Summary: Chapter 8
Over breakfast the next morning, Pumblechook sternly grills
Pip on multiplication problems. At ten, he is taken to Miss Havisham’s manor,
Satis House. The gate is locked, and a small, very beautiful girl
comes to open it. She is rude to Pumblechook and sends him away
when she takes Pip inside. She leads him through the ornate, dark
mansion to Miss Havisham’s candlelit room, where the skeletal old
woman waits by her mirror, wearing a faded wedding dress, surrounded
by clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
The girl leaves, and Miss Havisham orders Pip to play.
He tells her earnestly that he is too affected by the newness and
grandeur of the house to play. Miss Havisham forces him to call
for the girl, whose name is Estella. Estella returns, and Miss Havisham
orders her to play cards with Pip. Estella is cold and insulting,
criticizing Pip’s low social class and his unrefined manners. Miss
Havisham is morbidly delighted to see that Pip is nonetheless taken
with the girl. Pip cries when he leaves Satis House.
Summary: Chapter 9
When Pip returns home, he lies to Joe, Mrs. Joe, and Pumblechook about
his experience at Satis House, inventing a wild story in which Estella
feeds him cake and four immense dogs fight over veal cutlet from
a silver basket. He feels guilty for lying to Joe and tells him
the truth in the smithy later that day. Joe, who is astonished to
find out that Pip has lied, advises Pip to keep company with his
own class for the present and tells him that he can succeed someday
only if he takes an honest path. Pip resolves to remember Joe’s
words, but that night, as he lies in bed, he can’t help but imagine
how “common” Estella would find Joe, and he falls into a reverie
about the grandeur of his hours at Satis House.
Summary: Chapter 10
Pip continues to suffer through his schooling, but a new
desire for education and social standing makes him agree to take
extra lessons from his sensible friend Biddy. Later the same day,
when Pip goes to the pub to bring Joe home, he sees a mysterious
stranger stirring his drink with the same file Pip stole for the
convict. The stranger gives Pip two pounds, which Pip later gives
to Mrs. Joe. He continues to worry that his aid to the convict will
be discovered.
Analysis: Chapters 8–10
With the introduction of Miss Havisham and
Estella, the themes of social class, ambition, and advancement move
to the forefront of the novel. Pip’s hopes (encouraged by Mrs. Joe’s
and Pumblechook’s suggestive comments) that Miss Havisham intends
to raise him into wealth and high social class are given special urgency
by the passionate attraction he feels for Estella. His feelings
for the “very pretty and very proud” young lady, combined with the
deep impression made on him by Satis House, with its ornate grandeur,
haunted atmosphere, and tragic sense of mystery, raise in Pip a
new consciousness of his own low birth and common bearing. When
he returns from Satis House in Chapter 9,
he even lies about his experience there, unwilling to sully his thoughts
of it with the contrasting plainness of his everyday world: Estella
and Miss Havisham must remain “far above the level of such common
doings.”
Pip’s romantic sensibility, first visible in his tendency
to linger around his parents’ gravestones, is powerfully attracted
to the enigmatic world of Satis House. His desire for self-improvement
compels him to idealize Estella. Her condescension and spite match
Pip’s feelings about himself in the world of Satis House. He accepts
her cruelty—“Why, he is a common labouring-boy!”—without defending
himself because he sorrowfully believes her to be right. In fact, he
only cries when he is forced to leave her. The differences between their
social classes manifest themselves even in small things; while playing
cards in Chapter 8, Estella remarks disdainfully,
“He calls the knaves, jacks, this boy!”
