Great Expectations Parents Family Growing Up Quotes

“Good God!” cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. “Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 23. An exasperated Matthew Pocket reacts to his inattentive and incompetent wife letting the baby on her lap play with a dangerous nutcracker. The dramatic and violent metaphorical image of babies being “nut-crackered into their tombs” highlights the parental neglect of the Pocket children. Mrs. Pocket, who is obsessed with social status, becomes so engrossed in a conversation about aristocratic titles, she forgets about the baby on her lap. Dickens is satirizing pretentious parents who prioritize social climbing over caring for their children.

Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could “hold my own” with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 24. In London Matthew Pocket becomes tutor to Pip in order to educate him in the ways of being a gentleman. Pip lacks formal education aside from what he was taught in the local village school and the lessons Biddy gave him. Now that he has come into money, he is to be taught enough to “hold his own” with other wealthy young men.

“We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 33. When Estella says this to Pip, we are reminded of how Miss Havisham has taken away her adopted daughter’s ability to form her own choices. Estella is essentially a puppet of Miss Havisham, the abusive parent who has molded Estella into her tool of revenge on men after she herself was jilted at the altar. Pip is also no less free as his life is controlled by his benefactor Magwitch.

“It is not easy for even you.” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that is soft and soothing. I had.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 33. Estella tells Pip how much she enjoys the frustration of Miss Havisham’s relatives over Pip’s advance in fortunes. She reveals how much they hate Pip because of this. She tells him how they “watch you, misrepresent you, write letters about you (anonymous sometimes), and you are the torment and the occupation of their lives.” Estella’s dislike of her adoptive mother’s relatives stem from their scheming against her while growing up in Miss Havisham “strange house.”

Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of the baby’s having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him quiet during the unaccountable absence…of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply externally or to take as a tonic.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 33. It is richly ironic that Mr. Pocket makes a living as a well known lecturer on domestic economy and writing books on managing children and servants. For his own chaotic household is a disaster, the children are neglected and put in danger by the self-absorbed Mrs. Pocket, while the servants actually run the show.

She hung upon Estella’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. In Pip’s observation we see how Miss Havisham regards her daughter not as a person, but an object of beauty to be used and controlled. Note the use of the grotesque, hyperbolic, metaphorical image of Miss Havisham “devouring” Estella. She is not literally eating her daughter. But this portrays her as a possessive, controlling and obsessive parent, who sees herself as having ownership of Estella. She is the hungry animal while Estella is the food in her mad quest to use her daughter’s beauty to wreak revenge on men.

“I am what you have made me. Take all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the failure; in short, take me.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. Estella gives this blunt response to Miss Havisham when she complains about how cold and unloving her adopted daughter is towards her. The quote highlights the destructive influence the manipulative Miss Havisham has had on Estella’s life. Estella’s ice cold character and reputation result from the way she was brought up by Miss Havisham. She turned her daughter into a heartless person who can neither love nor care, instilling coldness and cruelty into her.

“Look at her so hard and thankless, on the hearth where she was reared! Where I took her into this wretched breast when it was first bleeding from its stabs, and where I have lavished years of tenderness upon her!”
“At least I was no party to the compact,” said Estella, “for if I could walk and speak, when it was made, it was as much as I could do. But what would you have? You have been very good to me, and I owe everything to you. What would you have?”
“Love,” replied the other.
“You have it.”
“I have not,” said Miss Havisham.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. Miss Havisham bitterly complains about being unloved by Estella. Her daughter should be grateful that she adopted her as a child at a time when her own heart was broken, she snaps. In a metaphor describing her pain of being jilted, Miss Havisham says that she took Estella “into this wretched breast when it was first bleeding from its stabs.” But Estella’s cold response is to say that she didn’t ask to be adopted and raised by Miss Havisham.

“Mother by adoption,” retorted Estella, never departing from the easy grace of her attitude, never raising her voice as the other did, never yielding either to anger or tenderness, – “mother by adoption, I have said that I owe everything to you. All I possess is freely yours. All that you have given me, is at your command to have again. Beyond that, I have nothing. And if you ask me to give you, what you never gave me, my gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. The damage Miss Havisham has done as a mother is highlighted by Estella’s uncompromising response to her when she demands Estella’s love. Pointedly calling her “mother by adoption,” Estella says she cannot give Miss Havisham what she never gave to her adopted daughter. It’s a painful lesson for Miss Havisham to learn the personal cost of having taught Estella not to love. Her scheme to use her daughter to inflict revenge on men has backfired.

“When have you found me false to your teaching? When have you found me unmindful of your lessons? When have you found me giving admission here,” she touched her bosom with her hand, “to anything that you excluded? Be just to me.”
“So proud, so proud!” moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her gray hair with both her hands.
“Who taught me to be proud?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?”
“So hard, so hard!” moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.
“Who taught me to be hard?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. Miss Havisham’s experiment in raising Estella to break men’s hearts in revenge for her own heartbreak spectacularly backfires. When Miss Havisham complains that her adopted daughter doesn’t show her love, Estella tells that she learned to be hard and proud from her adoptive mother.

“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. Here the puppet lays the blame at the feet of the puppet master. Estella tells her adoptive mother Miss Havisham that she is responsible for shaping her into the cold creature she is. Daughter to the criminal Magwitch and a woman accused of murder, Estella was adopted at an early age. Having brought up the child to be unfeeling and not express emotion, Miss Havisham demands that she show her love. But Estella calmly and matter-of-factly tells her that she cannot express what she never received.

“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son, – more to me nor any son. I’ve put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like, I see yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here’s the boy again, a looking at me whiles I eats and drinks!’ I see you there a many times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes. ‘Lord strike me dead!’ I says each time, – and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens, – ‘but wot, if I gets liberty and money, I’ll make that boy a gentleman!’ And I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings o’yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for wagers, and beat ’em!”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 39. Magwitch dramatically declares to Pip that he is his secret patron and source of his entire fortune. Although a hardened criminal, Magwitch shows that he has a noble side to his character, as we see in his powerful loyalty and generosity to Pip. He has never forgotten the kindness Pip showed to him as a little boy on the misty marches. It is clear too that he feels a fatherly affection for Pip. In this touching scene, he tenderly refers to him as his son. Clearly proud of turning the boy who helped him into a gentleman, there is much irony in the fact that this was done by a low-class criminal.

“So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 42. From Magwitch’s recount of his past to Pip and Herbert, it is clear that he was branded as a criminal from an early age. As an orphan child he was arrested or “took up” constantly. Magwitch is a good example of how a person can be a product of their environment. Difficult circumstances made him a criminal in his youth growing up an orphan in England. But after he was transported to Australia as a convict and allowed to work there, he was very successful as a sheep farmer and stock breeder and amassed a fortune.

“When I was a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn’t many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of being hardened. ‘This is a terrible hardened one,’ they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. ‘May be said to live in jails, this boy.’ Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on ’em, – they had better a measured my stomach, – and others on ’em giv me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t understand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t I?”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 42. Magwitch describes to Pip and Herbert how hunger and want drove him as an orphan boy with no family to a life of crime. He did it simply to feed himself, because he wasn’t given any other opportunities in life. Dickens is highlighting the social injustice of a society where poverty and lack of opportunity lead people into crime. He shows how they are simply punished and imprisoned without the root causes of crime being addressed.

“Miss Havisham gives you to him, as the greatest slight and injury that could be done to the many far better men who admire you, and to the few who truly love you. Among those few there may be one who loves you even as dearly, though he has not loved you as long, as I. Take him, and I can bear it better, for your sake!”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 44. When Pip hears from Estella that she is engaged to Bentley Drummle, he passionately pleads with her not to marry him. While expressing his own deep love for her, he accepts that he will not be the one to marry her. He points out that there are other worthy men who truly care for her. In an act of selflessness and generosity, he begs her to marry one of them instead. This is an indicator that Pip is improving as a character and reforming his selfish ways. Miss Havisham’s own cruel actions as a parent in raising Estella to be heartless and unfeeling are criticized by Pip.

“On whom should I fling myself away?” she retorted, with a smile. “Should I fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel (if people do feel such things) that I took nothing to him? There! It is done. I shall do well enough, and so shall my husband. As to leading me into what you call this fatal step, Miss Havisham would have had me wait, and not marry yet, but I am tired of the life I have led, which has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough to change it. Say no more. We shall never understand each other.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 44. When Pip accuses Estella of flinging herself away upon a brute like Bentley Drummle, this is her calm response. She insists that she will marry Drummle, but not because it’s Miss Havisham’s wish. Rather it is in defiance of her adoptive mother and the life she has put her through, which Estella wants to escape from.

“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done!… My Dear! Believe this: when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more… But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her, a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away, and put ice in its place.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 49. Miss Havisham is filled with feelings of shame and guilt over the way she manipulated Estella to break Pip’s heart. Using the metaphor of a “looking-glass,” she says that she recognized her own heartbreak in Pip’s, when she witnessed how he loved Estella. Miss Havisham expresses regret for the way she brought up her adopted daughter to be cold and unfeeling. At first she just wanted to save her from being taken advantage by predatory men, like she was. But as Estella grew into someone beautiful, Miss Havisham admits that her intentions became cruel. So she took away Estella’s heart and replaced it with ice, she confesses using another metaphor.

“Fearing he should be called upon to depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the child’s mother.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 50. Herbert explains part of Magwitch’s backstory to Pip. Magwitch was married to a woman who in a vengeful and jealous rage murdered another woman. She also threatened to destroy her own child she had with Magwitch, a child he was “exceedingly fond of.” Fearing that he might be the cause of the child’s death, Magwitch hid himself during his wife’s trial and remained anonymous. After she was acquitted, she disappeared and Magwitch lost both her and the child. We learn that this child was Estella. The incident also provided Compeyson the chance to blackmail Magwitch and suck him deeper into crime.

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net, – to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow…Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 51. Using a hypothetical story with no names, Jaggers explains to Pip how Estella came to be adopted by Miss Havisham who was looking for a child at the time. Estella’s mother was Molly who was on trial for murder and represented by Jaggers – she later became his housekeeper. With Estella’s father thinking that she was dead, Jaggers believed that he was saving the child. He tells how he saw children treated harshly by the legal system, ending up in prison, transported or sometimes hanged. In a metaphor Jaggers refers to those children he encountered in his legal work as “so much spawn.” He argued that he was doing good by rescuing young Estella from a rough life and facilitating her adoption to Miss Havisham. The brutality of the legal system in Victorian England is highlighted here.

“Put the case that the child grew up, and was married for money. That the mother was still living. That the father was still living. That the mother and father, unknown to one another, were dwelling within so many miles, furlongs, yards if you like, of one another. That the secret was still a secret, except that you had got wind of it. Put that last case to yourself very carefully…For whose sake would you reveal the secret? For the father’s? I think he would not be much the better for the mother. For the mother’s? I think if she had done such a deed she would be safer where she was. For the daughter’s? I think it would hardly serve her to establish her parentage for the information of her husband, and to drag her back to disgrace, after an escape of twenty years, pretty secure to last for life.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 51. Speaking hypothetically in lawyerly language, Mr. Jaggers is actually referring to the parentage of Estella, who as a child was adopted by the wealthy Miss Havisham. Revealing the secret of who her parents are would benefit no one, he tells Pip. Rather it would only bring harm and disgrace to parents and daughter, tarnishing reputations. While Jaggers doesn’t mention them by name, Estella’s mother is Molly, who was tried for murder, and her father is the convict Magwitch. Estella’s parentage is a good example of situational irony.

“Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love, and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney-corner of a winter night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for ever. Don’t tell him, Joe, that I was thankless; don’t tell him, Biddy, that I was ungenerous and unjust; only tell him that I honoured you both, because you were both so good and true, and that, as your child, I said it would be natural to him to grow up a much better man than I did.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 58. After learning that his two friends Joe and Biddy have just wed, Pip delivers this moving speech filled with repentance and remorse. Wishing them the blessing of children, he hopes one will remind them of Pip as a child growing up in the forge. But he asks them not tell their child of Pip’s selfishness and ingratitude, but that he honored them both for their goodness. His words are all the more poignant because Joe acted as a father figure to Pip, raising him after the death of both of his parents. Pip’s deep affection for Joe and Biddy is seen here, also his remorse and wish for redemption as he admits past failures and neglect of his true friends. This is an important step on his journey of self-improvement.

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