What’s in it for me? An epic tale of class and morality.
Victorian England witnessed the birth of a new kind of civilization.
Cities and factories mushroomed and coated the green and pleasant land of old in industrial grime. The countryside was abandoned by millions of men and women seeking employment in the satanic mills of smog-choked metropolises. Peasants became proletarian laborers and ruddy-faced aristocrats embraced new and urbane ideas and mores
No writer captured all this upheaval better than Charles Dickens, a writer who turned his penetrating gaze on every class involved in the sprawling saga of England’s industrialization.
Class was one of Dickens’s great obsessions and it also plays a key role in Great Expectations. The novel tells the story of Pip, a common laboring boy who “catches” shame and self-hatred from a haughty upper-class girl, Estella. Pip instinctively understands that the chasm between him and the girl he loves is unbridgeable – unless he becomes a gentleman. His wish would have been absurd in another era, but social advancement was as much a feature of Dickens’s England as endemic social conflict and class prejudice.
Pip leaves his village behind and learns to become a gentleman in London. His social rise is rapid and effortless, but his moral education is slow and painful. At every turn, Pip is forced to reckon with the question of what it means to be a good person. He often gets it wrong, not only because he is young and naive, but because he loses contact with the simple and good world represented by his stand-in father, Joe. His laborious reckoning with these mistakes forms the overarching theme of the novel. It is only after a great deal of suffering that Pip reaches maturity and completes that more difficult and profound education.
By the way: if you would like to listen to a very short summary right away, you can also skip to the very last section.
A fateful meeting
It was a cold afternoon on Christmas Eve and seven-year-old Pip found himself in the windswept churchyard of a village about thirty miles east of London.
He was contemplating two gravestones upon which were engraved the names of his mother and father. He sobbed and tears ran down his cheeks.
“Hold your noise!” commanded a harsh voice suddenly. Pip turned and saw a wild-looking man in sodden gray wool with an iron shackle around his ankle. “Where do you live?” he demanded. Pip told him he lived with his sister, Mrs. Joe, wife of Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith. “Blacksmith, eh?” The man eyed the shackle and hatched a plan.
Pip, under threat of having his heart and liver removed, roasted, and eaten if he breathed a word of this, was to steal a file and food and bring them to the man the next morning.
Back at the forge, Joe was in the kitchen poking the coals in the fireplace. Joe and Pip were, as the giant blacksmith said, the “best of friends.” Joe was his playmate – and protector. But there was little he could do to save Pip from the wrath of Mrs. Joe that evening.
It was bad enough being a blacksmith’s wife, she cried, without having to raise her dead parents’ ungrateful child “by hand.” She presently gave Pip a fresh taste of her hands-on rearing. “In the churchyard, indeed!” she raged, thrashing him with a stick. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been to the churchyard a long time ago – and stayed there too!”
At dawn, Pip crept downstairs. He took a file from the forge and a rind of cheese, some brandy, and a beautiful, round pork pie from the pantry, which he delivered to the man from the churchyard, who was half-dead from cold and hunger. He gulped down the brandy. His mouth full of cheese and pastry, he took the file to his shackle.
Christmas preparations were in full swing when Pip got back to the forge and his sister had prepared a superb dinner featuring a leg of pickled pork, vegetables, and roast fowl. Pip suffered through dinner knowing his theft must be discovered. When Mrs. Joe went to fetch what she said was an especially good pork pie, he leapt to his feet and ran.
His escape, however, was foiled by a sergeant who was knocking at the door. His men were hunting two convicts who’d escaped from the prison barges moored in the river, he said, but he needed the blacksmith to fix some faulty handcuffs first.
After repairing the handcuffs, Joe took Pip and joined the sergeant. The soldiers found their quarry near an abandoned fort in the marshes. There two men dressed in gray were trading ferocious blows in a muddy ditch. Then one man – Pip’s convict – had the other in a headlock. “I took him,” he thundered, “and I give him up to you!”
When he’d been handcuffed, the convict looked around. His eyes landed on Pip, who, with a slight shake of his head, communicated that he’d kept his word. The convict turned to the sergeant. There was something he wished to clear up lest innocent persons be suspected: he’d stolen a file and some food and drink from the blacksmith’s the previous night. “I’m sorry to say, blacksmith,” he said, turning to Joe, “that I’ve ate your pie.”
“God knows you’re welcome to it,” replied Joe. “We don’t know what you’ve done, but we wouldn’t have you starved for it, poor miserable fellow creature.”
Satis House
Miss Havisham, an immensely rich and grim lady, lived in a dismal place with high walls, barred doors, and shuttered windows called Satis House in the next town over.
When she remarked that she was looking for a playmate for her adopted daughter, Estella, one of Joe’s relations, who happened to be one of her tenants, mentioned Pip.
Pip was close to nine years old when he started visiting Satis House.
He’d never seen a lady like Miss Havisham before.
She always wore the same thing – a yellowed, crumpled bridal dress that hung loosely around her withered form. She spent her days in a room that looked as if it’d been prepared for a great banquet many years earlier – and never tidied since. Dusty bouquets of desiccated flowers lay around. On a dining table sat a large, untouched, cobweb-covered wedding cake. Every clock in the room had stopped at precisely the same time: twenty minutes to nine.
Estella was as beautiful as Miss Havisham was strange. She was about Pip’s age, but she couldn’t have been more self-possessed, proud, or scornful of him if she’d been twenty-one. Pip and Estella played cards under Miss Havisham’s watchful eyes. When Pip lost, she tossed her hand aside as if winning against a common laboring boy signified nothing.
Miss Havisham encouraged Estella’s cruelty. Her eyes lit up when the girl commented on Pip’s rough hands and his thick, ugly working boots. Estella’s contempt was infectious. When she closed the gate after Pip at the end of a visit, he cursed his own coarseness. This tortuous game went on and on. With each visit, Estella became more beautiful and more contemptuous and Pip fell more hopelessly in love with the scornful, unobtainable girl.
And then it was over. Estella was in Paris studying to be a lady, Miss Havisham informed Pip one afternoon, before remarking with distaste that he’d grown tall. It was best if he stopped coming to Satis House and began his apprenticeship instead.
The forge had once been the glowing road to manhood and independence in Pip’s mind, but it disgusted him now. Being coarse and common wouldn’t have mattered to him had no one told him that’s what he was. But Estella had told him, and he was deeply unsatisfied because of it. It was because of her that a new desire took shape in his heart. Pip wished to be a gentleman.
Great expectations
Something extraordinary happened one ordinary Saturday.
Pip, now a young man in the fourth year of his apprenticeship, was in the village pub with Joe when a grave-looking gentleman approached them.
Mr. Jaggers said he was a lawyer representing an anonymous client. That client, he went on, had bestowed a handsome property on Pip. If Joe released his apprentice, Pip would be removed from his present sphere of life, given an allowance and a tutor, and brought up as a gentleman. There was only one condition: Pip must never try to identify his benefactor.
There were no objections. Joe congratulated Pip on his great expectations and released him from his apprenticeship on the spot. Pip, for his part, was sure he already knew the identity of that benefactor – Miss Havisham. His heart leapt. In making him a gentleman, she was raising him up to Estella’s level and paving the way for their union!
Before departing for London, Pip called at Satis House to take his leave of Miss Havisham. “I’ve come into such good fortunes since we last met,” he said carefully, “and I’m so grateful for it.” She smiled cryptically and replied that her friend Mr. Jaggers had told her all about it.
Pip’s tutor was a relative of Miss Havisham’s, Mr. Pocket, and he lodged with the tutor’s son, Herbert, who quickly became his best friend in London.
Herbert told Pip Miss Havisham’s story. Her father had been a wealthy brewer. When he died, he left Miss Havisham a great fortune and effectively cut her badly behaved half-brother out of the will. She then fell in love with a charming suitor who managed to extract large sums of money from her. She even bought her half-brother’s shares in the brewery at an inflated price and handed them over to this man. Herbert’s father warned her to be careful, but she ignored him and cut off that side of the family. Finally, on the morning of their wedding day, at twenty minutes to nine, Miss Havisham received his note calling off the wedding.
Her suitor, it was later discovered, was an accomplice of half-her brother and the two men had shared the profits before disappearing. Despairing, Miss Havisham sought revenge through Estella, the adopted daughter she’d raised to “wreak havoc on the male sex.”
Shattered illusions
Pip’s rooms were lavishly decorated. He had servants, dressed exquisitely, dined expensively, and ran up large debts. He was, in short, a gentleman.
When he wasn’t spending his money or studying his books, he often went down to Satis House to visit Miss Havisham. That, at least, was his pretext.
Estella had returned from France and was more beautiful than ever. It was, of course, Estella who brought him back to this bleak house with its barred doors and shuttered windows.
Pip courted Estella slavishly but she remained as coolly indifferent to him as ever, neither leading him on nor rebuffing him. It was Miss Havisham who encouraged him. Estella, she told him one day, had been adopted, raised, and educated “to be loved.” That, she said with vehemence, was what he must do whether she chose to favor him, wound him, or rip his heart to pieces. Looking back, Pip recognized that her words could not have sounded more like a curse if she’d used the word “hate” or “destroy” instead of the word she’d chosen – “love.”
Pip wasn’t the only suitor whose ambitions Miss Havisham encouraged. The worst of them, and the most dangerous to Pip, was Bentley Drummle. Pip knew this high-born loafer from a gentleman’s club in London whose members did little but drink and insult each other. Pip had been bested by Bentley in these exchanges many times. Now, it seemed that Bentley also had the better of him in their rivalry for Estella’s affections too.
He was contemplating this dismal state of affairs on a dismal winter’s night when there was a knock at Pip’s door. Opening it, he saw a haggard-looking man in a great, ragged coat coming up the stairs. As he drew closer, the light from Pip’s candle illuminated his face. In an instant, Pip was back in that windswept churchyard overlooking the marshes. It was “his” convict!
Reluctantly, Pip invited him in to warm himself by the fire. He looked around and noted the lavish surroundings. Not bad for a blacksmith’s boy, he remarked, and asked Pip how he was living. Pip replied cautiously. He’d been chosen, he said, to succeed to some property by his guardian. “Could I make a guess as to the identity of that guardian?” asked the now-smiling convict. Pip’s heart stopped. He suddenly knew the true identity of his benefactor. “Yes, dear, boy,” the convict exclaimed, “I made a gentleman of you!”
The life story of Abel Magwitch (that was the man’s name) was short to tell: in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. He’d always had bad luck, said Abel, but never worse than the evil luck which put him on those prison barges.
It was a smooth-taking gentleman crook called Compeyson who’d landed him there. Compeyson had made a pot of money swindling some gullible rich woman with a sidekick of his called Arthur. He quickly lost the money gambling, however, and Arthur died soon thereafter. In short, he had needed a new accomplice. Which was when he met Able. Down on his luck as usual, and impressed by Compeyson’s style, he became his partner in crime.
They were caught and tried, but gentlemanly Compeyson talked his way into the judge’s good books. He got away with seven years on account of “good character” while Able got the full fourteen. Unhappily for Compeyson, though, they ended up on the same barge. Fearing for his life, and with good reason, he made a run for it. Able, who intended to take it, followed. It was Compeyson whom Pip had seen him wrestling with in that muddy ditch all those years ago.
Abel was banished to Australia for life and told he’d be hanged if he tried to return. He worked as a sheep farmer, stockbroker, and everything in between until, bit by bit, he amassed a fortune. Able paused and looked at Pip. In all that time, he said, he never forgot the boy who saved his life when he was half-dead from cold and hunger on the marshes. Every guinea he earned was for Pip. “I lived rough, my boy,” Abel said, “so that you should live smooth.”
Pip listened in amazement – and horror. The ship in which he’d sailed was wrecked; his illusions lay shattered about him like so much flotsam. Miss Havisham had no plans for him. Estella wasn’t designed for him. He’d been nothing more than a model to practice on in all those visits to Satis House. Worst of all, he’d deserted dear, kind Joe for a wretched convict!
Forgiveness
The tangled web into which Pip had stumbled as a boy was now at last unraveling.
The man who deceived Miss Havisham was Compeyson. Arthur, his accomplice in that affair, was her brother. Pip saw that his tutor and the father of his friend, Mr. Pocket, had been wronged by Miss Havisham. She mistook his warnings about Compeyson as a cover to advance his own interests and cut him and his side of the family off.
Pip went down to Satis House to reveal what he knew.
He told Miss Havisham that he’d discovered the identity of his benefactor and that he was as unhappy as she had intended him to be. In encouraging his mistaken impressions, she had focused all her hatred for self-interested, calculating, heartless men onto an innocent victim.
Miss Havisham didn’t deny it. Pip then turned to Estella.
He’d always loved her, as she well knew. Estella raised her eyes to his face but her expression was unchanged. He loved her still, Pip went on, even though he’d given up hope of calling her his own one day and knew she was to marry Bentley. “Don’t be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” she interrupted in a sharp tone. “I shall not be that.” Pip sobbed. “God bless you, and God forgive you,” he said. Those were the last words he spoke to Estella for a very long time.
As he closed the gate, he vowed to never return to that dismal house. A few weeks later, however, he received a note. There was something Miss Havisham wanted to tell him.
A change had come over her and she looked at Pip almost fearfully. It was a grievous thing she’d done, she admitted, to take an impressionable child and make him the object of her bitter vengeance. She had understood that when she heard Pip confessing his love for Estella. His words had been a looking glass in which the love she’d once felt was reflected back at her. Crying “What have I done?” she fell to her knees and begged for Pip’s forgiveness.
Pip took her hands into his own and said he’d already forgiven her. How could he not? He would have loved Estella just as dearly as he did under any circumstances.
Conclusion
Pip’s great expectations had come to nothing. All he could do now was see that Abel got out of the country and escaped the death verdict that would be pronounced on him if he was caught.
His repugnance for the convict had faded. He saw a generous, constant man who had only tried to help him. Abel, he realized, had been a better friend to him than he had to Joe.
Abel’s escape, however, was thwarted at the last minute. As he tried to board a steamer bound for Hamburg in the Thames estuary, a police boat intercepted his own. There was a skirmish. Abel was knocked into the water and pulled under the steamer and into its deadly propellers.
He survived long enough to be tried and sentenced to death by hanging, but not long enough to be brought to the gallows. Abel Magwitch died in a prison hospital bed, his hands in Pip’s. “God bless you, dear boy,” he said with his last remaining breath, “you never deserted me.”
It was true – technically. Pip didn’t contradict the dying convict, but he felt a bitter guilt in his heart. He hadn’t deserted Abel, but he had intended to.
Pip was alone. His benefactor was dead, Estella was married, and he had betrayed the only man whom he counted as family. Exhausted and sick, he collapsed into his bed one day and stayed there. For weeks, he was consumed by a feverish delirium that he thought must kill him. Finally, though, he came around. He opened his eyes and saw Joe.
“Oh Joe,” Pip cried, “you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. Don’t be so good to me!” Joe clasped Pip’s hand a little tighter and wiped his eyes. “You and me was ever the best of friends,” he said, calling him, as he always had, “dear Pip.”
When he had recovered, Pip settled his debts as best he could, sold his few remaining possessions, and left England to take up a position as a clerk in Europe.
He was a grown man when he returned several years later to see Joe. During that visit, Pip rose early one morning and made a secret pilgrimage to Satis House.
The place had been ripped down after Miss Havisham’s death. All that remained were the foundations and wildly overgrown garden. Pip sat down on a bench and remained there for a very long time contemplating the desolation.
It was close to dusk when he noticed an unmistakable figure in the distance: Estella!
Pip had heard news of Estella over the years. Bentley had been cruel to her. When a horse he’d been mistreating kicked out and killed him, Estella hadn’t mourned the death of her husband. But her suffering was evident. As Pip gazed into her face, he saw the marks of her suffering. The freshness of her beauty had faded but her indescribable charm remained.
She sat next to him on the bench and they talked quietly as the evening mist rose around them. She had, she said, thought often of Pip in recent times.
He replied that she had always held a place in his heart. There was a long pause. She hadn’t thought that she would take her leave of Pip at this spot, she said, but she was glad to do so in such a fitting place. “Glad to part again, Estella?” Pip answered. “To me,” he added, “parting is a painful thing.” Estella looked at him and spoke very earnestly. He had once said “God bless you, God forgive you!” to her. If he could say it then, he could surely say it now that her suffering had taught to understand what his heart used to be. “I have been bent and broken,” Estella said, “but – I hope – into a better shape.” Could they not part, then, as friends?
“We are friends,” said Pip, rising from the bench and taking her hand. “And will continue friends apart,” answered Estella.They left the ruined place that had once been Satis House, a name which, as Estella had told Pip a long time ago, meant “enough” in Latin.
The evening mists were rising and illuminating a broad expanse of tranquil light. But wherever Pip looked, he could see no shadow of another parting from Estella.