Pip's Disillusionment
The Return of the Convict: Chapter 39
On a stormy night in Chapter 39, a stranger arrives at Pip’s London chambers. Pip does not recognise him at first, but the man holds out both his hands and says: “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.” The stranger is Abel Magwitch — the convict from the marshes. He has returned illegally from transportation in Australia, risking execution, to see the gentleman he has created.
This revelation shatters everything Pip believed. His fortune does not come from the refined Miss Havisham but from a rough, uneducated convict. His ‘great expectations’ are built on criminal money. The dramatic irony that Dickens has sustained since Chapter 18 finally breaks, and Pip’s reaction is visceral: “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.”
Pip’s reaction to Magwitch — ‘abhorrence,’ ‘dread,’ ‘repugnance’ — reveals that despite claiming to be a gentleman, Pip’s values are entirely based on class prejudice. He is horrified not by what Magwitch has done, but by what Magwitch is: a convict, a working-class man, someone ‘beneath’ him.
The Shattering of Illusions
Magwitch’s revelation triggers a cascade of further disillusions. Pip realises that Miss Havisham never intended him for Estella — she used him as practice for Estella’s cruelty. His assumptions about his own worth, his future, and his place in society collapse simultaneously. He has spent years being ashamed of Joe, avoiding the forge, and running up debts — all funded by a man he considers beneath contempt.
Dickens uses this moment to expose the hubris at the heart of Pip’s character. Pip’s class prejudice blinded him. He assumed his benefactor must be a gentlewoman because he could not imagine anyone from the lower classes having the generosity or the means to fund his transformation. The irony is devastating: the convict’s love for Pip is genuine and selfless, while the ‘gentlewoman’ Miss Havisham was using him all along.
Magwitch’s desire to ‘make a gentleman’ is complex. On one level, it is genuine gratitude: Pip showed him kindness as a child, and Magwitch never forgot it. On another level, Magwitch wants to prove that he — a convict, despised by society — can create something the system says he cannot. He tells Pip: “I’ve come to the old country fur to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That’ll be my pleasure.” There is pride and ownership in this — Magwitch sees Pip as his creation, his proof that the class system is wrong. But Dickens also suggests that Magwitch’s desire to ‘own’ a gentleman replicates the very system he resents.
Pip’s Crisis of Identity
After Magwitch’s revelation, Pip is trapped. He cannot send Magwitch away — the old man risks execution if caught. He cannot continue his life as a gentleman — the money is tainted. He cannot return to the forge — he has burned that bridge with years of snobbery. Pip is suspended between worlds, belonging to neither.
Gradually, however, something shifts. Pip begins to see Magwitch not as a class category but as a human being. He learns Magwitch’s life story: orphaned, abused, criminalised by a society that offered him nothing. Magwitch was “in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail” from childhood. The repetition emphasises the cycle of poverty and criminality that Victorian society created and then punished.
Pip loses three illusions simultaneously: (1) that Miss Havisham is his benefactor, (2) that he is destined for Estella, and (3) that his gentleman status is legitimate. His gradual acceptance of Magwitch marks the beginning of his moral recovery.
Estella’s True Parentage
In a further twist, Pip discovers that Estella is Magwitch’s daughter. Her mother, Molly, is Jaggers’s housekeeper — a woman once accused of murder. The girl Pip idolised as the height of refinement is the daughter of a convict and an accused murderer. Dickens’s point is unmistakable: class identity is constructed, not innate. Estella’s ‘breeding’ is an illusion maintained by Miss Havisham’s wealth and Jaggers’s secrecy.
The revelation about Estella’s parentage completes Dickens’s demolition of the class system. Pip the ‘gentleman’ was made by a convict. Estella the ‘lady’ is the daughter of a convict and a suspected killer. The entire structure of social hierarchy — which insists that breeding determines worth — is exposed as a fiction. The only characters with genuine moral worth (Joe, Biddy, Herbert) never pretended to be anything other than what they are.