The Hunt on the Marshes

The pursuit across the dark marshes is short but vivid. Torches, shouting soldiers, the flat wet land, the river beyond. They hear the convicts before they see them — shouting, struggling in a ditch of freezing water. When the soldiers pry them apart, Magwitch is still trying to drown the other man. He does not resist arrest. He does not appeal for sympathy. What he does do, when asked about the food, is say clearly and without hesitation that he took it himself — that it wasn't the boy's fault, that the boy had nothing to do with it. He catches Pip's eye just once in the lantern light.

This moment — Magwitch protecting Pip from consequences while himself facing transportation to Australia for life — is the emotional core of the whole novel, planted in the fifth chapter. On first reading it appears to be a minor detail, an act of decency from a frightening man. On second reading, knowing that Magwitch has spent sixteen years in Australia earning money to make Pip a gentleman out of gratitude for a pork pie, the protection in Chapter 5 is the first payment on an enormous debt of love that Pip does not yet know exists.

Joe's response to learning a convict had stolen their food — 'we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creature' — establishes him as the novel's moral standard. It is the response of a man who has never learned to hate anyone for being hungry. Dickens gives it no emphasis, no narrative commentary. It is just what Joe says, naturally, and the contrast with Pip's later treatment of Joe is the sharpest moral irony in the book.