Great Expectations Summary: Pip, Miss Havisham and the Cost of Climbing
What Great Expectations is about
Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel and his second to last completed one. It first appeared as a serial in his weekly periodical All the Year Round, running from 1 December 1860 to August 1861, before Chapman & Hall published it in three volumes in October 1861. It is a bildungsroman, a novel about education and growing up, and it is narrated in the first person by its central figure. Dickens had only done that once before, in David Copperfield.
The narrator is Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, an orphan of seven living on the coastal marshes of Kent with his hot-tempered older sister and her husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. On Christmas Eve 1812, Pip goes to visit the graves of his parents and siblings. An escaped convict seizes him there and threatens to kill him unless the boy brings back food and a file. Pip steals a file from Joe's tools, along with a pie and brandy meant for Christmas dinner, and hands them over. Soldiers recapture the convict in the marshes, and the man confesses to the theft himself, clearing Pip.
A few years on, Pip is summoned to Satis House, the decaying home of Miss Havisham, a wealthy recluse who was jilted at the altar and still wears her old wedding dress. There he meets Estella, her adopted daughter, and falls in love with her. Estella is cold and hostile, a manner Miss Havisham actively encourages. Pip keeps visiting until he is old enough to learn a trade, and Miss Havisham pays for him to be apprenticed to Joe.
The book is built in three stages of Pip's expectations. The first ends when the lawyer Mr Jaggers arrives with news that an anonymous patron has settled money on Pip so that he can become a gentleman. Pip assumes the money comes from Miss Havisham, and leaves the forge for London.
The main characters
Pip is the narrator and the problem. He is kind at heart and painfully snobbish in practice, and the book lets him convict himself in his own words. When Joe visits him in London, Pip is ashamed to be seen with him.
Joe Gargery is the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith, the moral centre of the novel and the man Pip spends most of the book failing to deserve. Mrs Joe, Pip's sister, is harsh with him until a brutal attack leaves her bedridden and unable to speak or work.
Miss Havisham is one of the most famous figures Dickens created, a woman who has stopped the clocks on her own humiliation and raised a girl to inflict it on others. Estella is beautiful, aloof and fully aware of what she has been trained to do. Abel Magwitch is the convict from the graveyard. Around them sit Mr Jaggers the lawyer, his clerk John Wemmick, Herbert Pocket, who becomes Pip's friend and flatmate in London, the brutish aristocrat Bentley Drummle, Biddy, and Dolge Orlick, Joe's surly and envious assistant.
The themes
Wealth and poverty run through the whole book. Dickens fills it with extreme imagery of poverty, prison ships, chains and fights to the death, and the London Pip arrives in is not the soft white city he imagined but a place of litter and filth. Money in this novel is never clean and never simply earned.
Class and identity sit on top of that. Pip's income is fixed at £500 a year when he turns twenty one, which is roughly £43,000 in today's terms, and the money buys him debts and embarrassment rather than contentment. Becoming a gentleman turns out to be a matter of manners and money rather than character.
Love and rejection form the third strand. Miss Havisham was defrauded and deserted by her fiance, and she builds Estella as a weapon out of that injury. Pip loves Estella because he has been invited to, and Estella tells him plainly that she feels no qualms about trapping Drummle.
The turn in the story
Stop here if you want the second volume to surprise you. A week after his twenty third birthday, Pip learns that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham at all. It is Magwitch, the convict from the graveyard, who was transported to New South Wales, grew wealthy after gaining his freedom, and has returned to England at the risk of his life to see the boy who fed him. Pip, shocked, stops taking the money, and he and Herbert begin planning how to get Magwitch out of the country. The third stage follows from that.
Why it still matters
The novel was very widely praised. Thomas Carlyle called it "that Pip nonsense" and still greeted each instalment with roars of laughter. George Bernard Shaw later described it as "all of one piece and consistently truthful". Dickens himself, when the plot first came to him, called it "a very fine, new and grotesque idea", and he was pleased with both the public response and the sales during serialisation.
It still holds its standing with critics in the twenty first century, and it came seventeenth in the BBC's Big Read poll in 2003. It has been translated into many languages and adapted repeatedly for stage and screen. The reason is simple enough. The characters escaped the book long ago, and the question underneath the story, what a person owes to the people who made them, has not aged.
