Charles Dickens · 1861 · coming-of-age
Dickens's 1861 novel. A boy in the Kent marshes feeds a convict out of a churchyard, is later sent for by a woman who has stopped all the clocks, and then comes into money from an unnamed benefactor - and spends the rest of the book learning who paid for him and what it cost.
- 1Cooling churchyard
The row of small gravestones on the north Kent marshes where Pip meets his parents' names and then Magwitch, who turns him upside down for a file and a pie - a real churchyard Dickens walked to from Gad's Hill.
- 2The forge
Joe Gargery's forge at Chalk, and a sister who brings him up by hand - the childhood that Pip will spend the middle of the novel being ashamed of, and the man he will spend the end of it apologising to.
- 3Satis House
Miss Havisham's house in Rochester, based on Restoration House on Crow Lane: the stopped clocks, the one shoe, the cake with the mice in it, and a girl brought up to break hearts and told so in front of him.
- 4Barnard's Inn
London, and rooms Dickens calls the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together - Pip and Herbert Pocket running up debts on expectations neither of them has actually seen.
- 5Hammersmith
The Pockets' riverside house where Pip is tutored alongside Bentley Drummle, who will marry Estella and treat her badly - the gentleman's education, which teaches him mainly how to be ashamed of Joe.
- 6The Temple
Magwitch comes up the stairs out of the rain and Pip learns where the money came from - and the last act is four men in a boat on the tide below London Bridge, trying to get a convict out of the country.
- 7Cairo
Herbert's firm, and eleven years of Pip working in the East to pay off what he owes - the quiet ending Dickens wrote before his friends persuaded him to add the one where Estella is waiting.
- 8Satis House
He comes back to the site of the burnt house at evening and finds her among the ruins - and the last line has been argued about ever since, because Dickens rewrote it and never quite settled it.