Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

A few slow parts, but overall I really liked it. I always forget how much I like Dickens, then I get one chapter in and don’t want the book to end.

Summary

For my own sake, here’s a plot summary, FULL OF SPOILERS.

Pip, age 7. His parents are dead, so he was raised by his sister, who is older (20s) and married to Joe, the blacksmith. Joe is a faithful friend to Pip as much as a father figure (“what larks!”). Mrs. Joe (her name is Georgiana, but the book almost never refers to her by that name) “raises Pip by hand” and has quite a temper.

In the town cemetary, Pip meets a runaway convict who tells him to bring food and a file. Pip goes home, steals food from the pantry, steals a file from Joe’s blacksmith things, and takes them to the convict. He also encounters a second convict who is scared of the first one.

The next day is Christmas, and family friends assemble, including Mr. Wopsle and Uncle Pumblechook. Soldiers/police come to the door – Pip thinks he’s going to be arrested for stealing and helping a convict. But they want Joe to help them by fixing some manacles. They are about to capture the two escaped convicts. Joe, Pip, and others go down to the marshes to watch. The convict sees Pip, who is terrified of being found out, but the convict says he stole from the pantry of the blacksmith, and that covers things for Pip.

Now things slow down a bit. A rich woman, Miss Havisham, sends for Pip to come to her house and play for her amusement. Her house is dreary, and there is beautiful but heartless girl there, Pip’s age, named Estella. He goes to Miss H’s regularly for years and falls badly for Estella. Pip wishes he could be a gentleman and be fit for her.

He confides this with Biddy, a girl from home. She teaches him some things but is not much of a teacher at this point. Biddy is kind and good.

Mrs. H gets Joe to indenture Pip so he can learn to be a blacksmith.

This summary is taking too long to write. Here’s the rest of the book, as summarized by AI and then updated a bit by me:

Pip’s apprenticed to Joe, dreaming of Estella, when a lawyer, Jaggers, says a mystery benefactor’s funding him to be a gentleman in London. Pip thinks it’s Miss Havisham, but it’s actually the convict, Magwitch, repaying that old favor. Pip’s snobby phase kicks in—he ditches Joe and Biddy. Mrs. Joe’s attacked (hit on the head, by Joe’s assistant Orlick, it turns out), Biddy cares for her. Magwitch returns, a wanted man; Pip hides him but they’re caught. Estella marries someone else. Magwitch dies in jail (no more money for Pip), Pip gets sick, Joe cares for him. Joe marries Biddy. Pip is humbled. Estella’s husband (Drummel) having died, Pip meets her, and she is softened. The book ends with the suggestion that they will end up married.

Notes

Passages I noted while reading:

“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean that, but rather the contrary." (46)

Some great names in this. Mr. Wopsle. Uncle Pumblechook.

At one point, when Mr. Wopsle is about to make a moral point at dinner: (“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in severe parenthesis.) (58)

“Her contempt for me was so strong that it became infections, and I caught it.” (90)

“dunder-headed king of the noodles” –Pip’s sister calls Joe this

“The Pumblechookian Parlour”

Some of these phrases are so Wodehousian. I wonder if Dickens reminded people of any predecessor. How much can the British sense of humor be attributed to him?

“Whether I should at last dissolve that spell of my childhood” – beautiful way to refer to solving a mystery or misunderstanding from when you were a kid. (148)

Among the Finches (a club Pip and Herbert joined), there was “a fiction that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did.” (294) All too common!

Herbert is always “looking about him” without taking serious/decisive action. Wemmick’s emphasis on “portable property” and his “Walworth Sentiments” (how he behaves at home, very free and loving with his “Aged P.”), which are not for Little Britain (where he works for Mr. Jaggers, is completely unemotional, and is always espousing the virtues of “portable property”).

“There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationary.” (295) Pip and Herbert taking stock of their debts, studiously writing up a list. “The sound of our pens going refreshed us exceedingly, insomuch that I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this edifying business proceeding and actually paying the money.”

Page 298 - Pip thinks back on rougher parts of his upbringing, his sister beating him with a stick she called “Tickler,” but the memories “returned with a gentle tone upon them that softened even the edge of Tickler… [For] the day must come when it would be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.”

Vocab

• assort - classify
• connubial - relating to marriage
• equipage - horse-drawn carriage
• farinaceous - powdery
• frouzy - fetid, musty, dingy
• inveigled - coaxed, cajoled