🚨 Spoilers ahead. That's the whole point. If you wanted to be surprised, you should have read the book.
Pip, an orphan raised by his harsh sister and her kind husband Joe Gargery, meets an escaped convict on the Kent marshes and helps him. Years later a lawyer, Jaggers, announces a secret benefactor will make Pip a gentleman. Pip heads to London, snubs Joe, and chases Estella, the cold ward of Miss Havisham. The benefactor turns out to be the convict, Magwitch. He is recaptured and dies, and his fortune is forfeited. Pip, broke and ill, is nursed by Joe, works abroad, and returns to meet Estella again.
- Dickens wrote two different endings. The first ending had Pip and Estella meeting once, years later, with no hope of romance. Dickens changed it after his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton advised him to, and the softer version was published.
- Our hero's full name is Philip Pirrip. Chapter one has Pip say his father's family name was Pirrip and his Christian name Philip. His infant tongue could make of both nothing longer than Pip. The hero is named by a toddler.
- It first ran as a weekly serial. Great Expectations appeared in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861, one installment a week. It then came out as a three-volume book in 1861.
- “Miss Havisham is the one paying for Pip.” Wrong guess. Pip assumes it, and the book lets him. The money comes from Abel Magwitch, the convict he fed on the marshes, who made a fortune in Australia.
- “Pip and Estella marry at the end.” Wedding bells? Hardly. In the published ending they meet in the ruins of Satis House, and Pip sees 'no shadow of another parting from her.' Whether that means marriage is left open.
- “Estella is Miss Havisham's biological daughter.” Adopted, actually. Miss Havisham took Estella as a child. Jaggers's housekeeper Molly is her mother and Magwitch her father, which Pip works out near the end.
- If they say: “Isn't it just a rags to riches story?”
You say: “I'd say it's the reverse. Magwitch is a transported convict who risks hanging by returning, and when he dies his property is forfeited to the Crown. Pip inherits nothing.” - If they say: “Why do the clocks matter in Miss Havisham's house?”
You say: “I say they stopped at twenty minutes to nine, the moment she was jilted. She still wears the wedding dress and the cake still rots on the table. Her life is frozen.”
🍸 Your Bar Line
Great Expectations is a boy who thinks a jilted woman is buying his future, learns a convict was, loses every penny, and gets Dickens's second, softer ending in the ruins of Satis House.
