The pale young gentleman and I stood contemplating one another in Barnard’s Inn, until we both burst out laughing. “The idea of its being you!” said he. “The idea of its being you!” said I. And then we contemplated one another afresh, and laughed again. “Well!” said the pale young gentleman, reaching out his hand good-humoredly, “it’s all over now, I hope, and it will be magnanimous in you if you’ll forgive me for having knocked you about so.”I derived from this speech that Mr. Herbert Pocket (for Herbert was the pale young gentleman’s name) still rather confounded his intention with his execution. But I made a modest reply, and we shook hands warmly.“You hadn’t come into your good fortune at that time?” said Herbert Pocket.“No,” said I.“No,” he acquiesced: “I heard it had happened very lately. I was rather on the lookout for good fortune then.”“Indeed?”“Yes. Miss Havisham had sent for me, to see if she could take a fancy to me. But she couldn’t⁠—at all events, she didn’t.”I thought it polite to remark that I was surprised to hear that.“Bad taste,” said Herbert, laughing, “but a fact. Yes, she had sent for me on a trial visit, and if I had come out of it successfully, I suppose I should have been provided for; perhaps I should have been what-you-may-called it to Estella.”“What’s that?” I asked, with sudden gravity.He was arranging his fruit in plates while we talked, which divided his attention, and was the cause of his having made this lapse of a word. “Affianced,” he explained, still busy with the fruit. “Betrothed. Engaged. What’s-his-named. Any word of that sort.”“How did you bear your disappointment?” I asked.“Pooh!” said he, “I didn’t care much for it. She’s a tartar.”“Miss Havisham?”“I don’t say no to that, but I meant Estella. That girl’s hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex.”“What relation is she to Miss Havisham?”“None,” said he. “Only adopted.”“Why should she wreak revenge on all the male sex? What revenge?”“Lord, Mr. Pip!” said he. “Don’t you know?”“No,” said I.“Dear me! It’s quite a story, and shall be saved till dinnertime. And now let me take the liberty of asking you a question. How did you come there, that day?”I told him, and he was attentive until I had finished, and then burst out laughing again, and asked me if I was sore afterwards? I didn’t ask him if he was, for my conviction on that point was perfectly established.“Mr. Jaggers is your guardian, I understand?” he went on.“Yes.”“You know he is Miss Havisham’s man of business and solicitor, and has her confidence when nobody else has?”This was bringing me (I felt) towards dangerous ground. I answered with a constraint I made no attempt to disguise, that I had seen Mr. Jaggers in Miss Havisham’s house on the very day of our combat, but never at any other time, and that I believed he had no recollection of having ever seen me there.“He was so obliging as to suggest my father for your tutor, and he called on my father to propose it. Of course he knew about my father from his connection with Miss Havisham. My father is Miss Havisham’s cousin; not that that implies familiar intercourse between them, for he is a bad courtier and will not propitiate her.”Herbert Pocket had a frank and easy way with him that was very taking. I had never seen anyone then, and I have never seen anyone since, who more strongly expressed to me, in every look and tone, a natural incapacity to do anything secret and mean. There was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich. I don’t know how this was. I became imbued with the notion on that first occasion before we sat down to dinner, but I cannot define by what means.He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure was a little ungainly, as in the days when my knuckles had taken such liberties with it, but it looked as if it would always be light and young. Whether Mr. Trabb’s local work would have sat more gracefully on him than on me, may be a question; but I am conscious that he carried off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit.As he was so communicative, I felt that reserve on my part would be a bad return unsuited to our years. I therefore told him my small story, and laid stress on my being forbidden to inquire who my benefactor was. I further mentioned that as I had been brought up a blacksmith in a country place, and knew very little of the ways of politeness, I would take it as a great kindness in him if he would give me a hint whenever he saw me at a loss or going wrong.“With pleasure,” said he, “though I venture to prophesy that you’ll want very few hints. I dare say we shall be often together, and I should like to banish any needless restraint between us. Will you do me the favour to begin at once to call me by my Christian name, Herbert?”I thanked him and said I would. I informed him in exchange that my Christian name was Philip.“I don’t take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond, or so fat that he couldn’t see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a bird’s-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the neighborhood. I tell you what I should like. We are so harmonious, and you have been a blacksmith⁠—would you mind it?”“I shouldn’t mind anything that you propose,” I answered, “but I don’t understand you.”“Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There’s a charming piece of music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.”“I should like it very much.”“Then, my dear Handel,” said he, turning round as the door opened, “here is the dinner, and I must beg of you to take the top of the table, because the dinner is of your providing.”This I would not hear of, so he took the top, and I faced him. It was a nice little dinner⁠—seemed to me then a very Lord Mayor’s Feast⁠—and it acquired additional relish from being eaten under those independent circumstances, with no old people by, and with London all around us. This again was heightened by a certain gypsy character that set the banquet off; for while the table was, as Mr. Pumblechook might have said, the lap of luxury⁠—being entirely furnished forth from the coffeehouse⁠—the circumjacent region of sitting room was of a comparatively pastureless and shifty character; imposing on the waiter the wandering habits of putting the covers on the floor (where he fell over them), the melted butter in the armchair, the bread on the bookshelves, the cheese in the coal-scuttle, and the boiled fowl into my bed in the next room⁠—where I found much of its parsley and butter in a state of congelation when I retired for the night. All this made the feast delightful, and when the waiter was not there to watch me, my pleasure was without alloy.We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of his promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.“True,” he replied. “I’ll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the topic, Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth⁠—for fear of accidents⁠—and that while the fork is reserved for that use, it is not put further in than necessary. It is scarcely worth mentioning, only it’s as well to do as other people do. Also, the spoon is not generally used overhand, but under. This has two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after all is the object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on the part of the right elbow.”He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both laughed and I scarcely blushed.“Now,” he pursued, “concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you must know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don’t know why it should be a crack thing to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was and brew. You see it every day.”“Yet a gentleman may not keep a public house; may he?” said I.“Not on any account,” returned Herbert; “but a public house may keep a gentleman. Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his daughter.”“Miss Havisham was an only child?” I hazarded.“Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child; she had a half-brother. Her father privately married again⁠—his cook, I rather think.”“I thought he was proud,” said I.“My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately, because he was proud, and in course of time she died. When she was dead, I apprehend he first told his daughter what he had done, and then the son became a part of the family, residing in the house you are acquainted with. As the son grew a young man, he turned out riotous, extravagant, undutiful⁠—altogether bad. At last his father disinherited him; but he softened when he was dying, and left him well off, though not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham.⁠—Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one’s glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one’s nose.”I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I thanked him, and apologized. He said, “Not at all,” and resumed.“Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after as a great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what with debts and what with new madness wasted them most fearfully again. There were stronger differences between him and her than there had been between him and his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep and mortal grudge against her as having influenced the father’s anger. Now, I come to the cruel part of the story⁠—merely breaking off, my dear Handel, to remark that a dinner-napkin will not go into a tumbler.”Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it within those limits. Again I thanked him and apologized, and again he said in the cheerfullest manner, “Not at all, I am sure!” and resumed.“There appeared upon the scene⁠—say at the races, or the public balls, or anywhere else you like⁠—a certain man, who made love to Miss Havisham. I never saw him (for this happened five-and-twenty years ago, before you and I were, Handel), but I have heard my father mention that he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery (which had been weakly left him by his father) at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all. Your guardian was not at that time in Miss Havisham’s counsels, and she was too haughty and too much in love to be advised by anyone. Her relations were poor and scheming, with the exception of my father; he was poor enough, but not timeserving or jealous. The only independent one among them, he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and was placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first opportunity of angrily ordering my father out of the house, in his presence, and my father has never seen her since.”I thought of her having said, “Matthew will come and see me at last when I am laid dead upon that table;” and I asked Herbert whether his father was so inveterate against her?“It’s not that,” said he, “but she charged him, in the presence of her intended husband, with being disappointed in the hope of fawning upon her for his own advancement, and, if he were to go to her now, it would look true⁠—even to him⁠—and even to her. To return to the man and make an end of him. The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter⁠—”“Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?”“At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that it most heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day.”“Is that all the story?” I asked, after considering it.“All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it out for myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it was absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten one thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced confidence acted throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits.”“I wonder he didn’t marry her and get all the property,” said I.“He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may have been a part of her half-brother’s scheme,” said Herbert. “Mind! I don’t know that.”“What became of the two men?” I asked, after again considering the subject.“They fell into deeper shame and degradation⁠—if there can be deeper⁠—and ruin.”“Are they alive now?”“I don’t know.”“You said just now that Estella was not related to Miss Havisham, but adopted. When adopted?”Herbert shrugged his shoulders. “There has always been an Estella, since I have heard of a Miss Havisham. I know no more. And now, Handel,” said he, finally throwing off the story as it were, “there is a perfectly open understanding between us. All that I know about Miss Havisham, you know.”“And all that I know,” I retorted, “you know.”“I fully believe it. So there can be no competition or perplexity between you and me. And as to the condition on which you hold your advancement in life⁠—namely, that you are not to inquire or discuss to whom you owe it⁠—you may be very sure that it will never be encroached upon, or even approached, by me, or by anyone belonging to me.”In truth, he said this with so much delicacy, that I felt the subject done with, even though I should be under his father’s roof for years and years to come. Yet he said it with so much meaning, too, that I felt he as perfectly understood Miss Havisham to be my benefactress, as I understood the fact myself.It had not occurred to me before, that he had led up to the theme for the purpose of clearing it out of our way; but we were so much the lighter and easier for having broached it, that I now perceived this to be the case. We were very gay and sociable, and I asked him, in the course of conversation, what he was? He replied, “A capitalist⁠—an Insurer of Ships.” I suppose he saw me glancing about the room in search of some tokens of shipping, or capital, for he added, “In the City.”I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance of Insurers of Ships in the City, and I began to think with awe of having laid a young Insurer on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his responsible head open. But again there came upon me, for my relief, that odd impression that Herbert Pocket would never be very successful or rich.“I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and cut into the direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these things will interfere with my chartering a few thousand tons on my own account. I think I shall trade,” said he, leaning back in his chair, “to the East Indies, for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and precious woods. It’s an interesting trade.”“And the profits are large?” said I.“Tremendous!” said he.I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations than my own.“I think I shall trade, also,” said he, putting his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, “to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum. Also to Ceylon, specially for elephants’ tusks.”“You will want a good many ships,” said I.“A perfect fleet,” said he.Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I asked him where the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?“I haven’t begun insuring yet,” he replied. “I am looking about me.”Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard’s Inn. I said (in a tone of conviction), “Ah-h!”“Yes. I am in a countinghouse, and looking about me.”“Is a countinghouse profitable?” I asked.“To⁠—do you mean to the young fellow who’s in it?” he asked, in reply.“Yes; to you.”“Why, n-no; not to me.” He said this with the air of one carefully reckoning up and striking a balance. “Not directly profitable. That is, it doesn’t pay me anything, and I have to⁠—keep myself.”This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head as if I would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative capital from such a source of income.“But the thing is,” said Herbert Pocket, “that you look about you. That’s the grand thing. You are in a countinghouse, you know, and you look about you.”It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn’t be out of a countinghouse, you know, and look about you; but I silently deferred to his experience.“Then the time comes,” said Herbert, “when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made your capital, you have nothing to do but employ it.”This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden; very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly corresponded to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me that he took all blows and buffets now with just the same air as he had taken mine then. It was evident that he had nothing around him but the simplest necessaries, foreverything that I remarked upon turned out to have been sent in on my account from the coffeehouse or somewhere else.Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being puffed up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant ways, and we got on famously. In the evening we went out for a walk in the streets, and went half-price to the Theatre; and next day we went to church at Westminster Abbey, and in the afternoon we walked in the Parks; and I wondered who shod all the horses there, and wished Joe did.On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I had left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and them partook of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance off. That I could have been at our old church in my old churchgoing clothes, on the very last Sunday that ever was, seemed a combination of impossibilities, geographical and social, solar and lunar. Yet in the London streets so crowded with people and so brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening, there were depressing hints of reproaches for that I had put the poor old kitchen at home so far away; and in the dead of night, the footsteps of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard’s Inn, under pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to the countinghouse to report himself⁠—to look about him, too, I suppose⁠—and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or two to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him. It appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were hatched were incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of ostriches, judging from the places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday morning. Nor did the countinghouse where Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at all a good observatory; being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy presence in all particulars, and with a look into another back second floor, rather than a look out.I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon ’Change, and I saw fluey men sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I took to be great merchants, though I couldn’t understand why they should all be out of spirits. When Herbert came, we went and had lunch at a celebrated house which I then quite venerated, but now believe to have been the most abject superstition in Europe, and where I could not help noticing, even then, that there was much more gravy on the tablecloths and knives and waiters’ clothes, than in the steaks. This collation disposed of at a moderate price (considering the grease, which was not charged for), we went back to Barnard’s Inn and got my little portmanteau, and then took coach for Hammersmith. We arrived there at two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and had very little way to walk to Mr. Pocket’s house. Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little garden overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket’s children were playing about. And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs. Pocket’s children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with her legs upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket’s two nursemaids were looking about them while the children played. “Mamma,” said Herbert, “this is young Mr. Pip.” Upon which Mrs. Pocket received me with an appearance of amiable dignity.“Master Alick and Miss Jane,” cried one of the nurses to two of the children, “if you go a bouncing up against them bushes you’ll fall over into the river and be drownded, and what’ll your pa say then?”At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket’s handkerchief, and said, “If that don’t make six times you’ve dropped it, Mum!” Upon which Mrs. Pocket laughed and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and settling herself in one chair only, resumed her book. Her countenance immediately assumed a knitted and intent expression as if she had been reading for a week, but before she could have read half a dozen lines, she fixed her eyes upon me, and said, “I hope your mamma is quite well?” This unexpected inquiry put me into such a difficulty that I began saying in the absurdest way that if there had been any such person I had no doubt she would have been quite well and would have been very much obliged and would have sent her compliments, when the nurse came to my rescue.“Well!” she cried, picking up the pocket handkerchief, “if that don’t make seven times! What are you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!” Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and forgot me, and went on reading.I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air, wailing dolefully.“If there ain’t Baby!” said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising. “Make haste up, Millers.”Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the child’s wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be.We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her⁠—always very much to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself.“Gracious me, Flopson!” said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment, “everybody’s tumbling!”“Gracious you, indeed, Mum!” returned Flopson, very red in the face; “what have you got there?”“I got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.“Why, if it ain’t your footstool!” cried Flopson. “And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who’s to help tumbling? Here! Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book.”Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down.Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn’t quite see his way to putting anything straight. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared to have sustained a good many bereavements; for he wore at least four mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several rings and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were quite laden with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes⁠—small, keen, and black⁠—and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.“No,” said I.“I was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”“You are well acquainted with it now?”“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying something than for information.“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are plenty of people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.”“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off a little.“O! I don’t know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there’s not much bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by it.”“That makes it worse.”“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should say.”He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him: walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance, and that he was not smiling at all.“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of London.”“Is that far?”“Well! Say five miles.”“Do you know him?”“Why, you’re a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. I know him!”There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text, when he said here we were at Barnard’s Inn. My depression was not alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere public house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tomcats.We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flowerpot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar⁠—rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides⁠—addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard’s Mixture.”So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he, mistaking me; “the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.”He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs⁠—which appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find themselves without the means of coming down⁠—to a set of chambers on the top floor. Mr. Pocket, Jun., was painted on the door, and there was a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”“He hardly thought you’d come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You don’t want me any more?”“No, thank you,” said I.“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet pretty often. Good day.”“Good day.”I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting himself⁠—“To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?”I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion, but said yes.“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick⁠—“except at last. Very glad, I’m sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the window’s encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.Mr. Pocket, Junior’s, idea of shortly was not mine, for I had nearly maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper bag under each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of breath.“Mr. Pip?” said he.“Mr. Pocket?” said I.“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your account⁠—not that that is any excuse⁠—for I thought, coming from the country, you might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden Market to get it good.”For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think this was a dream.“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!”As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while the paper bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and combated with the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so suddenly at last, that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start out of my head, and as if this must be a dream.“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way. I am rather bare here, but I hope you’ll be able to make out tolerably well till Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably through tomorrow with me than with him, and might like to take a walk about London. I am sure I shall be very happy to show London to you. As to our table, you won’t find that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied from our coffeehouse here, and (it is only right I should add) at your expense, such being Mr. Jaggers’s directions. As to our lodging, it’s not by any means splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father hasn’t anything to give me, and I shouldn’t be willing to take it, if he had. This is our sitting room⁠—just such chairs and tables and carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn’t give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come for you from the coffeehouse. This is my little bedroom; rather musty, but Barnard’s is musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture’s hired for the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want anything, I’ll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together, but we shan’t fight, I dare say. But dear me, I beg your pardon, you’re holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take these bags from you. I am quite ashamed.”As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One, Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to be in mine, and he said, falling back⁠—“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!”“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

The journey from our town to the metropolis was a journey of about five hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stagecoach by which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address; it was, Little Britain, and he had written after it on his card, “just out of Smithfield, and close by the coach office.” Nevertheless, a hackney coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy greatcoat as he was years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time. It was a wonderful equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged things behind for I don’t know how many footmen to hold on by, and a harrow below them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the temptation.I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a straw-yard it was, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why the horses’ nosebags were kept inside, when I observed the coachman beginning to get down, as if we were going to stop presently. And stop we presently did, in a gloomy street, at certain offices with an open door, whereon was painted Mr. Jaggers.“How much?” I asked the coachman.The coachman answered, “A shilling⁠—unless you wish to make it more.”I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.“Then it must be a shilling,” observed the coachman. “I don’t want to get into trouble. I know him!” He darkly closed an eye at Mr. Jaggers’s name, and shook his head.When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed the ascent to his box, and had got away (which appeared to relieve his mind), I went into the front office with my little portmanteau in my hand and asked, Was Mr. Jaggers at home?“He is not,” returned the clerk. “He is in Court at present. Am I addressing Mr. Pip?”I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.“Mr. Jaggers left word, would you wait in his room. He couldn’t say how long he might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason, his time being valuable, that he won’t be longer than he can help.”With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an inner chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye, in a velveteen suit and knee-breeches, who wiped his nose with his sleeve on being interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting, when the clerk shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw used, and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone.Mr. Jaggers’s room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most dismal place; the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken head, and the distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to peep down at me through it. There were not so many papers about, as I should have expected to see; and there were some odd objects about, that I should not have expected to see⁠—such as an old rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several strange-looking boxes and packages, and two dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy about the nose. Mr. Jaggers’s own high-backed chair was of deadly black horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin; and I fancied I could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his forefinger at the clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to have had a habit of backing up against the wall; the wall, especially opposite to Mr. Jaggers’s chair, being greasy with shoulders. I recalled, too, that the one-eyed gentleman had shuffled forth against the wall when I was the innocent cause of his being turned out.I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers’s chair, and became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place. I called to mind that the clerk had the same air of knowing something to everybody else’s disadvantage, as his master had. I wondered how many other clerks there were upstairs, and whether they all claimed to have the same detrimental mastery of their fellow-creatures. I wondered what was the history of all the odd litter about the room, and how it came there. I wondered whether the two swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers’s family, and, if he were so unfortunate as to have had a pair of such ill-looking relations, why he stuck them on that dusty perch for the blacks and flies to settle on, instead of giving them a place at home. Of course I had no experience of a London summer day, and my spirits may have been oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit that lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr. Jaggers’s close room, until I really could not bear the two casts on the shelf above Mr. Jaggers’s chair, and got up and went out.When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of people standing about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the trials were on.While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and hear a trial or so: informing me that he could give me a front place for half a crown, whence I should command a full view of the Lord Chief Justice in his wig and robes⁠—mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and presently offering him at the reduced price of eighteen-pence. As I declined the proposal on the plea of an appointment, he was so good as to take me into a yard and show me where the gallows was kept, and also where people were publicly whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors’ Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged; heightening the interest of that dreadful portal by giving me to understand that “four on ’em” would come out at that door the day after tomorrow at eight in the morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a sickening idea of London; the more so as the Lord Chief Justice’s proprietor wore (from his hat down to his boots and up again to his pocket handkerchief inclusive) mildewed clothes which had evidently not belonged to him originally, and which I took it into my head he had bought cheap of the executioner. Under these circumstances I thought myself well rid of him for a shilling.I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and I found he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made the tour of Little Britain, and turned into Bartholomew Close; and now I became aware that other people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well as I. There were two men of secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew Close, and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the cracks of the pavement as they talked together, one of whom said to the other when they first passed me, that “Jaggers would do it if it was to be done.” There was a knot of three men and two women standing at a corner, and one of the women was crying on her dirty shawl, and the other comforted her by saying, as she pulled her own shawl over her shoulders, “Jaggers is for him, ’Melia, and what more could you have?” There was a red-eyed little Jew who came into the Close while I was loitering there, in company with a second little Jew whom he sent upon an errand; and while the messenger was gone, I remarked this Jew, who was of a highly excitable temperament, performing a jig of anxiety under a lamppost and accompanying himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, “O Jaggerth, Jaggerth, Jaggerth! all otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth!” These testimonies to the popularity of my guardian made a deep impression on me, and I admired and wondered more than ever.At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholomew Close into Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across the road towards me. All the others who were waiting saw him at the same time, and there was quite a rush at him. Mr. Jaggers, putting a hand on my shoulder and walking me on at his side without saying anything to me, addressed himself to his followers.First, he took the two secret men.“Now, I have nothing to say to you,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at them. “I want to know no more than I know. As to the result, it’s a tossup. I told you from the first it was a tossup. Have you paid Wemmick?”“We made the money up this morning, sir,” said one of the men, submissively, while the other perused Mr. Jaggers’s face.“I don’t ask you when you made it up, or where, or whether you made it up at all. Has Wemmick got it?”“Yes, sir,” said both the men together.“Very well; then you may go. Now, I won’t have it!” said Mr. Jaggers, waving his hand at them to put them behind him. “If you say a word to me, I’ll throw up the case.”“We thought, Mr. Jaggers⁠—” one of the men began, pulling off his hat.“That’s what I told you not to do,” said Mr. Jaggers. “You thought! I think for you; that’s enough for you. If I want you, I know where to find you; I don’t want you to find me. Now I won’t have it. I won’t hear a word.”The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved them behind again, and humbly fell back and were heard no more.“And now you!” said Mr. Jaggers, suddenly stopping, and turning on the two women with the shawls, from whom the three men had meekly separated⁠—“Oh! Amelia, is it?”“Yes, Mr. Jaggers.”“And do you remember,” retorted Mr. Jaggers, “that but for me you wouldn’t be here and couldn’t be here?”“O yes, sir!” exclaimed both women together. “Lord bless you, sir, well we knows that!”“Then why,” said Mr. Jaggers, “do you come here?”“My Bill, sir!” the crying woman pleaded.“Now, I tell you what!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Once for all. If you don’t know that your Bill’s in good hands, I know it. And if you come here bothering about your Bill, I’ll make an example of both your Bill and you, and let him slip through my fingers. Have you paid Wemmick?”“O yes, sir! Every farden.”“Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. Say another word⁠—one single word⁠—and Wemmick shall give you your money back.”This terrible threat caused the two women to fall off immediately. No one remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already raised the skirts of Mr. Jaggers’s coat to his lips several times.“I don’t know this man!” said Mr. Jaggers, in the same devastating strain: “What does this fellow want?”“Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham Latharuth?”“Who’s he?” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let go of my coat.”The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before relinquishing it, replied, “Habraham Latharuth, on thuthpithion of plate.”“You’re too late,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I am over the way.”“Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth!” cried my excitable acquaintance, turning white, “don’t thay you’re again Habraham Latharuth!”“I am,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and there’s an end of it. Get out of the way.”“Mithter Jaggerth! Half a moment! My hown cuthen’th gone to Mithter Wemmick at thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth. Mithter Jaggerth! Half a quarter of a moment! If you’d have the condethenthun to be bought off from the t’other thide⁠—at hany thuperior prithe!⁠—money no object!⁠—Mithter Jaggerth⁠—Mithter⁠—!”My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and left him dancing on the pavement as if it were red hot. Without further interruption, we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and the man in velveteen with the fur cap.“Here’s Mike,” said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.“Oh!” said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling at the bell-rope; “your man comes on this afternoon. Well?”“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a constitutional cold; “arter a deal o’ trouble, I’ve found one, sir, as might do.”“What is he prepared to swear?”“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this time; “in a general way, anythink.”Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. “Now, I warned you before,” said he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, “that if you ever presumed to talk in that way here, I’d make an example of you. You infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell me that?”The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious what he had done.“Spooney!” said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his elbow. “Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?”“Now, I ask you, you blundering booby,” said my guardian, very sternly, “once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is prepared to swear?”Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson from his face, and slowly replied, “Ayther to character, or to having been in his company and never left him all the night in question.”“Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?”Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before beginning to reply in a nervous manner, “We’ve dressed him up like⁠—” when my guardian blustered out⁠—“What? You will, will you?”(“Spooney!” added the clerk again, with another stir.)After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:⁠—“He is dressed like a ’spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook.”“Is he here?” asked my guardian.“I left him,” said Mike, “a setting on some doorsteps round the corner.”“Take him past that window, and let me see him.”The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery, which was painted over.“Tell him to take his witness away directly,” said my guardian to the clerk, in extreme disgust, “and ask him what he means by bringing such a fellow as that.”My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched, standing, from a sandwich box and a pocket flask of sherry (he seemed to bully his very sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements he had made for me. I was to go to “Barnard’s Inn,” to young Mr. Pocket’s rooms, where a bed had been sent in for my accommodation; I was to remain with young Mr. Pocket until Monday; on Monday I was to go with him to his father’s house on a visit, that I might try how I liked it. Also, I was told what my allowance was to be⁠—it was a very liberal one⁠—and had handed to me from one of my guardian’s drawers, the cards of certain tradesmen with whom I was to deal for all kinds of clothes, and such other things as I could in reason want. “You will find your credit good, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt like a whole caskful, as he hastily refreshed himself, “but I shall by this means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning the constable. Of course you’ll go wrong somehow, but that’s no fault of mine.”After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I asked Mr. Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not worth while, I was so near my destination; Wemmick should walk round with me, if I pleased.I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another clerk was rung down from upstairs to take his place while he was out, and I accompanied him into the street, after shaking hands with my guardian. We found a new set of people lingering outside, but Wemmick made a way among them by saying coolly yet decisively, “I tell you it’s no use; he won’t have a word to say to one of you;” and we soon got clear of them, and went on side by side. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud. Of that group I was one.A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cosy state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning over the back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an expression of contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great forefinger as he watched the group of faces.“Well!” said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading was done, “you have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no doubt?”Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He looked at everybody coldly and sarcastically.“Guilty, of course?” said he. “Out with it. Come!”“Sir,” returned Mr. Wopsle, “without having the honor of your acquaintance, I do say Guilty.” Upon this we all took courage to unite in a confirmatory murmur.“I know you do,” said the stranger; “I knew you would. I told you so. But now I’ll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not know, that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is proved⁠—proved⁠—to be guilty?”“Sir,” Mr. Wopsle began to reply, “as an Englishman myself, I⁠—”“Come!” said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. “Don’t evade the question. Either you know it, or you don’t know it. Which is it to be?”He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a bullying, interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr. Wopsle⁠—as it were to mark him out⁠—before biting it again.“Now!” said he. “Do you know it, or don’t you know it?”“Certainly I know it,” replied Mr. Wopsle.“Certainly you know it. Then why didn’t you say so at first? Now, I’ll ask you another question,”⁠—taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as if he had a right to him⁠—“do you know that none of these witnesses have yet been cross-examined?”Mr. Wopsle was beginning, “I can only say⁠—” when the stranger stopped him.“What? You won’t answer the question, yes or no? Now, I’ll try you again.” Throwing his finger at him again. “Attend to me. Are you aware, or are you not aware, that none of these witnesses have yet been cross-examined? Come, I only want one word from you. Yes, or no?”Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor opinion of him.“Come!” said the stranger, “I’ll help you. You don’t deserve help, but I’ll help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What is it?”“What is it?” repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.“Is it,” pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious manner, “the printed paper you have just been reading from?”“Undoubtedly.”“Undoubtedly. Now, turn to that paper, and tell me whether it distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that his legal advisers instructed him altogether to reserve his defence?”“I read that just now,” Mr. Wopsle pleaded.“Never mind what you read just now, sir; I don’t ask you what you read just now. You may read the Lord’s Prayer backwards, if you like⁠—and, perhaps, have done it before today. Turn to the paper. No, no, no my friend; not to the top of the column; you know better than that; to the bottom, to the bottom.” (We all began to think Mr. Wopsle full of subterfuge.) “Well? Have you found it?”“Here it is,” said Mr. Wopsle.“Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that he was instructed by his legal advisers wholly to reserve his defence? Come! Do you make that of it?”Mr. Wopsle answered, “Those are not the exact words.”“Not the exact words!” repeated the gentleman bitterly. “Is that the exact substance?”“Yes,” said Mr. Wopsle.“Yes,” repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the company with his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle. “And now I ask you what you say to the conscience of that man who, with that passage before his eyes, can lay his head upon his pillow after having pronounced a fellow-creature guilty, unheard?”We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had thought him, and that he was beginning to be found out.“And that same man, remember,” pursued the gentleman, throwing his finger at Mr. Wopsle heavily⁠—“that same man might be summoned as a juryman upon this very trial, and, having thus deeply committed himself, might return to the bosom of his family and lay his head upon his pillow, after deliberately swearing that he would well and truly try the issue joined between Our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, and would a true verdict give according to the evidence, so help him God!”We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too far, and had better stop in his reckless career while there was yet time.The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed, and with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about everyone of us that would effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose it, left the back of the settle, and came into the space between the two settles, in front of the fire, where he remained standing, his left hand in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right.“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us as we all quailed before him, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith among you, by name Joseph⁠—or Joe⁠—Gargery. Which is the man?”“Here is the man,” said Joe.The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip? Is he here?”“I am here!” I cried.The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the gentleman I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss Havisham. I had known him the moment I saw him looking over the settle, and now that I stood confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder, I checked off again in detail his large head, his dark complexion, his deep-set eyes, his bushy black eyebrows, his large watch-chain, his strong black dots of beard and whisker, and even the smell of scented soap on his great hand.“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my communication here; you will impart as much or as little of it as you please to your friends afterwards; I have nothing to do with that.”Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly Bargemen, and in a wondering silence walked home. While going along, the strange gentleman occasionally looked at me, and occasionally bit the side of his finger. As we neared home, Joe vaguely acknowledging the occasion as an impressive and ceremonious one, went on ahead to open the front door. Our conference was held in the state parlor, which was feebly lighted by one candle.It began with the strange gentleman’s sitting down at the table, drawing the candle to him, and looking over some entries in his pocketbook. He then put up the pocketbook and set the candle a little aside, after peering round it into the darkness at Joe and me, to ascertain which was which.“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not asked, and you see me here. What I have to do as the confidential agent of another, I do. No less, no more.”Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he got up, and threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus having one foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on the ground.“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for so doing?”“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip’s way,” said Joe, staring.“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr. Jaggers. “The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want anything?”“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made, and don’t try to go from it presently.”“Who’s a going to try?” retorted Joe.“I don’t say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”“Yes, I do keep a dog.”“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better. Bear that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something. “Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.”Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.“I am instructed to communicate to him,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, “that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman⁠—in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations.”My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.“Now, Mr. Pip,” pursued the lawyer, “I address the rest of what I have to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great expectations being encumbered with that easy condition. But if you have any objection, this is the time to mention it.”My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears, that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.“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.”Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.“I should think not! Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations.” Though he called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he still could not get rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion; and even now he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me while he spoke, as much as to express that he knew all kinds of things to my disparagement, if he only chose to mention them. “We come next, to mere details of arrangement. You must know that, although I have used the term ‘expectations’ more than once, you are not endowed with expectations only. There is already lodged in my hands a sum of money amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance. You will please consider me your guardian. Oh!” for I was going to thank him, “I tell you at once, I am paid for my services, or I shouldn’t render them. It is considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with your altered position, and that you will be alive to the importance and necessity of at once entering on that advantage.”I said I had always longed for it.“Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip,” he retorted; “keep to the record. If you long for it now, that’s enough. Am I answered that you are ready to be placed at once under some proper tutor? Is that it?”I stammered yes, that was it.“Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don’t think that wise, mind, but it’s my trust. Have you ever heard of any tutor whom you would prefer to another?”I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt; so, I replied in the negative.“There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I think might suit the purpose,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I don’t recommend him, observe; because I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I speak of is one Mr. Matthew Pocket.”Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham’s relation. The Matthew whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to be at Miss Havisham’s head, when she lay dead, in her bride’s dress on the bride’s table.“You know the name?” said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and then shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.My answer was, that I had heard of the name.“Oh!” said he. “You have heard of the name. But the question is, what do you say of it?”I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his recommendation⁠—“No, my young friend!” he interrupted, shaking his great head very slowly. “Recollect yourself!”Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him for his recommendation⁠—“No, my young friend,” he interrupted, shaking his head and frowning and smiling both at once⁠—“no, no, no; it’s very well done, but it won’t do; you are too young to fix me with it. Recommendation is not the word, Mr. Pip. Try another.”Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his mention of Mr. Matthew Pocket⁠—“That’s more like it!” cried Mr. Jaggers.⁠—And (I added), I would gladly try that gentleman.“Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be prepared for you, and you can see his son first, who is in London. When will you come to London?”I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I supposed I could come directly.“First,” said Mr. Jaggers, “you should have some new clothes to come in, and they should not be working-clothes. Say this day week. You’ll want some money. Shall I leave you twenty guineas?”He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them out on the table and pushed them over to me. This was the first time he had taken his leg from the chair. He sat astride of the chair when he had pushed the money over, and sat swinging his purse and eyeing Joe.“Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumbfoundered?”“I am!” said Joe, in a very decided manner.“It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?”“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood. And it ever will be similar according.”“But what,” said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse⁠—“what if it was in my instructions to make you a present, as compensation?”“As compensation what for?” Joe demanded.“For the loss of his services.”Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have often thought him since, like the steam-hammer that can crush a man or pat an eggshell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. “Pip is that hearty welcome,” said Joe, “to go free with his services, to honor and fortun’, as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child⁠—what come to the forge⁠—and ever the best of friends!⁠—”O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I see you again, with your muscular blacksmith’s arm before your eyes, and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel’s wing!But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future fortunes, and could not retrace the bypaths we had trodden together. I begged Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best of friends, and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but said not another word.Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognized in Joe the village idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said, weighing in his hand the purse he had ceased to swing:⁠—“Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you mean to say⁠—” Here, to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe’s suddenly working round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic purpose.“Which I meantersay,” cried Joe, “that if you come into my place bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if you’re a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay and stand or fall by!”I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable; merely stating to me, in an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice to anyone whom it might happen to concern, that he were not a going to be bull-baited and badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers had risen when Joe demonstrated, and had backed near the door. Without evincing any inclination to come in again, he there delivered his valedictory remarks. They were these.“Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here⁠—as you are to be a gentleman⁠—the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you shall receive my printed address in the meantime. You can take a hackney-coach at the stagecoach office in London, and come straight to me. Understand, that I express no opinion, one way or other, on the trust I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it, and I do so. Now, understand that, finally. Understand that!”He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have gone on, but for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as he was going down to the Jolly Bargemen, where he had left a hired carriage.“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers.”“Halloa!” said he, facing round, “what’s the matter?”“I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your directions; so I thought I had better ask. Would there be any objection to my taking leave of anyone I know, about here, before I go away?”“No,” said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.“I don’t mean in the village only, but up town?”“No,” said he. “No objection.”I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had already locked the front door and vacated the state parlor, and was seated by the kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing intently at the burning coals. I too sat down before the fire and gazed at the coals, and nothing was said for a long time.My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat at her needlework before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing coals, the more incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the silence lasted, the more unable I felt to speak.At length I got out, “Joe, have you told Biddy?”“No, Pip,” returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make off somewhere, “which I left it to yourself, Pip.”“I would rather you told, Joe.”“Pip’s a gentleman of fortun’ then,” said Joe, “and God bless him in it!”Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and looked at me. I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both heartily congratulated me; but there was a certain touch of sadness in their congratulations that I rather resented.I took it upon myself to impress Biddy (and through Biddy, Joe) with the grave obligation I considered my friends under, to know nothing and say nothing about the maker of my fortune. It would all come out in good time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was to be said, save that I had come into great expectations from a mysterious patron. Biddy nodded her head thoughtfully at the fire as she took up her work again, and said she would be very particular; and Joe, still detaining his knees, said, “Ay, ay, I’ll be ekervally partickler, Pip;” and then they congratulated me again, and went on to express so much wonder at the notion of my being a gentleman that I didn’t half like it.Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some idea of what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts entirely failed. She laughed and nodded her head a great many times, and even repeated after Biddy, the words “Pip” and “Property.” But I doubt if they had more meaning in them than an election cry, and I cannot suggest a darker picture of her state of mind.I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy. Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied with myself.Anyhow, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand, looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and about what they should do without me, and all that. And whenever I caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly (and they often looked at me⁠—particularly Biddy), I felt offended: as if they were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven knows they never did by word or sign.At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for our kitchen door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to air the room. The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my life.“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread and cheese and beer. “Five more days, and then the day before the day! They’ll soon go.”“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer-mug. “They’ll soon go.”“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I’ll come and put them on there, or that I’ll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook’s. It would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people here.”“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new genteel figure too, Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices. “So might Wopsle. And the Jolly Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”“That’s just what I don’t want, Joe. They would make such a business of it⁠—such a coarse and common business⁠—that I couldn’t bear myself.”“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe. “If you couldn’t abear yourself⁠—”Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister’s plate, “Have you thought about when you’ll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister and me? You will show yourself to us; won’t you?”“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick that it’s difficult to keep up with you.”(“She always were quick,” observed Joe.)“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening⁠—most likely on the evening before I go away.”Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an affectionate good night with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When I got into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean little room that I should soon be parted from and raised above, forever. It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at the same moment I fell into much the same confused division of mind between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in so often between the forge and Miss Havisham’s, and Biddy and Estella.The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic, and the room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking out, I saw Joe come slowly forth at the dark door, below, and take a turn or two in the air; and then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a pipe and light it for him. He never smoked so late, and it seemed to hint to me that he wanted comforting, for some reason or other.He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe, and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both of them more than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe’s pipe floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe⁠—not obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared together. I put my light out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy bed now, and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any more. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud. Of that group I was one.A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cosy state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning over the back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an expression of contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great forefinger as he watched the group of faces.“Well!” said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading was done, “you have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no doubt?”Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He looked at everybody coldly and sarcastically.“Guilty, of course?” said he. “Out with it. Come!”“Sir,” returned Mr. Wopsle, “without having the honor of your acquaintance, I do say Guilty.” Upon this we all took courage to unite in a confirmatory murmur.“I know you do,” said the stranger; “I knew you would. I told you so. But now I’ll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not know, that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is proved⁠—proved⁠—to be guilty?”“Sir,” Mr. Wopsle began to reply, “as an Englishman myself, I⁠—”“Come!” said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. “Don’t evade the question. Either you know it, or you don’t know it. Which is it to be?”He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a bullying, interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr. Wopsle⁠—as it were to mark him out⁠—before biting it again.“Now!” said he. “Do you know it, or don’t you know it?”“Certainly I know it,” replied Mr. Wopsle.“Certainly you know it. Then why didn’t you say so at first? Now, I’ll ask you another question,”⁠—taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as if he had a right to him⁠—“do you know that none of these witnesses have yet been cross-examined?”Mr. Wopsle was beginning, “I can only say⁠—” when the stranger stopped him.“What? You won’t answer the question, yes or no? Now, I’ll try you again.” Throwing his finger at him again. “Attend to me. Are you aware, or are you not aware, that none of these witnesses have yet been cross-examined? Come, I only want one word from you. Yes, or no?”Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor opinion of him.“Come!” said the stranger, “I’ll help you. You don’t deserve help, but I’ll help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What is it?”“What is it?” repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.“Is it,” pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious manner, “the printed paper you have just been reading from?”“Undoubtedly.”“Undoubtedly. Now, turn to that paper, and tell me whether it distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that his legal advisers instructed him altogether to reserve his defence?”“I read that just now,” Mr. Wopsle pleaded.“Never mind what you read just now, sir; I don’t ask you what you read just now. You may read the Lord’s Prayer backwards, if you like⁠—and, perhaps, have done it before today. Turn to the paper. No, no, no my friend; not to the top of the column; you know better than that; to the bottom, to the bottom.” (We all began to think Mr. Wopsle full of subterfuge.) “Well? Have you found it?”“Here it is,” said Mr. Wopsle.“Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that he was instructed by his legal advisers wholly to reserve his defence? Come! Do you make that of it?”Mr. Wopsle answered, “Those are not the exact words.”“Not the exact words!” repeated the gentleman bitterly. “Is that the exact substance?”“Yes,” said Mr. Wopsle.“Yes,” repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the company with his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle. “And now I ask you what you say to the conscience of that man who, with that passage before his eyes, can lay his head upon his pillow after having pronounced a fellow-creature guilty, unheard?”We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had thought him, and that he was beginning to be found out.“And that same man, remember,” pursued the gentleman, throwing his finger at Mr. Wopsle heavily⁠—“that same man might be summoned as a juryman upon this very trial, and, having thus deeply committed himself, might return to the bosom of his family and lay his head upon his pillow, after deliberately swearing that he would well and truly try the issue joined between Our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, and would a true verdict give according to the evidence, so help him God!”We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too far, and had better stop in his reckless career while there was yet time.The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed, and with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about everyone of us that would effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose it, left the back of the settle, and came into the space between the two settles, in front of the fire, where he remained standing, his left hand in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right.“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us as we all quailed before him, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith among you, by name Joseph⁠—or Joe⁠—Gargery. Which is the man?”“Here is the man,” said Joe.The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip? Is he here?”“I am here!” I cried.The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the gentleman I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss Havisham. I had known him the moment I saw him looking over the settle, and now that I stood confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder, I checked off again in detail his large head, his dark complexion, his deep-set eyes, his bushy black eyebrows, his large watch-chain, his strong black dots of beard and whisker, and even the smell of scented soap on his great hand.“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my communication here; you will impart as much or as little of it as you please to your friends afterwards; I have nothing to do with that.”Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly Bargemen, and in a wondering silence walked home. While going along, the strange gentleman occasionally looked at me, and occasionally bit the side of his finger. As we neared home, Joe vaguely acknowledging the occasion as an impressive and ceremonious one, went on ahead to open the front door. Our conference was held in the state parlor, which was feebly lighted by one candle.It began with the strange gentleman’s sitting down at the table, drawing the candle to him, and looking over some entries in his pocketbook. He then put up the pocketbook and set the candle a little aside, after peering round it into the darkness at Joe and me, to ascertain which was which.“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not asked, and you see me here. What I have to do as the confidential agent of another, I do. No less, no more.”Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he got up, and threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus having one foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on the ground.“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for so doing?”“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip’s way,” said Joe, staring.“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr. Jaggers. “The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want anything?”“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made, and don’t try to go from it presently.”“Who’s a going to try?” retorted Joe.“I don’t say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”“Yes, I do keep a dog.”“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better. Bear that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something. “Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.”Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.“I am instructed to communicate to him,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, “that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman⁠—in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations.”My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.“Now, Mr. Pip,” pursued the lawyer, “I address the rest of what I have to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great expectations being encumbered with that easy condition. But if you have any objection, this is the time to mention it.”My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears, that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.“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.”Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.“I should think not! Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations.” Though he called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he still could not get rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion; and even now he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me while he spoke, as much as to express that he knew all kinds of things to my disparagement, if he only chose to mention them. “We come next, to mere details of arrangement. You must know that, although I have used the term ‘expectations’ more than once, you are not endowed with expectations only. There is already lodged in my hands a sum of money amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance. You will please consider me your guardian. Oh!” for I was going to thank him, “I tell you at once, I am paid for my services, or I shouldn’t render them. It is considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with your altered position, and that you will be alive to the importance and necessity of at once entering on that advantage.”I said I had always longed for it.“Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip,” he retorted; “keep to the record. If you long for it now, that’s enough. Am I answered that you are ready to be placed at once under some proper tutor? Is that it?”I stammered yes, that was it.“Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don’t think that wise, mind, but it’s my trust. Have you ever heard of any tutor whom you would prefer to another?”I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt; so, I replied in the negative.“There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I think might suit the purpose,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I don’t recommend him, observe; because I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I speak of is one Mr. Matthew Pocket.”Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham’s relation. The Matthew whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to be at Miss Havisham’s head, when she lay dead, in her bride’s dress on the bride’s table.“You know the name?” said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and then shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.My answer was, that I had heard of the name.“Oh!” said he. “You have heard of the name. But the question is, what do you say of it?”I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his recommendation⁠—“No, my young friend!” he interrupted, shaking his great head very slowly. “Recollect yourself!”Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him for his recommendation⁠—“No, my young friend,” he interrupted, shaking his head and frowning and smiling both at once⁠—“no, no, no; it’s very well done, but it won’t do; you are too young to fix me with it. Recommendation is not the word, Mr. Pip. Try another.”Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his mention of Mr. Matthew Pocket⁠—“That’s more like it!” cried Mr. Jaggers.⁠—And (I added), I would gladly try that gentleman.“Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be prepared for you, and you can see his son first, who is in London. When will you come to London?”I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I supposed I could come directly.“First,” said Mr. Jaggers, “you should have some new clothes to come in, and they should not be working-clothes. Say this day week. You’ll want some money. Shall I leave you twenty guineas?”He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them out on the table and pushed them over to me. This was the first time he had taken his leg from the chair. He sat astride of the chair when he had pushed the money over, and sat swinging his purse and eyeing Joe.“Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumbfoundered?”“I am!” said Joe, in a very decided manner.“It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?”“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood. And it ever will be similar according.”“But what,” said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse⁠—“what if it was in my instructions to make you a present, as compensation?”“As compensation what for?” Joe demanded.“For the loss of his services.”Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have often thought him since, like the steam-hammer that can crush a man or pat an eggshell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. “Pip is that hearty welcome,” said Joe, “to go free with his services, to honor and fortun’, as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child⁠—what come to the forge⁠—and ever the best of friends!⁠—”O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I see you again, with your muscular blacksmith’s arm before your eyes, and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel’s wing!But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future fortunes, and could not retrace the bypaths we had trodden together. I begged Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best of friends, and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but said not another word.Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognized in Joe the village idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said, weighing in his hand the purse he had ceased to swing:⁠—“Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you mean to say⁠—” Here, to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe’s suddenly working round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic purpose.“Which I meantersay,” cried Joe, “that if you come into my place bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if you’re a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay and stand or fall by!”I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable; merely stating to me, in an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice to anyone whom it might happen to concern, that he were not a going to be bull-baited and badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers had risen when Joe demonstrated, and had backed near the door. Without evincing any inclination to come in again, he there delivered his valedictory remarks. They were these.“Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here⁠—as you are to be a gentleman⁠—the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you shall receive my printed address in the meantime. You can take a hackney-coach at the stagecoach office in London, and come straight to me. Understand, that I express no opinion, one way or other, on the trust I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it, and I do so. Now, understand that, finally. Understand that!”He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have gone on, but for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as he was going down to the Jolly Bargemen, where he had left a hired carriage.“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers.”“Halloa!” said he, facing round, “what’s the matter?”“I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your directions; so I thought I had better ask. Would there be any objection to my taking leave of anyone I know, about here, before I go away?”“No,” said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.“I don’t mean in the village only, but up town?”“No,” said he. “No objection.”I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had already locked the front door and vacated the state parlor, and was seated by the kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing intently at the burning coals. I too sat down before the fire and gazed at the coals, and nothing was said for a long time.My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat at her needlework before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing coals, the more incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the silence lasted, the more unable I felt to speak.At length I got out, “Joe, have you told Biddy?”“No, Pip,” returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make off somewhere, “which I left it to yourself, Pip.”“I would rather you told, Joe.”“Pip’s a gentleman of fortun’ then,” said Joe, “and God bless him in it!”Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and looked at me. I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both heartily congratulated me; but there was a certain touch of sadness in their congratulations that I rather resented.I took it upon myself to impress Biddy (and through Biddy, Joe) with the grave obligation I considered my friends under, to know nothing and say nothing about the maker of my fortune. It would all come out in good time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was to be said, save that I had come into great expectations from a mysterious patron. Biddy nodded her head thoughtfully at the fire as she took up her work again, and said she would be very particular; and Joe, still detaining his knees, said, “Ay, ay, I’ll be ekervally partickler, Pip;” and then they congratulated me again, and went on to express so much wonder at the notion of my being a gentleman that I didn’t half like it.Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some idea of what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts entirely failed. She laughed and nodded her head a great many times, and even repeated after Biddy, the words “Pip” and “Property.” But I doubt if they had more meaning in them than an election cry, and I cannot suggest a darker picture of her state of mind.I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy. Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied with myself.Anyhow, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand, looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and about what they should do without me, and all that. And whenever I caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly (and they often looked at me⁠—particularly Biddy), I felt offended: as if they were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven knows they never did by word or sign.At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for our kitchen door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to air the room. The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my life.“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread and cheese and beer. “Five more days, and then the day before the day! They’ll soon go.”“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer-mug. “They’ll soon go.”“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I’ll come and put them on there, or that I’ll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook’s. It would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people here.”“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new genteel figure too, Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices. “So might Wopsle. And the Jolly Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”“That’s just what I don’t want, Joe. They would make such a business of it⁠—such a coarse and common business⁠—that I couldn’t bear myself.”“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe. “If you couldn’t abear yourself⁠—”Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister’s plate, “Have you thought about when you’ll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister and me? You will show yourself to us; won’t you?”“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick that it’s difficult to keep up with you.”(“She always were quick,” observed Joe.)“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening⁠—most likely on the evening before I go away.”Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an affectionate good night with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When I got into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean little room that I should soon be parted from and raised above, forever. It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at the same moment I fell into much the same confused division of mind between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in so often between the forge and Miss Havisham’s, and Biddy and Estella.The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic, and the room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking out, I saw Joe come slowly forth at the dark door, below, and take a turn or two in the air; and then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a pipe and light it for him. He never smoked so late, and it seemed to hint to me that he wanted comforting, for some reason or other.He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe, and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both of them more than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe’s pipe floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe⁠—not obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared together. I put my light out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy bed now, and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any more. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship life, which was varied beyond the limits of the village and the marshes, by no more remarkable circumstance than the arrival of my birthday and my paying another visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket still on duty at the gate; I found Miss Havisham just as I had left her, and she spoke of Estella in the very same way, if not in the very same words. The interview lasted but a few minutes, and she gave me a guinea when I was going, and told me to come again on my next birthday. I may mention at once that this became an annual custom. I tried to decline taking the guinea on the first occasion, but with no better effect than causing her to ask me very angrily, if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took it.So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it, any more than as to the actual fact. It bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy, however. Her shoes came up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands were always clean. She was not beautiful⁠—she was common, and could not be like Estella⁠—but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered. She had not been with us more than a year (I remember her being newly out of mourning at the time it struck me), when I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I was poring at⁠—writing some passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at once by a sort of stratagem⁠—and seeing Biddy observant of what I was about. I laid down my pen, and Biddy stopped in her needlework without laying it down.“Biddy,” said I, “how do you manage it? Either I am very stupid, or you are very clever.”“What is it that I manage? I don’t know,” returned Biddy, smiling.She managed our whole domestic life, and wonderfully too; but I did not mean that, though that made what I did mean more surprising.“How do you manage, Biddy,” said I, “to learn everything that I learn, and always to keep up with me?” I was beginning to be rather vain of my knowledge, for I spent my birthday guineas on it, and set aside the greater part of my pocket money for similar investment; though I have no doubt, now, that the little I knew was extremely dear at the price.“I might as well ask you,” said Biddy, “how you manage?”“No; because when I come in from the forge of a night, anyone can see me turning to at it. But you never turn to at it, Biddy.”“I suppose I must catch it like a cough,” said Biddy, quietly; and went on with her sewing.Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair, and looked at Biddy sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her rather an extraordinary girl. For I called to mind now, that she was equally accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names of our different sorts of work, and our various tools. In short, whatever I knew, Biddy knew. Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or better.“You are one of those, Biddy,” said I, “who make the most of every chance. You never had a chance before you came here, and see how improved you are!”Biddy looked at me for an instant, and went on with her sewing. “I was your first teacher though; wasn’t I?” said she, as she sewed.“Biddy!” I exclaimed, in amazement. “Why, you are crying!”“No I am not,” said Biddy, looking up and laughing. “What put that in your head?”What could have put it in my head but the glistening of a tear as it dropped on her work? I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living, so highly desirable to be got rid of by some people. I recalled the hopeless circumstances by which she had been surrounded in the miserable little shop and the miserable little noisy evening school, with that miserable old bundle of incompetence always to be dragged and shouldered. I reflected that even in those untoward times there must have been latent in Biddy what was now developing, for, in my first uneasiness and discontent I had turned to her for help, as a matter of course. Biddy sat quietly sewing, shedding no more tears, and while I looked at her and thought about it all, it occurred to me that perhaps I had not been sufficiently grateful to Biddy. I might have been too reserved, and should have patronized her more (though I did not use that precise word in my meditations) with my confidence.“Yes, Biddy,” I observed, when I had done turning it over, “you were my first teacher, and that at a time when we little thought of ever being together like this, in this kitchen.”“Ah, poor thing!” replied Biddy. It was like her self-forgetfulness to transfer the remark to my sister, and to get up and be busy about her, making her more comfortable; “that’s sadly true!”“Well!” said I, “we must talk together a little more, as we used to do. And I must consult you a little more, as I used to do. Let us have a quiet walk on the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long chat.”My sister was never left alone now; but Joe more than readily undertook the care of her on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I went out together. It was summertime, and lovely weather. When we had passed the village and the church and the churchyard, and were out on the marshes and began to see the sails of the ships as they sailed on, I began to combine Miss Havisham and Estella with the prospect, in my usual way. When we came to the riverside and sat down on the bank, with the water rippling at our feet, making it all more quiet than it would have been without that sound, I resolved that it was a good time and place for the admission of Biddy into my inner confidence.“Biddy,” said I, after binding her to secrecy, “I want to be a gentleman.”“O, I wouldn’t, if I was you!” she returned. “I don’t think it would answer.”“Biddy,” said I, with some severity, “I have particular reasons for wanting to be a gentleman.”“You know best, Pip; but don’t you think you are happier as you are?”“Biddy,” I exclaimed, impatiently, “I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken to either, since I was bound. Don’t be absurd.”“Was I absurd?” said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows; “I am sorry for that; I didn’t mean to be. I only want you to do well, and to be comfortable.”“Well, then, understand once for all that I never shall or can be comfortable⁠—or anything but miserable⁠—there, Biddy!⁠—unless I can lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now.”“That’s a pity!” said Biddy, shaking her head with a sorrowful air.Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular kind of quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was half inclined to shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy gave utterance to her sentiment and my own. I told her she was right, and I knew it was much to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.“If I could have settled down,” I said to Biddy, plucking up the short grass within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my feelings out of my hair and kicked them into the brewery wall⁠—“if I could have settled down and been but half as fond of the forge as I was when I was little, I know it would have been much better for me. You and I and Joe would have wanted nothing then, and Joe and I would perhaps have gone partners when I was out of my time, and I might even have grown up to keep company with you, and we might have sat on this very bank on a fine Sunday, quite different people. I should have been good enough for you; shouldn’t I, Biddy?”Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for answer, “Yes; I am not over-particular.” It scarcely sounded flattering, but I knew she meant well.“Instead of that,” said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or two, “see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and⁠—what would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so!”Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account.” Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.“I don’t know,” I moodily answered.“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think⁠—but you know best⁠—that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think⁠—but you know best⁠—she was not worth gaining over.”Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?“It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her dreadfully.”In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a good grasp on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it well. All the while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced, that I was quite conscious it would have served my face right, if I had lifted it up by my hair, and knocked it against the pebbles as a punishment for belonging to such an idiot.Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me. She put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work, upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair. Then she softly patted my shoulder in a soothing way, while with my face upon my sleeve I cried a little⁠—exactly as I had done in the brewery yard⁠—and felt vaguely convinced that I was very much ill-used by somebody, or by everybody; I can’t say which.“I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is, that you have felt you could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing, and that is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it and always so far deserving it. If your first teacher (dear! such a poor one, and so much in need of being taught herself!) had been your teacher at the present time, she thinks she knows what lesson she would set. But it would be a hard one to learn, and you have got beyond her, and it’s of no use now.” So, with a quiet sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank, and said, with a fresh and pleasant change of voice, “Shall we walk a little farther, or go home?”“Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving her a kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”“Till you’re a gentleman,” said Biddy.“You know I never shall be, so that’s always. Not that I have any occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know⁠—as I told you at home the other night.”“Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships. And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, “shall we walk a little farther, or go home?”I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, “Pip, what a fool you are!”We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy today and somebody else tomorrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me right.”“I wish I could!” said Biddy.“If I could only get myself to fall in love with you⁠—you don’t mind my speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?”“Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don’t mind me.”“If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.”“But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way), Old Orlick.“Halloa!” he growled, “where are you two going?”“Where should we be going, but home?”“Well, then,” said he, “I’m jiggered if I don’t see you home!”This penalty of being jiggered was a favorite supposititious case of his. He attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware of, but used it, like his own pretended Christian name, to affront mankind, and convey an idea of something savagely damaging. When I was younger, I had had a general belief that if he had jiggered me personally, he would have done it with a sharp and twisted hook.Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a whisper, “Don’t let him come; I don’t like him.” As I did not like him either, I took the liberty of saying that we thanked him, but we didn’t want seeing home. He received that piece of information with a yell of laughter, and dropped back, but came slouching after us at a little distance.Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in that murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to give any account, I asked her why she did not like him.“Oh!” she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after us, “because I⁠—I am afraid he likes me.”“Did he ever tell you he liked you?” I asked indignantly.“No,” said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, “he never told me so; but he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye.”However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not doubt the accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed upon Old Orlick’s daring to admire her; as hot as if it were an outrage on myself.“But it makes no difference to you, you know,” said Biddy, calmly.“No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me; only I don’t like it; I don’t approve of it.”“Nor I neither,” said Biddy. “Though that makes no difference to you.”“Exactly,” said I; “but I must tell you I should have no opinion of you, Biddy, if he danced at you with your own consent.”I kept an eye on Orlick after that night, and, whenever circumstances were favorable to his dancing at Biddy, got before him to obscure that demonstration. He had struck root in Joe’s establishment, by reason of my sister’s sudden fancy for him, or I should have tried to get him dismissed. He quite understood and reciprocated my good intentions, as I had reason to know thereafter.And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that my disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge was gone, and that I was growing up in a fair way to be partners with Joe and to keep company with Biddy⁠—when all in a moment some confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon me like a destructive missile, and scatter my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune when my time was out.If my time had run out, it would have left me still at the height of my perplexities, I dare say. It never did run out, however, but was brought to a premature end, as I proceed to relate. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at all events that as her near relation, popularly known to be under obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than anyone else. But when, in the clearer light of next morning, I began to reconsider the matter and to hear it discussed around me on all sides, I took another view of the case, which was more reasonable.Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a quarter after eight o’clock to a quarter before ten. While he was there, my sister had been seen standing at the kitchen door, and had exchanged Good Night with a farm-laborer going home. The man could not be more particular as to the time at which he saw her (he got into dense confusion when he tried to be), than that it must have been before nine. When Joe went home at five minutes before ten, he found her struck down on the floor, and promptly called in assistance. The fire had not then burnt unusually low, nor was the snuff of the candle very long; the candle, however, had been blown out.Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither, beyond the blowing out of the candle⁠—which stood on a table between the door and my sister, and was behind her when she stood facing the fire and was struck⁠—was there any disarrangement of the kitchen, excepting such as she herself had made, in falling and bleeding. But, there was one remarkable piece of evidence on the spot. She had been struck with something blunt and heavy, on the head and spine; after the blows were dealt, something heavy had been thrown down at her with considerable violence, as she lay on her face. And on the ground beside her, when Joe picked her up, was a convict’s leg-iron which had been filed asunder.Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith’s eye, declared it to have been filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the hulks, and people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe’s opinion was corroborated. They did not undertake to say when it had left the prison ships to which it undoubtedly had once belonged; but they claimed to know for certain that that particular manacle had not been worn by either of the two convicts who had escaped last night. Further, one of those two was already retaken, and had not freed himself of his iron.Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed the iron to be my convict’s iron⁠—the iron I had seen and heard him filing at, on the marshes⁠—but my mind did not accuse him of having put it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account. Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the evening, he had been in diverse companies in several public houses, and he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against him, save the quarrel; and my sister had quarrelled with him, and with everybody else about her, ten thousand times. As to the strange man; if he had come back for his two banknotes there could have been no dispute about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore them. Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look round.It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention came, after all, to this;⁠—the secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief, it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he believed it, I had a further restraining dread that he would not believe it, but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a monstrous invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course⁠—for, was I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always done?⁠—and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of the assailant.The constables and the Bow Street men from London⁠—for, this happened in the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police⁠—were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay very ill in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied, and grasped at visionary teacups and wineglasses instead of the realities; her hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her speech was unintelligible. When, at last, she came round so far as to be helped downstairs, it was still necessary to keep my slate always by her, that she might indicate in writing what she could not indicate in speech. As she was (very bad handwriting apart) a more than indifferent speller, and as Joe was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary complications arose between them which I was always called in to solve. The administration of mutton instead of medicine, the substitution of Tea for Joe, and the baker for bacon, were among the mildest of my own mistakes.However, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. A tremulous uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a part of her regular state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or three months, she would often put her hands to her head, and would then remain for about a week at a time in some gloomy aberration of mind. We were at a loss to find a suitable attendant for her, until a circumstance happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living into which she had fallen, and Biddy became a part of our establishment.It may have been about a month after my sister’s reappearance in the kitchen, when Biddy came to us with a small speckled box containing the whole of her worldly effects, and became a blessing to the household. Above all, she was a blessing to Joe, for the dear old fellow was sadly cut up by the constant contemplation of the wreck of his wife, and had been accustomed, while attending on her of an evening, to turn to me every now and then and say, with his blue eyes moistened, “Such a fine figure of a woman as she once were, Pip!” Biddy instantly taking the cleverest charge of her as though she had studied her from infancy; Joe became able in some sort to appreciate the greater quiet of his life, and to get down to the Jolly Bargemen now and then for a change that did him good. It was characteristic of the police people that they had all more or less suspected poor Joe (though he never knew it), and that they had to a man concurred in regarding him as one of the deepest spirits they had ever encountered.Biddy’s first triumph in her new office, was to solve a difficulty that had completely vanquished me. I had tried hard at it, but had made nothing of it. Thus it was:⁠—Again and again and again, my sister had traced upon the slate, a character that looked like a curious T, and then with the utmost eagerness had called our attention to it as something she particularly wanted. I had in vain tried everything producible that began with a T, from tar to toast and tub. At length it had come into my head that the sign looked like a hammer, and on my lustily calling that word in my sister’s ear, she had begun to hammer on the table and had expressed a qualified assent. Thereupon, I had brought in all our hammers, one after another, but without avail. Then I bethought me of a crutch, the shape being much the same, and I borrowed one in the village, and displayed it to my sister with considerable confidence. But she shook her head to that extent when she was shown it, that we were terrified lest in her weak and shattered state she should dislocate her neck.When my sister found that Biddy was very quick to understand her, this mysterious sign reappeared on the slate. Biddy looked thoughtfully at it, heard my explanation, looked thoughtfully at my sister, looked thoughtfully at Joe (who was always represented on the slate by his initial letter), and ran into the forge, followed by Joe and me.“Why, of course!” cried Biddy, with an exultant face. “Don’t you see? It’s him!”Orlick, without a doubt! She had lost his name, and could only signify him by his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come into the kitchen, and he slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his brow with his arm, took another wipe at it with his apron, and came slouching out, with a curious loose vagabond bend in the knees that strongly distinguished him.I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce him, and that I was disappointed by the different result. She manifested the greatest anxiety to be on good terms with him, was evidently much pleased by his being at length produced, and motioned that she would have him given something to drink. She watched his countenance as if she were particularly wishful to be assured that he took kindly to his reception, she showed every possible desire to conciliate him, and there was an air of humble propitiation in all she did, such as I have seen pervade the bearing of a child towards a hard master. After that day, a day rarely passed without her drawing the hammer on her slate, and without Orlick’s slouching in and standing doggedly before her, as if he knew no more than I did what to make of it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s room, my education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a halfpenny. Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of literature were the opening lines,When I went to Lunnon town sirs,Too rul loo rulToo rul loo rulWasn’t I done very brown sirs?Too rul loo rulToo rul loo rul—still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart with the utmost gravity; nor do I recollect that I questioned its merit, except that I thought (as I still do) the amount of Too rul somewhat in excess of the poetry. In my hunger for information, I made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to bestow some intellectual crumbs upon me, with which he kindly complied. As it turned out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic lay-figure, to be contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied and clutched and stabbed and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon declined that course of instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his poetic fury had severely mauled me.Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society and less open to Estella’s reproach.The old battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a broken slate and a short piece of slate-pencil were our educational implements: to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe at the battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else⁠—even with a learned air⁠—as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river passing beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the bottom of the water. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea with their white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and Estella; and whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud or sail or green hillside or waterline, it was just the same.⁠—Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed himself on being “most awful dull,” that I had given him up for the day, I lay on the earthwork for some time with my chin on my hand, descrying traces of Miss Havisham and Estella all over the prospect, in the sky and in the water, until at last I resolved to mention a thought concerning them that had been much in my head.“Joe,” said I; “don’t you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a visit?”“Well, Pip,” returned Joe, slowly considering. “What for?”“What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?”“There is some wisits p’r’aps,” said Joe, “as forever remains open to the question, Pip. But in regard to wisiting Miss Havisham. She might think you wanted something⁠—expected something of her.”“Don’t you think I might say that I did not, Joe?”“You might, old chap,” said Joe. “And she might credit it. Similarly she mightn’t.”Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.“You see, Pip,” Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, “Miss Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham done the handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were all.”“Yes, Joe. I heard her.”“All,” Joe repeated, very emphatically.“Yes, Joe. I tell you, I heard her.”“Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were⁠—Make a end on it!⁠—As you was!⁠—Me to the North, and you to the South!⁠—Keep in sunders!”I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to me to find that he had thought of it; for it seemed to render it more probable.“But, Joe.”“Yes, old chap.”“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the day of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after her, or shown that I remember her.”“That’s true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes all four round⁠—and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of hoofs⁠—”“I don’t mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don’t mean a present.”But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it. “Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain for the front door⁠—or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for general use⁠—or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork when she took her muffins⁠—or a gridiron when she took a sprat or suchlike⁠—”“I don’t mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn’t. No, I would not. For what’s a door-chain when she’s got one always up? And shark-headers is open to misrepresentations. And if it was a toasting-fork, you’d go into brass and do yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can’t show himself oncommon in a gridiron⁠—for a gridiron is a gridiron,” said Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave, and you can’t help yourself⁠—”“My dear Joe,” I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don’t go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all along; “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack just now, if you would give me a half-holiday tomorrow, I think I would go uptown and make a call on Miss Est⁠—Havisham.”“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain’t Estavisham, Pip, unless she have been rechris’ened.”“I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of it, Joe?”In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well of it. But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not received with cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my visit as a visit which had no ulterior object but was simply one of gratitude for a favor received, then this experimental trip should have no successor. By these conditions I promised to abide.Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick. He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge⁠—a clear Impossibility⁠—but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its understanding. He was a broadshouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of great strength, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper’s out on the marshes, and on working-days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched, locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half-resentful, half-puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had was, that it was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and that I might consider myself fuel. When I became Joe’s ’prentice, Orlick was perhaps confirmed in some suspicion that I should displace him; howbeit, he liked me still less. Not that he ever said anything, or did anything, openly importing hostility; I only noticed that he always beat his sparks in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came in out of time.Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of my half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by and by he said, leaning on his hammer⁠—“Now, master! Sure you’re not a going to favor only one of us. If Young Pip has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick.” I suppose he was about five-and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient person.“Why, what’ll you do with a half-holiday, if you get it?” said Joe.“What’ll I do with it! What’ll he do with it? I’ll do as much with it as him,” said Orlick.“As to Pip, he’s going up town,” said Joe.“Well then, as to Old Orlick, he’s a going up town,” retorted that worthy. “Two can go up town. Tain’t only one wot can go up town.”“Don’t lose your temper,” said Joe.“Shall if I like,” growled Orlick. “Some and their uptowning! Now, master! Come. No favoring in this shop. Be a man!”The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman was in a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot bar, made at me with it as if he were going to run it through my body, whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out⁠—as if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood⁠—and finally said, when he had hammered himself hot and the iron cold, and he again leaned on his hammer⁠—“Now, master!”“Are you all right now?” demanded Joe.“Ah! I am all right,” said gruff Old Orlick.“Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,” said Joe, “let it be a half-holiday for all.”My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing⁠—she was a most unscrupulous spy and listener⁠—and she instantly looked in at one of the windows.“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in that way. I wish I was his master!”“You’d be everybody’s master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an ill-favored grin.(“Let her alone,” said Joe.)“I’d be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister, beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn’t be a match for the noodles, without being a match for your master, who’s the dunder-headed king of the noodles. And I couldn’t be a match for the rogues, without being a match for you, who are the blackest-looking and the worst rogue between this and France. Now!”“You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good’un.”(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me, with my husband standing by? Oh! oh! oh!” Each of these exclamations was a shriek; and I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages; “what was the name he gave me before the base man who swore to defend me? Oh! Hold me! Oh!”“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I’d hold you, if you was my wife. I’d hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a scream together⁠—which was her next stage. “To hear the names he’s giving me! That Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my husband standing by! Oh! Oh!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down⁠—which were the last stages on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect Fury and a complete success, she made a dash at the door which I had fortunately locked.What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded parenthetical interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and ask him what he meant by interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe; and further whether he was man enough to come on? Old Orlick felt that the situation admitted of nothing less than coming on, and was on his defence straightway; so, without so much as pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went at one another, like two giants. But, if any man in that neighborhood could stand uplong against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he had been of no more account than the pale young gentleman, was very soon among the coal dust, and in no hurry to come out of it. Then Joe unlocked the door and picked up my sister, who had dropped insensible at the window (but who had seen the fight first, I think), and who was carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to revive, and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in Joe’s hair. Then came that singular calm and silence which succeed all uproars; and then, with the vague sensation which I have always connected with such a lull⁠—namely, that it was Sunday, and somebody was dead⁠—I went upstairs to dress myself.When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without any other traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick’s nostrils, which was neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of beer had appeared from the Jolly Bargemen, and they were sharing it by turns in a peaceable manner. The lull had a sedative and philosophical influence on Joe, who followed me out into the road to say, as a parting observation that might do me good, “On the rampage, Pip, and off the rampage, Pip:⁠—such is Life!”With what absurd emotions (for we think the feelings that are very serious in a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to Miss Havisham’s, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed the gate many times before I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how I debated whether I should go away without ringing; nor, how I should undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my own, to come back.Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.“How, then? You here again?” said Miss Pocket. “What do you want?”When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my business. But unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and presently brought the sharp message that I was to “come up.”Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone.“Well?” said she, fixing her eyes upon me. “I hope you want nothing? You’ll get nothing.”“No indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am doing very well in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to you.”“There, there!” with the old restless fingers. “Come now and then; come on your birthday.⁠—Ay!” she cried suddenly, turning herself and her chair towards me, “You are looking round for Estella? Hey?”I had been looking round⁠—in fact, for Estella⁠—and I stammered that I hoped she was well.“Abroad,” said Miss Havisham; “educating for a lady; far out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who see her. Do you feel that you have lost her?”There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last words, and she broke into such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at a loss what to say. She spared me the trouble of considering, by dismissing me. When the gate was closed upon me by Sarah of the walnut-shell countenance, I felt more than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with everything; and that was all I took by that motion.As I was loitering along the High Street, looking in disconsolately at the shop windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a gentleman, who should come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in his hand the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in which he had that moment invested sixpence, with the view of heaping every word of it on the head of Pumblechook, with whom he was going to drink tea. No sooner did he see me, than he appeared to consider that a special Providence had put a ’prentice in his way to be read at; and he laid hold of me, and insisted on my accompanying him to the Pumblechookian parlor. As I knew it would be miserable at home, and as the nights were dark and the way was dreary, and almost any companionship on the road was better than none, I made no great resistance; consequently, we turned into Pumblechook’s just as the street and the shops were lighting up.As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell, I don’t know how long it may usually take; but I know very well that it took until half-past nine o’ clock that night, and that when Mr. Wopsle got into Newgate, I thought he never would go to the scaffold, he became so much slower than at any former period of his disgraceful career. I thought it a little too much that he should complain of being cut short in his flower after all, as if he had not been running to seed, leaf after leaf, ever since his course began. This, however, was a mere question of length and wearisomeness. What stung me, was the identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic, Pumblechook’s indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever; Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer monomania in my master’s daughter to care a button for me; and all I can say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is, that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, “Take warning, boy, take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the weakness to become my benefactor.It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out with Mr. Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy mist out, and it fell wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur, quite out of the lamp’s usual place apparently, and its rays looked solid substance on the fog. We were noticing this, and saying how that the mist rose with a change of wind from a certain quarter of our marshes, when we came upon a man, slouching under the lee of the turnpike house.“Halloa!” we said, stopping. “Orlick there?”“Ah!” he answered, slouching out. “I was standing by a minute, on the chance of company.”“You are late,” I remarked.Orlick not unnaturally answered, “Well? And you’re late.”“We have been,” said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance⁠—“we have been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening.”Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we all went on together. I asked him presently whether he had been spending his half-holiday up and down town?“Yes,” said he, “all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn’t see you, but I must have been pretty close behind you. By the by, the guns is going again.”“At the hulks?” said I.“Ay! There’s some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have been going since dark, about. You’ll hear one presently.”In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the well-remembered boom came towards us, deadened by the mist, and heavily rolled away along the low grounds by the river, as if it were pursuing and threatening the fugitives.“A good night for cutting off in,” said Orlick. “We’d be puzzled how to bring down a jailbird on the wing, tonight.”The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in silence. Mr. Wopsle, as the ill-requited uncle of the evening’s tragedy, fell to meditating aloud in his garden at Camberwell. Orlick, with his hands in his pockets, slouched heavily at my side. It was very dark, very wet, very muddy, and so we splashed along. Now and then, the sound of the signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along the course of the river. I kept myself to myself and my thoughts. Mr. Wopsle died amiably at Camberwell, and exceedingly game on Bosworth Field, and in the greatest agonies at Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes growled, “Beat it out, beat it out⁠—Old Clem! With a clink for the stout⁠—Old Clem!” I thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk.Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it took us past the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to find⁠—it being eleven o’clock⁠—in a state of commotion, with the door wide open, and unwonted lights that had been hastily caught up and put down scattered about. Mr. Wopsle dropped in to ask what was the matter (surmising that a convict had been taken), but came running out in a great hurry.“There’s something wrong,” said he, without stopping, “up at your place, Pip. Run all!”“What is it?” I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my side.“I can’t quite understand. The house seems to have been violently entered when Joe Gargery was out. Supposed by convicts. Somebody has been attacked and hurt.”We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made no stop until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people; the whole village was there, or in the yard; and there was a surgeon, and there was Joe, and there were a group of women, all on the floor in the midst of the kitchen. The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me, and so I became aware of my sister⁠—lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire⁠—destined never to be on the rampage again, while she was the wife of Joe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

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.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 parlor 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.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 anyone. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my shirtsleeves 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.I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to know of myself in that connection.For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I proceed to add was Joe’s. It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me. Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss Havisham’s would seem to show me Estella’s face in the fire, with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me⁠—often at such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would have a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than ever, in my own ungracious breast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com

It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see Joe arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss Havisham’s. However, as he thought his court-suit necessary to the occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked far better in his working-dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.At breakfast-time my sister declared her intention of going to town with us, and being left at Uncle Pumblechook’s and called for “when we had done with our fine ladies”⁠—a way of putting the case, from which Joe appeared inclined to augur the worst. The forge was shut up for the day, and Joe inscribed in chalk upon the door (as it was his custom to do on the very rare occasions when he was not at work) the monosyllable hout, accompanied by a sketch of an arrow supposed to be flying in the direction he had taken.We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver bonnet, and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited Straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it was a fine bright day. I am not quite clear whether these articles were carried penitentially or ostentatiously; but I rather think they were displayed as articles of property⁠—much as Cleopatra or any other sovereign lady on the rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or procession.When we came to Pumblechook’s, my sister bounced in and left us. As it was almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham’s house. Estella opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she appeared, Joe took his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands; as if he had some urgent reason in his mind for being particular to half a quarter of an ounce.Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I knew so well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I looked back at Joe in the long passage, he was still weighing his hat with the greatest care, and was coming after us in long strides on the tips of his toes.Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff and conducted him into Miss Havisham’s presence. She was seated at her dressing-table, and looked round at us immediately.“Oh!” said she to Joe. “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?”I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself or so like some extraordinary bird; standing as he did speechless, with his tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm.“You are the husband,” repeated Miss Havisham, “of the sister of this boy?”It was very aggravating; but, throughout the interview, Joe persisted in addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe now observed in a manner that was at once expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and great politeness, “as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time what you might call (if you was anyways inclined) a single man.”“Well!” said Miss Havisham. “And you have reared the boy, with the intention of taking him for your apprentice; is that so, Mr. Gargery?”“You know, Pip,” replied Joe, “as you and me were ever friends, and it were looked for’ard to betwixt us, as being calc’lated to lead to larks. Not but what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the business⁠—such as its being open to black and sut, or suchlike⁠—not but what they would have been attended to, don’t you see?”“Has the boy,” said Miss Havisham, “ever made any objection? Does he like the trade?”“Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip,” returned Joe, strengthening his former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and politeness, “that it were the wish of your own hart.” (I saw the idea suddenly break upon him that he would adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on to say) “And there weren’t no objection on your part, and Pip it were the great wish of your hart!”It was quite in vain for me to endeavor to make him sensible that he ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and gestures to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he persisted in being to Me.“Have you brought his indentures with you?” asked Miss Havisham.“Well, Pip, you know,” replied Joe, as if that were a little unreasonable, “you yourself see me put ’em in my ’at, and therefore you know as they are here.” With which he took them out, and gave them, not to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow⁠—I know I was ashamed of him⁠—when I saw that Estella stood at the back of Miss Havisham’s chair, and that her eyes laughed mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to Miss Havisham.“You expected,” said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, “no premium with the boy?”“Joe!” I remonstrated, for he made no reply at all. “Why don’t you answer⁠—”“Pip,” returned Joe, cutting me short as if he were hurt, “which I meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No. You know it to be No, Pip, and wherefore should I say it?”Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there; and took up a little bag from the table beside her.“Pip has earned a premium here,” she said, “and here it is. There are five-and-twenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master, Pip.”As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened in him by her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at this pass, persisted in addressing me.“This is wery liberal on your part, Pip,” said Joe, “and it is as such received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far nor near, nor nowheres. And now, old chap,” said Joe, conveying to me a sensation, first of burning and then of freezing, for I felt as if that familiar expression were applied to Miss Havisham⁠—“and now, old chap, may we do our duty! May you and me do our duty, both on us, by one and another, and by them which your liberal present⁠—have-conweyed⁠—to be⁠—for the satisfaction of mind-of⁠—them as never⁠—” here Joe showed that he felt he had fallen into frightful difficulties, until he triumphantly rescued himself with the words, “and from myself far be it!” These words had such a round and convincing sound for him that he said them twice.“Goodbye, Pip!” said Miss Havisham. “Let them out, Estella.”“Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?” I asked.“No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery! One word!”Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to Joe in a distinct emphatic voice, “The boy has been a good boy here, and that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no other and no more.”How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine; but I know that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding upstairs instead of coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances until I went after him and laid hold of him. In another minute we were outside the gate, and it was locked, and Estella was gone. When we stood in the daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a wall, and said to me, “Astonishing!” And there he remained so long saying, “Astonishing” at intervals, so often, that I began to think his senses were never coming back. At length he prolonged his remark into “Pip, I do assure you this is as-ton-ishing!” and so, by degrees, became conversational and able to walk away.I have reason to think that Joe’s intellects were brightened by the encounter they had passed through, and that on our way to Pumblechook’s he invented a subtle and deep design. My reason is to be found in what took place in Mr. Pumblechook’s parlor: where, on our presenting ourselves, my sister sat in conference with that detested seedsman.“Well?” cried my sister, addressing us both at once. “And what’s happened to you? I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor society as this, I am sure I do!”“Miss Havisham,” said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort of remembrance, “made it wery partick’ler that we should give her⁠—were it compliments or respects, Pip?”“Compliments,” I said.“Which that were my own belief,” answered Joe; “her compliments to Mrs. J. Gargery⁠—”“Much good they’ll do me!” observed my sister; but rather gratified too.“And wishing,” pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another effort of remembrance, “that the state of Miss Havisham’s elth were sitch as would have⁠—allowed, were it, Pip?”“Of her having the pleasure,” I added.“Of ladies’ company,” said Joe. And drew a long breath.“Well!” cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook. “She might have had the politeness to send that message at first, but it’s better late than never. And what did she give young Rantipole here?”“She giv’ him,” said Joe, “nothing.”Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.“What she giv’,” said Joe, “she giv’ to his friends. ‘And by his friends,’ were her explanation, ‘I mean into the hands of his sister Mrs. J. Gargery.’ Them were her words; ‘Mrs. J. Gargery.’ She mayn’t have know’d,” added Joe, with an appearance of reflection, “whether it were Joe, or Jorge.”My sister looked at Pumblechook: who smoothed the elbows of his wooden armchair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had known all about it beforehand.“And how much have you got?” asked my sister, laughing. Positively laughing!“What would present company say to ten pound?” demanded Joe.“They’d say,” returned my sister, curtly, “pretty well. Not too much, but pretty well.”“It’s more than that, then,” said Joe.That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said, as he rubbed the arms of his chair, “It’s more than that, Mum.”“Why, you don’t mean to say⁠—” began my sister.“Yes I do, Mum,” said Pumblechook; “but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph. Good in you! Go on!”“What would present company say,” proceeded Joe, “to twenty pound?”“Handsome would be the word,” returned my sister.“Well, then,” said Joe, “It’s more than twenty pound.”That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a patronizing laugh, “It’s more than that, Mum. Good again! Follow her up, Joseph!”“Then to make an end of it,” said Joe, delightedly handing the bag to my sister; “it’s five-and-twenty pound.”“It’s five-and-twenty pound, Mum,” echoed that basest of swindlers, Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her; “and it’s no more than your merits (as I said when my opinion was asked), and I wish you joy of the money!”If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been sufficiently awful, but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to take me into custody, with a right of patronage that left all his former criminality far behind.“Now you see, Joseph and wife,” said Pumblechook, as he took me by the arm above the elbow, “I am one of them that always go right through with what they’ve begun. This boy must be bound, out of hand. That’s my way. Bound out of hand.”“Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,” said my sister (grasping the money), “we’re deeply beholden to you.”“Never mind me, Mum,” returned that diabolical cornchandler. “A pleasure’s a pleasure all the world over. But this boy, you know; we must have him bound. I said I’d see to it⁠—to tell you the truth.”The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial presence. I say we went over, but I was pushed over by Pumblechook, exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick; indeed, it was the general impression in Court that I had been taken red-handed; for, as Pumblechook shoved me before him through the crowd, I heard some people say, “What’s he done?” and others, “He’s a young ’un, too, but looks bad, don’t he?” One person of mild and benevolent aspect even gave me a tract ornamented with a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and entitled To Be Read in My Cell.The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than a church⁠—and with people hanging over the pews looking on⁠—and with mighty Justices (one with a powdered head) leaning back in chairs, with folded arms, or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or writing, or reading the newspapers⁠—and with some shining black portraits on the walls, which my unartistic eye regarded as a composition of hardbake and sticking-plaster. Here, in a corner my indentures were duly signed and attested, and I was “bound”; Mr. Pumblechook holding me all the while as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold, to have those little preliminaries disposed of.When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had been put into great spirits by the expectation of seeing me publicly tortured, and who were much disappointed to find that my friends were merely rallying round me, we went back to Pumblechook’s. And there my sister became so excited by the twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve her but we must have a dinner out of that windfall at the Blue Boar, and that Pumblechook must go over in his chaise-cart, and bring the Hubbles and Mr. Wopsle.It was agreed to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For, it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it worse, they all asked me from time to time⁠—in short, whenever they had nothing else to do⁠—why I didn’t enjoy myself? And what could I possibly do then, but say I was enjoying myself⁠—when I wasn’t!However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made the most of it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top of the table; and, when he addressed them on the subject of my being bound, and had fiendishly congratulated them on my being liable to imprisonment if I played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept late hours or bad company, or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my indentures appeared to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair beside him to illustrate his remarks.My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they wouldn’t let me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off, woke me up and told me to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the evening Mr. Wopsle gave us Collins’s ode, and threw his bloodstained sword in thunder down, with such effect, that a waiter came in and said, “The Commercials underneath sent up their compliments, and it wasn’t the Tumblers’ Arms.” That, they were all in excellent spirits on the road home, and sang, O Lady Fair! Mr. Wopsle taking the bass, and asserting with a tremendously strong voice (in reply to the inquisitive bore who leads that piece of music in a most impertinent manner, by wanting to know all about everybody’s private affairs) that he was the man with his white locks flowing, and that he was upon the whole the weakest pilgrim going.Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom, I was truly wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should never like Joe’s trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatexpectations.substack.com