Pip, Miss Havisham and the Secret Benefactor: How Dickens Built Great Expectations Around One Grotesque Idea

In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens follows an orphan nicknamed Pip from a childhood on the Kent marshes to a life as a young "gentleman" in London, paid for by a mysterious benefactor, and then through the shock of learning where the money really came from. It is Dickens's thirteenth novel, a bildungsroman told entirely in the first person, and it first ran as a weekly serial in his magazine All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861 before appearing in three volumes in October 1861. Along the way it gives us some of fiction's most famous figures: the escaped convict Abel Magwitch, the jilted Miss Havisham in her old wedding dress, the cold and beautiful Estella and the kind blacksmith Joe Gargery.

Dickens in 1860

By the time he started the book, Dickens was a celebrity. Born in Portsmouth in 1812, he had left school at twelve to work in a boot-blacking factory while his father sat in a debtors' prison, an experience that left a lasting mark and later fed his interest in social reform. He had just published A Tale of Two Cities, and both that book and Great Expectations were resounding successes.

His private life, though, was in pieces. He had separated from his wife Catherine in 1858, and in early September 1860 he burned almost all his correspondence in a field behind his house at Gad's Hill in Kent. Some critics have suggested that Estella's icy teasing reflects Ellen Ternan, the much younger woman with whom he was having a secret affair, though that remains a suggestion rather than a proven link. What is clear is that the novel is a return to roots, set in the part of Kent where he grew up and had recently resettled.

"A very fine, new and grotesque idea"

The novel began with a single image. Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster that he had found "such a very fine, new and grotesque idea": a boy befriends an escaped convict, who makes a fortune in Australia and secretly leaves it to the boy, who then loses it to the Crown. Miss Havisham and Estella were not yet part of the plan.

Then business took over. In September 1860, sales of All the Year Round were falling, and Dickens decided that he had to "strike in" himself. The idea was turned into a weekly serial of thirty-six episodes starting on 1 December, and sales recovered at once. Writing week to week was "unimaginably difficult", he said, but he kept going, and before writing the chapter about Magwitch's escape attempt he took friends on a boat trip down the Thames to study the riverbanks.

The story in three stages

The book is built in three "stages" of Pip's expectations. In the first, seven-year-old Pip lives with his hot-tempered sister and her gentle husband Joe on the marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents are buried, an escaped convict seizes him and demands food and a file. Terrified, Pip steals both and brings them to him. Later he is invited to Satis House, the decaying home of Miss Havisham, who was jilted at the altar and still wears her wedding dress. There he falls in love with her adopted daughter Estella, who treats him with scorn, as Miss Havisham encourages her to do. After some years as Joe's apprentice, Pip is told by the lawyer Mr Jaggers that an anonymous patron will pay for him to become a gentleman. He assumes it must be Miss Havisham.

In the second stage, London turns out to be dirty and crowded, not the "soft white city" Pip imagined. He shares rooms with the cheerful Herbert Pocket, runs up debts, and is ashamed when Joe comes to visit. Estella is introduced into society and chooses the brutish Bentley Drummle. Then, a week after Pip's twenty-third birthday, the truth arrives: his benefactor is the convict from the churchyard, Abel Magwitch, who was transported to New South Wales, grew rich there, and has returned to England at the risk of his life to see the gentleman he made.

In the third stage, Pip stops taking Magwitch's money but plans with Herbert to smuggle him out of England. Secrets unravel: the other convict from the marshes, Compeyson, was the man who deserted Miss Havisham, and Estella turns out to be Magwitch's daughter. Miss Havisham asks Pip's forgiveness before her dress catches fire. The escape fails on the river, Magwitch is captured and dies, and his fortune goes to the Crown. Pip falls ill and Joe nurses him back to health, then Pip goes to work abroad with Herbert.

The people who make the book

Pip is a very honest narrator about his own snobbery, which is why readers forgive him. Joe Gargery is the novel's moral anchor: unsophisticated, patient and loyal, he never changes his values. Miss Havisham is a figure of frozen time, and Estella is her instrument, raised, as Miss Havisham later admits, to be heartless towards men. Magwitch, rough and frightening at first, becomes the most moving character in the book. The critic John Hillis Miller even called Pip the archetype of all Dickensian heroes.

Names matter, too. The very first sentence explains that Philip Pirrip's "infant tongue" could make nothing longer of his name than Pip, and the first condition of his fortune is that he must always keep the name Pip. Herbert, meanwhile, nicknames him Handel, after the piece called The Harmonious Blacksmith, a joke that quietly reminds us of the forge Pip has left behind.

Themes: money, class and conscience

The word "expectations" means a legacy to come, so money is in the title itself. Other major themes include crime, social class, ambition and imperialism, along with conscience, moral regeneration and redemption through love. The novel asks what really makes a gentleman. Miss Havisham's inherited wealth is socially respectable, while Magwitch's money, earned by his own hard work in a penal colony, is treated as tainted; Dickens shows it as greasy, crumpled banknotes. Pip's money brings him not happiness but anxiety, debt and loneliness, so that London becomes a kind of prison for him.

The turning point comes in chapter 39. When Magwitch reveals himself, Pip realizes that the deepest pain is not losing Estella but knowing that for the sake of a convict's money he had deserted Joe. From there the novel becomes a story of moral recovery: Pip learns to love Magwitch, to repay Joe's goodness, and to see himself clearly.

Two endings

Dickens wrote two endings. In the first, Pip, still single, meets Estella briefly in London after she has remarried following Drummle's death. Edward Bulwer-Lytton thought this too sad, so Dickens changed it: Pip meets the widowed Estella in the ruins of Satis House, and the final line, as later revised, says he "saw no shadow of another parting from her". Forster, Shaw and George Orwell preferred the original ending as more natural, and modern critics are still split. Reading both is one of the pleasures of the book.

Legacy

Readers loved it from the start. All the Year Round is estimated to have sold about 100,000 copies a week during the serial. Thomas Carlyle called it "that Pip nonsense" yet laughed aloud at each instalment, and George Bernard Shaw praised it as "all of one piece and consistently truthful". Orwell judged its later part psychologically among the best things Dickens ever did. In 2015 critics outside the UK placed it fourth among the 100 greatest British novels. It has been translated into many languages and adapted many times for stage and screen.

Learn with Pip: English expressions

Expression	Meaning	Example
great expectations	hopes of future wealth or success	He came to London with great expectations.
benefactor	person who gives money or help	His benefactor was a convict.
come into money	suddenly receive a fortune	Pip suddenly came into money.
jilted	abandoned by a lover, often before a wedding	Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar.
look down on	treat as inferior	Pip began to look down on Joe.

Try this: Write three sentences about a time your "great expectations" turned out differently, using "benefactor" or "look down on" once.