Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and others as 'Pip', is a young orphan living on the Kentish marshes with his formidable and much older sister and her good-hearted but unsophisticated husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. On one memorable day he is suddenly confronted, in the local churchyard, by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Frightened of Magwitch and yet pitying him, Pip brings him food but the convict is soon recaptured and returned to the hulks to await transportation to Australia. Pip's encounter with him fades in his memory. Summoned to the house of the eccentric Miss Havisham, a recluse since she was jilted on her wedding day, he meets her ward, the beautiful Estella, and loses his heart to her. Estella meets all his boyish protestations of love with disdain but he continues to worship her as he grows up. As a young man, he is suddenly taken away from the world he knows when he is informed by the lawyer Jaggers that he has 'great expectations' and that a mysterious benefactor is prepared to subsidize his transformation into a gentleman. Travelling to London, Pip joins forces with his room-mate, the amiable Herbert Pocket, acquires the superficial polish needed to accompany his rise in status and establishes himself as a young man about town. He always assumes that his hidden well-wisher is Miss Havisham and that he can, therefore, continue to hope for the love of Estella. But the illegal return of Magwitch from the penal colony reveals how mistaken he has been in all his assumptions. Great Expectations is peopled, as Dickens's novels always are, by comic eccentrics and grotesques but, at its heart, it is the narrative of one young man's progress towards a deeper understanding of himself and of the true personal history which has shaped his character.

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