Great Expectations

CHARLES DICKENS
GREAT EXPECTATIONS


A general summery


First Stage - Chapters 1-19Firs

First stage - Chapters 1-19
Pip Pirrip, the narrator of Great Expectations, lives on the marshes with his sister and brother-in-law, Joe Gargery, who is the village blacksmith, as his parents and other relations are all dead. One day when the seven-year-old Pip visits the churchyard where his parents and brothers are buried, an escaped convict seizes him, and threatens him with terrible consequences unless Pip gets him a file and some food, which the terrified boy steals from his sister and brother-in-law. Though the escaped convict is soon recaptured, Pip never forgets this early alarm or the way it made him steal from and deceive Joe and his sister.
When he grows older, Pip is employed by a rich, eccentric lady, Miss Havisham, to play with her adopted ward, and, though Estella treats Pip with contempt, he admires her for her beauty and self-possession, and falls in love with her. (Pip learns later that Miss Havisham's eccentric behaviour is caused by the fact that she was abandoned on her wedding day by her fiance, Compeyson, years earlier.) Though Pip had looked forward to becoming Joe's apprentice in the village forge, his acquaintance with Estella and the way she despises his lowly origins makes him ashamed of himself, and he longs to become a gentleman. One day Pip's sister, Mrs Joe, is brutally assaulted, and though Pip suspects Joe's journeyman, Orlick, there is no proof. Pip's former teacher, Biddy, moves into Joe's house to nurse Mrs Joe. Then, in a remarkable change of fortune, Pip learns from a lawyer, Mr Jaggers, that he has 'great expectations,' and should leave the marshes to begin to learn the life of a gentlemen. Believing that the source of his wealth is Miss Havisham, Pip leaves Joe and Biddy and sets out for London.

Second Stage - Chapters 20-39
Pip settles into lodgings in London with Herbert Pocket, under the tuition of whose father he...