Is Joe Gargery as good as Pip says he is?

How should we read Great Expectations?

(Page numbers are for the Penguin edition.)

In the middle of telling his story, long after its events are over, Pip turns away to apostrophise Joe: ‘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!’ It is his summing up. But is it Dickens’s? It is a note that he liked to sound and his readers liked to hear. And it is consistently Pip’s note where Joe and his relations with Joe are concerned: ‘dear, good, noble Joe’, ‘O God bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian man’ (pp. 437, 424). But is this what the book - Dickens’s book, not Pip’s - shows us?

There is no question, of course, but that Joe, from first to last, is a good-hearted and lovable man. Pip loves him and it is easy to see why. When Joe asks Pip’s sister to marry him, he adds ‘And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child, … there’s room for him, at the forge’ (p. 44). When Jaggers suggests he might want ‘compensation’ for the loss of Pip’s ‘services’, he says, as ‘with the touch of a woman’ he lays his hand on Pip’s shoulder, ‘Pip is that hearty welcome … to go free with his services, to honour 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!—’ (p. 128). When, near the end, he nurses Pip back to health, he could hardly do so more tenderly and more lovingly. And, if only he gave any sign of feeling injured, one would say ‘forgivingly’ too. Eleven years later (in the revised ending) we glimpse him as a loving husband and the father of a second Pip, named ‘for your sake, dear old chap’ (p. 439).

But there is more to be said. To begin with, Pip’s opinion of Joe is backed (in both senses) by his opinion of himself - the latter as low as the former is high. What he blames himself for - not without cause - is abandoning Joe and the forge for illusions of wealth and gentility. When he learns that the source of his ‘expectations’ is not Miss Havisham but Magwitch, his ‘sharpest and deepest pain’ is that ‘it was for the convict … that I had deserted Joe’ (p. 295). When he overcomes his repugnance for Magwitch, he reflects, ‘I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe’ (p. 408). When he blesses Joe, he does so ‘penitently’ and while condemning himself: ‘Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. Don’t be so good to me!’ (p. 423). Because Joe doesn’t mention the loss of his expectations, he doubts it can be right to mention it himself: ‘I was so doubtful of myself now, and put so much trust in him’ (p. 427). When, the better he gets, the uneasier Joe becomes, ‘I soon began to understand that the cause of it was in me, and that the fault of it was all mine’ (p. 429). When he says goodbye to Joe and Biddy, he isn’t satisfied just to tell them that, whereas they are ‘good and true’, he is ‘thankless’, ‘ungenerous and unjust’, has ‘ill repaid’ them for all they have done for him and that, if they have a boy of their own ‘it would be natural to him to grow up a much better man than I did’ but also insists they say they forgive him for it: ‘Pray you let me hear you say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and think better of me, in the time to come’ (pp. 437-8). It is better not to think of the embarrassment he must be causing.

Pip’s estimate of Joe and his estimate of himself aren’t two separate judgements but two interpenetrating or mutually supporting halves of one. If Joe isn’t that good, Pip isn’t that bad and vice versa. Whatever there is in the book to cast doubt on one half casts doubt on the other.

Of course, Pip does have reason to be ashamed, so perhaps he is right to think so badly of himself and so well of Joe. Perhaps we are to take it that, although he judges himself harshly, he does so reasonably; no longer blinded by his expectations, he can now see himself, and Joe, as they truly are; he has recovered from a long-lasting metaphorical fever as well as a short-lived literal one. But in that case how are we to take that proposal he intends to make to Biddy? It is framed at exactly the same time and in exactly the same self-abasing spirit: 

The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in my first unhappy time. Then, I would say to her, ‘Biddy, I think you once liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since. If you can like me only half as well once more, if you can take me with all my faults and disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like a forgiven child (and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier of you that I was—not much, but a little. And, Biddy, it shall rest with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or whether I shall try for any different occupation down in this country, or whether we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me, which I set aside when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now, dear Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you.’ (p. 431)

There is just no saving that, is there? It’s one of those proposals - like Mr Collins’s to Elizabeth Bennet - that itself tells the woman why she must refuse the man. What woman would want to be reminded, in a proposal, even obliquely (or, perhaps, especially, obliquely) that the man really wanted someone else, who didn’t want him? What man, in a proposal, would want to remind her (even, or perhaps especially, obliquely)? Even if she thought the man really did want her - which isn’t likely - why on earth would she want him, a man so crippled by remorse, disappointment and self-doubt that what, apparently, he wants is not a wife but a mother? He is thankful that he doesn’t actually make the proposal—but not because he has any doubts about it, only because he would have been making it to an already married woman. It isn’t the sign of what he thinks it, an awakened and healthy conscience; it is a symptom of damage; and, if it is a symptom, so, perhaps, is his self-abasement generally. 

He imagines he’d like Biddy to mother him ‘like a forgiven child’ immediately after he has been luxuriating in having Joe nurse him like a sick one:

I was little Pip again … I was like a child in his hands … I would half believe that all my life since the days of the old kitchen was one of the mental troubles of the fever that was gone … Joe wrapped me up, took me in his arms, carried me down to [the carriage], and put me in, as if I were still the small helpless creature … and I laid my head on Joe’s shoulder, as I had laid it long ago (pp. 426-7)

Why else is this regression to childhood dependence so intensely satisfying for Pip as a grown man, except that he never enjoyed it as a child? He wasn’t orphaned just by the deaths of his biological parents but also, more deeply, in the upbringing he receives from his foster parents. He is brought up by his sister - twenty years older than himself - and by Joe. There is nothing motherly about ‘Mrs Joe’ - she is a tyrant, physical and moral:

Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive. (p. 57)

Joe, married to a different woman, would make (as he does make when, much later, married to Biddy) a good father. But what he doesn’t have is the strength of character to protect Pip from his wife. For Pip, this means that he has neither mother nor father and, for Joe, that he loses the chance of fatherhood that, in taking Pip in, he gave himself. For Pip is certainly ready to love and be loved: ‘I loved Joe—perhaps for no better reason in those early days than because the dear fellow let me love him’ (p. 37). How these phrases speak of both Pip’s need and Joe’s unfitness to fill it: he let Pip love him! The child’s love went out to him and he let it! The boy sees clearly the man’s shortcomings. He does justice to what is lovable in him, but is undeceived about its limits:

Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness. (p. 7)

A ‘dear fellow’, ‘companion and friend’, he might be but a father he isn’t. ‘I always treated him as a larger species of child, and as no more than my equal’ (p. 8). Under the rule of Pip’s sister, Joe and he are ‘fellow-sufferers’, ‘both brought up by hand’; and Joe’s ‘station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when there was company, than when there was none’ (pp. 10, 7, 24). When there is company Pip is in even more need of protection than when there isn’t because the only company they ever have - Mr Pumblechook, the Hubbles and Wopsle - make up a gang of bullies which takes its cue from the tyrant-sister: ‘“Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner’. Joe ‘always aided and comforted me when he could’ but only ‘in some way of his own, and he always did so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a pint’ (pp. 23-4).

But what Pip knows as a child he learns to forget. As a grown man, he says, ‘There was no change whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was in my eyes still; just as simply faithful, and as simply right’; he treated me ‘in the old unassertive protecting way’ as if Pip were still the child ‘to whom he had so abundantly given of the wealth of his great nature’ (pp. 426-7). But, of course, what Joe was in Pip’s eyes then isn’t at all what he is now. Then, Pip recognised Joe’s shortcomings; then, he knew he was unprotected and that there was no protecting him unassertively; then, he knew that what he got in abundance from Joe was … gravy.

Joe - and Biddy on his behalf - aren’t themselves as easy in their consciences as you might expect. In his own eyes, Joe isn’t ‘simply faithful, and as simply right’. The first time Joe sees the need to excuse himself, Pip is still a child; and the excuse is not so much thin as topsy-turvy or self-confuting: he lets his wife bully Pip because his own father bullied his mother:

I’m dead afeerd of going wrong in the way of not doing what’s right by a woman, and I’d fur rather of the two go wrong the t’other way, and be a little ill-conwenienced myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn’t no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself; but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you’ll overlook short-comings. (p. 45)

For seventeen or more years, the matter sits on his conscience and, vicariously, on Biddy’s. When he is nursing the grown-up Pip he reports Biddy urging him - like the good wife she is shortly to become, anxious for his good name - to excuse himself again, on a different but no better ground: that he let Mrs Joe bully Pip for Pip’s sake not his own:

‘Lookee here, old chap,’ said Joe. ‘I done what I could to keep you and Tickler in sunders, but my power were not always fully equal to my inclinations. For when your poor sister had a mind to drop into you, it were notsermuch,’ said Joe, in his favourite argumentative way, ‘that she dropped into me too, if I put myself in opposition to her but that she dropped into you always heavier for it. I noticed that. It ain’t a grab at a man’s whisker, nor yet a shake or two of a man (to which your sister was quite welcome), that ’ud put a man off from getting a little child out of punishment. But when that little child is dropped into, heavier, for that grab of whisker or shaking, then that man naterally up and says to himself, “Where is the good as you are a doing? I grant you I see the ’arm,” says the man, “but I don’t see the good. I call upon you, sir, therefore, to pint out the good.” … Biddy giv’ herself a deal o’ trouble with me afore I left (for I am most awful dull), as I should view it in this light, and, viewing it in this light, as I shouldser put it. Both of which,’ said Joe, quite charmed with his logical arrangement, ‘being done, now this to you a true friend, say. Namely. You mustn’t go a over-doing on it, but you must have your supper and your wine-and-water, and you must be put betwixt the sheets.’

The delicacy with which Joe dismissed this theme, and the sweet tact and kindness with which Biddy—who with her woman’s wit had found me out so soon—had prepared him for it, made a deep impression on my mind. (pp. 428-9)

But it isn’t Pip whom Biddy’s wit has found out, it’s Joe; and it’s towards Joe, not Pip, that she shows (if this is what it is) her sweet tact and kindness. And as for Joe dismissing his theme with delicacy … having done the bidding of his wife-to-be, he hurries it out of the way. He hadn’t wanted Pip ‘to go into’ ‘onnecessary subjects’ (p. 428) from the past but this, evidently, was a necessary one.

‘Home,’ Pip says, ‘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’ (p. 97). But that belief is so insubstantial that the first breath of Estella’s contempt flattens it. Bullied by the woman who is the nearest he has to a mother, unprotected by the man who is the nearest to a father, no wonder. No wonder he feels like ‘a dog in disgrace’ at Miss Havisham’s when he has so often been just such a dog at home (p. 57). When, as a grown man, he luxuriates in Joe’s fatherly tenderness, he’s making up for lost time, luxuriating in something he never had as a child. What he had instead, from Joe - hardly the same thing - was friendship and equality in suffering. So there is, or there becomes - something even a bit melancholy in those reiterated phrases of Joe’s: ‘What larks!’ and ‘Ever the best of friends!’ (pp. 16,  91, 199; 44, 128-9, 428, 431). They too speak of his shortcomings, of what he hasn’t been to Pip, and of what Pip has missed.

The chance of fatherhood Joe misses, Magwitch takes. Joe lets himself be loved, Magwitch won’t let himself not be loved. He claims Pip as his son whether Pip will or no. Having escaped from the Australian penal settlement where he has made himself rich, he makes himself known to Pip in London, where Pip is now the gentleman he meant him to be: ‘All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?’. He has come, at the risk of his life, half-way round the world - ‘sea-tossed and sea-washed, months and months’ - to inspect his property (pp. 293-4).

And that the property is what he meant it to be shows in the very manner in which it speaks to - addresses - its owner, the stranger, whom at first Pip can’t see: ‘There is some one down there, is there not? … What floor do you want? … That is my name.—There is nothing the matter? … Pray what is your business? … Do you wish to come in?’ (p. 287). All wonderfully polite; and politeness of a certain - to any Englishman - readily identifiable sort, the politeness of a gentleman wishing it to be registered that he is one. It is a kind of politeness which might perhaps be better called ‘correctness’ for it doesn’t mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, to be polite but only to keep to the rules of a code - including of grammar - and thereby to demonstrate that the speaker knows the code and keeps to it. It is a kind of politeness (now out of favour) which keeps those on the receiving end at a distance. It’s meant to ensure - but here doesn’t - that the exchange that is about to take place does so not man to man (or woman) but gentleman to, well, gentleman or not. ‘We meet,’ it declares, ‘not in our vulnerable characters as men and women but only as occupants of our stations in society.’ It is politeness as assertion and protection: asserting your claim to be of one sort, protecting you from the claims and importunities of the other, to claim admittance and deny it. And, all the while, getting you off scot-free from any charge of impoliteness. And done, and understood, in a twinkling: ‘Pray what is your business?’

Magwitch - no less English than Pip - knows how to reply: ‘Yes. … The top. Mr. Pip. … Nothing the matter. … My business? … Ah! Yes. I will explain my business, by your leave. … Yes, … I wish to come in, Master’ (p. 287). But Magwitch is too much in earnest and has too much at stake merely to state his business. He tells Pip what it is, initially, in involuntary looks and gestures which bring the two men face to face - into collision - in a way no statement ever could:

an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. … I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was holding out both his hands to me. … I resented the sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face. … He looked about him with the strangest air—an air of wondering pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired—… once more holding out both his hands to me … and again held out both his hands. Not knowing what to do—for, in my astonishment I had lost my self-possession—I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held them. … so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look at me, that the words died away on my tongue. … his look … made my hand very difficult to master. … I saw with amazement that his eyes were full of tears. (pp. 287-9)

When he does state it, Magwitch’s business with Pip turns out to be not the money he has spent on making him a gentleman but the love that urged him to earn it: ‘I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above work What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit’ (p. 291). He makes just the claim on Pip that Joe might have been expected to make but never does: ‘Look’ee here Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son’ (p. 292). And though, at first, Pip repudiates the claim, he gradually discovers that he has no choice but to admit it and return it. His love of Joe may not have made Joe a father to him but Magwitch’s love of him does, at last and against his will, make him a son to Magwitch. And just as what seems to stand in the way of Joe’s feeling like a father is that he doesn’t act like one, so what seems to give Pip the feelings of a son is that he does act like one. He learns to feel like a son by protecting Magwitch as if Magwitch were his father.

And it is not so surprising or psychologically implausible that throughout the telling of his story, Pip should feel himself more the wronger than the wronged. Who does the unloved child most need to believe in but the neglectful parent? What child has a greater need to believe in his parents than the child neglected by them? And if that means he must blame himself for anything wanting in their relations, so be it. It is the lesser and the less painful thing: ‘“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe, bending over me. “Ever the best of friends; ain’t us, Pip?” I was ashamed to answer him’ (p. 428). But it can be easier, more comfortable and more comforting, to be ashamed of oneself than of a neglectful parent. What, after all, is more shameful than to be an unloved child, communing with injustice, solitary and unprotected?

It is difficult to say what the limits are to the damage done to Pip. No reader is capable of blaming the six-year-old child for stealing a file and ‘wittles’ for the convict on the marsh or for not owning up to it, in such a household as Mrs Joe’s, but the grown-up Pip telling his story does. He, as an adult, is as censorious of his six-year-old self as ever Mrs Joe or Pumblechook could be:

I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for myself. (p. 38)

But his ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ here are as little Dickens’s as Huck Finn’s are Mark Twain’s when Huck reproaches himself for not turning Jim in to the men looking for ‘runaway niggers’:

They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat.

Pip, under the tutelage of Mrs Joe and Pumblechook, did get started right when he was little and didn’t get beat. He assimilated the Pumblechookian morality and made it his own; and, surprisingly, it proves to have wonderful affinities with the gentleman’s morality his expectations lay down on top of it.

When Magwitch first introduces himself on his return, before telling Pip that it is he not Miss Havisham who has been his benefactor, Pip addresses him - pompously, censoriously - just as any right-thinking but good–hearted member of society might address a transported convict who has committed the additional crime of returning when proscribed:

Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did when I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by mending your way of life. … I am glad to believe you have repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so. I am glad that, thinking I deserved to be thanked, you have come to thank me. (p. 289)

When he learns that it is to Magwitch that he owes his money and position, the clichés that mark his recoil - ‘as if he had been a snake’, ‘my blood ran cold’, ‘stained with blood’, ‘knew not what crimes’, ‘his wicked spirit’, ‘a desperately violent man’, ‘a wild beast’, ‘my dreadful burden’ (pp. 292-6) - make up a sort of layman’s version of the judgement delivered at Magwitch’s trial. They show the sentiments that are the basis of the Law: ‘wretched creatures … offender against the laws … violence and daring … miserable man … his errors … old offences … fatal moment … propensities and passions … scourge to society … haven of rest and repentance … appointed punishment … aggravated case … Die’ (pp. 417-18).

Even when has learned to accept Magwitch as something like a father and to behave very much like a son - as well as doing his absolute best to save Magwitch’s life and, when he can’t, being at his side every day, loyally and lovingly, to give him all the comfort, the comfort of love, he can - Pip still can’t help seeing him as a sinner, but not as the sinner which every man, including himself, is; as the sinner that Magwitch, the convict, peculiarly is and respectable people generally are not. Pip could not, at this stage, behave more loyally or self-forgetfully towards Magwitch, but that doesn’t stop him (and how wonderful of Dickens to see the possibility) from showing himself to have in him more than a bit of that sermonising fraud Wopsle who tormented him as a child. Magwitch, he says, ‘was ever ready to listen to me, and it became the first duty of my life to say to him, and read to him, what I knew he ought to hear’ (p. 416). Unfortunately, Pip doesn’t pay the attention to his own text that he ought. In his commentary on the story of the two men who went into the Temple to pray, it’s the Pharisee he sounds like:

Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two men who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no better words that I could say beside his bed than ‘O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!’ (p. 420)

What becomes of a child without love? In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s answer seems to be: Perhaps a healthy rebel; why not? Jane, from infancy, is an unloved orphan. She is bullied and browbeaten and, from her ‘very first recollections of existence’, treated as of no account. But, because cruel treatment only stimulates her to rebel and because there is nothing remotely self-destructive in her rebellion, the book has nothing to tell us about the place of love in our lives or what it might mean for an adult to be unloved as a child. Jane’s own capacity to love and be loved - we are to understand - isn’t the less or coarsened or compromised in any way by growing up unloved. She suffers no ill effects at all. Her judgement of people and things is unimpaired. She knows as much - or as little - of herself and others as her author. There is absolutely nothing that Charlotte Brontë knows that Jane doesn’t. Perhaps - probably - things can turn out like that but, good as it is for her (and all the readers who have ever enjoyed identifying with her), for the book she’s the heroine of, it’s not so good. It means that Charlotte Brontë takes up her subject - as interesting a one as can be imagined - and puts it down with a shrug. Unloved as a child? So? We bounce back.

Dickens’s very different answer, in Great Expectations, is: Damaged, in some ways irreparably. Pip, his orphaned protagonist and narrator, is damaged emotionally and in judgement too. He is so damaged by his upbringing that he has a better understanding of things (‘the identity of things’) as a child than an adult. Growing up for him isn’t growing into knowledge but out of it. The grown man who tells the story has forgotten things he knew as a child. Dickens - with a Micawber, a William Dorrit, a Murdstone and a dead Philip Pirrip for fathers, and sent to the blacking factory like a little labouring hind - must himself have felt unfathered; Great Expectations is a wonderful working out of what that might mean in someone’s life, including for what it might mean for him as a storyteller, telling his own story.

One of the things everyone knows about Dickens is that he is sentimental, yet there is nothing sentimental in his treatment of Joe. Joe fails Pip, as Pip doesn’t fail Magwitch, and Dickens couldn’t be more unsentimentally clearsighted about it. Joe fails the child, and his pleas of mitigation fail too. Dickens leaves no room for appeal. He even makes it an aggravating circumstance that it is just because he fails Pip so badly that Pip so earnestly vindicates him and convicts himself.

What is it that makes Magwitch, in contrast to Joe, so extravagantly adopt Pip - altogether to make him the purpose of his life - and without Pip knowing? According to any outward and visible sign, anything that Jaggers might recognise as evidence - not much, scarcely anything at all. It is something that he finds - as ‘a wretched warmint, hunted ... near death and dunghill’ - in the six-year-old in their brief encounter on the marsh (p. 17). Partly, no doubt, it is that Pip helps him practically by bringing him food and drink and a file, and doesn’t give him away. But that’s not the essential thing. (How could it be?) It’s much more the spirit in which Pip does it, a spirit of solidarity or, perhaps we should say, charity, which, unlike the mere practical doing, can’t be accounted for by the coercion of fear:

Pitying his desolation ... I made bold to say, ‘I am glad you enjoy it.’

‘Did you speak?’

‘I said, I was glad you enjoyed it.’

‘Thankee, my boy. I do.’ (p. 18)

It’s as little, or as much, as a gesture, hardly noticeable but - for someone with eyes to see - rightly understood:

I looked at him eagerly when he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had been waiting for him to see me, that I might try to assure him of my innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having been more attentive. (p. 35)

It is the man’s appreciation of the charity the child has for him, when he stands so much in need of it and finds so little of it, and when he has lost his own daughter, ‘destroyed’, as he believes, by her mother. And what is it worth to him, this help offered to the helpless by the helpless? Evidently, half-a-lifetime of labour and dedication and the risk of life, simply all he has. He magnifies, we can say, the meaning of his encounter with Pip, magnifies it, not exaggerates it, magnifies it as the parable of the widow’s mite magnifies the value of her mite. And in doing so he discovers in it or perhaps gives to it a value that it really and truly has, confirmed by its upshot, that Pip, as a man, rediscovers the charity he had for him as a child, acknowledging him as a second father and behaving like a son. If children need adults to depend on, adults no less need to be depended on by children. The hunger for parents in children is matched by a hunger for children in parents, even when parents only in their imaginations. (And it's not gratuitous, I hope, to add that, in this, there is a kind of confutation of the late-modern belief that homosexuality weighs as evenly in the balance with heterosexuality as the two words do.)

Originally published in Essays in Criticism (vol. 71, issue 4, Oct. 2021) as “Can we take Pip’s word for it?”—but without the last sentence, in brackets.