Great Expectations: Pip’s Class Dream, Convict Benefactor, and Two Endings

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 29

# Great Expectations: Pip's Class Dream, Convict Benefactor, and Two Endings

This factual guide introduces the serial publication, complete story, characters, three-stage structure, and major themes of Great Expectations. It does not replace the novel. The one-minute introduction avoids the ending; the full guide includes domestic abuse, punishment, fire, drowning, death, and both endings.

One-minute introduction

On the coastal marshes of Kent, orphan Philip Pirrip derives the name Pip from letters on family gravestones. One cold evening he meets escaped convict Magwitch beside his parents' grave and is forced to steal food and a file. Pip believes the secret can bring only punishment, not knowing that a small act of mercy has changed another life.

Soon, wealthy Miss Havisham summons Pip to Satis House, a mansion stopped on the morning of a cancelled wedding. Her adopted daughter Estella mocks his coarse hands and thick boots. He learns to despise the forge and Joe, the blacksmith brother-in-law who loves him. Years later, lawyer Jaggers announces that an anonymous patron will finance Pip's education as a London gentleman. Pip assumes Miss Havisham is preparing him to marry Estella. The novel lets him inhabit those “great expectations”, then makes him confront the source of money, the projections of desire, and the actual cost of gentility.

Essential facts

  • Author: Charles Dickens (1812–1870). Great Expectations was his thirteenth novel and penultimate completed one.
  • First appearance: thirty-six weekly instalments in Dickens's journal All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861. Weekly suspense contributed to an unusually compact plot.
  • Book edition: an unillustrated three-volume edition from Chapman and Hall in July 1861. Its volumes correspond to the novel's three “Stages”; the book appeared before the final serial instalments had all run.
  • Form: fifty-nine chapters narrated retrospectively in the first person. Child Pip's immediate sensations coexist with adult Pip's shame, irony, and revision.
  • Time and place: principally the first half of the nineteenth century, moving from Kent marshes, forge, and a Rochester-like town to London, the Thames, and overseas commerce.
  • Title: “expectations” means hopes and also anticipated property or income in the language of inheritance. Pip receives not only a dream but an identity made from anonymous money, conditions, and misreading.
  • Manuscript: Dickens gave the bound manuscript in 1861 to Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend, who bequeathed it to Wisbech and Fenland Museum in 1868.
  • Textual issue: on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's advice Dickens replaced his first ending. Modern critical editions normally print the revised ending published in his lifetime and append the unused original.

Why Dickens turned to weekly serialisation

After the success of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, All the Year Round needed another work capable of sustaining circulation. A successor was not holding readers, and Dickens interrupted other plans to devise Great Expectations under weekly editorial pressure. Its first number concentrates graveyard, fugitive, hunger, threat, stolen food, file, and a second convict into a small space. It satisfies and leaves mechanisms for return.

The three Stages fit the triple-decker and reverse the educational novel. Stage One covers childhood, Satis House, and apprenticeship, ending with the expectations. Stage Two covers London formation, debt, and estrangement, ending when the benefactor appears. Stage Three holds the escape plan, revelations of parentage, lost property, and moral rebuilding. Whenever Pip thinks life is about to begin, the marsh returns in another form.

Dickens provided no illustrations for the British first edition, leaving first-person language and readers' imagination unusually dominant. Contemporary American publication in Harper's Weekly included images and should not be treated as identical material form.

Stage One: graveyard, convict, and stolen food

Pip's parents and five dead brothers lie in the churchyard. He imagines their bodies from letter shapes, establishing identity as something made by text, error, and desire. An escaped convict seizes him and demands food and a tool for his iron, inventing a savage accomplice to terrify him.

Pip is raised “by hand” by his irritable sister Mrs Joe Gargery, who beats him. Her husband Joe is a strong blacksmith, gentle and barely literate, and treats Pip as an equal companion. Joe's kindness is real, although his passivity does not stop his wife's violence. On Christmas Eve Pip steals pie, brandy, bread, and other food, along with a file from the forge, and carries them to the fugitive.

Soldiers later require Joe to repair handcuffs, then lead a search across the marsh. Magwitch is found fighting another escaped man, Compeyson. After recapture, Magwitch says he stole the food and file, protecting Pip. Society labels him criminal, yet he shields a child; adults claiming respectability can be cruel. Legal status and moral conduct separate in the opening movement.

The marsh is not only Gothic atmosphere. Fog obscures direction, river links London and maritime movement, prison hulks sit offshore, and the sound of irons seems to pursue Pip through mud. When he leaves, crime and money return by the same water.

Satis House: how shame is manufactured

Joe's uncle Pumblechook claims credit for securing Pip an opportunity with wealthy Miss Havisham. Satis means enough, but its owner is frozen by unsatisfied revenge. Miss Havisham wears a yellowing bridal dress, excludes daylight, keeps clocks at twenty minutes to nine, and lets the wedding feast decay. One abandoned moment consumes all later time.

Estella plays cards with Pip and mocks his language, hands, boots, and labouring habits. He had not been ashamed of blacksmith life; her contempt becomes his eye on himself. Class enters bodily perception before London, turning useful hands into evidence to hide.

In the yard Pip fights and defeats a “pale young gentleman”, later identified as Herbert Pocket. Miss Havisham repeatedly orders Pip to love Estella without permitting mutual knowledge. She enjoys relatives circling an inheritance and lets Pip believe he may be selected. She never promises him money or marriage, but knowingly declines to correct the inference.

When Pip reaches apprenticeship age, Miss Havisham pays Joe a premium and ends the visits. Having once wished to learn the forge, Pip now experiences it as enclosure. The loss is not blacksmithing itself but his adoption of Estella's judgment of Joe and himself.

Joe, Biddy, and Orlick: the forge is no pure idyll

Biddy studies with Pip at an improvised school and helps him learn. Intelligent and direct, she recognises that he both wants gentility and imagines changing Estella. Pip confides in her while treating her as safe audience and possible reserve, not always as an independent judge.

Forge worker Orlick resents Pip, quarrels with Joe, and hates Mrs Joe. She is later struck with an old leg iron and left disabled and unable to speak clearly. Biddy moves in to care for her. Pip suspects Orlick, yet converts the childhood aid to a fugitive into diffuse self-blame, absorbing violence he did not commit. Adult narration retains this tendency: sincere remorse can become a drama with Pip at its centre.

Mrs Joe changes after the attack and eventually dies. The narrative neither forgets her earlier abuse nor treats the assault as a clean punishment for a bad woman. Domestic and public violence meet in the leg iron.

The great expectations arrive

Several years into apprenticeship, London lawyer Jaggers announces that an unnamed benefactor will educate Pip as a gentleman under Jaggers's guardianship. Conditions include retaining “Pip”, making no inquiry, and attempting no contact. Pip instantly fills the blank with Miss Havisham and imagines Estella as the prize.

Pumblechook recasts himself as Pip's maker, and neighbours change towards anticipated money. Joe refuses compensation for losing an apprentice, declining to price affection. Pip is embarrassed by Joe's clothes, accent, and manners even before departure, trying to stage a genteel farewell while creating distance.

Nothing in the expectations commands him to despise home. Jaggers supplies money and education; Pip chooses to interpret movement as severance from the forge. The older narrator repeatedly admits this collaboration, making the book a confession about desire rather than merely a poor child corrupted from outside.

Stage Two: London is not the imagined capital

Pip's first London contains crowding, dirt, courts, prisons, and slaughterhouse smell rather than gentlemanly radiance. Jaggers's office in Little Britain is packed with criminal clients who fear him. He repeatedly washes his hands, treating professional contact as contamination, though water cannot make classed law neutral.

Pip lodges at dilapidated Barnard's Inn and recognises Herbert Pocket as the pale gentleman. Herbert, generous and cheerful, calls him Handel and explains Miss Havisham's history. Her wealthy brewer father left property, while half-brother Arthur and swindler Compeyson plotted against her. Compeyson gained trust through courtship and money, then sent a letter on the wedding morning. He is also the second convict from the marsh. Marriage fraud and the criminal world belong to one network.

Matthew Pocket gives Pip broad education and genteel speech without a defined profession. The Pocket family itself is full of social aspiration and domestic disorder. Fellow pupils include kind Startop and Bentley Drummle, brutal despite wealth and birth. Drummle refutes the equation between gentlemanly origin and gentlemanly character.

Pip joins the spending club Finches of the Grove. He and Herbert calculate their debts ceremonially and continue purchasing. At twenty-one Pip receives five hundred pounds yearly while the final capital remains secret. Expectations make current funds feel like advances on limitless future property: debt is a delusion about time.

Jaggers and Wemmick: can professional selves be divided?

Jaggers's clerk John Wemmick treats office clients as sources of information and “portable property”, wearing a post-office expression. At his self-built Walworth Castle, he tends his Aged Parent, operates bridge and garden rituals, and eventually marries Miss Skiffins. He tries to separate professional and domestic selves completely.

The division is survival and an ethical problem. If goodness exists only at home, does institutional harm cease to belong to the worker? Wemmick privately warns Pip and assists Magwitch's escape, provided Jaggers never knows. Jaggers appears to lack a private self, but later evidence suggests he quietly changed the lives of a woman and child.

Pip's best use of money also passes through Wemmick. He secretly finances Herbert's partnership in Clarriker's business, preserving his friend's independence and work. Magwitch displays Pip as “his” gentleman; Pip's gift, by contrast, does not demand a public identity of debt. The funds still derive from unearned income, but he begins to understand help without ownership.

Joe in London and Pip at home: shame becomes betrayal

Joe comes to London in an ill-fitting suit with a message, uncomfortable among Pip's rooms and Herbert. Pip is equally anxious about grammar, hat, and manners. Joe concludes gently that he and Pip are most natural together at the forge. Class performance has become a barrier between them.

When Pip later visits Satis House, he chooses an inn rather than Joe's home, fearing that old life will lower him. Estella has returned from education abroad with greater power over admirers. She says she has not been taught to love and repeatedly warns Pip not to expect it. He treats the warning as evidence of unique confidence and assumes Miss Havisham's programme is still preparing them.

Estella shows preference for Drummle, and Pip becomes jealous. She decides to marry the brute, perhaps through a pattern of self-harm, resistance to Miss Havisham, or inability to recognise reciprocity. No single motive closes the choice. Pip regards her as the destination of his expectations and seldom asks what life she wants.

A stormy night: the benefactor returns from Australia

After Pip turns twenty-three, a rough elderly man enters in rain. Pip recognises the churchyard convict. Magwitch announces that after transportation to New South Wales he prospered through livestock and labour, placed money with Jaggers, and returned illegally to see the gentleman he made. A transported person returning under sentence risked death.

Pip initially feels revulsion and terror. He loses both the fantasy of Miss Havisham's patronage and an intended marriage, then realises he deserted Joe for wealth produced by a convict. The amount has not altered; a label attached to its source makes the identity seem polluted. Gentlemanly society accepts colonial money into London so long as the person who made it does not enter the drawing room.

Magwitch has possessive expectations too. Dressing Pip as a gentleman repays childhood kindness and takes revenge on the society that punished him. He displays a human investment while knowing little about Pip's vocation or affections. Pip gradually encounters not an abstract criminal but an ageing person who loves him, has risked everything, and needs protection.

Compeyson: courts also read clothes and accent

Magwitch tells of hunger, homelessness, and repeated exploitation before educated Compeyson recruited him for crime. At joint trial, Compeyson used respectable dress, controlled speech, and counsel to present himself as led astray by rough Magwitch, receiving lighter punishment.

Compeyson is also Miss Havisham's false bridegroom, aided by her half-brother Arthur. Satis House, prison hulk, and Pip's London income are rooms in one classed legal system. A man capable of performing gentility more easily appears to a court as an unfortunate associate; visible roughness receives a heavier moral identity.

Pip and Herbert conceal Magwitch under the name Provis near the riverside home of Herbert's fiancée Clara, intending to row towards an outbound steamer and avoid watched docks. Wemmick privately warns that Pip's rooms are observed. This flight differs from the boy's ascent away from the forge: adult Pip now accepts risk for another life.

Miss Havisham's remorse and fire

At Satis House Pip confirms that Miss Havisham was never his benefactor and challenges her cultivation of the mistake. She admits the inference began without a full design, then became enjoyable when grasping relatives shared it. Pip asks her not for compensation but funds to complete Herbert's business arrangement. She agrees through Jaggers and asks forgiveness.

She sees too late that raising Estella to revenge herself on men did not protect a girl; it made another generation unable to love or receive love. Repentance cannot cancel the years but makes her more than a frozen eccentric. Her bridal dress then catches fire at the hearth. Pip uses coat and hands to extinguish it and is badly burnt. Miss Havisham later dies of the injuries.

Fire restores time to the decades-stopped bridal chamber. The burns on Pip's hands answer the coarse hands he wished to hide: they now bear injury from saving someone. Hands throughout the novel work, incriminate, wash, and care.

Estella's parents: an origin assembled from fragments

From Magwitch, Pip hears of Molly, a woman with whom he had a daughter. Accused of killing another woman in jealousy, Molly was defended successfully by Jaggers, who exploited weaknesses in the case and presentation of her powerful wrists. She later became his silent, intimidating housekeeper. Magwitch believed the child dead.

Pip combines age, appearance, and several accounts to conclude that Estella is Magwitch and Molly's daughter. Jaggers does not give a simple testimonial declaration, but acknowledges that he once transferred a baby at risk of crime and poverty to Miss Havisham, believing secrecy protective.

Class lineage turns inside out. The aristocratic ideal who taught a forge boy shame is a child of two people connected with criminal courts. The point is not inherited criminality. Estella's coldness was mainly manufactured by Miss Havisham's education, just as Pip's shame was socially manufactured. Noble and criminal families are institutional stories.

Orlick's ambush and the return of old violence

An anonymous note draws Pip to an abandoned sluice-house near home. Orlick binds him, confesses attacking Mrs Joe, and plans murder from unemployment, jealousy, and accumulated grievance. Leg iron, forge conflict, and childhood fear converge just before the escape attempt.

Facing death, Pip's worst pain is not losing the expectations but inability to tell Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch that he has changed. Herbert, Startop, and Trabb's boy follow clues and rescue him. Cooperation across rank saves him, and a boy dismissed by genteel townspeople becomes the decisive actor.

Thames escape, trial, and Magwitch's death

Pip, Herbert, and Startop practise rowing, then carry Magwitch down the Thames to meet an overseas steamer. A police boat intercepts them with informer Compeyson aboard. Magwitch lunges at his old enemy; both enter the water. Compeyson drowns and Magwitch is injured and arrested.

The Crown forfeits his colonial estate, cancelling Pip's expectations. Rather than deny the connection to protect money, Pip stays through prison, trial, and sickbed. Magwitch receives a death sentence but dies before execution. Pip tells him that his daughter lives and that he loves her. It cannot change judgment but restores the patron from “convict who made a gentleman” to a father who lost a child.

One good deed does not erase Magwitch's crimes, and legal conviction does not exhaust his moral being. The state transported him, allowed wealth to return, then seized life and property when his body followed. Repentance, public safety, class bias, and imperial economy remain in conflict.

Bankruptcy, Joe's care, and a second departure

With expectations gone, Pip is indebted and gravely ill. As creditors close in, Joe comes to London, nurses him, and pays the debts without claiming a moral triumph. Intimacy revives during fever. Once Pip recovers health and class consciousness, Joe quietly leaves, with a note saying the bills are settled.

Pip returns intending to marry Biddy as if she has been waiting. He arrives on the day she and Joe have married. They have not betrayed him; once more he imagined other lives as a reserve ending in his plot. He asks forgiveness, blesses them, and accepts Herbert's invitation to join Clarriker's overseas business.

This departure reverses London. Pip starts low, works, pays what he owes, and eventually becomes partner rather than dependent on secret inheritance. Yet honest employment remains in British overseas commerce. Local and Indigenous labour stay outside narration. Empire first serves as Magwitch's punishment and enrichment, then as the space of Pip's respectable rebuilding.

What the two endings mean

In the manuscript ending, Pip walks in London years later with Joe and Biddy's child, little Pip, and encounters Estella in a carriage. Drummle has died after an accident caused by abusing a horse, and Estella has married a poor doctor who once protected her. Mistaking the child for Pip's, she kisses him. The adults shake hands and part. Pip understands that suffering has allowed her to recognise the heart she once injured. Their marriage is explicitly unavailable, but acknowledgment is possible.

After Bulwer-Lytton's response, Dickens wrote the ending published in his lifetime. Eleven years later, unmarried Pip visits Joe, Biddy, and their child, then walks through demolished Satis House. In the ruined garden he meets widowed Estella. Drummle's abuse and loss have changed her. They acknowledge injury and leave as friends; in the evening Pip sees no shadow of another parting.

There is no wedding. The absence of a parting shadow can suggest a shared future, a present reconciliation, or Pip's continued habit of turning hope into fact. The revision offers greater symmetry and possibility; the draft more clearly refuses to reward growth with Estella. Neither is simply unhappy versus happily ever after. Estella has a life independent of Pip in both, and Pip ceases demanding the old dream from her.

Retrospective first person: child and adult Pip speak together

The graveyard gives child logic directly: Pip infers faces from lettering and believes the fugitive's invention. Adult prose preserves fear precisely while allowing readers to perceive adult absurdity. The superimposition produces humour and pain.

The older Pip knows which assumptions failed and judges his snobbery, ingratitude, and passivity harshly. He is not a perfectly objective final court. Remorse can overstate his centrality in other people's suffering, his Estella narrative remains shaped by obsession, and the revised last sentence may create another expectation. Confession does not guarantee total reliability.

Suspense depends on the narrator withholding what he now knows so readers relive previous ignorance. Patron, Compeyson, Estella's parents, and Orlick connect gradually. Narrative does not merely report from maturity; it makes mistaken expectation operate again.

Gentleman, labour, and class performance

Pip initially defines gentleman through income, clothes, accent, education, and freedom from manual work. London supplies counterexamples: Drummle has birth without mercy, Pumblechook pretension without rank, Jaggers power without intimacy, Herbert generosity without wealth, Joe loyalty without grammar, and Magwitch sacrifice within criminal history.

The novel places reliability, gratitude, care, work, and responsibility at the ethical centre of gentility, without pretending social hierarchy disappears. Joe's London discomfort is real, courts do favour a Compeyson performance, and Pip's education creates language and opportunity. Moral revaluation does not abolish inequality.

Blacksmith labour remains a measure. Joe's hands make and mend; Magwitch needs a file against irons; Pip learns shame about hands and burns them in rescue. Dickens does not command him to retain one occupation forever. He learns that productive labour is no lower than consumption or inheritance.

Principal characters

  • Pip: orphan, apprentice, gentleman-in-training, and retrospective narrator. Sensitive and compassionate, snobbish and self-deceiving; growth means accepting relational responsibility, not winning a person.
  • Joe Gargery: Pip's blacksmith brother-in-law, offering unconditional care and dignity of work. His gentleness is admirable, while passive response to domestic violence is a limitation.
  • Biddy: intelligent, practical teacher and carer who recognises Pip's delusions. She is not a substitute romance awaiting the protagonist.
  • Abel Magwitch: transported convict shaped by poverty and criminal networks, enriched in New South Wales, and patron of Pip. Generous, possessive, unlawful, and deeply paternal.
  • Miss Havisham: wealthy victim of marriage fraud who trains Estella as revenge, then sees the consequences of reproducing injury.
  • Estella: child of Magwitch and Molly and adopted daughter of Miss Havisham. She carries out a heartbreak education and warns Pip; she injures and has been manufactured to injure.
  • Herbert Pocket: friend and business partner, representing work, mutual aid, and more equal adult friendship.
  • Jaggers: criminal lawyer and manager of secrets, skilled in evidentiary rules, serving institutions while secretly altering Molly's and Estella's lives.
  • Wemmick: clerk who divides office efficiency from Walworth kindness and privately helps Pip at crucial moments.
  • Compeyson: genteel fraudster, Magwitch's former partner and Miss Havisham's false bridegroom, showing class performance at court and in courtship.
  • Bentley Drummle: born and wealthy gentleman without gentleness, who marries and abuses Estella.
  • Orlick: forge worker and attacker who turns grievance against Mrs Joe and Pip.

Major themes

Expectation and self-deception. Anonymous facts are sparse, while Pip completes patron, marriage, and destiny through desire. Expectation changes his treatment of present people.

Class, shame, and the gentleman. Estella's gaze makes the labouring body feel defective. Socially recognisable gentility and ethical worth are distinguished, though material society does not make them coincide.

Crime, law, and morality. Magwitch is convicted and protective; Compeyson respectable and exploitative; courts read clothes and accent. Law remains necessary without monopolising value.

Empire and invisible sources of wealth. Australia is penal space and producer of a London gentleman's income. It remains a distant mechanism from which local and Indigenous experience is absent.

Education, work, and debt. Education enlarges capacity and becomes a consumer identity. Herbert builds through work; Pip matures by repaying financial and affective obligations.

Parenting as manufacture. Magwitch uses money to make a gentleman, Miss Havisham uses trauma to make a heartbreaker, and Jaggers uses secrecy to make a safe identity. Treating children as projects obscures autonomy.

Fire, hands, chains, and river. Fire creates at the forge and destroys at Satis; hands work, incriminate, wash, and nurse; chains link marsh to household; river joins fear, empire, and responsibility.

Common oversimplifications and reading suggestions

Pip's gentility is not an inspirational success track but an experiment in desire, misrecognition, and responsibility. Miss Havisham never promises money or marriage: she encourages the inference, and Pip chooses belief. Estella is not born heartless but trained as an instrument, while still making consequential choices. Magwitch is not a hidden perfect father; generosity contains possession and revenge, though Pip learns care beyond label. Joe is not noble automatically because poor: goodness lies in conduct, and avoidance also has costs. The revised ending remains ambiguous and does not state a Pip–Estella marriage.

For a first reading, divide the book into three Stages and record what Pip expects, whom he ignores, and what he owes in each. Draw the secret chains Magwitch–Compeyson–Miss Havisham and Magwitch–Molly–Jaggers–Estella. Mark when adult Pip comments on the child, separating experienced feeling from retrospective verdict. Follow hands, food, file, money, fire, and fog. Read both endings before choosing a preference, asking what each makes education cost.

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