Great Expectations: From Marshes to Expectations and Back
Follow Pip's three-stage journey to distinguish a rise in status from a change in values. Read how shame, reversal and return make his development real but incomplete.
Reading a three-stage life
Study all 59 chapters of Great Expectations: Chapters 1–19 form Stage One, 20–39 Stage Two and 40–59 Stage Three. Whole-text responses draw on this complete development.
Dickens formally divides Pip's account into three stages. The first ends after Chapter 19 and the second after Chapter 39; Stage Three then runs from Chapter 40 to Chapter 59.
| Stage | Chapters | Outward movement | Question about development |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | 1-19 | Childhood on the marshes, the forge, Satis House, expectations and departure | What makes Pip dissatisfied with the person and home he already has? |
| Two | 20-39 | London education, gentlemanly display, spending and the benefactor's return | Does greater status make Pip a better judge of value? |
| Three | 40-59 | Response to the revelation, attempted rescue, loss, illness, return and work | Can Pip change without recovering what his choices have damaged? |
A Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, follows a young person's education and development. That literary context gives us a useful question, not a ready-made answer: does Pip's movement through three stages form a mature self, or does Dickens complicate the idea that development should be steady and upward?
The crucial distinction is between social advancement and moral development. Money, location and status can change quickly. Better judgement is shown through what Pip recognises, values and chooses when his imagined future collapses.
Stage One: how expectation begins
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 14
[1] It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.
[2] Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.
[3] How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
[4] Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe’s ’prentice, I should be distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 19
[1] I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had supposed it would be, and reflecting that it would never have done to have had an old shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of all the High Street. I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-bye, O my dear, dear friend!”
[2] Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before,—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then.
[3] So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the course of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind, and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to get down and walk back, when we changed again. And while I was occupied with these deliberations, I would fancy an exact resemblance to Joe in some man coming along the road towards us, and my heart would beat high.—As if he could possibly be there!
[4] We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Stage One is not a picture of a perfectly innocent Pip waiting for London to corrupt him. In Chapter 1 he is frightened into helping the escaped convict, yet his help also shows sympathy for someone suffering. The important change begins after Satis House. Estella's judgement of his hands and boots gives Pip a new, class-conscious way of seeing himself.
By Chapter 14, before Jaggers has announced any fortune, Pip feels “ashamed of home”. This brief wording matters because the object of shame is not a wrong action but “home” itself. The adult Pip narrates the feeling retrospectively and judges it critically, allowing the reader to sympathise with the younger boy while also recognising the ingratitude in his new self-disgust.
Chapter 18 then gives desire a plot to inhabit. Jaggers says that Pip is to be brought up as a gentleman, but he does not name the benefactor or promise Estella. Pip fills the gap by assuming that Miss Havisham is making him into Estella's future partner. His expectation is therefore both financial and interpretive: he receives limited facts, then turns them into the story he wants.
The first-stage ending makes departure feel double. Pip imagines London and greatness, yet his hesitation on the road shows that another part of him already knows the cost of leaving. Development starts, then, with a divided self: compassion and attachment remain present, but shame and fantasy increasingly organise his choices.
A worked reading
A precise argument might begin: Pip's moral difficulty starts before his social rise. Chapter 14's “ashamed of home” is stronger evidence for this claim than the simple fact that he later moves to London. The retrospective narrator exposes the younger Pip's shame as a mistaken judgement, so Dickens presents development as a need to relearn value, not merely to gain experience.
Stage Two: London and the stalled education
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 34
[1] We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 39
[1] I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life. I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where I seemed to be suffocating,—I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on one knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I shuddered at, very near to mine.
[2] “Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec’lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman,—and, Pip, you’re him!”
[3] The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.
[4] “Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son,—more to me nor any son. I’ve put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like, I see yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here’s the boy again, a looking at me whiles I eats and drinks!’ I see you there a many times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes. ‘Lord strike me dead!’ I says each time,—and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens,—‘but wot, if I gets liberty and money, I’ll make that boy a gentleman!’ And I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings of yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for wagers, and beat ’em!”
[5] In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one grain of relief I had.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Pip enters Stage Two expecting enlargement, but his first view of London is “ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty” (Chapter 20). The four-part list punctures the grandeur he has projected onto the city. London is not simply an evil place - it also brings friendship and later offers work - but its first appearance warns that Pip's imagined progress and lived experience will not match neatly.
The mismatch spreads into Pip's behaviour. His discomfort during Joe's Chapter 27 visit shows how strongly gentlemanly performance now controls his judgement. In Chapter 34, Pip admits that he and Herbert “spent as much money as we could” while receiving very little value. The balanced contrast between much spending and little return exposes their supposed enjoyment as performance rather than fulfilment.
This is why Stage Two can be described as moral stasis: Pip moves socially and geographically, but his ability to judge worth does not advance with him. The term is useful only because the evidence supports it. It is not a claim that Pip does nothing good or that London alone causes every fault.
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