Great Expectations

This is the great novel about money, class, and shame—and about the people we snub while climbing. Pip's rise and humbling still cuts because his snobbery is ordinary, not villainous: he simply absorbs what society tells him counts. Read it if you've ever outgrown a place or a person and regretted it. It's also one of the most gripping plots Dickens ever built, with a climax on a dark river.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The Convict in the Churchyard

   Christmas Eve. Seven-year-old Pip stands alone in a churchyard on the Kent marshes, staring at the graves of his parents and siblings, when he is seized by an escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, who threatens to cut his throat and demands Pip bring him food (wittles) and a file. Pip steals a pork pie and brandy from his sister's pantry and a file from Joe Gargery's forge, and delivers them through the fog on Christmas morning. At Christmas dinner, with Mr. Wopsle, the Hubbles, and Uncle Pumblechook tormenting him, his sister discovers the pie is missing, and soldiers arrive to ask Joe to mend shackles. On the marshes, the soldiers find two convicts brawling in a ditch: Magwitch and Compeyson. Magwitch protects Pip, confessing he alone stole the food and file from the blacksmith's house. Uncle Pumblechook arranges for Pip to go play at Satis House, the rotting mansion of Miss Havisham, who stopped all the clocks at twenty minutes to nine and still wears her tattered wedding dress and one shoe, having been jilted at the altar decades earlier. In a darkened room she orders Estella to play cards with Pip, and Estella sneers at his coarse hands and thick boots, calling him common. On a later visit, a pale young gentleman challenges him to a fistfight in the garden; Pip knocks him down again and again, and Estella lets him kiss her cheek.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Gentleman's Debt

   Years pass at the forge, where Pip is bound apprentice—Miss Havisham gives Joe twenty-five pounds (guineas) as payment for Pip's apprenticeship to the blacksmith trade—and where Biddy, the schoolmistress's granddaughter, comes to nurse Mrs. Joe after she is savagely attacked with a convict's leg-iron, the one he filed off Magwitch's chain. Mrs. Joe survives but cannot speak or work. Pip confides in Biddy that he wants to be a gentleman, that he cannot stop loving Estella. Lawyer Mr. Jaggers informs Pip at the Three Jolly Bargemen that Pip has 'great expectations' from an anonymous benefactor who will provide for him to be brought up as a gentleman in London, on condition he keeps the name of Pip and never asks who his patron is. Pip assumes it's Miss Havisham, says goodbye to Joe and Biddy—privately ashamed of his old home—and arrives in dirty, grimy London, is disgusted by Smithfield market and Newgate Prison. He lodges with Herbert Pocket, the pale young gentleman he once thrashed, who tutors him in manners and tells him the story of Miss Havisham's ruin by a fraudulent lover. Pip studies under Matthew Pocket alongside the brutish nobleman Drummle and the amiable Startop, and meets Jaggers's housekeeper Molly, whose wrists show scars and who is pointedly compared by Jaggers to a tamed tiger or wild beast. When Joe visits Barnard's Inn in his Sunday clothes, calling Pip 'Sir,' Pip is ashamed of him and doesn't see him off. Pip and Herbert run up debts and live beyond their means, keeping a 'book of debts' they review weekly. Mrs. Joe dies; Pumblechook dominates the funeral. On Pip's twenty-first birthday his allowance is fixed at five hundred pounds a year. Then, on a stormy night in his twenty-third year, the convict Abel Magwitch reveals himself, a transported convict who returned despite the death penalty for returning from transportation, announcing 'Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you!'

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Truth Comes Ashore

   Pip is horrified to learn his fortune comes from a transported convict and stops taking Magwitch's money. Magwitch tells his history: led into crime by Compeyson, the gentleman swindler who jilted Miss Havisham; Compeyson received a lighter sentence at trial due to his superior social class and appearance. Pip returns to Satis House to confront Miss Havisham, who admits she did it to torment her greedy relatives; Pip tells her he forgives her, and she kneels at his feet begging forgiveness. He declares his love to Estella; she coldly tells him, 'You must know that I have no heart—if that has anything to do with my memory,' and coldly tells him she will marry Bentley Drummle. At dinner at Jaggers's, Wemmick tells Pip that Molly was once accused of murder and acquitted through Jaggers's defense, and that she is Estella's mother; Pip deduces that Magwitch is Estella's father, though Jaggers and Wemmick never confirm it directly. Miss Havisham, before her death, gives Pip a banknote of nine hundred pounds to complete Herbert's partnership in Clarriker's, crying 'What have I done!'—As Pip leaves, her wedding dress catches fire; he burns his arms trying to save her, but she later dies of her injuries. Orlick lures Pip to an isolated sluice-house on the marshes, where Orlick—admitting he attacked Mrs. Joe—prepares to kill Pip with a hammer before Herbert and Startop burst in to rescue him. Pip, Herbert, and Startop attempt to row Magwitch down the Thames to a steamer bound for Hamburg, but a police boat carrying Compeyson intercepts them. Magwitch seizes Compeyson and they fight in the river, Compeyson drowning; Magwitch is injured, captured, and imprisoned.

4. 4

   Act 4

   What a Gentleman Is Worth

   Pip visits the dying, condemned Magwitch in the prison hospital and tells him his lost daughter Estella is alive and a lady. Magwitch dies peacefully before his execution, with Pip at his side. Then everything Pip has left collapses: Pip falls gravely ill with fever and faces arrest for debt, and Joe comes to nurse him back to health, paying off his debts without a word of reproach, then quietly going home. Pip returns to the village to propose to Biddy, only to discover she has just married Joe that very day. He asks their forgiveness, vows to repay Joe, and leaves for Cairo to join Herbert's firm Clarriker & Co., where he works as a clerk. After eleven years in Egypt, Pip returns and meets the widowed Estella in the ruined garden of Satis House. She says, 'Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.' As they walk out hand in hand, Pip tells us he 'saw no shadow of another parting from her.'

Anyone who has ever been embarrassed by where they came from or who raised them. It's also essential for readers who like their coming-of-age stories laced with guilt, gothic decay, and dark comedy.

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