Great Expectations

I read Great Expectations first at sixteen and thought it was about a boy who gets money. Rereading now, with the Chapman and Hall 1861 book in mind and a modern 544 page Penguin text in hand, I see it is about shame. How it sticks. How money feeds it. How love can be trained into cruelty. Dickens serialized it in All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861, then published it in three volumes in 1861. I took it slow this time, a section a night, and the marsh scenes still smell of wet grass and iron.

Pip Pirrip grows up on the Kent marshes with his sister Mrs Joe, who raises him by hand, meaning with a cane, and her kind husband Joe Gargery the blacksmith. Pip is small, hungry, scared of churchyards. On a gray afternoon he brings food and a file to an escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, hiding in the graves. He steals pork pie and brandy from home, shaking the whole time. Magwitch grabs him, eats, thanks him in a rough way, gets caught, and is shipped away. Pip thinks that is the end. It is the start.

Money enters through Miss Havisham. She lives in Satis House, half dark, in a yellowed wedding dress, with clocks stopped at twenty to nine. Jilted decades ago on her wedding morning, she raises an adopted girl, Estella, to be beautiful and cold, to break men's hearts as hers was broken. Pip is sent to play there. He meets Estella, proud and bright, who mocks his boots and hands. He falls for her at once and hates his home for being common. Miss Havisham watches and smiles. She pays for Pip to be bound to Joe as apprentice, then seems to forget him.

London and the fortune

When Pip is about eighteen, a lawyer named Mr Jaggers brings news. A secret patron will make Pip a gentleman. Pip will get money for London, for clothes, for study, for joining good society. He must never ask who pays. Pip assumes Miss Havisham means him for Estella. He leaves Joe and Biddy, good people who love him, with a careless goodbye. He takes rooms in London with Herbert Pocket, a cheerful young man who teaches him how to eat, dress, owe money, and laugh at himself. Pip learns to be a gentleman mostly by spending.

London chapters are my favorite for texture. Fog on the stairs. Clerks shouting. Jaggers washing his hands with scented soap after court. Wemmick with a post box mouth and a tiny castle at Walworth with a cannon fired at nine. Bentley Drummle, slow and cruel. Startop, kind. Estella, now grown, glittering at balls, engaged in cool talk with many men and warmth with none. Pip watches her and pays tailor bills he cannot afford. He joins a club called the Finches. He runs up debts. He looks down on Joe when Joe visits and talks too loud. That visit hurt me more than any prison scene. Joe, so large and gentle in a London coat, calling Pip sir. Pip, ashamed of his shame.

Miss Havisham keeps pulling strings. She lets Pip think she is his patron. She asks him to love Estella. She parades Estella before him and Drummle and others. Estella warns him straight out. She has no heart. She was raised to punish. Pip hears it as a puzzle to solve with more love. He is twenty and certain.

Then the convict returns. On a rainy night Magwitch knocks at Pip's door, old and wet, with money and love in his eyes. He is Pip's patron. He made a fortune sheep farming in Australia and sent it all to make the boy who fed him a gentleman. If caught in England, where he was sentenced to exile for life, he will hang. Pip faints. When he wakes, everything flips. His fine life is built on prison labor and kindness, not on a lady's favor. His disgust at Magwitch shames him at once. Magwitch only wants to see his gentleman drink tea.

Trying to save Magwitch

The second half turns into a quiet thriller. Pip, Herbert, and Wemmick try to hide Magwitch and get him out by boat down the Thames. Pip stops spending. He sells what he can. He works. He learns Magwitch's story. As a boy Magwitch was hungry and beaten, jailed for small thefts, used by a smooth partner named Compeyson, the same man who jilted Miss Havisham. Compeyson got light time. Magwitch got heavy time. Hate kept him alive. Love for Pip steadied him.

Estella's past threads in here too. Jaggers handled her as a child. Her mother was Molly, Jaggers's housekeeper, once tried for murder. Her father was Magwitch. Miss Havisham took her and raised her cold. So Estella, whom Pip worshipped as a star, is the daughter of a convict and a servant, raised as revenge. Pip learns this late and sits very still with it. Class, the thing he chased, was paint all along.

Miss Havisham breaks in a scene I will not forget. Pip confronts her. You let me think you were my patron. You let me love Estella knowing she could not love back. Miss Havisham, in her rotting dress, asks for pardon. What have I done. She catches fire from her own hearth leaning too close. Pip burns his hands saving her. She lives a while, blind and pained, repeating forgive me. It is too late for clean pardon, but Pip gives what he can.

The boat escape fails. Police and Compeyson close on the river. Magwitch and Compeyson grapple in the water. Compeyson drowns. Magwitch is caught, tried, sentenced to death, already dying from chest injury and age. Pip visits daily, reads to him, tells him his daughter Estella lives and is beautiful and loved. Magwitch smiles and dies at peace. The state takes his money, so Pip's fortune ends. Creditors come. Pip gets sick with fever. Joe nurses him without a word about debts or pride, then leaves money for bills and slips away rather than embarrass Pip awake. Pip follows him home to the forge to say plain words at last.

Home and the end

Home chapters feel washed clean after London smoke. Biddy has married Joe, which stings Pip and then settles. Pip works as a clerk abroad with Herbert, pays debts slowly, learns to live on little. He is no longer a gentleman in money, but he is gentler as a man. That pun would have made Dickens smile.

Years later Pip returns to the old marshes and to Satis House, now mostly pulled down. Mist hangs. He meets Estella there. She married Drummle, who hurt her and died. She is softer, tired, kinder. They walk out together. Dickens first wrote a bleak parting, then at Bulwer Lytton's urging wrote the known ending where Pip sees no shadow of another parting. It is not a promise of marriage. It is a hint that two bruised people might sit easy. I like the restraint. After so much wanting, a quiet walk is enough.

What holds strongest is voice. Pip narrates as an older man looking back, fond and severe with his young self. He tells you when he was a snob. He tells you what dinner cost and what coat he wore and why it mattered to a boy who owned nothing. Joe's speech, slow and true, breaks my heart every time. You are not common, Joe tells Pip. Common is in the mind, not the coat. Jaggers's hand washing, Wemmick's castle, Miss Havisham's cake covered in spiders and mice. Dickens piles objects until they mean.

Estella is harder. Some readers find her thin. I see her as made thin on purpose, starved of ordinary feeling by training, then slowly fed by pain. Her change at the end is small. A hand held longer. A sentence finished softly. That smallness feels earned after Drummle.

What drags. The middle London debt plot repeats. Pip buys, regrets, borrows, repeats. Herbert's schemes to place himself in business take pages. Mr Pumblechook and Mrs Joe comedy bits, funny at first, go long. Compeyson as pure villain feels flat next to Magwitch's full life. And Miss Havisham's fire, while vivid, arrives fast after long stasis.

Jaggers, Wemmick, and the law

I want to spend more time with Jaggers and Wemmick because they carry Dickens at his best. Jaggers is the great London lawyer, sharp eyes, heavy watch chain, a room full of death masks of hanged clients. He washes his hands with scented soap after every case, as if to rinse off guilt. He never tells Pip who pays. He never lies outright. He lets Pip dream wrong and bills for the dreaming. Yet he also saves Estella as a baby, places her with Miss Havisham, keeps Molly as housekeeper rather than letting her hang. His mercy hides inside procedure. I liked that_complex mix more on this read than the fog.

Wemmick is the clerk with two faces and he knows it. At work he is dry, takes bribes in the form of portable property, nods at Jaggers. At home in Walworth he has a tiny castle with a drawbridge, a cannon, an aged father called the Aged P, a fiancee named Miss Skiffins. He tells Pip to get portable property and to marry for love, both in the same breath. His advice to Pip about Magwitch, to hold tight and say little, saves lives. The castle scenes, with tea and toast and the flag raised on Sundays, give the book air when London offices choke. They also show Dickens saying a man can be hard at work and soft at home without splitting in two.

Biddy and Joe deserve a longer note too. Biddy teaches in the village school, learns from books she borrows, sees Pip clearly from the start. She tells him Estella is not worth his hurt, not from jealousy but from sense. She marries Joe after Pip leaves, not as second prize but as two kind people choosing calm. Joe speaks slow because he thinks slow and true. His forgiveness never turns into lecture. When Pip is sick and broke, Joe pays the surgeon, nurses him, leaves a note and goes home before thanks can sour into debt talk. I cried at that note again. It lists no sums. It just wishes health.

Money and class up close

Dickens keeps showing how money moves through hands. Pip gets twenty five pounds, then five hundred a year, then debts to match. Tailors bow. Bootmakers measure. Club waiters remember. Herbert, poor gentleman himself, teaches Pip to behave by writing memos on conduct. They start a club to fine themselves for bad habits and spend the fines on dinner. It is funny until bills come. Pip owes all over town. He hides letters. He thinks a rich marriage will fix arithmetic. It will not, and Dickens, who knew debt fear himself, writes the dread well. Knocks at doors. Steps on stairs. A name called in a coffee house.

Magwitch's money has a different smell. Hard sheep work in heat, saved coin by coin, sent across seas with love. Pip first finds it dirty. Then he finds it cleaner than Miss Havisham's games. Compeyson's money, by contrast, is all paper and charm, forged notes and false promises. Jaggers handles all three streams with the same soap. The point lands without speech. How money is made marks how it feels to spend.

Estella's coldness reads clearer when you track cash. Raised as ornament, shown off at rich tables, told to attract and refuse, she learns to price herself high and feel little. Drummle buys her with title and temper. Pip offers love without price and she cannot use it until pain teaches her value beyond market. Her late softness is not a cure. It is a first honest accounting.

Still, I would press this on anyone who thinks classics are slow. The marsh opening, the London fog, the river chase, the forge close. Four strong movements with jokes and fear between. It taught me again that wanting to rise is not the sin. Forgetting who fed you on the way is. Pip forgets Joe to chase Estella, forgets Biddy's plain sense, forgets Magwitch's humanity until it knocks wet at his door. Remembering costs him his fortune and returns him to himself.

I closed my copy with burnt fingers in mind. Pip's hands scarred from saving the woman who used him. Joe's hands rough from honest work. Magwitch's hands chained then freed by death. Dickens keeps score on hands. Mine held the book a little tighter.