Great Expectations Stage 1 Summary & Analysis

As an infant, Philip Pirrip was unable to pronounce either his first name or his last; doing his best, he called himself "Pip," and the name stuck. Now Pip, a young boy, is an orphan living in his sister's house in the marsh country in southeast England. One evening, Pip sits in the isolated village churchyard, staring at his parents' tombstones. Suddenly, a horrific man, growling, dressed in rags, and with his leg in chains, springs out from behind the gravestones and seizes Pip. This escaped convict questions Pip harshly and demands that Pip bring him food and a file with which he can saw away his leg irons.

Frightened into obedience, Pip runs to the house he shares with his overbearing sister and her kindly husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. The boy stashes some bread and butter in one leg of his pants, but he is unable to get away quickly. It is Christmas Eve, and Pip is forced to stir the holiday pudding all evening. His sister, whom Pip calls Mrs. Joe, thunders about. She threatens Pip and Joe with her cane, which she has named Tickler, and with a foul-tasting concoction called tar-water. Very early the next morning, Pip sneaks down to the pantry, where he steals some brandy (mistakenly refilling the bottle with tar-water, though we do not learn this until Chapter 4) and a pork pie for the convict. He then sneaks to Joe's smithy, where he steals a file. Stealthily, he heads back into the marshes to meet the convict.

Unfortunately, the first man he finds hiding in the marshes is actually a second, different convict, who tries to strike Pip and then flees. When Pip finally comes upon his original tormentor, he finds him suffering, cold, wet, and hungry. 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.

The first chapters of Great Expectations set the plot in motion while introducing Pip and his world. As both narrator and protagonist, Pip is naturally the most important character in Great Expectations: the novel is his story, told in his words, and his perceptions utterly define the events and characters of the book. As a result, Dickens's most important task as a writer in Great Expectations is the creation of Pip's character. Because Pip's is the voice with which he tells his story, Dickens must make his voice believably human while also ensuring that it conveys all the information necessary to the plot. In this first section, Pip is a young child, and Dickens masterfully uses Pip's narration to evoke the feelings and problems of childhood. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Pip is looking at his parents' gravestones, a solemn scene which Dickens renders comical by having Pip ponder the exact inscriptions on the tombstones. When the convict questions him about his parents' names, Pip recites them exactly as they appear on the tombstones, indicating his youthful innocence while simultaneously allowing Dickens to lessen the dramatic tension of the novel's opening. As befits a well-meaning child whose moral reasoning is unsophisticated, Pip is horrified by the convict. But despite his horror, he treats him with compassion and kindness. It would have been easy for Pip to run to Joe or to the police for help rather than stealing the food and the file, but Pip honors his promise to the suffering man—and when he learns that the police are searching for him, he even worries for his safety. Still, throughout this section, Pip's self-commentary mostly emphasizes his negative qualities: his dishonesty and his guilt. This is characteristic of Pip as a narrator throughout Great Expectations. Despite his many admirable qualities—the strongest of which are compassion, loyalty, and conscience—Pip constantly focuses on his failures and shortcomings. To understand him as a character, it is necessary to look beyond his self-descriptions and consider his actions. In fact, it may be his powerful sense of his own moral shortcomings that motivates Pip to act so morally. As the novel progresses, the theme of self-improvement, particularly economic and social self-improvement, will become central to the story. In that sense, Pip's deep-seated sense of moral obligation, which is first exhibited in this section, works as a kind of psychological counterpart to the novel's theme of social advancement. Pip's surroundings—in this section, the "shrouded" marshes of Kent and the oppressive bustle of Mrs. Joe's house—are also important to the novel. Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens uses setting to create dramatic atmosphere: the setting of the book always sets the tone for the action and reinforces Pip's perception of his situation. When the weather is dark and stormy, trouble is usually brewing, and when Pip goes alone into the mist-shrouded marsh, danger and ambiguity usually await. In this section, Pip's story shifts rapidly between dramatic scenes with the convict on the marshes and comical scenes under Mrs. Joe's thumb at home. Despite Mrs. Joe's rough treatment of Pip, which she calls bringing him up "by hand," the comedy that pervades her household in Chapter 2 shows that it is a safe haven for Pip, steeped in Joe's quiet goodness despite Mrs. Joe's bombast. When Pip ventures out alone onto the marshes, he leaves the sanctuary of home for vague, murky churchyards and the danger of a different world. This sense of embarking alone into the unknown will become a recurrent motif throughout the novel, as Pip grows up and leaves his childhood home behind. In terms of narrative, the introduction of the convict is the most important occurrence in the plot of the first section. Though Pip believes that the convict's appearance in his life is an isolated incident, he will feel this character's influence in many ways throughout the novel. The convict will later reappear as the grim Magwitch, Pip's secret benefactor and the chief architect of his "great expectations." Though Dickens gives us no indication of the man's future in Pip's life, he does create the sense that the convict will return, largely by building a sense of mystery around the man's situation and around his relationship to the second convict Pip encounters in the marsh.

As he returns home, Pip is overwhelmed by a sense of guilt for having helped the convict. He even expects to find a policeman waiting for him at Joe's house. When Pip slips into the house, he finds no policemen, only Mrs. Joe busy in the kitchen cooking Christmas dinner. Pip eats breakfast alone with Joe. The two go to church; Mrs. Joe, despite her moralizing habits, stays behind. Christmas dinner is an agonizing affair for Pip, who is crowded into a corner of the table by his well-to-do Uncle Pumblechook and the church clerk, Mr. Wopsle. Terrified that his sneaking out of the house to help the convict will be discovered, Pip nearly panics when Pumblechook asks for the brandy and finds the bottle filled with tar-water. His panic increases when, suddenly, several police officers burst into the house with a pair of handcuffs.

Pip is sure that the policemen have come to arrest him, but all they want is for Joe to fix their handcuffs. The bumbling policemen tell Pip and Joe that they are searching for a pair of escaped convicts, and the two agree to participate in the manhunt. Seeing the policemen, Pip feels a strange surge of worry for "his" convict. After a long hunt, the two convicts are discovered together, fighting furiously with one another in the marsh. Cornered and captured, Pip's convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the food and file himself. The convict is taken away to a prison ship and out of Pip's life—so Pip believes—forever.

Joe carries Pip home, and they finish their Christmas dinner; Pip sleepily heads to bed while Joe narrates the scene of the capture to Mrs. Joe and the guests. Pip continues to feel powerfully guilty about the incident—not on his sister's account, but because he has not told the whole truth to Joe.

After the incident, some time passes. Pip lives with his guilty secret and struggles to learn reading and writing at Mrs. Wopsle's school. At school, Pip befriends Biddy, the granddaughter of the teacher. One day, Joe and Pip sit talking; the illiterate Joe admires a piece of writing Pip has just done. Suddenly, Mrs. Joe bursts in with Pumblechook. Highly self-satisfied, they reveal that Pumblechook has arranged for Pip to go play at the house of Miss Havisham, a rich spinster who lives nearby. Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook hope she will make Pip's fortune, and they plan to send him home with Pumblechook before he goes to Miss Havisham's the next day. The boy is given a rough bath, dressed in his suit, and taken away by Pumblechook.

In addition to the introduction of the convict, the other important plot development in the early chapters of Great Expectations occurs at the very end of Chapter 7, when Pip learns he is to be taken to Miss Havisham's to play. His introduction to Miss Havisham and her world will determine a great part of his story and will change him forever. Though Pip has no sense of the importance of the event, Dickens conveys its importance to the reader through Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who are obviously ecstatic at the idea of Pip befriending the wealthy old woman. This is the first hint in the novel of the theme of social class and social improvement, which will quickly become the dominant idea. Because he spends the first several chapters of the book exclusively among those of his own social station, the theme of social class is not particularly important in this section. But Pip's low social standing makes itself felt in subtle ways—in the colloquial dialect spoken by Joe and his sister, the mean ambition of Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, and the ineffective rigor of his country school (where he is taught by Mr. Wopsle's great aunt), for example. By describing Pip's early education, Dickens continues to emphasize the idea of self-improvement. Just as Pip's behavior indicates a desire for moral improvement and Mrs. Joe's ambition indicates a desire for social improvement, Pip's struggle to learn to read indicates a desire for intellectual and educational improvement. To emphasize this point, Dickens contrasts Pip's meager knowledge with the ignorance of Joe, who admires Pip's poor writing because he himself is unable to read or write. Dickens also uses this scene to develop Pip's special relationship with Joe. Although Joe is not Pip's father or even his brother, he is the most caring person in his life—a simple, honest man. Dickens contrasts Joe's earnest good nature with the grasping ambition and self-satisfaction of Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe, implying even at this early stage of the novel that real self-improvement (the kind that leads to goodness) is not connected to social advancement or even education, but rather stems from honesty, empathy, and kindness. Pip will spend fifty chapters learning this lesson himself, and will then be struck by the fact that, in the figure of Joe, the best example had been in front of him all along. As he did in the first three chapters, throughout this section Dickens demonstrates a masterful ability to tell his story effectively without ever losing the perspective of childhood. Though the novel itself is narrated by the adult Pip remembering his life, Pip the character is still a little boy in these chapters, and the narrator comically and sympathetically conveys his immature impressions. At the Christmas dinner in Chapter 4, for instance, Pip is terrified that his secret will be found out, but he balances his fear with a deep desire to tweak Mr. Wopsle's large nose—to "pull it until he howled." His sense of guilt for sneaking behind his guardians' backs is so great that he believes the whole world is busy trying to discover his secret, and he fully expects to "find a constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me up."

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.

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.

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.

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!" Though the introduction of Satis House and Miss Havisham seem to have little to do with the early plotline of the convict and the marshes, Dickens keeps the earlier story in the reader's mind with the appearance of the mysterious figure in Chapter 10, who stirs his drink with the file Pip gave to the convict and gives Pip a small sum of money. This foreshadows not only the eventual return of the convict, but also the major plot twist of the novel, when Pip discovers that the source of his mysterious fortune (which he has not yet received in this section) is not Miss Havisham, as he thought, but the convict Magwitch. Like the earlier chapters, this section abounds in mystery and foreshadowing, particularly relating to Miss Havisham's character: what is the reason behind her bizarre appearance, her behavior, and her home decor, with its stopped clocks and crumbling relics of an earlier time? At this stage of the novel, Dickens does not answer questions, only raises them. The reader's natural curiosity will help propel the book forward.

Not long after his encounter with the mysterious man in the pub, Pip is taken back to Miss Havisham's, where he is paraded in front of a group of fawning, insincere relatives visiting the dowager on her birthday. He encounters a large, dark man on the stairs, who criticizes him. He again plays cards with Estella, then goes to the garden, where he is asked to fight by a pale young gentleman. Pip knocks the young gentleman down, and Estella allows him to give her a kiss on the cheek. He returns home, ashamed that Estella looks down on him.

Pip worries that he will be punished for fighting, but the incident goes unmentioned during his next visit to Miss Havisham's. He continues to visit regularly for the next several months, pushing Miss Havisham around in her wheelchair, relishing his time with Estella, and becoming increasingly hopeful that Miss Havisham means to raise him from his low social standing and give him a gentleman's fortune. Because he is preoccupied with his hopes, he fails to notice that Miss Havisham encourages Estella to torment him, whispering "Break their hearts!" in her ear. Partially because of his elevated hopes for his own social standing, Pip begins to grow apart from his family, confiding in Biddy instead of Joe and often feeling ashamed that Joe is "common." One day at Satis House, Miss Havisham offers to help with the papers that would officially make Pip Joe's apprentice, and Pip is devastated to realize that she never meant to make him a gentleman.

Joe visits Satis House to complete Pip's apprenticeship papers; with his rough speech and crude appearance, he seems horribly out of place in the Gothic mansion. Estella laughs at him and at Pip. Miss Havisham gives Pip a gift of twenty-five pounds, and Pip and Joe go to Town Hall to confirm the apprenticeship. Joe and Mrs. Joe take Pip out to celebrate with Pumblechook and Mr. Wopsle, but Pip is surly and angry, keenly disappointed by this turn in his life.

Where the earlier sections of the novel focused very closely on short spans of time, this section covers several months and is mostly concerned with Pip's general development from an innocent boy to an ambitious young man. The themes of ambition and social advancement are central to this development, as Pip increasingly uses his ambiguous relationship with Miss Havisham as a pretext for believing that the old woman intends him to marry Estella. The consequence of Pip's intensifying social ambition is that he loses some of his innocence and becomes detached from his natural, sympathetic kindness. In the early chapters of the novel, Pip sympathized with the convict, despite the threat the man posed to his safety. Now, Pip is unable to sympathize even with Joe, the most caring figure in his life. Because he loves Estella, Pip has come to value what Estella seems to value, and when Joe visits Satis House in Chapter 13, Pip is mortified by his rough manners and poor clothes. They now seem out of place even to Pip, a measure of the extent to which he has adapted to life at Miss Havisham's house during his months of regular visits. Miss Havisham herself, with her maniacal energy and her inscrutable motives, is a frightening creature to Pip. Despite her wedding dress (an outfit that symbolizes hope, regeneration, and renewal), he constantly thinks of her as a symbol of death, describing her as a "skeleton" and picturing her hanging from a gallows. Her insane behavior—traipsing around her house in a wedding dress, with a wedding feast on her table and all the clocks stopped—will soon be explained, but for now it simply adds to her mysterious and powerful dramatic presence. Surely a woman this eccentric wouldn't be above transforming an orphan boy into a gentleman, he thinks. With this line of thinking, the first of Pip's "great expectations" creeps into his life. The title of the novel, of course, refers to Pip's hopes for social advancement and romantic success with Estella. The sight of something finer than what he himself has makes him intensely desire it, and he fiercely clings to his hopes of being elevated and married to Estella. He even ignores more realistic hopes, using his relationship with Biddy only to improve his education and his chances with Estella. He has little reaction to realistic dangers, as we saw earlier, when he was nonplussed by his encounter with the mysterious stranger in Chapter 10. His thoughts are for Estella alone. Although Pip increasingly believes that Miss Havisham intends to make him a gentleman (at least until his disappointment in Chapter 13), Dickens creates dramatic irony by giving the reader a sense that the old woman has no such intention in mind. Rather, Dickens indicates that Miss Havisham is not really interested in Pip at all but only in somehow using Estella as a weapon against men. As the novel progresses, the source of her strange hostility will become clear, but in this section of the novel the reader is already able to make a fairly good guess: jilted on her wedding day (hence the dress and the feast), the old woman has raised Estella as a tool of revenge on men, training her to break men's hearts as her own heart was broken years ago. Throughout this section, unbeknownst to him, Pip is her test case, an experiment to measure the young girl's prowess at winning the love of men. Toward this purpose, Miss Havisham is delighted by the speed with which Pip falls in love with Estella. Pip's realization that the extent of Miss Havisham's assistance will be her help on his apprenticeship papers—that he will be bound to Joe's forge and to his social class after all—is devastating to him; it is the first of a series of disappointments that seem to be the inevitable result of Pip's great expectations.

Time passes as Pip begins working in Joe's forge; the boy slowly becomes an adolescent. He hates working as Joe's apprentice, but out of consideration for Joe's goodness, he keeps his feelings to himself. As he works, he thinks he sees Estella's face mocking him in the forge, and he longs for Satis House.

Pip still tries hard to read and expand his knowledge, and on Sundays, he also tries to teach Joe to read. One Sunday, Pip tries to persuade Joe that he needs to visit Miss Havisham, but Joe again advises him to stay away. However, his advice sounds confused, and Pip resolves to do as he pleases. Joe's forge worker, Dolge Orlick, makes Pip's life even less pleasant. Orlick is vicious, oafish, and hateful, and he treats Pip cruelly. When Pip was still a young child, Orlick frightened him by convincing him that the devil lived in a corner of the forge. One day, Mrs. Joe complains about Orlick taking a holiday, and she and Orlick launch into a shouting match. Mrs. Joe gleefully calls on Joe to defend her honor, and Joe quickly defeats Orlick in the fight. Mrs. Joe faints from excitement. Pip visits Miss Havisham and learns that Estella has been sent abroad. Dejected, he allows Wopsle to take him to Pumblechook's for the evening, where they pass the time reading from a play. On the way home, Pip sees Orlick in the shadows and hears guns fire from the prison ships. When he arrives home, he learns that Mrs. Joe has been attacked and is now a brain-damaged invalid.

Pip's old guilt resurfaces when he learns that convicts—more specifically, convicts with leg irons that have been filed through—are suspected of the attack on his sister. The detectives who come from London to solve the crime are bumblers, and the identity of the attacker remains undiscovered. Mrs. Joe, who is now unable to talk, begins to draw the letter "T" on her slate over and over, which Pip guesses represents a hammer. From this, Biddy deduces that she is referring to Orlick. Orlick is called in to see Mrs. Joe, and Pip expects her to denounce him as her attacker. Instead, she seems eager to please Orlick and often calls for him in subsequent days by drawing a "T" on her slate.

In Chapter 10, Pip received an unwelcome reminder of the convict when the stranger in the pub appeared with the stolen file. In this section, he receives an even more unpleasant reminder when an escaped convict from the prison ships—possibly the stranger from the pub—is blamed for the attack on Mrs. Joe. Because of Pip's powerful moral sense, he is racked with guilt over the incident. As he says in Chapter 16, "It was horrible to think that I had provided the instrument, however undesignedly." Of course, Mrs. Joe's strange interest in Orlick in the next chapters marks him as the true attacker, and Pip guesses this truth almost immediately. Even though Pip is in no way at fault in the incident, his conscience still troubles him. Themes of guilt and innocence run powerfully through this section, as Pip's adolescent mind wavers between right and wrong, between his desire to be good and his stark sense of evil. The play he reads at Pumblechook's house tells the story of a man whose lover convinces him to kill his uncle for money. Pip will soon abandon Joe for money and the promise of Estella. Like the apparition of the convict and the figures of the police, the fight between Joe and Orlick emphasizes this theme of starkly divided good and evil: Orlick's slouching, lumbering badness is a powerful contrast to Joe's quiet inner goodness, and their fight gives a physical presence to Pip's internal struggle.

Biddy moves in to help nurse Mrs. Joe. Pip visits Satis House again and notices how bleak it is without Estella. He walks with Biddy on Sunday and confides to her his dissatisfaction with his place in life. Although he seems to be attracted to Biddy, he tells her the secret of his love for Estella. When Biddy advises him to stay away from Estella, Pip is angry with her, but he still becomes very jealous when Orlick begins trying to flirt with her.

At the pub one evening, Pip sits in a crowd listening to Wopsle read the story of a murder trial from a newspaper. A stranger begins questioning Wopsle about the legal details of the case. Pip recognizes him as the large, dark man he met on the stairs at Miss Havisham's (in Chapter 11). The stranger introduces himself as the lawyer Jaggers, and he goes home with Pip and Joe. Here, he explains that Pip will soon inherit a large fortune. His education as a gentleman will begin immediately. Pip will move to London and become a gentleman, he says, but the person who is giving him the fortune wishes to remain secret: Pip can never know the name of his benefactor. Pip's fondest wish has been realized, and he assumes that his benefactor must be Miss Havisham—after all, he first met Jaggers at her house, and his tutor will be Matthew Pocket, her cousin. Joe seems deflated and sad to be losing Pip, and he refuses Jaggers's condescending offer of money. Biddy is also sad, but Pip adopts a snobbish attitude and thinks himself too good for his surroundings. Still, when Pip sees Joe and Biddy quietly talking together that night, he feels sorry to be leaving them.

Pip's snobbery is back in the morning, however, as he allows the tailor to grovel over him when he goes in for a new suit of clothes. Pip even allows Pumblechook to take him out to dinner and ingratiate himself. He tries to comfort Joe, but his attempt is obviously forced, and Biddy criticizes him for it. Preparing to leave for London, he visits Miss Havisham one last time; based on her excitement and knowledge of the details of his situation, Pip feels even more certain that she is his anonymous benefactor. After a final night at Joe's house, Pip leaves for London in the morning, suddenly full of regret for having behaved so snobbishly toward the people who love him most.

As Pip enters adolescence, Dickens gradually changes the presentation of his thoughts and perceptions. When Pip was a young child, his descriptions emphasized his smallness and confusion; beginning around Chapter 14, they begin to emphasize his moral and emotional turmoil. Pip becomes more aware of the qualities and characteristics of the people around him. He refrains from complaining about life in the forge out of respect for Joe's role in his childhood: "Home was never a pleasant place for me, because of my sister's temper. But Joe had sanctified it." Though the respect he pays Joe is clearly admirable, Pip the narrator passes to Joe all the credit for his behavior. He says in Chapter 14, "It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful." Just as Orlick is an immediate contrast to Joe, Biddy emerges in this section as a contrasting figure to Estella. Her plainness, frankness, and kindness are diametrically opposed to Estella's cold beauty, dishonesty, and cruelty. Pip seems to feel a natural attraction to Biddy, but his overpowering passion for Estella makes him use Biddy only as a means to an end, as a confidante and a teacher. Pip's desire to elevate his social standing never leaves him; he even seeks to better his surroundings by trying to teach Joe to read. When the ominous figure of the lawyer Jaggers appears with the message of Pip's sudden fortune, the young man's deepest wish comes true. But the exultant Pip is not content simply to enjoy his good fortune; rather, he reads more into it than he should, deciding that "Miss Havisham intended me for Estella" and that she must be his benefactor. His adolescent self-importance causes him to put on airs and act snobbishly toward Joe and Biddy, a character flaw that Pip will demonstrate throughout Great Expectations. In his career as a gentleman, he will cover up moments of uncertainty and fear by acting, as he says in Chapter 19, "virtuous and superior." In part, this poor behavior is caused by the same character trait that causes Pip to covet self-advancement. Pip has a deep-seated strain of romantic idealism, and as soon as he can imagine something better than his current condition (whether material, emotional, or moral), he immediately desires that improvement: when he sees Satis House, he longs for wealth; when he meets Estella, he longs for love and beauty; and when he acts poorly, he feels a powerful guilt that amounts to a longing to have acted more morally. This is the psychological center of the novel's theme of self-improvement. But Pip's romantic idealism is inherently unrealistic. Whatever he might wish, it is impossible to become a gentleman overnight and never again be a common boy, to immediately forget one's old friends, family, and surroundings, and to abruptly change one's inner self. When Pip suddenly receives his fortune, he experiences a moment in which his romantic ideal seems to have come true. But the impediments remain, and Pip is forced to contend with the entanglements of his affection for his family and his home. Feeling his emotions clash, Pip is unsure how to behave, so he gives in fully to his romantic side and tries to act like a wealthy aristocrat—a person, he imagines, who would be snobbish to Joe and Biddy. Though he is at heart a very good person, Pip has not yet learned to value human affection and loyalty above his immature vision of how the world ought to be. In this section and throughout the novel, behaving snobbishly is a way for Pip to simplify the complicated emotional situations in which he finds himself as he attempts to impose his immature picture of the world on the real complexities of life. When Pip moves to London, a new stage in his life begins. As we are told at the end of Chapter 19: "This is the end of the first stage of Pip's expectations."