Great Expectations

The story is told by Pip, an orphan raised by hand by his harsh sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith, in the bleak marsh country near the sea. In the opening pages a starving escaped convict seizes the small boy among the graves and terrifies him into stealing food and a file. The convict is soon recaptured, but the encounter, and the secret kindness Pip showed him, set the whole novel in motion.

Pip is then summoned to the decaying mansion of Miss Havisham, a wealthy woman jilted on her wedding morning who has stopped all the clocks at twenty minutes to nine and lives on in her yellowed bridal dress. There he is set to play before her beautiful, cold ward Estella, whom she is raising to break men's hearts. Estella scorns Pip's coarse hands and common boots, and he leaves ashamed of his home, his trade, and himself, and begins to long to become a gentleman.

A London lawyer, Jaggers, brings astonishing news: Pip has come into great expectations from a secret benefactor and is to be brought up as a gentleman. Pip assumes the money is Miss Havisham's and that he is intended for Estella. He moves to London, takes up the manners and debts of a young gentleman, befriends Herbert Pocket, and grows steadily more ashamed of Joe, whose visit to the city he can hardly bear.

The foundation of his new life gives way on a stormy night when his benefactor reveals himself: not Miss Havisham, but Abel Magwitch, the convict from the marshes, who has grown rich abroad and poured his fortune into making the boy who once fed him a gentleman. Pip recoils in disgust even as he grasps that his whole genteel identity rests on a hunted man's love, and that Estella was never meant for him. Other truths surface, including that Estella is in fact Magwitch's lost daughter.

The remainder of the book is Pip's undoing and education. He tries to smuggle the doomed Magwitch out of England, fails, and watches him captured and sentenced to die; yet his loathing turns to tenderness, and he stays at the convict's side to the end. Stripped of his fortune, fallen ill, and nursed back to health by the forgiving Joe, Pip at last sees his own ingratitude and asks Joe and Biddy to forgive him. Years later, humbled and hard-working, he meets a softened, suffering Estella in the ruins of the old garden.