I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 5 9As a feared and respected lawyer who seems to be on nodding
terms with almost every ex- jailbird in London, Jaggers acts as the
bridge in the story between the underworld and the overworld.
His office displays the hideous death masks of hanged convicts on
its walls. Since he draws part of his livelihood from death, he is also
one of the book’s several examples of the living dead. Magwitch,
whose life as a prisoner is a living death, is another. So is Miss
Havisham, frozen in the moment of her lover’s betrayal, and so is
Mrs Joe, who hovers somewhere between life and death after
Orlick has smashed in her skull. The death of Mrs Joe suggests that
Pip is not only in cahoots with a criminal. He is also indirectly
responsible for murder. It was he who stole the file that Magwitch
used to free himself from his leg- iron, and it was with the discarded
leg- iron that Orlick attacked Mrs Joe. The shadow of matricide
hangs over the hero.
* * *The opening of Great Expectations sets a magnificent scene of
desolation. Pip is alone on the flat, dreary, fever- breeding marshes,
wandering among the tombstones of the churchyard, with a prison
ship anchored offshore and a gibbet or gallows not far off. Death,
crime and human misery converge in this adroitly set- up symbolism.
Then Magwitch leaps out on the boy suddenly, in a moment of
primordial trauma. The terrified child finds himself confronted by
a monstrously alien figure, one who like many such figures in
mythology is lame:
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A
man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied
round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and