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Summary and Analysis Chapters 26-28. Pip, Herbert, Drummle, and Startop meet Jaggers at his office because he has invited them to his house for dinner. Pip has previously seen Jaggers' cleaning ritual of meticulously washing his hands between court cases or clients. Today before heading home, the ritual is expanded.
In Chapter 20, he does not allow his clients to talk to him, and he scrubs his hands ferociously at the end of each workday, symbolically attempting to remove the moral taint of his work. Herbert (the “pale young gentleman” of Chapter 11) makes a natural contrast to the lawyer; he is everything Jaggers is not. Kind, relaxed, and poor, he is the perfect gentleman to educate Pip in …
Charles Dickens, "Chapter 26," Great Expectations, Lit2Go Edition, (1861), accessed April 14, ... and he would wash his hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came in from a police-court or dismissed a client from his room. ... He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his replying in his heavy ...
beneath the surface he seems disgusted by his own work. In Chapter 20, he does not allow his clients to talk to him, and he scrubs his hands ferociously at the end of each workday, symbolically attempting to remove the moral taint of his work. Herbert (the “pale young gentleman” of Chapter 11) makes a natural contrast to the lawyer; he is everything Jaggers is not.
Great Expectations Chapter 26: An Invitation to Dinner... After the lawyer ceremoniously washes his hands (this is an obsessive habit of Jaggers', which Pip interprets as the lawyer's attempt to wash himself clean of his clients), the lawyer, Herbert, Startop, Bentley Drummle and Pip walk together to Jaggers' house.
Summary: Chapter 26 Pip's fellow students attend the dinner at Jaggers's with Pip, and Pip and Drummle quarrel over a loan Drummle ungratefully borrowed from Startop. Jaggers warns Pip to stay away from Drummle, though the lawyer claims to like the disagreeable young man himself.
Summary: Chapter 3 Pip is kind to the man, but the convict becomes violent again when Pip mentions the other escapee he encountered in the marsh, as though the news troubles him greatly. As the convict scrapes at his leg irons with the file, Pip slips away through the mists and returns home.
Back at Barnard's Inn, Pip tells Herbert about his love for Estella and is shocked to hear Herbert already intuited it. Herbert reveals that he too believes Estella is secretly betrothed to Pip. But when he hears Mr. Jaggers has never mentioned marriage among Pip's expectations, Herbert changes his mind.
In Chapter 33, Pip gets a chance to sit down with Estella. He thinks she is lovely, but he also realizes how miserable she makes him. They talk about his life, and Estella tells him that his friends talk smack about him in letters to Mrs. Havisham.
EstellaSummary: Chapter 32 Pip receives a note from Estella, ordering him to meet her at a London train station.
Hebasically asks for three wishes: education, wealth, and social advancement. These three wishes are mostly so he can impress Estella, whom Miss Havishammoulds as a way of wreaking revenge on the male sex. Pip does not want to be a lowly blacksmith like Joe. He wants to be intelligent.Dec 22, 2014
The novel has 59 chapters and is divided into three sections of about twenty chapters each.Feb 5, 2022
Pip seems to spend his entire life being frightened and terrified—of his sister, of the convict, of the convict's supposed friend, and even of himself, "from whom an awful promise had been extract" (61).
Lesson Summary In Chapter 35 of Great Expectations, Pip goes to his sister's funeral. Mr. Trapp has planned it and it is an over-the-top spectacle that the whole neighborhood watches. Once the funeral is finally over, Pip, Biddy, and Joe are alone.
By Charles Dickens The next morning, Pip tells Jaggers that Orlick is one rotten cookie, and Jaggers promises to have Orlick fired at once.
Estella has changed in that she has become a beautiful young woman. She is much more flirtatious than when she was younger, but it is a controlled flirting. She knows what she is doing.Sep 26, 2018
Pip's guardian, Jaggers, is also Miss Havisham's lawyer. He is acquainted with Herbert's father, Matthew Pocket, because Matthew is Miss Havisham's cousin, though the two are not on good terms.
Herbert currently works in a counting-house, but is an aspiring "capitalist" who hopes to insure merchant ships and make his fortune someday. Pip doubts he will ever achieve this. The following Monday the two proceed to Hammersmith where Pip meets Matthew Pocket and the rest of the family.
Pip spends a great deal of time with Estella in the house of her London hostess, Mrs. Brandley. However, he is not treated as a serious suitor. Rather, he is allowed to accompany Estella everywhere she goes, watching her treat her other suitors cruelly but being more or less ignored himself.
Time passes, and Pip is now twenty-three. One night, during a midnight thunderstorm, he hears heavy footsteps trudging up his stairs. An old sailor enters Pip’s apartment, and Pip treats him nervously and haughtily before recognizing him. It is Pip’s convict, the same man who terrorized him in the cemetery and on the marsh when he was a little boy.
As we saw in the previous section, Pip has now matured into an adult, marking a new phase in the novel; additionally, the reappearance of the convict and the solution of the mystery of Pip’s benefactor mark an important milestone in the book’s narrative development.
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