Great Expectations — who's who

Philip Pirrip, called Pip from infancy. An orphan raised by his sister and Joe the blacksmith at the forge on the Kent marshes. The novel is his retrospective narration from middle age of how completely wrong he was — about where his money came from, about Estella, and about the people he was leaving behind. Dies, in the structural sense, as a gentleman, and is reborn as a man with debts paid and no illusions left.

Pip's brother-in-law and surrogate father. Illiterate, gentle, completely without pretension. Calls Pip "old chap" with helpless affection throughout the novel. Pip is ashamed of him in London. Joe registers the shame, never holds it against him, nurses Pip through the fever, pays his debts, and goes home before Pip can thank him. Marries Biddy in the closing chapters. They name their son Pip.

A quiet, capable young woman who was Pip's childhood friend at the village school and then came to help at the forge after Mrs. Joe's accident. She sees Pip clearly and tells him so, gently and without cruelty. Pip imagines at one point that she would make a sensible wife — a fallback plan he never quite asks for. She marries Joe in the closing chapters. She was always the right answer to the question Pip kept asking in the wrong places.

Joe's journeyman blacksmith at the forge, sullen and dangerous from his first appearance. He is almost certainly responsible for the attack on Mrs. Joe in Chapter 15, though it is never directly proven. He resurfaces in Chapter 53 in the old sluice house on the marshes, where he has Pip tied up and means to kill him — a scene of almost Gothic intensity in an otherwise realistic novel. His grudge against Pip is the novel's darkest underside.

A wealthy spinster, jilted at the altar in her youth at twenty to nine in the morning. Every clock in Satis House stopped at that moment. Her wedding dress still on. The cake still on the table, decaying for decades. She summoned Pip to the house when he was a child to begin training Estella on him. The late scene in which she begs Pip's forgiveness on her knees is one of Dickens's most painful pages. She dies in a fire set by a stray ember before her rotting wedding cake.

Adopted as a young child by Miss Havisham and raised to be beautiful, cold, and incapable of love. She tells Pip plainly and repeatedly that she has no heart to give him. Her parents, revealed in the closing sections, are Molly the housekeeper (defended by Jaggers on a murder charge) and Abel Magwitch the convict — a fact that knits together the whole social world of the novel. She marries Bentley Drummle; he treats her badly; she is widowed. In the final scene at Satis House she and Pip meet again, and the encounter is the most carefully balanced scene in Dickens.

A group of Miss Havisham's distant relatives who circle Satis House in hope of a legacy — Camilla, Georgiana, Cousin Raymond, and Sarah Pocket. They fawn on Miss Havisham without quite concealing their calculations. Dickens uses them as the prototype of what the gentleman's world looks like from the inside: pretentious, idle, and parasitic on inherited money they have not earned and will not receive.

The escaped convict from Chapter 1, who returns to London in Chapter 39 as the old man "Provis" to reveal that he, not Miss Havisham, has been Pip's benefactor all along. Transported to Australia after his recapture, he made a fortune in sheep-farming and spent it on making Pip a gentleman. His love for Pip, from a distance of sixteen years, is the most uncomplicated thing in the novel. Dies in the prison hospital after the failed escape attempt down the Thames, with Pip holding his hand.

The London lawyer who acts as intermediary between Magwitch and Pip, and between almost everyone else in the novel who has a secret to protect. He defended Molly on a murder charge and took her into service. He adopted Estella on Magwitch's behalf and placed her with Miss Havisham. He knows more about the connections between characters than any of them know about each other. His habit of washing his hands between clients is both literal and figurative. He never lies; he simply never volunteers anything.

Jaggers's cheerful clerk at Little Britain, who is one person at work (dry, practical, a collector of "portable property") and a completely different person at home, in his eccentric fortified cottage in Walworth that he calls the Castle, where he keeps an "Aged Parent" and a garden and a drawbridge. The division is comic but also the novel's most sympathetic portrait of the compromises professional life demands, and his scheme to help Pip move Magwitch to safety is one of the warmer things in the book.

Pip's London roommate and only reliable friend. Son of Matthew Pocket, Miss Havisham's sensible cousin who actually teaches Pip. Herbert and Pip had briefly fought each other as boys in Miss Havisham's garden in Volume One, and recognized each other with surprise in London. Pip secretly funds his merchant partnership through Wemmick; Herbert never learns it. Marries Clara Barley and goes to Cairo. Gives Pip a job when Pip is broke and starting over.

A fellow student at Matthew Pocket's, ungainly and disagreeable, whom Jaggers nevertheless identifies early as a man to watch — "the Spider," he calls him. Dickens uses him as the novel's portrait of what the gentleman's manner can conceal: pure brutishness. Estella marries him. He treats her badly. He dies in a riding accident before the novel closes, which is the only good thing he does.