Great Expectations: Retrospect, Secrets and Serial Reversals
Explore how adult hindsight, delayed secrets and returning images change the meaning of Pip's story. Analyse the difference between a surprising event and a revelation that makes earlier scenes look different.
Two Pips in one voice
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.
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.
Pip is both the person who once experienced the story and the adult who later narrates it. The distance between those two versions of Pip is retrospective narration. It allows Dickens to place a remembered feeling beside a later judgement of that feeling.
| Layer in the narration | Question to ask | What it can reveal |
|---|---|---|
| The younger Pip experiencing the moment | What does he notice, want, fear or assume at that time? | His knowledge is limited by childhood, desire, shame and the information other characters withhold. |
| The adult Pip telling the story | Which details does he select, label, correct or judge? | Hindsight can expose an earlier error while preserving how powerful it once felt. |
| The reader comparing both | Where can we see more than the younger Pip sees? | The gap can create sympathy, irony or a reason to question Pip's preferred story. |
The opening already uses this double perspective. In Ch1, the child makes the name "Pip" from his longer name, while the adult narrator describes how that invention happened. The memory gives us the child's imaginative logic and the adult's ability to inspect it.
Ch14 makes the moral distance sharper. The younger Pip feels ashamed of the forge and imagines Estella despising him there. The adult begins by calling shame of home "a most miserable thing" and admits that his attitude could be judged ungrateful. The adult does not erase the child's humiliation; he changes how the reader is invited to judge it.
Calling Pip simply "unreliable" would flatten this movement. His younger perceptions are limited and often desire-driven, but the retrospective voice repeatedly recognises those limits. A more precise claim is that the narration is self-correcting without becoming all-knowing: the adult can expose an old error, yet he still shapes the memory and cannot supply every other character's private thought.
When a clue becomes a story
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 18
[1] “I should think not! Now you are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret, until the person chooses to reveal it. I am empowered to mention that it is the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by word of mouth to yourself. When or where that intention may be carried out, I cannot say; no one can say. It may be years hence. Now, you are distinctly to understand that you are most positively prohibited from making any inquiry on this head, or any allusion or reference, however distant, to any individual whomsoever as the individual, in all the communications you may have with me. If you have a suspicion in your own breast, keep that suspicion in your own breast. It is not the least to the purpose what the reasons of this prohibition are; they may be the strongest and gravest reasons, or they may be mere whim. This is not for you to inquire into. The condition is laid down. Your acceptance of it, and your observance of it as binding, is the only remaining condition that I am charged with, by the person from whom I take my instructions, and for whom I am not otherwise responsible. That person is the person from whom you derive your expectations, and the secret is solely held by that person and by me. Again, not a very difficult condition with which to encumber such a rise in fortune; but if you have any objection to it, this is the time to mention it. Speak out.”
[2] Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.
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.
A secret creates an empty space, but the empty space does not interpret itself. In Ch18, Jaggers tells Pip that his benefactor's identity must remain "a profound secret." Jaggers does not name Miss Havisham, promise Estella to Pip or tell Pip what the money means.
Pip fills the gap with the future he wants. Because Jaggers is connected with Miss Havisham, because Pip has been summoned to Satis House, and because he desires Estella, he treats Miss Havisham's patronage as certainty. His conclusion is understandable, but it remains an inference.
| Stage | What the text establishes | What Pip adds |
|---|---|---|
| Ch18: the expectations are announced | An unnamed benefactor will fund Pip's new life; the name is withheld. | Miss Havisham must be the benefactor. |
| Ch18 onwards: Pip imagines the purpose | Pip is to go to London and be educated as a gentleman. | Miss Havisham must be preparing him for Estella. |
| Ch29: Pip returns to Satis House | Miss Havisham continues to encourage his attention to Estella without explaining the money. | Her behaviour appears to confirm the romance he already believes. |
| Ch39: Magwitch returns | The convict Pip helped as a child has made his fortune abroad and paid for Pip's expectations. | Pip's preferred account of his rise collapses. |
The adult narration can record the younger Pip's confidence without endorsing it. This produces an irony larger than "Pip is wrong": his ambition determines which clues seem important, while the childhood connection he has pushed away turns out to be the material cause of his gentlemanly life.
The Ch39 revelation is therefore a serial reversal. It supplies new information and forces earlier information into a different pattern:
- Jaggers's secrecy no longer points securely towards Satis House.
- Pip's gift to the hungry convict becomes the beginning of a long, hidden obligation.
- Money that seemed to promise social separation now ties Pip to the criminal past he rejects.
- Magwitch's claim to be Pip's "second father" challenges Pip's fantasy that Miss Havisham has authored his future.
- The reader must reconsider not only the donor's identity but Pip's judgement of gentility, loyalty and debt.
A reader may suspect Magwitch before Pip does, especially because the adult narrator keeps the opening convict in the story's memory. That reading and genuine surprise are both defensible. The analytical point is not that every reader reacts identically, but that Dickens makes Ch39 alter the significance of earlier scenes.
Revelation by instalments
Great Expectations first appeared in 36 weekly numbers of All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861. That publication context matters when it explains a formal effect. It should not be added as an isolated fact.
Three kinds of time operate together:
| Kind of time | What Dickens controls | Question for analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Remembered time | The years of Pip's childhood and adulthood | How does the adult narrator compress, revisit or judge the past? |
| Narrated sequence | The order in which facts, clues and revelations appear | What earlier scene changes meaning when a secret is disclosed? |
| Publication time | The weekly divisions and waits experienced by original serial readers | What is a reader left to infer, remember or anticipate between numbers? |
The modern chapter is not automatically the weekly unit. Some weekly instalments contain two chapters, while Ch39 alone formed the Great Expectations instalment published on 11 May 1861. Avoid the formula that "every chapter ends on a cliffhanger." Dickens varies the size and effect of the weekly units.
Ch39 has unusual structural weight:
- it is the benefactor revelation;
- it completes Stage Two in the novel's three-stage design;
- it occupies a weekly instalment on its own;
- it turns the next stage from the pursuit of expectations towards the moral, practical and legal consequences of their source.
The placement gives the revelation room. A weekly reader does not move immediately into a long explanation of what follows; the number ends with Pip forced to face Magwitch and the collapse of his imagined future. Suspense is one effect, but enforced reconsideration is more precise: the pause leaves the reader with an altered account of the previous twenty-three numbers.
The three stages make Pip's story resemble a life he has divided and judged retrospectively:
| Stage | Modern chapters | Broad structural movement |
|---|---|---|
| Stage One | 1-19 | childhood attachments, Satis House and the formation of Pip's expectations |
| Stage Two | 20-39 | London, gentlemanly ambition and the growth of Pip's mistaken story |
| Stage Three | 40-59 | consequences, discoveries, attempted repair and a qualified return |
This stage map is not a substitute for analysis. Its use is to show why Ch39 is a hinge: a secret disclosed at the exact boundary changes the direction from expectation to retrospective reckoning.
Places and motifs that remember
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 8
[1] “He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!”
[2] I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
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.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 59
[1] “I little thought,” said Estella, “that I should take leave of you in taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.”
[2] “Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me, the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.”
[3] “But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “‘God bless you, God forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now,—now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”
[4] “We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.
[5] “And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.
[6] I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Pip leaves places behind physically, but the narration makes him return to them in memory and action. A setting can therefore measure a change in perception. It should not be reduced to a permanent code such as "forge equals good" or "London equals evil."
Continue this lesson.
You’re previewing NovaLearn without an account. Create a free account to read the rest.
Create free account