H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 5 0sometimes unavoidable, so there follows a brief summary of
Dickens’s novel. Pip, the hero, lives as a child with his adult sister
Mrs Joe and her childlike, kind- hearted husband Joe Gargery, who
works as a blacksmith in the desolate marshlands of south- eastern
England. Mrs Joe brings up Pip with a heavy hand, and inflicts
something of the same harsh treatment on her long- suffering
husband. Pip’s parents are dead, and while inspecting their grave in
the churchyard one day he is collared by a convict, Abel Magwitch,
who has escaped from a nearby prison ship. Magwitch asks Pip for
a file to free himself from his leg- iron, along with some food and
drink, and the boy obliges by stealing these items from his home.
But Magwitch is recaptured, and finds himself shipped off for life
to the British penal colony in Australia.
Meanwhile, Pip is summoned by a rich, eccentric local gentle-
woman, Miss Havisham, to her decaying home Satis House, where
he is to play with her haughty, beautiful young ward Estella. Miss
Havisham’s life has been blighted by a lover who jilted her on their
wedding day, and the clocks of Satis House have been halted at this
fatal hour. She herself sits like a skeleton or ghastly waxwork amid
the rotting, vermin- ridden remains of her wedding banquet,
shrouded in her tattered wedding dress. Pip falls in love with
Estella, whom Miss Havisham is bringing up with the express
purpose of breaking men’s hearts in revenge for her own ill-
treatment. Unknown to him, young Pip has been brought along for
Estella to limber up on.
As a result of his experience of Satis House, Pip becomes
increasingly dissatisfied with his lowly existence at the forge, where
he has been indentured as Joe’s apprentice. He hatches ambitions
to become a gentleman and by doing so to win Estella, who
professes to despise his plebeian way of life. Meanwhile, Mrs Joe is