Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: A Detailed Character Analysis
Great Expectations: A Detailed Character Analysis
Great Expectations chronicles the progress of Pip from childhood through adulthood. As he moves from the marshes of Kent to London society, he encounters a variety of extraordinary characters: from Magwitch, the escaped convict, to Miss Havisham and her ward, the arrogant and beautiful Estella. In this fascinating story, Dickens shows the dangers of being driven by a desire for wealth and social status. Pip must establish a sense of self against the plans which others seem to have for him – and somehow discover a firm set of values and priorities.
Main Characters in Great Expectations
Pip – The protagonist and narrator of Great Expectations, Pip begins the story as a young orphan boy being raised by his sister and brother-in-law in the marsh country of Kent, in the southeast of England. Pip is passionate, romantic, and somewhat unrealistic at heart, and he tends to expect more for himself than is reasonable. Pip also has a powerful conscience, and he deeply wants to improve himself, both morally and socially.
Read an in-depth analysis of Pip.
Estella – Miss Havisham’s beautiful young ward, Estella is Pip’s unattainable dream throughout the novel. He loves her passionately, but, though she sometimes seems to consider him a friend, she is usually cold, cruel, and uninterested in him. As they grow up together, she repeatedly warns him that she has no heart.
Read an in-depth analysis of Estella.
Miss Havisham – Miss Havisham is the wealthy, eccentric old woman who lives in a manor called Satis House near Pip’s village. She is manic and often seems insane, flitting around her house in a faded wedding dress, keeping a decaying feast on her table, and surrounding herself with clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine. As a young woman, Miss Havisham was jilted by her fiancé minutes before her wedding, and now she has a vendetta against all men. She deliberately raises Estella to be the tool of her revenge, training her beautiful ward to break men’s hearts.
Read an in-depth analysis of Miss Havisham.
Abel Magwitch (The Convict) – A fearsome criminal, Magwitch escapes from prison at the beginning of Great Expectations and terrorizes Pip in the cemetery. Pip’s kindness, however, makes a deep impression on him, and he subsequently devotes himself to making a fortune and using it to elevate Pip into a higher social class. Behind the scenes, he becomes Pip’s secret benefactor, funding Pip’s education and opulent lifestyle in London through the lawyer Jaggers.
Joe Gargery – Pip’s brother-in-law, the village blacksmith, Joe stays with his overbearing, abusive wife—known as Mrs. Joe—solely out of love for Pip. Joe’s quiet goodness makes him one of the few completely sympathetic characters in Great Expectations. Although he is uneducated and unrefined, he consistently acts for the benefit of those he loves and suffers in silence when Pip treats him coldly.
Jaggers – The powerful, foreboding lawyer hired by Magwitch to supervise Pip’s elevation to the upper class. As one of the most important criminal lawyers in London, Jaggers is privy to some dirty business; he consorts with vicious criminals, and even they are terrified of him. But there is more to Jaggers than his impenetrable exterior. He often seems to care for Pip, and before the novel begins, he helps Miss Havisham to adopt the orphaned Estella. Jaggers smells strongly of soap: he washes his hands obsessively as a psychological mechanism to keep the criminal taint from corrupting him.
Herbert Pocket – Pip first meets Herbert Pocket in the garden of Satis House, when, as a pale young gentleman, Herbert challenges him to a fight. Years later, they meet again in London, and Herbert becomes Pip’s best friend and key companion after Pip’s elevation to the status of gentleman. Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel.” He is the son of Matthew Pocket, Miss Havisham’s cousin, and hopes to become a merchant so that he can afford to marry Clara Barley.
Wemmick – Jaggers’s clerk and Pip’s friend, Wemmick is one of the strangest characters in Great Expectations. At work, he is hard, cynical, sarcastic, and obsessed with “portable property”; at home in Walworth, he is jovial, wry, and a tender caretaker of his “Aged Parent.”
Biddy – A simple, kindhearted country girl, Biddy first befriends Pip when they attend school together. After Mrs. Joe is attacked and becomes an invalid, Biddy moves into Pip’s home to care for her. Throughout most of the novel, Biddy represents the opposite of Estella; she is plain, kind, moral, and of Pip’s own social class.
Dolge Orlick – The day laborer in Joe’s forge, Orlick is a slouching, oafish embodiment of evil. He is malicious and shrewd, hurting people simply because he enjoys it. He is responsible for the attack on Mrs. Joe, and he later almost succeeds in his attempt to murder Pip.
Mrs. Joe – Pip’s sister and Joe’s wife, known only as “Mrs. Joe” throughout the novel. Mrs. Joe is a stern and overbearing figure to both Pip and Joe. She keeps a spotless household and frequently menaces her husband and her brother with her cane, which she calls “Tickler.” She also forces them to drink a foul-tasting concoction called “tar-water.” Mrs. Joe is petty and ambitious; her fondest wish is to be something more than what she is, the wife of the village blacksmith.
Uncle Pumblechook – Pip’s pompous, arrogant uncle. (He is actually Joe’s uncle and, therefore, Pip’s uncle-in-law, but Pip and his sister both call him “Uncle Pumblechook.”) A merchant obsessed with money, Pumblechook is responsible for arranging Pip’s first meeting with Miss Havisham. Throughout the rest of the novel, he will shamelessly take credit for Pip’s rise in social status, even though he has nothing to do with it, since Magwitch, not Miss Havisham, is Pip’s secret benefactor.
Compeyson – A criminal and the former partner of Magwitch, Compeyson is an educated, gentlemanly outlaw who contrasts sharply with the coarse and uneducated Magwitch. Compeyson is responsible for Magwitch’s capture at the end of the novel. He is also the man who jilted Miss Havisham on her wedding day.
Bentley Drummle – An oafish, unpleasant young man who attends tutoring sessions with Pip at the Pockets’ house, Drummle is a minor member of the nobility, and the sense of superiority this gives him makes him feel justified in acting cruelly and harshly toward everyone around him. Drummle eventually marries Estella, to Pip’s chagrin; she is miserable in their marriage and reunites with Pip after Drummle dies some eleven years later.
Molly – Jaggers’s housekeeper. In Chapter 48, Pip realizes that she is Estella’s mother.
Mr. Wopsle – The church clerk in Pip’s country town; Mr. Wopsle’s aunt is the local schoolteacher. Sometime after Pip becomes a gentleman, Mr. Wopsle moves to London and becomes an actor.
Startop – A friend of Pip’s and Herbert’s. Startop is a delicate young man who, with Pip and Drummle, takes tutelage with Matthew Pocket. Later, Startop helps Pip and Herbert with Magwitch’s escape.
Miss Skiffins – Wemmick’s beloved, and eventual wife.
In-Depth Character Analysis
Pip
As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations presents the growth and development of a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip. As the focus of the bildungsroman, Pip is by far the most important character in Great Expectations: he is both the protagonist, whose actions make up the main plot of the novel, and the narrator, whose thoughts and attitudes shape the reader’s perception of the story. As a result, developing an understanding of Pip’s character is perhaps the most important step in understanding Great Expectations.
Because Pip is narrating his story many years after the events of the novel take place, there are really two Pips in Great Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character—the voice telling the story and the person acting it out. Dickens takes great care to distinguish the two Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with perspective and maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels about what is happening to him as it actually happens. This skillfully executed distinction is perhaps best observed early in the book, when Pip the character is a child; here, Pip the narrator gently pokes fun at his younger self, but also enables us to see and feel the story through his eyes.
As a character, Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip’s idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.
On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert’s way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all those who love him. Pip’s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.
Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip’s desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness. But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pip’s oversimplified sense of his world’s hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and that his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about him most. Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the man who narrates the novel, completing the bildungsroman.
Estella
Often cited as Dickens’s first convincing female character, Estella is a supremely ironic creation, one who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to torment men and break their hearts, Estella wins Pip’s deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she represents Pip’s first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip; as Pip learns near the end of the novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the coarse convict, and thus springs from the very lowest level of society.
Historical Context and Themes
Charles Dickens wrote his enduringly popular novel, Great Expectations, between December 1860 and September 1861. As was usual for this most prolific of novelists, the book was first published in serial form, and the installments would be as eagerly awaited as the soap operas of today. This novel, however, contains an interesting and informative retrospective by the author on aspects of his life, hidden from even those closest to him, which he had first addressed in the painfully autobiographical David Copperfield some ten years earlier (a difficult decade for Dickens in his personal life) and to some extent alters the perception of himself which Dickens had there vicariously presented.
The intricate plot of Great Expectations surrounds the life of an orphaned boy, Pip, who is brought up “by hand” by his rather cruel sister and her kindly husband, Joe, the local blacksmith, to whom Pip turns for the only affection available. He sees Joe less as a father-figure than “a larger species of child,” and as “no more than my equal” and this rather telling reference to “equality” is to be one of the major themes of the book, i.e. Victorian class-consciousness and notions of what constitutes a “gentleman.” (One of the reasons Dickens chose, in fact to write the book was to redress the imbalance he felt he had created in the earlier creation of the “gentleman” Copperfield and his snobbery towards the lads with whom he was compelled to work in the factory to which he had been consigned; Dickens had suffered a similar fate as a child and never spoke of it though he never forgot it.).
Pip’s encounter at the beginning of the novel, in the graveyard where his parents are buried and from the stones of which he gains his only sense of self, with the terrifying convict, Magwitch, whom he is compelled to help yet for whom he feels compassion, is quickly followed by his being called to “play” by the enigmatically grotesque Miss Havisham, shrouded in her wedding gown and frozen in time as a result of her being jilted, and this juxtaposition has much importance as the plot progresses, clearly foreshadowing the later unraveling of the mystery of Pip’s benefactor. It is at Miss Havisham’s house that Pip meets and falls instantly in love with her ward, the beautiful and distant Estella, whose name, with its link to “star,” is emblematic of both these characteristics. Chiefly because of this fateful meeting and Estella’s disdain of his social class, Pip decides he “want[s] to be a gentleman.” This, significantly, he confides only to Biddy whom Dickens makes clear he should have married but his obsession with Estella obscures his vision on this as so much else, until it is too late. The plot advances significantly when Pip is told, by the sudden arrival of the lawyer, Jaggers, that he is to be the recipient of funds from an unknown benefactor which will make his dream come true and so begins the London phase of his life where he meets the amiable Herbert Pocket and his feckless family, the amusing and shrewd clerk, Wemmick, and re-encounters Estella.
Pip is naturally encouraged by both circumstance and history to believe that it is Miss Havisham who is his benefactor but in fact, it is Magwitch, the convict, he helped as a child, who is making him into a gentleman, as he learns when Magwitch suddenly appears, and this dislocation of origins adds to Dickens’ development of the central theme of gentility. In fact, the true gentleman of the book is Joe, as Pip ultimately realizes.
Spanish Summary of Great Expectations
Charles Dickens escribió su perdurable y popular novela, Grandes Esperanzas, entre diciembre de 1860 y septiembre de 1861. Como era habitual para el más prolífico de los novelistas, el libro fue publicado por primera vez en forma de serie, y las entregas serían tan esperadas como los “culebrones” de hoy. Esta novela, sin embargo, contiene una retrospectiva interesante e informativa del autor sobre aspectos de su vida, oculta incluso a los más cercanos a él, que había abordado por primera vez en la dolorosamente autobiográfica David Copperfield unos diez años antes (una década difícil para Dickens en su vida personal) y en cierta medida altera la percepción de sí mismo que Dickens había presentado allí indirectamente.
La intrincada trama de Grandes Esperanzas rodea la vida de un niño huérfano, Pip, que es criado “a mano” por su hermana más cruel y su amable marido, Joe, el herrero, a quien Pip recurre por el único afecto disponible. Él ve a Joe menos como una figura paterna que como “una especie más grande de niño, y nada más que como mi igual” y esta referencia a la “igualdad” es uno de los temas principales del libro, es decir, la conciencia de clase victoriana y las nociones de lo que constituye un “caballero”. (Una de las razones por las que Dickens eligió, de hecho, escribir el libro fue para corregir el desequilibrio que sentía que había creado en la creación anterior del “caballero” Copperfield y su esnobismo hacia los muchachos con los que se vio obligado a trabajar en la fábrica a la que había sido consignado; Dickens había sufrido un destino similar de niño y nunca habló de ello, aunque nunca lo olvidó).
El encuentro de Pip al comienzo de la novela, en el cementerio donde sus padres están enterrados y de cuyas piedras obtiene su único sentido de sí mismo, con el aterrador convicto, Magwitch, a quien se ve obligado a ayudar pero por quien siente compasión, es rápidamente seguido por su llamado a “jugar” por la enigmática y grotesca señorita Havisham, envuelta en su vestido de novia y congelada en el tiempo como resultado de haber sido plantada, y esta yuxtaposición tiene una gran importancia a medida que avanza la trama, presagiando claramente el posterior desenlace del misterio del benefactor de Pip. Es en la casa de la señorita Havisham donde Pip conoce y se enamora al instante de su pupila, la hermosa y distante Estella, cuyo nombre, con su relación con “estrella”, es emblemático de estas dos características. Principalmente a causa de este fatídico encuentro y del “desprecio” de Estella por su clase social, Pip decide que “quiere ser un caballero”. Esto, significativamente, se lo confía solo a Biddy, de quien Dickens deja en claro que debería haberse casado, pero su obsesión por Estella oscurece su visión sobre esto como tantas otras cosas, hasta que es demasiado tarde. La trama avanza significativamente cuando a Pip le dice, por la repentina llegada del abogado, Jaggers, que va a ser el destinatario de los fondos de un benefactor desconocido, lo que hará realidad su sueño y así comienza la etapa de Londres de su vida en la que se encuentra con el amable Herbert Pocket y su irresponsable familia, el divertido y sagaz secretario, Wemmick, y se reencuentra con Estella.
Pip es, naturalmente, alentado por las circunstancias y la historia a creer que es la señorita Havisham quien es su benefactora, pero en realidad, es Magwitch, el convicto al que ayudó de niño, quien lo está convirtiendo en un caballero, como se entera cuando Magwitch aparece de repente, y esta dislocación de los orígenes se suma al desarrollo de Dickens sobre el tema central de la nobleza. De hecho, el verdadero caballero del libro es Joe, como Pip finalmente se da cuenta.
Further Reviews and Analysis
Great Expectations, the novel, presents the story of a young boy growing up and becoming a gentleman. He must learn to appreciate people for who they are, not shun them for who they aren’t. Nicknamed Pip, Philip Pirrip, the main character, goes through many changes in his personality, as he is influenced by various people. Pip experiences tough times as a boy and a young man, but at the end he has become a fine, moral young man. In the beginning, Pip, an orphan, considers himself to be a common laboring boy, but he has a desire to improve his station in life. He is raised by his sister, and her husband, Joe Gargery. Then Pip meets Estella, the adopted daughter of Miss Havisham, an old lady who is bitter and eccentric. Estella taunts Pip and is very cruel to him, but he still falls in love with her. Miss Havisham is teaching Estella to hurt men, because she herself was deserted by her fiancé on her wedding day. One day, Mr. Jaggers, a lawyer, reveals to Pip, that there are “Great Expectations” for Pip. He is given the money to become a gentleman and receive a good education; he assumes that his benefactor is Miss Havisham. In London, Pip makes many new, high-society friends. When Joe Gargery comes to visit Pip in his new way of life, Pip is ashamed of Joe, because he is a commoner. At this time, Pip is around twenty years old. Estella is still the center of his attractions. When she comes to London, he meets her, but she tries to warn Pip to stay away from her because she might hurt his feelings. She is being kind to him in the only way that she knows how. Around the same time, Pip receives a letter telling him that Mrs. Joe Gargery had died. A man from Pip’s past steps out, an ex-convict, named Magwitch, who he had fed many years ago; this man is his true benefactor. Pip finally knows the truth about this man. Magwitch is Estella’s father, and Mr. Jaggers’s housekeeper is Estella’s mother. A short time later, Estella is wed to Bentley Drummle, but she is very unhappy. Pip falls ill, and Joe comes to take care of him. While he is being nursed back to health, Pip starts to appreciate Joe and begins to look past the fact that he is “common.” He receives the news that Miss Havisham is dead. Pip visits Joe’s home and is told that Joe and Biddy, Pip’s friend, are married. Pip then returns to London and continues his life for eleven more years. Pip finally goes back to Joe’s house, to find that Joe and Biddy have a son, and they have named him Pip. During that last visit, he returns to Miss Havisham’s old run-down home. There he meets Estella, grown into a woman, her husband dead. There, Estella asks Pip to forgive her, he does, and all is well. So the story ends, with grown Pip and a changed Estella both at peace with each other. In conclusion, I thought that this was a very well written book. It took me a while to get into it and understand the plot, but now I see that Dickens wrote Great Expectations with a very complex plot and well described characters. From Joe Gargery to Miss Havisham, I really got to know the characters as if they were people. I would describe this book as a delightful story with a sprinkle of mystery and a handful of romance, with a pinch of fun.
This may be one of the most impressive books I have ever read. It tells the story of a young boy who becomes a man; it shows our Pip (his name) as he truly was. I mean, the author never justified his behavior, not even when he was weak and offensive. Pip is not a hero, he is just a human being. He is not a criminal either, you can say he didn’t do anything extraordinary such as save the world nor invent the light bulb. In change, he grew in compassion and gratitude. With him we learn the “worst sides of the human nature”; he loses his fortune, but at the end he accomplishes his “Great Expectations.”–Submitted by Anonymous
Great Expectations is a very old story, so interesting. From the cover you think “what’s the point of reading this?” then when you look at the pages you think I will never finish this. Well for a matter of fact this story has words that will improve your literature skills to a very high level; it may have some high standard words but that is only to help improve your English. Great Expectations is about love, family, and rejection as Pip and Miss Havisham have both been rejected in certain ways. Pip is the main character, a boy around 13 years old, easy to fright, and goes through his life suffering lots of sadness. He is in love with a girl named Estella and wants her to find his love, but for him being shy and not showing himself to her, it makes it very hard for him.
Pip meets an escaped convict, Magwitch, and gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives. When Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor he snobbishly abandons his friends for London society and his ‘great expectations’. He grows through misfortune and suffering to maturity in the theme of Dicken’s best-loved novels. Dickens blends gripping drama with penetrating satire to give a compelling story rich in comedy and pathos: he has also created two of his finest, most haunting characters in Pip ans Miss Havisham.–Submitted by Louis Kisitu.
This is the story of Pip, an orphan boy adopted by a blacksmith’s family. Pip learns how to find happiness. He learns the meaning of friendship and the meaning of love and he becomes a better person for it.–Submitted by Anonymous.
This novel is about a boy named Pip. He is an orphan who lives with his sister and his father-in-law Joe, his best friend. Joe is the local blacksmith who may not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but he is kind to Pip. The story begins at a graveyard and the reader sees Pip looking at the gravestones of his mother and father. Then suddenly a convict appears and tells Pip to steal food and a file to free him. The story only gets crazier from there. After Pip gets apprenticed to Joe, a mysterious benefactor comes and gives Pip the chance to become a gentleman, which he accepts in order to impress Estella, a noble young girl.–Submitted by Anonymous.
Great Expectations is one of the most important novels of its time. It follows the life of young Pip, from his awakening to life. This first chapter is worth memorizing for you or to impress your friends. Great literature! It goes on to tell the story of a young working class lad in England, who inherits a fortune from an unknown source and becomes a gentleman. In this process, he meets the beautiful Estelle and falls in love. The fact that he feels unworthy and the truth about his benefactor loom large. It is the answers to these questions that leave us thinking about this novel, these characters and what it means to have status. The great author Dickens wrote this such a long ago, yet it rings true; though I wonder how many self-made men can call themselves gentlemen?–Yours Truly, Lisa Hobbs
Great Expectations is a dramatic novel; we are prepared for this by the drama of the opening chapter. Charles Dickens uses an advanced language that plants a clear insight of the setting, the character profiles, and the novels’ historic aspects. Pip, the main character of this novel is orphaned from the start. The opening chapter shows this vulnerable child visiting his family; cold and alone standing in front of the seven graves of his mum, his dad, and his five brothers. Pip’s situation is desperate, like his view on life, and challenged. This creates a dramatic entrance for Magwich, the escaped convict who threatens Pip with his life for the return of three unimportant items of food, water, and a file for his irons. By the end of this chapter Pip is left fleeing for his life in dramatic blur.–Submitted by NIkki Howick.