H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 5 2he has learned that Magwitch, unknown to himself, is Estella’s
father. He tells the old man on his deathbed that he has a daughter
whom he, Pip, dearly loves. In doing so, he grants the old lag a
peaceful death.
Pip is now bitterly remorseful for his former snobbery and social
ambition. Being no longer in possession of his fortune, he becomes
a clerk and then a partner in a modest business enterprise. He has
a grave illness, and is joyfully reunited with Joe and Biddy. Joe
nurses him back to health like a baby, after which he encounters
Estella once more. She, too, is now almost without possessions.
Miss Havisham has died at a fire in her home, and before her death
repents of the way she has set out to break Pip’s heart. Estella,
tempered by suffering like Pip himself, is equally humbled
and contrite. She and Pip seem likely to marry, though Dickens’s
original ending was rather more sombre.
These, then, are the bare bones of the narrative, mercifully shorn
of some outrageous coincidences and surreally improbable plot-
ting. What significant patterns can we discover in it? We may note
to begin with the extraordinary number of false parents that the
story contains. Mrs Joe is Pip’s sister but behaves as his mother,
while her husband Joe Gargery is in the position of Pip’s father but
is in fact his best friend and metaphorical brother. In the end, to
complicate matters further, Pip will recognise in Joe his true spir-
itual father. In this sense, the Gargery family is a grisly parody of a
conventional one, with Mrs Joe acting as both sister and mother to
Pip, and as both wife and mother to Joe. Joe, for his part, acts as
both brother and father to Pip. One is reminded of Tom Lehrer’s
satirical song about Oedipus: ‘He loved his mother like no other, /
His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.’ Towards
the end of the novel, Pip will nurse his spiritual father Magwitch as