338 Dickens, Charles
Mrs. Joe, and her husband, Joe. Early in the story,
Pip’s “expectations” of life are quite low. Mrs. Joe
thinks little of him, and he can hope for no more
in life than to be apprenticed to his brother-in-law.
However, during the opening scene of the novel, Pip
has an encounter that will change those expectations
more than once during the course of his life. He
meets the fearsome convict Magwitch, who is hid-
ing in the graveyard, cold and hungry. Magwitch is
a wanted man, bound for transport to Australia. Pip
steals food for Magwitch, and the doomed man is
forever grateful for this kindness.
Shortly after this encounter, Pip begins to visit
the home of the wealthy Miss Havisham to act as
a playmate for her ward, Estella. Miss Havisham is
a bitter woman, having been jilted at the altar many
years before. She is raising Estella, quite literally, to
break men’s hearts. Although Pip falls in love with
Estella and thinks himself on the road to becoming
a gentleman, he is eventually sent away. Pip’s expec-
tations are then raised by a lawyer who arrives to tell
him that he has a secret benefactor who wants to
send him to London to be educated. Pip, of course,
believes the benefactor is Miss Havisham, who has
finally seen him for the raw gentleman material he
thinks he is. During his time in London, he devel-
ops into a snobbish elitist who will have little to do
with his former life. He then finds out, however,
that his benefactor is none other than the criminal
Magwitch, and he must eventually learn that status
and wealth are not what are most important in life,
but rather strength of character. All the characters
in this novel, but especially Pip, learn the pain of
rejection, face the cruelty life can dole out, and
experience the power of hope.
Jennifer McClinton-Temple
HOpe in Great Expectations
In many ways, this novel is about hope and its power
to sustain us in bleak times. Its title focuses our
attention on what we as humans might expect from
life. Our expectations, Dickens seems to be saying
here, should be great; that they should also be real-
istic does not change that.
The opening of the novel is a scene seem-
ingly without hope. Set in a graveyard on a dreary
Christmas Eve, the poor orphan Pip is crying by
the graves of his parents, whom he never knew. The
scene is decidedly bleak, with a “dark flat wilderness
beyond the churchyard” and the “distant savage lair
from which the wind was rushing” that was the sea
beyond that. However, Pip’s fateful graveyard meet-
ing with the convict Magwitch breaks up this scene,
and although Pip will not know it for many years to
come, their encounter will give hope to them both.
For Magwitch, hope is what drives him after he
is transported to Australia. His having been sent
there in the first place is a situation that might rob
all hopeful thoughts from even the most optimistic
soul. England, the only home he has ever known, has
determined him unworthy to ever live there again,
to ever call himself an Englishman, all for a crime
he did not commit. During his time in Australia,
however, Magwitch sustains himself with thoughts
of Pip, whom he thinks of as his good Samaritan.
When others mocked him, he would remind himself
that while he might not be a gentleman himself, he
was raising one across the sea. He later says to Pip,
“This way I kep myself a going. And this way I held
steady afore my mind that would for certain come
one day and see my boy, and make myself known to
him, on his own ground.” This hope is so strong in
Magwitch that he defies the law in the end, return-
ing to forbidden England so that he may fulfill his
wish and reunite with Pip.
In direct contrast to Magwitch’s life-sustaining
hope, Miss Havisham has lost all hope. After being
jilted at the altar, she spends her life mourning this
loss, wearing her wedding clothes, stopping the
clocks at the time of her abandonment, and watch-
ing her wedding cake harden and decay. She is a
figure entirely without joy and without hope that life
can and will change for the better. She was, as Pip’s
friend Herbert explains, quite a desirable “catch” as a
young woman, but her pain is so great and her pride
so wounded that she cannot see beyond the past in
order to hope for the future.
Pip, too, is fixated, but his fixation is bound
up entirely in hope. He loves Estella almost from
the moment that he meets her, and despite her
consistently poor treatment of him, he holds out
hope that she will return his affection. After their
first meeting, when he is left alone to explore the
estate, he thinks “Estella was walking away from me