Pip's Childhood: Magwitch & Miss Havisham
The Opening: Pip and the Convict
Great Expectations opens in a graveyard on the Kent marshes. The young orphan Pip is visiting his parents’ graves when a terrifying convict — Abel Magwitch — seizes him and demands food and a file to remove his leg-iron. Pip is “a small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry.” The opening establishes two things that drive the entire novel: Pip’s vulnerability and his first moral choice.
Pip steals food from his sister’s pantry and a file from Joe’s forge, and brings them to Magwitch. This act of terrified kindness becomes the foundation of the plot. Magwitch never forgets it. Years later, transported to Australia, he devotes his life to making Pip a gentleman — repaying the child who showed him humanity when no one else would. Dickens plants the seed of the novel’s central irony here: Pip’s ‘great expectations’ originate in an act of compassion, yet they ultimately corrupt him.
The graveyard opening establishes Pip’s isolation (orphan among tombstones), introduces the convict Magwitch, and triggers the central irony: Pip’s act of compassion eventually funds the ‘great expectations’ that corrupt him.
Life at the Forge
Pip is “brought up by hand” by his sister, Mrs Joe Gargery, a phrase Dickens uses with dark irony — it means both bottle-fed (Mrs Joe is not his mother) and physically beaten. Mrs Joe is harsh, resentful, and violent, wielding a cane she calls Tickler. In contrast, her husband Joe is Pip’s protector and companion. Joe is a blacksmith — strong, gentle, uneducated, and utterly loyal. He tells Pip: “Ever the best of friends; ain’t us, Pip?”
The forge represents honest labour, warmth, and simple goodness. Pip is happy there — or at least content — until Satis House introduces him to a world of wealth and refinement that makes him despise his own home. Dickens establishes the forge as a moral touchstone: Pip’s journey away from it is a journey away from goodness, and his return at the end signals moral recovery.
Mrs Joe’s violence towards Pip and Joe is presented with grim humour — Tickler is almost a comic prop — but Dickens is showing something real. Victorian children had few legal protections; physical punishment was normal and expected. Mrs Joe resents being ‘burdened’ with Pip, and her anger reflects the limited options available to working-class women. She is later attacked by Orlick, struck with a convict’s leg-iron, leaving her brain-damaged and dependent. Dickens’s treatment of her is complex: she is both a victim of her circumstances and a source of suffering for Pip and Joe.
Satis House: Pip’s World Transformed
When Pip is summoned to Satis House to “play” for the wealthy Miss Havisham, his entire sense of self is shattered. Satis House is a decaying mansion where time has stopped: the clocks are frozen at twenty to nine, the wedding breakfast rots on the table, and Miss Havisham wears her yellowed bridal dress. She was jilted on her wedding day by the swindler Compeyson and has never recovered.
Miss Havisham has adopted Estella and raised her as a weapon of revenge against men. Estella is beautiful, cold, and cruel. She humiliates Pip immediately: “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy! And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!” Before this moment, Pip had never felt ashamed of who he was. After it, he is consumed by shame. He tells us: “I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my coarse hands and my common boots… They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now.”
Estella’s class-based humiliation (‘coarse hands’, ‘thick boots’, ‘knaves’ vs ‘Jacks’) transforms Pip’s self-image. For the first time, he feels ashamed of his class — and this shame drives the entire plot. He begins to desire a life of wealth and refinement, rejecting the forge and everything Joe represents.
Miss Havisham’s Manipulation
Miss Havisham uses both Pip and Estella as instruments of her revenge. She encourages Pip’s infatuation with Estella, watching with satisfaction as Estella’s cruelty causes him pain. “Break their hearts, my pride and hope,” she tells Estella, “break their hearts and have no mercy!” Miss Havisham has taught Estella to be incapable of love — a fact that will eventually rebound on Miss Havisham herself when Estella cannot love her either.
Pip mistakenly believes Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that she intends him to marry Estella. This assumption — based entirely on class prejudice (he cannot imagine a convict as a benefactor) — is the novel’s great dramatic irony.
After visiting Satis House, Pip begins to lie. He tells Mrs Joe and Pumblechook fantastic stories about Miss Havisham’s house — claiming they played with flags and swords and that she sat in a velvet coach. He confesses the lies to Joe. But the change had already happened, alone in the Satis House courtyard: “I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.” This is the first sign of Pip’s snobbery. He does not wish Joe were kinder or wiser — he wishes Joe were more ‘genteel.’ His values have already begun to shift from moral worth to social status.
The Seeds of Discontent
By the end of Stage 1, Pip is apprenticed to Joe as a blacksmith — a future that once seemed natural and good. But now he calls the forge “coarse and common” and his life there a source of shame. He tells Biddy: “I want to be a gentleman.” The repetition of ‘common’ throughout these chapters is deliberate: Dickens shows how Estella’s single word of class contempt has colonised Pip’s entire way of seeing himself and his world.