Pip's Great Expectations
The Announcement: Chapter 18
The lawyer Jaggers arrives at the forge with extraordinary news: an anonymous benefactor has given Pip “great expectations.” Pip will be “immediately removed from his present sphere of life” and brought up as a gentleman in London. There are two conditions: Pip must always keep the name ‘Pip,’ and he must never try to discover the identity of his benefactor.
Pip assumes — without any evidence — that Miss Havisham is behind the gift. This assumption reveals his deepest prejudice: he cannot conceive of a convict as a benefactor. A gentleman’s fortune, he believes, must come from a gentlewoman. This is the novel’s central dramatic irony, and Dickens sustains it for over twenty chapters.
Jaggers’s two conditions are: Pip must keep the name ‘Pip’ and must never seek the benefactor’s identity. Pip’s assumption that Miss Havisham is behind it reveals his class prejudice — he cannot imagine a convict funding a gentleman.
Leaving the Forge
Pip’s departure from the forge is one of the novel’s most painful passages. He is already ashamed of his home and his family. When Biddy suggests that Joe might not feel comfortable visiting Pip in London, Pip is offended — yet she is absolutely right. Pip tells us he walked away from the forge and then, overcome with emotion, turned back. But “the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.” The mists are symbolic: childhood innocence lifting to reveal the adult world. The phrase echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Adam and Eve leave Eden — Dickens implies Pip is leaving his own paradise.
Even before leaving, Pip’s snobbery surfaces. He condescends to Joe, mentally redesigning him as a gentleman. He patronises Biddy, telling her he will “remove Joe into a higher sphere” when he is rich. Biddy’s quiet response — “And don’t you think he knows that?” — exposes Pip’s arrogance. Joe does not want to be ‘removed’; he is content at the forge. Pip’s desire to ‘improve’ Joe reveals that he has already internalised the class system’s values: he equates worth with status.
London: Moral Corruption
Pip arrives in London expecting grandeur and finds squalor. His first impression is of “the immensity of London” and its overwhelming dirt. He is taken to Jaggers’s office in Little Britain, near Smithfield Market and Newgate Prison. This geography is deliberate: Dickens places Pip’s new life literally adjacent to the criminal world, foreshadowing the revelation that his fortune comes from a convict.
Pip’s London life is characterised by waste, idleness, and debt. He and Herbert Pocket join a club called the Finches of the Grove, whose sole purpose is extravagant dining. Pip runs up debts he cannot pay. He learns to dress, speak, and behave like a gentleman, but he produces nothing of value. His education gives him manners without morality, refinement without purpose.
Pip’s London life is defined by waste: the Finches of the Grove club (pointless extravagance), mounting debts, and idleness. He acquires manners without morality. Dickens shows that becoming a ‘gentleman’ has made Pip a worse person, not a better one.
Herbert Pocket and Wemmick
Herbert Pocket is Pip’s roommate and becomes his closest friend. Herbert is a gentleman by birth but has no money. He is cheerful, loyal, and unpretentious — everything a gentleman should be, by Dickens’s moral standards. Herbert nicknames Pip “Handel” (after the composer) and gently teaches him table manners without making him feel ashamed. He represents what Pip could become if he valued character over status.
Wemmick, Jaggers’s clerk, lives a double life. At work he is hard, mechanical, and emotionless — his mouth is like a “post-office” slot. At home in Walworth, he transforms into a warm, caring man who looks after his elderly father (the “Aged Parent”) in a miniature castle complete with a drawbridge and a cannon. Dickens uses Wemmick to show how Victorian London forces people to split their identities: public hardness for survival, private warmth for humanity.
Jaggers is London’s most powerful criminal lawyer. After every client meeting, he ceremonially washes his hands with scented soap and dries them on a clean towel. This ritual symbolises his attempt to separate himself from the moral contamination of his work. Jaggers never reveals more than he must; he deals in evidence, not emotion. Yet beneath this cold exterior, he has quietly arranged for Magwitch’s daughter (Estella) to be adopted by Miss Havisham — an act of hidden compassion. Dickens uses Jaggers to show how the legal system forces people to suppress their humanity.