Novel: Great Expectations

Overview
Great Expectations is a first-person bildungsroman narrated by Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, tracing his journey from impoverished boyhood on the Kent marshes to disillusioned adulthood in London. Serialized in 1860–61, the novel follows Pip’s pursuit of gentility, love, and identity as he learns that wealth and status can deform character as surely as hardship. The story entwines a mystery about an anonymous benefactor with the ruined grandeur of Satis House, whose mistress Miss Havisham and her ward Estella exert a magnetic pull on Pip’s imagination and ambitions.

Childhood and Satis House
As a child orphan raised by his harsh sister Mrs. Joe and her kind blacksmith husband Joe Gargery, Pip encounters an escaped convict in a misty churchyard and, terrified, steals food and a file to aid him. Soon after, Pip is summoned by wealthy recluse Miss Havisham to her decaying mansion, where time seems frozen at the moment she was jilted. There Pip meets Estella, beautiful and scornful, who mocks his coarse manners and inflames his shame and yearning. He grows dissatisfied with Joe and the forge, imagining refinement as the path to Estella’s heart, even as Miss Havisham encourages his infatuation and nurses her own bitterness.

A Gentleman in London
When the lawyer Mr. Jaggers announces that Pip has “great expectations” from a secret patron, Pip assumes Miss Havisham intends him for Estella. He moves to London, is tutored by Matthew Pocket, and befriends Herbert Pocket, with whom he shares lodgings and extravagant debts. Pip, mortified by his origins, neglects Joe and Biddy’s steadfast affection. Meanwhile, ominous figures hover: the journeyman Orlick menaces the family, Mrs. Joe is violently assaulted and later dies, and Estella, raised to break hearts, returns to society only to accept the boorish nobleman Bentley Drummle. Pip’s gentility brings little contentment, only distance from those who love him.

Unmasking the Benefactor
On a stormy night, the truth arrives in the person of Abel Magwitch, the very convict Pip aided as a boy. Returned illegally from transportation, Magwitch reveals he is Pip’s patron, having made a fortune in Australia and dedicated it to elevating the child who showed him kindness. Pip’s assumptions about Miss Havisham collapse; he recoils from Magwitch’s roughness but eventually recognizes his loyalty. Jaggers’s housekeeper Molly is revealed as Estella’s mother, and Magwitch her father, intertwining the fates of convict and gentlewoman. Miss Havisham, guilt-stricken for misleading Pip and wrecking Estella’s capacity for love, begs forgiveness and later dies after her wedding dress catches fire. Pip tries to smuggle Magwitch out by boat, but the plan fails in a river pursuit involving Magwitch’s old enemy Compeyson, who once jilted Miss Havisham; Magwitch is captured and mortally injured.

Aftermath and Ending
Stripped of fortune when Magwitch dies and his estate is forfeited, Pip falls ill; Joe comes to London, nurses him, and quietly pays his debts. Humbled, Pip returns to the forge to find Joe married to Biddy and their new child named for Pip. He seeks honest work with Herbert abroad and matures through industry, not inheritance. Years later, Pip visits the ruins of Satis House and encounters Estella, changed by suffering after Drummle’s death. In the revised, widely read ending, they leave the garden together with an intimation of continuing companionship, suggesting that hard-won self-knowledge, rather than wealth, offers the truest expectation.