Five-minute digest
Great Expectations
Summary
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive. Pip is then sent to play at Satis House, where the wealthy Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding day, still wears her yellowed bridal dress among stopped clocks and a rotting wedding feast. Her proud adopted daughter Estella mocks Pip as a common laboring boy, and he grows ashamed of the forge and of Joe even after he is bound as Joe's apprentice. His sister is struck down by an unseen attacker and left an invalid, and the kind, clever Biddy comes to keep house. Then the London lawyer Jaggers announces that Pip has great expectations: an unnamed benefactor will make him a gentleman. Believing Miss Havisham is his patron and Estella intended for him, Pip goes to London, shares rooms with the cheerful Herbert Pocket, runs into debt and is embarrassed when Joe visits. Estella, raised to break men's hearts, marries the brutish Bentley Drummle. One stormy night the convict, Abel Magwitch, returns from New South Wales, where he has grown rich, and reveals that he is Pip's benefactor, having risked hanging to see the gentleman he made. Pip is horrified, yet he and Herbert shelter him. Pip learns that Magwitch's old enemy Compeyson was Miss Havisham's faithless bridegroom and that Estella is Magwitch's lost daughter. Miss Havisham, repenting what she has done, begs Pip's forgiveness; her dress catches fire and Pip is burned saving her. Pip barely escapes murder by the journeyman Orlick, his sister's attacker. An attempt to smuggle Magwitch abroad by the Thames fails; Compeyson drowns in the struggle, and Magwitch, injured and condemned, dies in the prison infirmary holding Pip's hand, after Pip tells him his daughter lives. His wealth is forfeit. Pip falls into a fever and is nursed by Joe, who quietly pays his debts. Returning to ask Biddy to marry him, Pip finds her Joe's bride. He works for eleven years in Herbert's firm in the East and, revisiting Satis House, meets the widowed Estella, softened by suffering, and sees no shadow of another parting.
Top Lessons
The gentleman and the true gentleman
Pip thinks money and manners make a gentleman, yet the least polished characters, Joe and in his rough way Magwitch, show the most loyalty and self-sacrifice. Dickens measures a man by his heart and conduct rather than his rank.
Ingratitude recognized
Pip the narrator judges his younger self honestly, admitting that he was too cowardly to do what he knew to be right. The novel shows that seeing one's own ingratitude is the beginning of a changed heart.
Revenge that ruins its maker
Miss Havisham stops time to nurse her injury and trains Estella to break hearts. Her vengeance destroys both her own life and the girl's capacity to love, until she cries out in remorse and asks forgiveness.
Forgiveness and faithful love
Joe nurses Pip through his fever and pays his debts without reproach, and Pip prays beside the dying Magwitch for mercy on a sinner. Forgiveness given and received runs through the closing chapters.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”
“In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
“In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”
Frequently cited
“Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
Frequently cited
“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”
Frequently cited
“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith.”
“I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above work.”
“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
Frequently cited
“You are part of my existence, part of myself.”
“Take the pencil and write under my name, ‘I forgive her.’”
“O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!”
Frequently cited
“I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”
Frequently cited
“I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
Medical Lens
The novel records several medical events in ordinary early-nineteenth-century terms. Mrs Joe's head injury leaves her with impaired sight, hearing, memory and speech, communicating by signs traced on a slate. Miss Havisham's seclusion is a study in fixed, self-nursed grief that wastes her health, and after her dress catches fire she is dressed with cotton-wool by the surgeons and lies in delirium repeating the same phrases. Pip's burned hands and arm are dressed by a surgeon, and after Magwitch's death he falls into a long fever with delirium, nursed back to health by Joe. Magwitch, injured in the river struggle, declines and dies in the prison infirmary.
- Chapter XVI
Mrs Joe's condition after the blow from the leg-iron: impaired senses and memory, and the signs she traces on a slate.
- Chapter VIII
Satis House and Miss Havisham's stopped clocks and withered bridal dress.
- Chapter XLIX
Miss Havisham's dress catches fire; the surgeon dresses her burns and Pip's.
- Chapter LVI
Magwitch's decline and death in the prison infirmary.
- Chapter LVII
Pip's fever and delirium, and Joe's nursing.