“Pip,
dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together,
as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith,
and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions among
such must come, and must be met as they come.”
Joe says these words to Pip as a farewell
in Chapter 27, after their awkward meeting
in London. Pip, now a gentleman, has been uncomfortably embarrassed
by both Joe’s commonness and his own opulent lifestyle, and the
unpretentious Joe has felt like a fish out of water in Pip’s sumptuous
apartment. With this quote, Joe tells Pip that he does not blame
him for the awkwardness of their meeting, but he chalks it up instead
to the natural divisions of life. The blacksmith concocts a metaphor
of metalsmithing to describe these natural divisions: some men are
blacksmiths, such as Joe, and some men are goldsmiths, such as Pip.
In these simple terms, Joe arrives at a wise and resigned attitude
toward the changes in Pip’s social class that have driven them apart,
and he shows his essential goodness and loyalty by blaming the division
not on Pip but on the unalterable nature of the human condition.