Great Expectations

Pip is an orphan who grows up in the marshes of Kent, England, raised by his much older sister and her husband, Joe, the village blacksmith. On a cold Christmas Eve, the boy visits the graveyard where his parents and little brothers lie, dead too young, and a ragged, starving man leaps out from behind a headstone and grabs him by the throat.

The man is Magwitch, a convict escaped from the prison ships anchored in the river, with an iron still clamped to his ankle. He demands food and a file to cut the chain, and threatens Pip with a terrible fate if he tells anyone. Terrified, the boy steals bread, pie and the file from his own kitchen and hands everything over the next morning, never imagining that this small gesture will come back, years later, in the most unexpected way possible.

Magwitch is recaptured right there and taken back to the prison ship. Pip believes the scare is over. But in this brief encounter Dickens has already planted the seed of everything the novel will unfold: gratitude, shame and the question of who truly deserves to be called a gentleman.

Mrs. Joe keeps repeating that she raised Pip by hand, a phrase of the time meaning she brought him up all by herself, and she collects on that sacrifice with slaps and pinches. In her house, the cane nicknamed Tickler always hangs on the wall, ready for any disobedience.

Joe, her husband, is the opposite: a big blacksmith with simple speech and hands calloused from the forge, who treats Pip as an equal and not as a burden. On nights when Mrs. Joe is in a foul mood, the two exchange knowing glances by the fire, a silent alliance between those who get beaten and those who get beaten too.

It is Joe who teaches Pip, asking nothing in return, that affection doesn't need fancy speeches to be real. This is the moral standard the whole book uses as a yardstick: every time Pip drifts away from that simple way of loving, something inside him cracks.

A distant relative arranges for Pip to visit Miss Havisham, a very wealthy woman who lives shut away in a decaying mansion called Satis House. She receives the boy wearing the same yellowed wedding dress, with only one shoe, sitting near a wedding cake covered in cobwebs and mice.

Decades earlier, on her wedding day, she was jilted at the altar by her groom, minutes before the ceremony, before even signing the dowry contract arranged between the families. Since then she has stopped every clock in the house at twenty minutes to nine, the exact hour of the news: curtains closed, candlelight all day long.

Miss Havisham doesn't try to get over her pain: she preserves it, decorated, like a private museum of her own resentment. It is to this house frozen in time that Pip will return again and again, always leaving more unhappy with his simple life than when he came in.