Great Expectation (1861) – Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens’ second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens’s weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.
The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens’s most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens’s themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
Upon its release, the novel received near-universal acclaim. Although Dickens’s contemporary Thomas Carlyle referred to it disparagingly as “that Pip nonsense,” he nevertheless reacted to each fresh instalment with “roars of laughter.” Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as “All of one piece and consistently truthful.” During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales; when the plot first formed in his mind, he called it “a very fine, new and grotesque idea.”
In the 21st century, the novel retains good ratings among literary critics and in 2003 it was ranked 17th on the BBC’s The Big Read poll.
In his Book of Memoranda, begun in 1855, Dickens wrote names for possible characters: Magwitch, Provis, Clarriker, Compey, Pumblechook, Orlick, Gargery, Wopsle, Skiffins, some of which became familiar in Great Expectations. There is also a reference to a “knowing man”, a possible sketch of Bentley Drummle. Another evokes a house full of “Toadies and Humbugs”, foreshadowing the visitors to Satis House in chapter 11. Margaret Cardwell discovered the “premonition” of Great Expectations from a 25 September 1855 letter from Dickens to W. H. Wills, in which Dickens speaks of recycling an “odd idea” from the Christmas special “A House to Let” and “the pivot round which my next book shall revolve.” The “odd idea” concerns an individual who “retires to an old lonely house…resolved to shut out the world and hold no communion with it.”
Great Expectations contains a variety of literary genres, including the bildungsroman, gothic novel, crime novel, as well as comedy, melodrama and satire; and it belongs—like Wuthering Heights and the novels of Walter Scott—to the romance rather than realist tradition of the novel.
Complex and multifaceted, Great Expectations is a Victorian bildungsroman, or initiatory tale, which focuses on a protagonist who matures over the course of the novel. Great Expectations describes Pip’s initial frustration upon leaving home, followed by a long and difficult period that is punctuated with conflicts between his desires and the values of established order. During this time he re-evaluates his life and re-enters society on new foundations.
Elements of the silver-fork novel are found in the character of Miss Havisham and her world, as well as Pip’s illusions. This genre, which flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, presents the flashy elegance and aesthetic frivolities found in high society. In some respects, Dickens conceived Great Expectations as an anti silver fork novel, attacking Charles Lever’s novel A Day’s Ride, publication of which began January 1860, in Household Words. This can be seen in the way that Dickens satirises the pretensions and morals of Miss Havisham and her sycophants, including the Pockets (except Matthew), and Uncle Pumblechook.
Dickens’s novel has influenced a number of writers. Sue Roe’s Estella: Her Expectations (1982), for example, explores the inner life of an Estella fascinated with a Havisham figure. Miss Havisham is again important in Havisham: A Novel (2013), a book by Ronald Frame, that features an imagining of the life of Miss Catherine Havisham from childhood to adulthood. The second chapter of Rosalind Ashe’s Literary Houses (1982) paraphrases Miss Havisham’s story, with details about the nature and structure of Satis House and coloured imaginings of the house within. Miss Havisham is also central to Lost in a Good Book (2002), Jasper Fforde’s alternate history fantasy novel, which features a parody of Miss Havisham. It won the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association 2004 Dilys Award. Magwitch is the protagonist of Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which is a re-imagining of Magwitch’s return to England, with the addition, among other things, of a fictionalised Dickens character and plot-line. Carey’s novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1998. Mister Pip (2006), a novel by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones, won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Mister Pip is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s, where the young protagonist’s life is impacted in a major way by her reading of Great Expectations. In May 2015, Udon Entertainment’s Manga Classics line published a manga adaptation of Great Expectations.
Plot: The book includes three “stages” of Pip’s expectations.
1. First Stage
  1. Pip is an orphan, about seven years old, who lives with his hot-tempered older sister and her kindly blacksmith husband Joe Gargery on the coastal marshes of Kent. On Christmas Eve 1812, Pip is visiting the graves of his parents and siblings. There, he unexpectedly encounters an escaped convict who threatens him with death if he does not bring back food and tools. Terrified, Pip steals a file from among Joe’s tools and a pie and brandy that were meant for Christmas dinner, which he delivers to the convict.
  2. That evening, Pip’s sister is about to look for the missing pie when soldiers arrive and ask Joe to mend some shackles. Joe and Pip accompany them into the marshes to recapture the convict, who is fighting with another escaped convict. The first convict confesses to stealing food, clearing Pip.
  3. Pip is ashamed of Joe at Satis House, by Francis Arthur Fraser
  4. A few years pass. Miss Havisham, a wealthy and reclusive spinster, asks Mr Pumblechook, a relation of the Gargerys, to find a boy to visit her. She was jilted at the altar and still wears her old wedding dress and lives in dilapidated Satis House. Pip visits Miss Havisham and falls in love with Estella, her adopted daughter. Estella is aloof and hostile to Pip, which Miss Havisham encourages. During one visit, another boy picks a fistfight with Pip, where Pip easily gains the upper hand. Estella watches, and allows Pip to kiss her afterwards. Pip visits Miss Havisham regularly, until he is old enough to learn a trade.
  5. Joe accompanies Pip for the last visit to Miss Havisham, at which she gives the money for Pip to be bound as an apprentice blacksmith. Joe’s surly assistant, Dolge Orlick, is envious of Pip and dislikes Mrs Joe. When Pip and Joe are away from the house, Joe’s wife is brutally attacked, leaving her unable to speak or do her work. Orlick is suspected of the attack. Mrs Joe changes and becomes kindhearted after the attack. Pip’s former schoolmate Biddy joins the household to help with her care.
  6. Miss Havisham with Estella and Pip. Art by H. M. Brock
  7. Four years into Pip’s apprenticeship, Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, informs him that he has been provided with money from an anonymous patron, allowing him to become a gentleman. Pip is to leave for London, but presuming that Miss Havisham is his benefactress, he first visits her.
2. Second Stage
  1. Pip sets up house in London at Barnard’s Inn with Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor, Matthew Pocket, who is a cousin of Miss Havisham. Pip realizes Herbert is the boy he fought with years ago. Herbert tells Pip how Miss Havisham was defrauded and deserted by her fiancé. Pip meets fellow pupils, Bentley Drummle, a brute of a man from a wealthy noble family, and Startop, who is agreeable. Jaggers disburses the money Pip needs. During a visit, Pip meets Jaggers’s housekeeper Molly, a former convict.
  2. When Joe visits Pip at Barnard’s Inn, Pip is ashamed to be seen with him. Joe relays a message from Miss Havisham that Estella will be at Satis House for a visit. Pip returns there to meet Estella and is encouraged by Miss Havisham, but he avoids visiting Joe. He is disquieted to see Orlick now in service to Miss Havisham. He mentions his misgivings to Jaggers, who promises Orlick’s dismissal. Back in London, Pip and Herbert exchange their romantic secrets: Pip adores Estella and Herbert is engaged to Clara. Pip meets Estella when she is sent to Richmond to be introduced into society.
  3. Pip and Herbert build up debts. Mrs Joe dies and Pip returns to his village for the funeral. Pip’s income is fixed at £500 (equivalent to £45,000 in 2021) per annum when he comes of age at twenty-one. With the help of Jaggers’s clerk, Wemmick, Pip plans to help advance Herbert’s future prospects by anonymously securing him a position with the shipbroker, Clarriker’s. Pip takes Estella to Satis House. She and Miss Havisham quarrel over Estella’s coldness. In London, Bentley Drummle outrages Pip, by proposing a toast to Estella. Later, at an Assembly Ball in Richmond, Pip witnesses Estella meeting Bentley Drummle and warns her about him; she replies that she has no qualms about entrapping him.
  4. A week after he turns 23 years old, Pip learns that his benefactor is the convict he encountered in the churchyard, Abel Magwitch, who had been transported to New South Wales after being captured. He has become wealthy after gaining his freedom there, but cannot return to England on pain of death. However, he returns to see Pip, who was the motivation for all his success.
3. Third Stage
  1. Pip is shocked, and stops taking Magwitch’s money. He and Herbert Pocket devise a plan for Magwitch to escape from England.
  2. Magwitch shares his past history with Pip, and reveals that the escaped convict whom he fought in the churchyard was Compeyson, the fraudster who had deserted Miss Havisham.
  3. Pip returns to Satis Hall to visit Estella and meets Bentley Drummle, who has also come to see her and now has Orlick as his servant. Pip accuses Miss Havisham of misleading him about his benefactor. She admits to doing so, but says that her plan was to annoy her relatives. Pip declares his love to Estella, who coldly tells him that she plans on marrying Drummle. Heartbroken, Pip walks back to London, where Wemmick warns him that Compeyson is seeking him. Pip and Herbert continue preparations for Magwitch’s escape.
  4. At Jaggers’s house for dinner, Wemmick tells Pip how Jaggers acquired his maidservant, Molly, rescuing her from the gallows when she was accused of murder.
  5. Then, full of remorse, Miss Havisham tells Pip how the infant Estella was brought to her by Jaggers and raised by her to be unfeeling and heartless. She knows nothing about Estella’s parentage. She also tells Pip that Estella is now married. She gives Pip money to pay for Herbert Pocket’s position at Clarriker’s, and asks for his forgiveness. As Pip is about to leave, Miss Havisham’s dress catches fire. Pip saves her, injuring himself in the process. She eventually dies from her injuries, lamenting her manipulation of Estella and Pip. Pip now realises that Estella is the daughter of Molly and Magwitch. When confronted about this, Jaggers discourages Pip from acting on his suspicions.
  6. Magwitch makes himself known to Pip
  7. A few days before Magwitch’s planned escape, Pip is tricked by an anonymous letter into going to a sluice-house near his old home, where he is seized by Orlick, who intends to murder him and freely admits to injuring Pip’s sister. As Pip is about to be struck by a hammer, Herbert Pocket and Startop arrive and save Pip’s life. The three of them pick up Magwitch to row him to the steamboat for Hamburg, but they are met by a police boat carrying Compeyson, who has offered to identify Magwitch. Magwitch seizes Compeyson, and they fight in the river. Seriously injured, Magwitch is taken by the police. Compeyson’s body is found later.
  8. Pip is aware that Magwitch’s fortune will go to the Crown after his trial. Herbert, who is preparing to move to Cairo, Egypt, to manage Clarriker’s office there, offers Pip a position there. Pip always visits Magwitch in the prison hospital as he awaits trial, and on Magwitch’s deathbed tells him that his daughter Estella is alive. After Herbert’s departure for Cairo, Pip falls ill in his room, and faces arrest for debt. However, Joe nurses Pip back to health and pays off his debt. When Pip begins to recover, Joe slips away. Pip then returns to propose to Biddy, only to find that she has married Joe. Pip asks Joe’s forgiveness, promises to repay him and leaves for Cairo. There he shares lodgings with Herbert and Clara, and eventually advances to become third in the company. Only then does Herbert learn that Pip paid for his position in the firm.
  9. After working eleven years in Egypt, Pip returns to England and visits Joe, Biddy, and their son, Pip Jr. Then, in the ruins of Satis House, he meets the widowed Estella, who asks Pip to forgive her, assuring him that her misfortune, and her abusive marriage to Drummle until his death, has opened her heart. As Pip takes Estella’s hand, and they leave the moonlit ruins, he sees “no shadow of another parting from her.”
Characters:
Pip and his family
1. Philip Pirrip, nicknamed Pip, an orphan and the protagonist and narrator of Great Expectations. In his childhood, Pip dreamed of becoming a blacksmith like his kind brother-in-law, Joe Gargery. At Satis House, about age 8, he meets and falls in love with Estella, and tells Biddy that he wants to become a gentleman. As a result of Magwitch’s anonymous patronage, Pip lives in London after learning the blacksmith trade, and becomes a gentleman. Pip assumes his benefactor is Miss Havisham; the discovery that his true benefactor is a convict shocks him. Pip, at the end of the story, is united with Estella.
2. Joe Gargery, Pip’s brother-in-law, and his first father figure. He is a blacksmith who is always kind to Pip and the only person with whom Pip is always honest. Joe is disappointed when Pip decides to leave his home to live in London to become a gentleman rather than be a blacksmith in business with Joe. He is a strong man who bears the shortcomings of those closest to him.
3. Mrs Joe Gargery, Pip’s hot-tempered adult sister, Georgiana Maria, called Mrs Joe, is 20 years older than Pip. She brings him up after their parents’ death. She does the work of the household but too often loses her temper and beats her family. Orlick, her husband’s journeyman, attacks her during a botched burglary, and she is left disabled until her death.
4. Mr Pumblechook, Joe Gargery’s uncle, an officious bachelor and corn merchant. While not knowing how to deal with a growing boy, he tells Mrs Joe, as she is known, how noble she is to bring up Pip. As the person who first connected Pip to Miss Havisham, he claims to have been the original architect of Pip’s expectations. Pip dislikes Mr Pumblechook for his pompous, unfounded claims. When Pip stands up to him in a public place, after those expectations are dashed, Mr Pumblechook turns those listening to the conversation against Pip.
Miss Havisham and her family
1. Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who takes Pip on as a companion for herself and her adopted daughter, Estella. Havisham is a wealthy, eccentric woman who has worn her wedding dress and one shoe since the day that she was jilted at the altar by her fiancé. Her house is unchanged as well. She hates all men, and plots to wreak a twisted revenge by teaching Estella to torment and spurn men, including Pip, who loves her. Miss Havisham is later overcome with remorse for ruining both Estella’s and Pip’s chances for happiness. Shortly after confessing her plotting to Pip and begging for his forgiveness, she is badly burned when her dress accidentally catches fire. In a later chapter Pip learns from Joe that she is dead.
2. Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, whom Pip pursues. She is a beautiful girl and grows more beautiful after her schooling in France. Estella represents the life of wealth and culture for which Pip strives. Since Miss Havisham has sabotaged Estella’s ability to love, Estella cannot return Pip’s passion. She warns Pip of this repeatedly, but he will not or cannot believe her. Estella does not know that she is the daughter of Molly, Jaggers’s housekeeper, and the convict Abel Magwitch, given up for adoption to Miss Havisham after her mother was arrested for murder. In marrying Bentley Drummle, she rebels against Miss Havisham’s plan to have her break a husband’s heart, as Drummle is not interested in Estella but simply in the Havisham fortune.
3. Matthew Pocket, Miss Havisham’s cousin. He is the patriarch of the Pocket family, but unlike her other relatives, he is not greedy for Havisham’s wealth. Matthew Pocket tutors young gentlemen, such as Bentley Drummle, Startop, Pip and his own son Herbert.
4. Herbert Pocket, the son of Matthew Pocket, who was invited like Pip to visit Miss Havisham, but she did not take to him. Pip first meets Herbert as a “pale young gentleman” who challenges Pip to a fistfight at Miss Havisham’s house when both are children. He later becomes Pip’s friend, tutoring him in the “gentlemanly” arts and sharing his rooms with Pip in London.
5. Camilla, one of the sisters of Matthew Pocket, and therefore a cousin of Miss Havisham, she is an obsequious, detestable woman who is intent on pleasing Miss Havisham to get her money.
6. Cousin Raymond, a relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money. He is married to Camilla.
7. Georgiana, a relative of Miss Havisham who is only interested in her money. She is one of the many relatives who hang around Miss Havisham “like flies” for her wealth.
8. Sarah Pocket, the sister of Matthew Pocket, relative of Miss Havisham. She is often at Satis House. She is described as “a dry, brown corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made out of walnut shells, and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers.”
From Pip’s youth
1. The Convict, who escapes from a prison ship, whom Pip treats kindly, and who in turn becomes Pip’s benefactor. His name is Abel Magwitch, but he uses the aliases “Provis” and “Mr Campbell” when he returns to England from exile in Australia. He is a lesser actor in crime with Compeyson, but gains a longer sentence in an apparent application of justice by social class.
2. Mr and Mrs Hubble, simple folk who think they are more important than they really are. They live in Pip’s village.
3. Mr Wopsle, clerk of the church in Pip’s village. He later gives up the church work and moves to London to pursue his ambition to be an actor, adopting the stage name “Mr Waldengarver.” He sees the other convict in the audience of one of his performances, attended also by Pip.
4. Biddy, Wopsle’s second cousin and near Pip’s age; she teaches in the evening school at her grandmother’s home in Pip’s village. Pip wants to learn more, so he asks her to teach him all she can. After helping Mrs Joe after the attack, Biddy opens her own school. A kind and intelligent but poor young woman, she is, like Pip and Estella, an orphan. She acts as Estella’s foil. Orlick was attracted to her, but she did not want his attentions. Pip ignores her affections for him as he pursues Estella. Recovering from his own illness after the failed attempt to get Magwitch out of England, Pip returns to claim Biddy as his bride, arriving in the village just after she marries Joe Gargery. Biddy and Joe later have two children, one named after Pip. In the ending to the novel discarded by Dickens but revived by students of the novel’s development, Estella mistakes the boy as Pip’s child.
Mr Jaggers and his circle
1. Mr Wemmick and “The Aged P.”, illustration by Sol Eytinge Jr.
2. Mr Jaggers, prominent London lawyer who represents the interests of diverse clients, both criminal and civil. He represents Pip’s benefactor and Miss Havisham as well. By the end of the story, his law practice links many of the characters.
3. John Wemmick, Jaggers’s clerk, who is Pip’s chief go-between with Jaggers and looks after Pip in London. Wemmick lives with his father, “The Aged Parent”, in a small replica of a castle, complete with a drawbridge and moat, in Walworth.
4. Molly, Mr Jaggers’s maidservant whom Jaggers saved from the gallows for murder. She is revealed to be Magwitch’s estranged wife and Estella’s mother.
5. Antagonists
6. Compeyson, a convict who escapes the prison ship after Magwitch, who beats him up ashore. He is Magwitch’s enemy. A professional swindler, he was engaged to marry Miss Havisham, but he was in league with her half-brother, Arthur Havisham, to defraud Miss Havisham of part of her fortune. Later he sets up Magwitch to take the fall for another swindle. He works with the police when he learns Abel Magwitch is in London, fearing Magwitch after their first escapes years earlier. When the police boat encounters the one carrying Magwitch, the two grapple, and Compeyson drowns in the Thames.
7. Arthur Havisham, younger half brother of Miss Havisham, who plots with Compeyson to swindle her.
8. Dolge Orlick, journeyman blacksmith at Joe Gargery’s forge. Strong, rude and sullen, he is as churlish as Joe is gentle and kind. He ends up in a fistfight with Joe over Mrs Gargery’s taunting, and Joe easily defeats him. This sets in motion an escalating chain of events that leads him secretly to assault Mrs Gargery and to try to kill her brother Pip. The police ultimately arrest him for housebreaking into Uncle Pumblechook’s, where he is later jailed.
9. Bentley Drummle, a coarse, unintelligent young man from a wealthy noble family being “the next heir but one to a baronetcy”. Pip meets him at Mr Pocket’s house, as Drummle is also to be trained in gentlemanly skills. Drummle is hostile to Pip and everyone else. He is a rival for Estella’s attentions and eventually marries her and is said to abuse her. He dies from an accident following his mistreatment of a horse.
10. Other characters
11. Clara Barley, a very poor girl living with her gout-ridden father. She marries Herbert Pocket near the novel’s end. She dislikes Pip at first because of his spendthrift ways. After she marries Herbert, they invite Pip to live with them.
12. Miss Skiffins occasionally visits Wemmick’s house and wears green gloves. She changes those green gloves for white ones when she marries Wemmick.
13. Startop, like Bentley Drummle, is Pip’s fellow student, but unlike Drummle, he is kind. He assists Pip and Herbert in their efforts to help Magwitch escape.

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Great Expectation (1861) – Charles Dickens

About the Author: Abirlal Mukherjee (Mukhopadhyay)

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Great Expectation (1861) – Charles Dickens

About the Author: Abirlal Mukherjee (Mukhopadhyay)

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