding, and because he is so sure of himself everyone agrees. Mrs Joe then hauls Pip up to bed. Looking back, the older narrator judges himself harshly: he was too cowardly to tell the truth, just as he had been too cowardly to refuse to steal.

7. Chapter 7

   Pip struggles to learn to read and write at an evening school kept by Mr Wopsle's great-aunt, who sleeps through the lessons, and he learns more from Biddy, her granddaughter, an orphan who was also brought up by hand. One winter night, about a year after the hunt on the marshes, Pip writes Joe a letter on his slate, and Joe, who can barely read, calls him a scholar. Joe explains that he never went to school because his father drank and beat both him and his mother. He tells Pip that when he courted Mrs Joe he told her to bring the poor little child with her, because there was room for him at the forge, and Pip bursts into tears and hugs him. Joe puts up with his wife's temper because he saw his own mother drudge and slave without peace, and he would rather be put out himself than fail to do right by a woman. From that night Pip looks up to Joe in his heart. Then Mrs Joe comes home from market with Uncle Pumblechook and the news that Miss Havisham, a rich, grim lady who lives shut away in the town, wants Pip to go and play at her house, and he is scrubbed and sent off with Pumblechook that night.

8. Chapter 8

   Pip spends the night at Pumblechook's seed shop in the town, where at breakfast Pumblechook fires sums at him while eating well himself. At Miss Havisham's dismal, barred house, a proud and pretty girl leads him by candlelight to a room where Miss Havisham sits in a yellowed bridal dress with one shoe on, her watch and a clock stopped at twenty minutes to nine. She tells him her heart is broken and makes him play cards with the girl, Estella, who calls him a common labouring boy and mocks his coarse hands, his thick boots and his calling the knaves Jacks. Waiting in the courtyard, Pip looks at his hands and boots with new shame and wishes Joe had been brought up more genteelly. When Estella gives him food as if he were a dog in disgrace, he hides behind a gate in the brewery lane and cries, and later, in the empty brewery, he has a terrifying vision of Miss Havisham hanging from a beam. He walks the four miles home convinced that he is common and ignorant and "in a low-lived bad way". Estella's contempt is catching: Pip had never been ashamed of his hands before, but now he sees himself through her eyes.

9. Chapter 9

   Pip cannot bear to describe Miss Havisham and Estella to his sister and Pumblechook, so, bullied and shoved against the wall, he makes up a story of velvet coaches, gold plates and fighting dogs. The lies catch out Pumblechook, who nods along as if he knows Miss Havisham but has to admit he has never seen her. Pip feels no guilt towards the two of them, only towards Joe, and confesses to him that night in the forge. Joe's answer is simple: lies are lies, and going crooked is no way to become "oncommon". Yet in bed Pip thinks how common Estella would find Joe, with his thick boots and coarse hands. The older narrator ends by calling this a memorable day that made great changes in him.

10. Chapter 10

    Pip's new wish to be "uncommon" starts with learning, and he asks Biddy to share all she knows, though the village evening school is comic chaos. At the Three Jolly Bargemen a secret-looking stranger, with one eye half shut as if taking aim, draws Joe into talk of the lonely church on the marshes, runaway convicts and who Pip is. Then, so that only Pip can see, he stirs his rum with a file, and Pip knows it for Joe's file and knows that this man knows his convict. The stranger gives Pip a shilling, which turns out at home to be wrapped in two one-pound notes; Joe runs back to return them, but the man has gone. Mrs Joe hides the notes in a teapot in the parlour, where they stay, a nightmare to Pip. His old secret has come back, now mixed with his new shame at being "on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts".

11. Chapter 11

    Satis House shows Pip more of its strangeness. Miss Havisham's relations, among them Camilla, her husband Raymond and Sarah Pocket, wait on her, flatter her and score points off one another, and Pip sees at once that they are "toadies and humbugs". In a room across the landing a wedding feast is still laid out under cobwebs, with spiders running in and out of the rotting bride-cake, and Miss Havisham says she will be laid on that table when she dies. It is her birthday, the day the cake was brought, and no one is allowed to mention it. Estella is crueller than before, slapping Pip and calling him a "little coarse monster". After Pip beats a pale young gentleman who insists on fighting him by the rules, Estella seems oddly delighted and lets him kiss her cheek, but Pip feels the kiss is handed to a common boy like a coin.

12. Chapter 12

    Pip's guilty imagination runs wild after the fight, picturing arrest and revenge, but at Satis House nothing is said and the pale young gentleman has vanished. For at least eight or ten months Pip goes every other day to push Miss Havisham round in a garden-chair, and they sing Joe's forge song, Old Clem. She asks what he is going to be, but seems to prefer him ignorant and offers no help. She watches Estella's changing moods with "miserly relish" and seems to whisper to her to break hearts without mercy. At home Pumblechook and Mrs Joe endlessly discuss what Miss Havisham will do for Pip, while Pip confides only in Biddy. When Miss Havisham suddenly tells him to bring Joe and his indentures, Mrs Joe is furious at being left out and scrubs the house in a rage.

13. Chapter 13

    Joe dresses up uncomfortably for Pip's sake, and at Satis House he is so overawed that he answers every question by talking to Pip. Pip is ashamed of him in front of Estella, yet Joe's dignity shows when he says he never expected a premium, and Miss Havisham seems to understand him better than Pip had thought possible. She gives twenty-five guineas and makes clear it is all Pip will get. Joe then calms his wife by inventing compliments from Miss Havisham and saying the money was meant for Mrs Joe. Pumblechook pretends he knew all along, pushes Pip to the Town Hall to be bound as if he were a criminal, and sits at the head of a celebration dinner paid for out of the guineas. Pip ends the day wretched, certain he will never like the trade he once liked.

14. Chapter 14

    The older Pip looks back on the misery of his apprenticeship. Home was never very pleasant because of his sister's temper, but Joe had made him believe in it; within a single year everything there looks coarse and common. The forge, once "the glowing road to manhood and independence", now offers nothing but dull endurance. Pip gives all the credit for his steady work to Joe, who is faithful and industrious where Pip is restless and discontented. His worst fear is that Estella will see him black-faced at the forge and despise him, and he keeps imagining her face at the window. The whole chapter is a confession, with the narrator judging his younger self as ungrateful.

15. Chapter 15

    Pip's learning goes on, and he tries to pass it on to Joe, though he admits the motive was to make Joe less common and less open to Estella's scorn. Orlick, Joe's slouching journeyman, dislikes Pip and demands a half-holiday too; when Mrs Joe abuses him he insults her back, and Joe knocks him down, after which the two men share a pot of beer. At Satis House, Sarah Pocket lets Pip in, and Miss Havisham, seeing him look round for Estella, taunts him that she is abroad and asks if he feels he has lost her. In town Mr Wopsle insists on taking Pip to Pumblechook's to hear the tragedy of George Barnwell, and both men treat Pip as the wicked apprentice of the play. On the foggy walk home Orlick joins them, the guns sound for escaped convicts, and Pip finds that his sister has been struck down from behind in her own kitchen.

16. Chapter 16

    The facts of the attack are set out like evidence: nothing was taken, the candle was blown out, and a leg-iron filed through some time ago lay beside Mrs Joe. Pip believes it is the iron his convict filed off on the marshes, and wonders whether Orlick or the stranger with the file used it, though he can find little against either. He feels he provided the weapon, yet the secret has grown so much a part of him that he still cannot tell Joe, afraid that Joe would either turn from him or not believe him. The Bow Street men from London arrest the wrong people and catch no one. Mrs Joe is left with poor sight, hearing, memory and speech, but her temper becomes patient, and after Mr Wopsle's great-aunt dies, Biddy moves in to look after her. When Biddy realises that Mrs Joe's T-shaped sign stands for Orlick's hammer, and so for Orlick, Mrs Joe does not accuse him but tries eagerly to please him, which puzzles Pip.

17. Chapter 17

    Life settles into routine, broken only by a yearly birthday visit to Miss Havisham, who gives Pip a guinea each time. Pip notices how Biddy has changed: neat, sweet-tempered and so quick that she learns everything he learns. On a summer walk by the river he confides that he wants to be a gentleman, and admits it is because the beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's called him common. Biddy asks whether he wants to spite Estella or win her, and suggests that spite would be better shown by ignoring her, and that she is not worth winning. Pip knows Biddy would never hurt him as Estella does and wishes he could fall in love with her, but Biddy firmly says he never will. Orlick, who Biddy says "dances at" her, trails them home, and Pip is left torn between Biddy and the forge on one side and, on the other, Estella and a stray hope that Miss Havisham may make his fortune.

18. Chapter 18

    Mr Jaggers makes a startling entrance, bullying Mr Wopsle over a newspaper murder report and reminding the whole pub that the law supposes every man innocent until he is proved guilty. At Joe's house he tells Pip he will come into a handsome property and be brought up as a gentleman, on two conditions: he must always keep the name Pip, and he must never ask who his benefactor is. Pip at once decides that Miss Havisham is making his fortune. Joe wants nothing for releasing him, and when Jaggers presses money on him as compensation, Joe squares up to fight him. The older narrator looks back on "dear good faithful tender Joe" with love and regret, while the young Pip already resents the sadness in Joe and Biddy's congratulations and wants his new clothes kept out of sight of the village. By bedtime the first night of his bright fortunes has become the loneliest of his life.

19. Chapter 19

    With his indentures burnt, Pip begins to look down on the village, planning a dinner for everyone with "a gallon of condescension" and comforting himself that the convict he once helped is far away, perhaps dead. He hints to Joe, and then tells Biddy, that Joe's learning and manners need improving; when Biddy says Joe may be too proud to be taken out of a place he fills well, Pip accuses her of envy. In town Mr Trabb bows him into the shop the moment he hears of the fortune, and Pip's first taste of "the stupendous power of money" is seeing the cheeky Trabb's boy flattened. Pumblechook shakes his hand again and again, takes the credit for his luck and suggests he put money into the business. At Satis House Miss Havisham, whom Pip sees as his fairy godmother, takes pleasure in Sarah Pocket's jealousy, and Pip kneels to kiss her hand. He admits to himself that his wish to walk to the coach alone may come from the contrast between himself and Joe, and only after crying by the finger-post does he feel "more aware of my own ingratitude". Pip's pride and his conscience pull against each other all through his last week at home.

20. Chapter 20

    London greets Pip with dirt and death. Mr Jaggers's office has a chair like a coffin and two casts of swollen faces on the shelf, Smithfield is "asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam", and a drunken guide at Newgate shows him where the gallows is kept and the door where four prisoners are to be hanged in two days' time. The people waiting for Jaggers fear and worship him, and he treats them all with contempt, wanting to know no more than he must, checking that they have paid Wemmick and threatening to drop their cases if they bother him. When Mike, one of his clients, brings a witness ready to swear to "anythink", Jaggers explodes at him for saying so, then judges the man by one look through the window and sends him away. His arrangements for Pip are generous but cold, and come with the warning that Pip will "go wrong somehow". Pip is impressed by his guardian's fame, but the chapter shows how close the law works to lies and crime.

21. Chapter 21

    Wemmick is hard to read: his mouth looks as if it is smiling when it is not, and he wears mourning rings, a brooch and a watch-chain hung with seals, as if laden with remembrances of departed friends. His view of London is flat and practical: people will cheat, rob and murder you if there is anything to be got by it. Barnard's Inn is a disappointment, a dismal square that looks to him like a burying-ground, and its rotten staircase window crashes down like a guillotine. Young Mr Pocket, by contrast, is warm, apologetic and open about being poor: he earns his own bread and would not take money from his father even if there were any. The comic recognition at the end, "the prowling boy" and "the pale young gentleman", ties Pip's new life in London straight back to Satis House.

22. Chapter 22

    Herbert is frank and cheerful, with what Pip calls "a natural incapacity to do anything secret and mean", and he corrects Pip's table manners so lightly that they both laugh. His story of Miss Havisham explains Satis House: a proud brewer's daughter, she gave her heart and great sums of money to a showy man who broke off the marriage by letter on the wedding day. Herbert's father, the only relation who warned her, believes that "no varnish can hide the grain of the wood", an idea that bears directly on Pip's attempt to become a gentleman. Herbert also says that Estella has been brought up to "wreak revenge on all the male sex", and Pip feels sure that Herbert, like him, takes Miss Havisham to be his benefactor. Herbert's grand plans to insure ships and trade in silks and spices, while he works unpaid in a countinghouse, gently mirror Pip's own expectations. At Hammersmith Mrs Pocket reads in the garden while her children tumble over her footstool, a first sign that nobody is really running the house.

23. Chapter 23

    The Pocket household is comedy with a point. Mrs Pocket, a knight's daughter raised to marry a title, has grown up "highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless", and cares more about her grandpapa's position than her children's safety. When little Jane takes the nutcrackers away from the baby, her mother scolds her for interfering, and Mr Pocket can only cry out and try to lift himself up by his own hair. Downstairs the servants rule, and the cook is found drunk with the household's butter set aside to sell. Mrs Pocket and Drummle, "next heir but one to a baronetcy", talk about titles while the house falls apart around them. Pip, meanwhile, is touchy about his past: when his rowing teacher says he has the arm of a blacksmith, he nearly gives up the lessons.

24. Chapter 24

    Pip learns that he is not being trained for any profession, only to "hold my own" among young men with money, and Mr Pocket proves an honest and hard-working tutor. Mr Jaggers handles even a small request by making Pip name the sum himself, pushing him from fifty pounds to five to "four times five". Wemmick says this manner is "not personal; it's professional", and calls his master as deep as Australia. In the office Wemmick is chatty but hard: the rings and brooch he wears were gifts from clients who were hanged, and his motto is "Get hold of portable property." In the police court Jaggers frightens witnesses, thieves and even the magistrate, and Pip cannot make out which side he is on. The law, as Pip sees it here, runs on fear and power rather than fairness.

25. Chapter 25

    Pip's new world has snobs of its own: Drummle is idle, proud, mean, reserved and suspicious, and the Camillas, who hate Pip for his fortune, fawn on him to his face. Pip admits he "soon contracted expensive habits", though he sticks to his books. The heart of the chapter is Wemmick's double life. At Walworth he is proud of his little castle, with its drawbridge, flag, gun and fountain, and tender towards his deaf father, the Aged, whom he loves to please. He keeps the two worlds strictly apart: Mr Jaggers has never seen the house or heard of the Aged, because "the office is one thing, and private life is another". On the walk back to Little Britain, Pip watches him grow dry and hard again until his mouth is a post office once more, a clear picture of how a public face can hide a private warmth.

26. Chapter 26

    Jaggers washes his hands after every client, as if washing the client off, and even at home he keeps everything under his own hand. At dinner he quietly draws out the worst in each guest: Pip finds himself bragging about his prospects and patronising Herbert, and Drummle grows openly insulting. Jaggers makes his housekeeper, Molly, show her wrists, one of them deeply scarred, and she obeys though she begs him not to, which shows the hold he has over the people around him. He takes an odd liking to Drummle, "the Spider", yet tells Pip to keep clear of him. When Drummle raises a glass to throw at Startop, Jaggers catches it and ends the party. The last picture of him "washing his hands of us" sums up how he keeps himself apart from everyone he deals with.

27. Chapter 27

    Pip admits he would have paid money to keep Joe away, and the older narrator sees that his shame comes from fearing what Drummle, a man he despises, would think. He has also taken on a boy servant, Pepper, whom he calls the Avenger, dresses in a canary waistcoat and top boots, and can barely find work for. Joe is uncomfortable in the smart rooms: he juggles his hat, drops his food and swings between calling Pip "Pip" and "sir". The narrator admits the fault was his own: "if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me." Joe passes on the news that Mr Wopsle has gone on the stage, and Miss Havisham's message about Estella. His farewell, comparing life to "partings welded together", shows that he understands the gap between them better, and more kindly, than Pip does.

28. Chapter 28

    The older narrator exposes young Pip's excuses for avoiding Joe's house, counting him among the "self-swindlers". The convicts on the coach are treated like animals: a passenger rages at having to sit near them, and Pip admits that, so despised, he might have behaved just as they do. From their talk he learns that his convict asked the other man to find "that boy that had fed him and kep his secret" and give him two one-pound notes, and that his convict was later tried again for escaping and made a "Lifer". The man does not know Pip, but Pip is overcome by a fear he cannot name. At the Blue Boar, a local newspaper hints heavily that Pumblechook was Pip's first patron and the founder of his fortunes, a comic end to a tense chapter. The chapter shows that Pip's childhood secret still has power over him, however far he has risen.

29. Chapter 29

    Pip walks to Satis House imagining himself as a knight in a romance, chosen by Miss Havisham to bring the house back to life and marry Estella. Estella has grown so elegant that Pip feels he has slipped back into "the coarse and common boy", and she does not remember the hurts of his childhood visits. She tells him plainly that she has no "softness" or "sentiment", but he refuses to believe her. Miss Havisham, drawing his head down to hers, repeats "Love her, love her, love her!" so fiercely that to Pip the word sounds more like a curse, and describes love as blind devotion and utter submission. Estella's remark that Pip's old companions would be "quite unfit company" for him now drives away any thought of visiting Joe. The older narrator's cry of "Wretched boy!" and his closing regret about Joe judge his younger self harshly.

30. Chapter 30

    Pip enjoys being stared at in his old town until Trabb's boy performs a series of parodies, pretending to tremble at his dignity and then strutting past crying "Don't know yah!" Rather than visit Joe, Pip sends him a codfish and a barrel of oysters. With Herbert he admits that he owes everything to luck, not effort, and that all his expectations depend on the constancy of one person, whom he believes to be Miss Havisham. Herbert, cheerful but honest, points out that Estella was never named as a condition of Pip's fortune and warns that loving her "may lead to miserable things"; Pip says he cannot give her up. Herbert then shares his own secret: he means to marry Clara, whose invalid father roars and bangs on the floor upstairs, as soon as he has some capital. The chapter sets real friendship, in Herbert, against the empty show that Trabb's boy mocks.

31. Chapter 31

    Wopsle's Hamlet turns into a comedy: the ghost coughs and loses its place, the audience shouts answers to "to be or not to be", and one actor playing several parts is pelted with nuts. Pip laughs in spite of himself but still feels for his old townsman. Backstage, Herbert whispers praise for Pip to repeat, "Massive and concrete", and Wopsle takes it as his due, blaming the jeers on a man he says the actor playing the King employs. Pip and Herbert take him home, where he talks until two in the morning about reviving the Drama. Like Pip, Wopsle has left the village to remake himself in London, and the gap between how he sees himself and how others see him is played for laughs. Pip's dream at the end brings the comedy back to his own worries about Estella and his fortune.

32. Chapter 32

    Estella's short, cool note throws Pip into such a state that he haunts the coach office hours before her coach can arrive. Wemmick walks among the Newgate prisoners "as a gardener might walk among his plants", friendly but businesslike, and asks the condemned Colonel for a pair of his pigeons as "portable property". He explains that Jaggers keeps himself "so high" that no one dares approach him, which gives him power over everyone. Waiting alone, Pip reflects that crime has clung to him since his childhood on the marshes, "like a stain that was faded but not gone". He beats the prison dust from his clothes because he cannot bear to bring Newgate near Estella. The chapter shows how badly Pip wants to keep his gentleman's life, and his dreams of Estella, apart from crime.

33. Chapter 33

    Estella's manner is more winning than before, and Pip suspects Miss Havisham's influence behind it. She hands him her purse and says they have no choice but to "obey our instructions", and her talk of their being under orders pains him. She laughs at the Pocket relations who try to turn Miss Havisham against Pip, then, more darkly, recalls being brought up in "that strange house from a mere baby" among their plots. Passing Newgate, she murmurs "Wretches!", and Pip would not admit his visit there for anything. She lets him kiss her cheek, calls him "Pip" for the first time and tells him Miss Havisham's jewels are nearly all hers, yet he knows he "never was happy with her, but always miserable". The chapter shows Estella as the product of Miss Havisham's plans and, for a moment, as someone marked by her own childhood.

34. Chapter 34

    Looking back, Pip admits that his expectations have not all been good for him: he is uneasy about Joe, troubled about Biddy, and sometimes wishes he had never seen Miss Havisham's face. He also sees that his lavish habits have led Herbert, who is too proud to accept help, into debts he cannot afford. Their evenings of looking into their affairs become a comic ritual: a special dinner, plenty of stationery, neat bundles of bills and a "Margin" that only leads to more debt. Herbert goes into the City every day to "look about him" for an opening, without success. The narrator sums up their life as "a gay fiction" of pleasure over "a skeleton truth" of misery. The sudden news of Mrs Joe's death ends the chapter and summons Pip back to the village.

35. Chapter 35

    Pip goes home for his sister's funeral, which Mr Trabb's firm runs as a grim and absurd show of black cloaks and hired mourners. Pumblechook fawns on Pip all day, and even hints that Mrs Joe would have thought the honour of Pip's presence worth dying for. Joe is stiff and awkward in the best parlour, and looks like himself again only when he half changes back into his working clothes. In the garden Biddy tells Pip that his sister died quietly with her arms round Joe's neck, saying "Joe", "Pardon" and "Pip", and that Orlick still lurks near the house. When Pip grandly promises to come down often to see Joe, Biddy's honest doubt offends him, and he spends the night brooding on the injustice she has done him. In the last lines the older Pip admits that Biddy was right.

36. Chapter 36

    Pip and Herbert have run further into debt by the time Pip comes of age. On his twenty-first birthday Mr Jaggers gives him a banknote for five hundred pounds and tells him that he must now manage his own money, living on that sum each year until his benefactor appears. Jaggers says he thinks his instructions unwise, and will not say when the benefactor will appear, only that his own part will end when that person makes themselves known. Pip takes this to mean that Jaggers resents or disapproves of Miss Havisham's plan for him and Estella. Pip then asks Wemmick how to help a friend get started in business, and in the office Wemmick says he might as well throw the money off a bridge. His private opinion, he hints, must be asked for at Walworth. Jaggers's guarded company leaves both young men gloomy, and Herbert jokes that he feels as if he has committed a crime.

37. Chapter 37

    Pip visits Wemmick's castle at Walworth, where the Aged, who is hard of hearing, tells him that his son took charge of him when his hearing failed. Wemmick arrives with Miss Skiffins, a regular Sunday visitor, and away from the office he gladly agrees to help Pip set Herbert up in business without Herbert knowing. The evening is warm and comic, as the Aged reads the paper aloud and Wemmick's arm keeps creeping round Miss Skiffins's waist, only to be put back on the table. Through Miss Skiffins's brother, an accountant, they find Clarriker, a young merchant who needs capital, and Pip pays half of his five hundred pounds and promises more. Herbert comes home glowing with his lucky chance, and Pip cries with happiness that his expectations have done some good to somebody. It is the most unselfish thing Pip has done with his money.

38. Chapter 38

    Estella now lives at Richmond with Mrs Brandley, an old friend of Miss Havisham's, and Pip follows her everywhere, though she uses his closeness to tease her other admirers. When he takes her to Satis House, Miss Havisham hungrily makes Estella list the men she has fascinated, and Pip concludes that Estella has been raised to take revenge on men, and that she will not be given to him until she has done so. For the first time he sees the two women quarrel: Miss Havisham calls Estella cold and ungrateful, and Estella calmly replies that she is only what Miss Havisham has taught her to be. That night Pip sees Miss Havisham walking the house with a candle, making a low cry. In London, Bentley Drummle toasts Estella at Pip's club, and she begins to let him follow her. When Pip protests, Estella says she deceives and entraps all her admirers except him. Miss Havisham's plan hurts everyone it touches, herself included.

39. Chapter 39

    Pip is twenty-three, living in the Temple, and still knows nothing more about his expectations. On a night of violent storm, with Herbert away in Marseilles, a rough, weather-beaten man of about sixty climbs the stairs and holds out both hands to him, and Pip realises he is the convict from the marshes. Pip coldly tries to send him off with a drink, and offers to repay the two one-pound notes the convict once sent him; the convict burns them. Then, by guessing Pip's income and his guardian's initial, he reveals that he is Pip's benefactor: he has grown rich as a sheep-farmer abroad, and has sent his money home to make Pip a gentleman. Pip is overcome with horror, and once he can think, he sees that Miss Havisham never meant Estella for him. His deepest pain is that he deserted Joe for the sake of a convict. The man was sent away for life and will be hanged if caught, so Pip must now protect him.

40. Chapter 40

    Pip decides to tell his laundress that his uncle has come from the country, and on the dark stairs he stumbles over a crouching man who slips away; the watchman says a stranger came in with his visitor. The convict says he has taken the name Provis, that his real name is Abel Magwitch, and that Mr Jaggers defended him at his last trial. Jaggers, careful not to be told anything officially, confirms that Magwitch is Pip's benefactor, and only he: Pip's belief that it was Miss Havisham rested on "not a particle of evidence". Provis wants to watch Pip spend his money like a gentleman, while Pip is repelled by his greedy eating and his proud looks of ownership. However well Pip dresses him, he still looks like the fugitive from the marshes. Pip compares himself to the student in Frankenstein, except that here the creature has made him. After five dreadful days Herbert returns and is made to swear secrecy on Provis's greasy black book.

41. Chapter 41

    Pip tells Herbert the whole story while Provis sits by, pleased with the gentleman he has made and promising to keep a "genteel muzzle" on. Once he has gone to his lodging, Herbert sits in Provis's chair, jumps out of it, and the two friends share their dislike of him without a word. Pip will take no more of Provis's money, though he is heavily in debt and trained for nothing, and Herbert talks him out of becoming a soldier, not knowing that Pip's money paid for his own place at Clarriker's. Herbert warns that if Pip rejects him, Provis might recklessly let himself be caught, and Pip feels he would then be something like his murderer. They agree that Pip must first get Provis safely out of England, going with him so that he will agree to leave, and only then free himself. Next morning Pip asks Provis to tell them about his life and the other convict.

42. Chapter 42

    Provis sums up his life as "in jail and out of jail". He does not know where he was born, first remembers stealing turnips in Essex to live, and was called "hardened" while still a ragged child. More than twenty years ago he fell in with Compeyson, a smooth, educated swindler who passed as a gentleman and made Provis his tool. When both were tried for passing stolen notes, the court judged them by their looks and backgrounds: Compeyson got seven years and Provis fourteen. Provis attacked him on the prison ship, escaped, and hunted him down on the marshes, so Compeyson is the other convict Pip saw fighting in the ditch. Provis also tells of Compeyson's dying partner Arthur, who raved that a mad woman in white was coming for him with a shroud. Herbert then passes Pip a note: Miss Havisham's half-brother was named Arthur, and Compeyson is the man who claimed to love her.

43. Chapter 43

    Pip wonders, then refuses to dwell on, how much of his shrinking from Provis comes from his feelings for Estella, and he now fears that Compeyson, if he is alive, would inform on the returned convict. Before any plan to go abroad, he decides he needs to see Estella and Miss Havisham, but finds that Estella has gone to Satis House without him. To get away for a night he pretends he has promised to visit Joe, and the older Pip calls this a "meanness". At the Blue Boar he meets Bentley Drummle, who is in town because of Estella. Their battle for the fire is comic, but Drummle's sneer about "smithies" and his remark that he will dine at "the lady's" cut Pip deeply. As Drummle leaves, a slouching man who reminds Pip of Orlick brings him a light.

44. Chapter 44

    Pip tells Miss Havisham that he knows who his patron is, though he will not say who, and she admits she let him go on in his mistake, partly to punish her grasping relations. When he asks if that was kind, she flares up, asking who she is that she should be kind. He speaks up for Matthew and Herbert Pocket, and asks her to help Herbert without Herbert knowing. Then he tells Estella he has loved her ever since he first saw her. She answers that his words touch nothing in her, and that she will marry Drummle by her own choice, because she is tired of the life she has led. Pip's outpouring of love and forgiveness leaves Miss Havisham with her hand on her heart and a look of "pity and remorse". The scene shows the harm of her plan on both sides: Pip is heartbroken, and Estella seems unable to feel at all.

45. Chapter 45

    The words "Don't go home" haunt Pip through a miserable night in a hotel room. At the Castle, Wemmick speaks only in his "private and personal" capacity and names no names, but makes clear that he has heard, at a place he will not name, that Pip's rooms have been watched. Answering only by nods, he confirms that Compeyson is alive and in London. Herbert has already moved Provis, whom Wemmick calls only "Tom, Jack, or Richard", to the upper floor of the house by the river where Clara lives with her bedridden father. Wemmick advises Pip to lie low and not try to get Provis abroad too soon, and, true to form, to secure Provis's "portable property". Pip spends a quiet, sleepy day by the fire with the Aged. Wemmick's help shows how different his warm Walworth self is from the guarded clerk of Little Britain.

46. Chapter 46

    Pip meets Clara for the first time and is charmed by her gentleness, and by the patient way she serves her growling, gouty father. Provis, known in the house as Mr Campbell, seems softened, and Pip decides not to tell him about Compeyson in case he goes looking for his enemy and ruins himself. Herbert's plan is that he and Pip, both good oarsmen, should take Provis down the river themselves, so Pip starts keeping a boat at the Temple stairs until his trips become an everyday sight. Parting from Provis, Pip is surprised to find his heart heavy and anxious. The chapter marks a shift in Pip's feelings: the man he shrank from is now someone he fears for. The same river that carries Herbert's hopes towards Clara carries Pip's dread towards Magwitch.

47. Chapter 47

    Pip refuses to take any more of his patron's money, sending back the unopened pocketbook by Herbert and selling some jewellery to get by. He avoids the newspapers so as not to see Estella's marriage confirmed, and asks the reader whether they have never clung to a hope in the same way. An evening at the theatre shows Mr Wopsle's acting career sinking into comic bit-parts. Then Wopsle's news turns the comedy to fear: Compeyson sat behind Pip "like a ghost", and Pip is sure he was there because Pip was. Wopsle's careful memory of the torchlit march across the marshes brings Pip's childhood straight back into his present danger. Pip writes to Wemmick, and he and Herbert become more cautious than ever.

48. Chapter 48

    Jaggers's toast to "Mrs Bentley Drummle" confirms that Estella has married, and he coolly predicts that Drummle will either beat her or cringe before her. When the housekeeper's fingers move as if knitting, Pip links them with Estella's knitting at Satis House, and a string of half-noticed resemblances comes together in his mind. Away from the office, Wemmick tells her story: married very young to a tramping man, she was tried for strangling an older, stronger woman out of jealousy. Jaggers won her acquittal by dressing her to look slight and explaining the scratches on her hands as bramble marks. She was also suspected of killing her child, a girl of about three. Pip's conviction turns the proud Estella's origins upside down: the young lady raised to break hearts appears to be the daughter of a servant once tried for murder.

49. Chapter 49

    Miss Havisham is changed: she seems almost afraid of Pip, and asks whether he can believe there is anything human in her heart. She gives him a written order on Jaggers for the money Herbert needs and asks him one day to write "I forgive her" under her name. When Pip, admitting his own life has been "blind and thankless", forgives her at once, she falls on her knees crying "What have I done!" She says she first meant only to save Estella from misery like her own, but as the girl grew she "stole her heart away, and put ice in its place". She does not know whose child Estella was: Jaggers brought her at two or three, and Estella knows only that she was an orphan who was adopted. On a last walk round, Pip fancies he sees Miss Havisham hanging from a beam in the brewery, as he once did as a boy, and minutes later finds her ablaze; the bridal dress she has worn for years burns away.

50. Chapter 50

    Pip's left arm is badly burned and he is haunted by the glare and noise of the fire. Herbert, a gentle and patient nurse, tells him what Provis said the night before about the woman he once had "great trouble with". She was tried for killing a stronger woman in a barn, and Jaggers's defence of her first made his name known to Provis. Provis hid rather than give evidence about the child and so cause her death, and lost both mother and child; Compeyson later used this secret to keep him poorer and working harder. The dates fit: the girl would have been about Pip's age, and the boy in the churchyard brought her into Provis's mind. Pip, already sure that Jaggers's housekeeper is Estella's mother, sees that Estella's father is the convict hiding down the river.

51. Chapter 51

    Pip cannot say why he needs to prove Estella's parentage, and wonders whether he was really glad to pass on to Provis, the man he is trying to save, some of the romantic interest that had so long surrounded his own life. Jaggers gives a slight start when Pip names Provis as her father, and Pip is sure Jaggers never knew who the father was. When Jaggers will not talk, Pip appeals to Wemmick's "gentle heart", giving away his Walworth home and his old father, and the two men eye each other with comic suspicion. Jaggers then "puts a case": a lawyer who saw children every day growing up to be hanged saved one little girl by taking her from her mother and giving her to an eccentric rich lady, and kept the mother's wild nature down ever since. Revealing the truth now, he argues, would not help the father, the mother or the daughter. Minutes later both men turn savagely on a client, Mike, for showing his feelings, as if to prove they have none.

52. Chapter 52

    Pip completes the secret arrangement that makes Herbert a partner at Clarriker's, the only good thing, he says, that he has done since his expectations began. Herbert is to run a new branch of the firm in the East, and Pip feels his "last anchor" loosening. When Wemmick's note arrives, Pip and Herbert plan Provis's escape with care: Startop will help row, and they will take him well below Gravesend to meet a steamer bound abroad. An anonymous letter then calls Pip to the marshes, and the mention of Provis's name overrides all his doubts. At an inn of minor reputation the landlord tells him his own story as the town tells it, with Pumblechook as the founder of his fortunes and Pip as ungrateful. Pumblechook's false claims make Pip feel his ingratitude to Joe more sharply than ever.

53. Chapter 53

    Pip is caught in a noose in the dark sluice-house and tied to a ladder, and the flare of a match shows him Orlick. Drunk and gloating, Orlick blames Pip for costing him his place and turning Biddy against him, and means to burn his body in the limekiln. He confesses that he struck down Pip's sister with the filed leg-iron and that he was the man on Pip's stairs, but insists "it was you", an accusation that echoes Pip's old guilt about the leg-iron. He also knows Provis's real name, Magwitch, and warns that Compeyson is as good a match for Magwitch as Orlick has been for Pip. Facing death, Pip fears most of all being misremembered by those he loves. He is saved by Herbert, Startop and Trabb's boy, of whom he had long thought badly, but they give up any thought of pursuing Orlick rather than risk delaying Provis's escape.

54. Chapter 54

    The escape begins hopefully on a bright March day, and Magwitch, the least anxious of the party, enjoys his freedom on the river. His image of the tide running through his fingers shows how little anyone can control what happens next. At the lonely inn the Jack's talk of a hovering galley makes them all uneasy, and in the night Pip sees two men looking at their boat. As the steamer bears down, the officer names "Abel Magwitch, otherwise Provis", and in the struggle Magwitch uncovers Compeyson, who drowns. Pip's feelings are transformed: his repugnance melts away, and in the shackled prisoner he sees "a much better man than I had been to Joe". Knowing that Magwitch's wealth will be forfeited to the Crown, Pip realises that Magwitch need never know his hopes of making Pip rich have come to nothing.

55. Chapter 55

    Magwitch is committed for trial once an old officer from the prison-ship identifies him, and Mr Jaggers warns that nothing can stop the case going against him. Pip has no legal claim to Magwitch's money and resolves never to try for one; notes found on Compeyson's body suggest the informer hoped to profit from its forfeiture. Herbert, about to leave for Cairo, offers Pip a clerk's place in the new branch and a home with him and Clara, and Pip asks for two or three months because of "a vague something" he does not yet explain. Wemmick, who timed the escape for when he heard Compeyson was away, thinks the clever Compeyson deceived even his own people. He still regrets the lost "portable property" more than its owner. His surprise wedding to Miss Skiffins, which he pretends is quite unplanned, brings some comedy into a dark time, and like everything at Walworth it is to be kept from Mr Jaggers.

56. Chapter 56

    Badly injured, Magwitch grows weaker every day in the prison infirmary, humble and uncomplaining, while Pip talks and reads to him. His trial is short, since his return alone makes him guilty, and he is sentenced to death with thirty-one others before a crowded gallery that Pip calls "a large theatrical audience". The judge describes a man who has broken the law almost from infancy, but Magwitch answers him with quiet dignity. Pip writes petitions for mercy to the Home Secretary and others in authority, and visits daily, holding Magwitch's hand. When Magwitch thanks him for never deserting him, Pip stays silent, remembering that he once meant to. His last gift is the truth about Magwitch's lost child, and Magwitch dies holding Pip's hand. Pip ends with a humble prayer for mercy on "a sinner".

57. Chapter 57

    Already feverish, Pip is arrested for a jeweller's bill but is too ill to be moved. In his delirium every face turns into Joe's, and when he wakes it really is Joe, sent by Biddy, who has nursed him for weeks. Joe brings news: Miss Havisham is dead, leaving most of her property to Estella and four thousand pounds to Matthew Pocket because of what Pip said of him, and Orlick is in jail for breaking into Pumblechook's house. Joe cares for Pip as tenderly as when he was a child, and gently stops him from going over the past. But as Pip grows stronger Joe begins to call him "sir", and Pip sees that the fault is his own. Joe leaves without warning, having paid the debt, and Pip, humbled, resolves to go home and ask Biddy to marry him.

58. Chapter 58

    News of Pip's fall has reached the town ahead of him, and the Blue Boar, which courted him when he was rich, now treats him coolly. Satis House is to be sold as building materials and pulled down. Pumblechook, still posing as the founder of Pip's fortunes, lectures him on his ingratitude in front of the landlord and waiter, and Pip walks to the forge feeling he is leaving "arrogance and untruthfulness" behind. He arrives on Joe and Biddy's wedding day, and is thankful he never spoke to Joe of his own hope of marrying Biddy. They forgive him freely, and he promises to repay the money that kept him out of prison. Abroad, he rises from clerk to partner in Clarriker's modest but respected firm, and reflects that the lack of ability he once found in Herbert had perhaps been in himself. When Clarriker at last tells Herbert who paid for his partnership, the two friends are none the worse for it.

59. Chapter 59

    After eleven years away, Pip returns to the forge to find Joe and Biddy with a little girl and a son named Pip, who sits on Pip's old stool by the fire. He tells Biddy he is unlikely to marry and that his "poor dream" of Estella has "all gone by", yet that evening he walks to the site of Satis House for her sake. Pip has heard that Estella led a most unhappy life, separated from a cruel husband who has since died after an accident caused by his ill-treatment of a horse. Only the garden wall is left of the old house, and Estella has come to take leave of the ground before it is built on. She has been softened by suffering, which "has been stronger than all other teaching", and asks Pip to tell her they are friends. She speaks of continuing "friends apart", but the novel's last sentence has them leaving the ruins together, her hand in his, and Pip seeing "no shadow of another parting from her".

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