Satis House Quotes

Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred…all the brewery beyond stood open, away to the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused. The cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate; and it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 8. This is a key moment in the story when Pip visits Miss Havisham’s mansion Satis House. It is a gloomy, neglected and isolated place with many iron bars, walled up windows and barred courtyard. As Pip describes it, it resembles a jail. A ship simile also conjures up an image of the house as a prisoner ship, like the Hulks. The mansion is Miss Havisham’s personal prison – by her own choice. For many years she hasn’t been outside it, not since she was jilted at the altar by her fiancé Compeyson.

“Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three – or all one to me – for enough…but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 8. There is irony in the meaning of the name of Miss Havisham’s mansion, Satis House. Estella explains that the word Satis means enough, and also that whoever had it needed for nothing more. But those who named it hadn’t high standards if they found the great house satisfying, Estella remarks. It turns out that house owner Miss Havisham and daughter Estella are far from satisfied people. While they are wealthy, they are also miserable.

I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 8. When Pip encounters Miss Havisham for the first time, he finds a decayed and ghost-like figure wearing an old bridal gown. Similes liken her withered body to her faded, yellow wedding dress and wilting flowers about her in Satis House. Like her once great mansion, described by Pip as being in a state of disrepair and decay, she is a relic from the past. Miss Havisham’s bridal dress, symbolizing her heartbreak at being jilted at the altar, foreshadows the unhappy love lives both Pip and Estella will experience. Estella enters an abusive marriage with the brutish Bentley Drummle, while Pip misses his chance of happiness with Biddy and winds up unmarried.

I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine. “Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 8. Satis House is the once grand and now decaying mansion where time has stood still for years. When Miss Havisham’s wedding plans collapsed, she hid herself away there wearing her wedding clothes. Trapped in an emotional time warp, she stopped all the clocks at the precise time her fiancé stood her up at the altar.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 8. Miss Havisham is depicted as one of the most miserable, grotesque and pathetic victims of love. Jilted at the altar years before, Pip remarks on all the objects in the room that reflect how she is frozen in time and unable to move on from the heartbreak. The stopped clock and watch. The unworn yellowed shoe and ragged silk stocking. The withered wedding dress and veil she wears, compared in similes to grave clothes and a shroud. The dress is foreshadowing of the unhappy lives Pip and Estella will experience.

I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 8. Pip experiences this nightmarish ghostly illusion of Miss Havisham hanging from a beam of the ceiling as he walks through the abandoned brewery at Satis House. His vision provides an atmosphere of foreboding and foreshadows Miss Havisham’s death when she is consumed by fire. The brewery is a symbol of the decay and stagnation that pervade Satis House. It reflects Miss Havisham’s frozen existence and is a perpetual reminder of the love she thought was hers but was lost in the most heartless of ways.

So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was wanted at Miss Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply revolving that I was a common labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived bad way.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 9. As Pip travels between the upper class world of Satis House and his world at the forge, the walk home provides him plenty of time to reflect. Before he met Miss Havisham and her ward Estella he was mostly satisfied with his position in life. But Estella’s criticism of his common laboring class appearance and behavior has made him feel ashamed and dissatisfied with his position in life. We see the beginnings of the embers of desire and ambition to improve himself and move up the social ladder in the boy Pip.

The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 11. This is the eerie scene as described by Pip on entering the banquet room of Miss Havisham’s house. On a table he observes an uneaten and decaying wedding cake, which she has kept as a symbol of her heartbreak and moment she was abandoned at the altar many years before. It has been left in place to rot after her planned wedding that never took place. A simile compares it to a black fungus. Cobwebs and spiders crawling in and out of it complete the bizarre scene. Amid the decay of Satis House the cake is a powerful metaphor and reminder of Miss Havisham’s failed wedding and refusal to move past her trauma.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.” She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state to crumble under a touch. “When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table – which shall be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him – so much the better if it is done on this day!”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 11. Dressed in her yellowed wedding dress, Miss Havisham makes this melodramatic and hyperbolic speech to a horrified Pip. She is speaking to him in the room where her wedding feast was to have taken place years before. Using a grim metaphor, she compares her grief to being eaten by teeth sharper than those of the mice that have gnawed at her wedding feast. She speaks of her “ruin” or demise, vowing that when she is laid out in her bride’s dress for the funeral, it will be “the finished curse upon him.” She is referring to her fiancé Compeyson on whom she wants revenge, hoping that he will be cursed by her death. Miss Havisham’s “withered” wedding dress foreshadows the unhappy life Pip and Estella will have. The decay of Satis House comes through strongly in this passage: the yellowed tablecloth on the table, the cobwebs, everything worn away and crumbling, including Miss Havisham.

Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 15. Pip plans to visit Satis House after being absent for some time and has a very idealized view of the mansion and the Havishams. His description of them representing everything that is picturesque, or visually attractive and charming, is deeply ironic. In his last visit to the house the place was filled with decay and darkness. Miss Havisham presented a grotesque and ghostly figure in a withered and yellowed wedding dress. And Estella proved rude, mean-spirited and insulting to Pip. Picturesque is hardly what should come to mind.

She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin, – in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 29. While he waits to go to Miss Havisham’s, Pip shares his thoughts of what he believes to be his patroness’s plans for him. The problem is that he deludes and deceives himself with this fairy tale-like dream. He imagines himself to be the young knight who will marry his love Estella and restore to life the decaying Satis House. And all this with the help and blessing of his fairy godmother Miss Havisham. That has certainly been Pip’s ambition and dream. But the theatrical imagery and language suggests it is all fantasy and a fairy tale that will have no fairy tale ending.

It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we began the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal feast. But, in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave fallen back in the chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked more bright and beautiful than before, and I was under stronger enchantment.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 29. When Pip returns to Satis House, he finds Miss Havisham in her chair with the decaying remains of her wedding feast. In metaphors of death, Miss Havisham is described as a “figure from the grave” in her “funereal room.” A simile about her chair being pushed into the past emphasizes how time stopped for her in Satis House when she was jilted by her fiancé on her wedding day.

A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet up to scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark. I could trace out where every part of the old house had been, and where the brewery had been, and where the gates, and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking along the desolate garden walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 59. When Pip revisits the site of Satis House in the misty dusk after spending 11 years abroad, only the garden wall is still standing. The house and brewery are gone. He is surprised to find Estella walking the grounds. The mist and moonlight imagery are symbolic of both uncertainty and clarity, perhaps suggesting hope for the future after the uncertainties of the past.

“The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I made in all the wretched years.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 59. Estella and Pip meet in the ruins of Satis House. She is a changed and humbled character as she speaks about being owner of the dilapidated mansion, her only possession. Now free because Miss Havisham’s power is gone, we see Estella’s guilt over never standing up to Miss Havisham while she was alive.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 59. In the last lines of the novel Pip takes Estella’s hand as they walk together from the grounds of Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion Satis House. The rising mists seem to signify a brighter path and future. To some readers, this may suggest that the pair finally found happiness in marriage after their years of separation. But nothing is so clear cut. There were in fact two endings to Great Expectations. In the first Dickens has Estella quietly remarrying a country doctor after the death of cruel husband Bentley Drummle and having a chance encounter with Pip in a London street. Dickens later revised this on advise that it was too downbeat. The revised edition has an ambiguous ending with Pip meeting the widowed Estella in the grounds of the ruined Satis House and they leaving together hand in hand. Pip’s remark about seeing “no shadow of another parting from her” implies that he thinks they have a future together. But this is open to interpretation, since Estella has just told him that they “will continue friends apart.” The reader is entitled to believe that this is more of Pip’s wishful thinking and another of his “great expectations.”
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