Pip's Disillusionment
Magwitch’s Return
Chapter 39 is the novel’s great turning point. On a stormy night, an aged stranger arrives at Pip’s London rooms. Pip gradually recognises the man as the convict from the marshes — Abel Magwitch. In a scene that mirrors the Gothic terror of the opening, Magwitch reveals that he is Pip’s benefactor. He has worked for years in Australia, sending every penny to the lawyer Jaggers to fund Pip’s transformation into a gentleman. Magwitch calls Pip his “gentleman” with fierce pride: “Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you!”
Pip’s reaction reveals the depth of his class prejudice. He is not grateful — he is repulsed. He describes Magwitch’s “large brown veinous hands” and admits “the repugnance with which I shrank from him.” The man who funded his entire gentleman’s life is less acceptable to Pip than Miss Havisham because he is from the wrong class. Dickens forces the reader to recognise the hypocrisy: Pip earned none of the money himself. Miss Havisham’s fortune came from her father’s brewery, and Compeyson never added to it — he cheated great sums out of her.
Pip’s revulsion at Magwitch exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the class system. He accepted the money eagerly when he believed it came from a “respectable” source (Miss Havisham) but is horrified when he learns it came from a convict. Dickens shows that class prejudice is so deeply ingrained that Pip rejects genuine love and sacrifice because it comes in the “wrong” social package. The money itself is identical — only Pip’s perception of its source has changed.
The Shattering of False Expectations
Magwitch’s return destroys every false expectation Pip has built his life upon. Miss Havisham is not his patron. He was never intended for Estella. His “gentleman” status was funded by the lowest member of society. The title of the novel itself becomes ironic: Pip’s “great expectations” were never what he believed them to be.
Dickens structures this revelation as a moment of devastating anagnorisis — a classical term for the moment of recognition that changes everything. Pip is forced to confront several painful truths simultaneously: that his wealth is tainted, that his snobbery was built on a lie, and that the convict he feared and despised loves him more genuinely than anyone in the “respectable” world. This is the beginning of Pip’s moral redemption, though it takes time for him to fully accept what Magwitch’s return means.
Magwitch’s backstory reveals the class bias of Victorian justice. He was born into poverty, orphaned, and turned to crime as a child because he had no other options. He describes himself: “I’ve been done everything to, pretty well — except hanged.” His partner in crime, Compeyson, was an educated man who planned the crimes and let Magwitch take the blame. At their trial Magwitch saw “how gentlemanly Compeyson looked, wi’ his curly hair and his black clothes and his white pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of a wretch I looked.” Compeyson got seven years; Magwitch got fourteen. The same crime, different punishments — because the law judged by class, not by guilt.
Pip’s Growing Awareness
After the initial shock, Pip gradually begins to see Magwitch differently. He learns Magwitch’s story and understands the depth of the old convict’s love. Magwitch did not fund Pip’s education for personal gain — he wanted to create a gentleman as proof that even a convict could produce something “fine.” Pip begins to feel shame not about Magwitch but about his own reaction to Magwitch. The retrospective narrator comments with painful self-awareness on his younger self’s revulsion.
Pip also confronts Miss Havisham. In Chapter 44 he accuses her of letting him believe she was his benefactor. She admits it: “I let you go on.” Miss Havisham does not deny it. She used Pip as another tool in her revenge, encouraging his hopes about Estella to increase the eventual pain. Pip’s confrontation with Miss Havisham marks a turning point: he stops being a passive victim of other people’s manipulations and begins to take moral responsibility for his own life.
Pip’s transformation from revulsion to compassion is the novel’s moral heart. Initially he cannot bear to touch Magwitch. By the escape attempt (Chapter 54), he risks his own life to save the old convict. By Magwitch’s deathbed, Pip holds his hand and tells him his daughter (Estella) is alive, “a lady and very beautiful.” Dickens shows that true moral growth means learning to value people for their character, not their class.
The Escape Attempt
Pip, Herbert, and their friend Startop attempt to smuggle Magwitch out of England by rowing down the Thames to meet a foreign steamer. If Magwitch is caught, he faces execution as a returned transportee. The attempt fails — Compeyson betrays them. In the struggle, Compeyson drowns and Magwitch is badly injured. He is arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
The failed escape is structurally significant because it shows Pip acting selflessly for the first time in the novel. He no longer cares about the money (which will be confiscated by the Crown upon Magwitch’s conviction). He cares about the man. This reversal — from valuing money to valuing people — is Dickens’s central moral argument. Pip has finally learned what Joe always knew: that love and loyalty are worth more than any fortune.
Compeyson is Dickens’s sharpest critique of class-based justice. He is the educated man who jilted Miss Havisham, planned the crimes that Magwitch was punished for, and manipulated everyone around him. Yet because he looked and spoke like a gentleman, the law treated him more leniently. He received a shorter sentence, and after release, he betrayed Magwitch to the authorities. Dickens uses Compeyson to argue that the class system does not just ignore criminals from the upper class — it actively protects them while punishing the poor for the same offences.