Summary: Chapter 20
Jaggers takes Pip to London, where the country boy is
amazed and displeased by the stench and the thronging crowds in
such areas as Smithfield. Jaggers seems to be an important and powerful
man: hordes of people wait outside his office, muttering his name
among themselves. Pip meets Jaggers’s cynical, wry clerk, Wemmick.
Summary: Chapter 21
Wemmick introduces Pip to Herbert Pocket, the
son of Pip’s tutor, with whom Pip will spend the night. Herbert
and Pip take an immediate liking to one another; Herbert is cheerful
and open, and Pip feels that his easy good nature is a contrast
to his own awkward diffidence. Whereas Pip’s fortune has been made
for him, Herbert is an impoverished gentleman who hopes to become
a shipping merchant. They realize, surprised, that they have met
before: Herbert is the pale young gentleman whom Pip fought in the
garden at Satis House.
Summary: Chapter 22
Pip asks Herbert to help him learn to be a gentleman,
and, after a feast, the two agree to live together. Herbert subtly
corrects Pip’s poor table manners, gives him the nickname “Handel,”
and tells him the whole story of Miss Havisham. When she was young,
her family fortune was misused by her unruly half brother, and she
fell in love with—and agreed to marry—a man from a lower social
class than her own. This man convinced her to buy her half brother’s share
of the family brewery, which he wanted to run, for a huge price.
But on their wedding day, the man never appeared, instead sending
a note which Miss Havisham received at twenty minutes to nine—the
time at which she later stopped all her clocks. It was assumed that
Miss Havisham’s lover was in league with her half brother and that
they split the profits from the brewery sale. At some later point,
Miss Havisham adopted Estella, but Herbert does not know when or
where.
Summary: Chapter 23
The next day, Pip visits the unpleasant commercial world
of the Royal Exchange before going to Matthew Pocket’s house to
be tutored and to have dinner. The Pockets’ home is a bustling,
chaotic place where the servants run the show. Matthew is absentminded but
kind, and his wife is socially ambitious but not well born; the children
are being raised by the nurse. Pip’s fellow students are a strange
pair: Bentley Drummle, a future baronet, is oafish and unpleasant,
and a young man named Startop is soft and delicate. At dinner, Pip
concentrates on his table manners and observes the peculiarities
of the Pockets’ social lives.
Summary: Chapter 24
Pip returns to Jaggers’s office in order to
arrange to share rooms with Herbert. There Pip befriends the lively
Wemmick, who invites him to dinner. Pip sees Jaggers in the courtroom,
where he is a potent and menacing force, frightening even the judge
with his thundering speeches.
Summary: Chapter 25
Pip continues to get to know his fellow students
and the Pockets, attending dinners at both Wemmick’s and Jaggers’s.
Wemmick’s house is like something out of a dream, an absurd “castle”
in Walworth that he shares with his “Aged Parent.” Pip observes
that Wemmick seems to have a new personality when he enters his
home: while he is cynical and dry at work, at home he seems jovial
and merry.
