Pip's secret fortune came from the convict he fed in a graveyard
On Christmas Eve 1812 a seven-year-old orphan steals a pie and a file for a terrified stranger on the Kent marshes. Years later, living as a London gentleman on anonymous money, Pip learns who has really been paying: the escaped prisoner Abel Magwitch, not the jilted recluse Miss Havisham.
Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations as his thirteenth novel, and it was the second of his books, after David Copperfield, told entirely by its hero in the first person. It first appeared in weekly instalments in his own magazine, All the Year Round, between 1 December 1860 and August 1861, before Chapman & Hall issued it as a three-volume book that October.
The story is a coming-of-age tale in three stages. Pip grows up with his short-tempered sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. Summoned to Satis House, he meets Miss Havisham, who still wears the wedding dress she had on when her fiancé abandoned her, and falls for her adopted daughter Estella, whom she has trained to be cold toward men. When the lawyer Mr Jaggers announces that a hidden patron will fund Pip's transformation into a gentleman, Pip assumes Havisham is behind it and grows ashamed of Joe.
The twist arrives a week after his 23rd birthday. Magwitch, transported to New South Wales, has made a fortune there and risks execution by coming back to England to see the boy who inspired him. The man he fought in the churchyard turns out to be Compeyson, the swindler who deserted Havisham. An attempted escape by river ends with Magwitch captured and dying, while Pip, ill and in debt, is nursed and bailed out by Joe. He later works eleven years in Cairo before a final meeting with a widowed Estella among the ruins of Satis House.
Readers took to it at once. Thomas Carlyle mocked it as "that Pip nonsense" yet laughed loudly at every new part, and George Bernard Shaw later called it "all of one piece and consistently truthful". In 2003 it placed 17th in the BBC's Big Read poll, and it still draws around 25,000 monthly downloads on Project Gutenberg.
Source: Great Expectations
